I know…I know… silly from a marketing perspective. “If you want to sell a product you want authority. Even if you aren’t one and want to sell a product, you want to be an authentic and sincere that gives off the aura of being anti-authority to establish your credibility.”

My issue though is that, as the dynamics of online writing evolves, marketing becomes less synonymous with a product and more with writing. Especially copywriting.

In fact, I have problems with communicating both offline and online.

Yet I found copyblogger to have helped me understand how to communicate better than even blogs specifically tailored towards writing. (or at least fill my holes with the whys and hows)

For example, (and I’m going to show my problem with failing to be succinct here), it’s very easy to be bombarded by advise on “being succinct”, “mudering your darlings”, “cutting back on adjectives and adverbs”, etc. etc.

But only through chancing upon copyblogger (I had no idea that the word “copywriting” existed before this) was I able to be introduced to the purpose of headlines, the difference between a well-written opening line and an actual lin that hooks readers, etc. etc.

Even the issues normally more focused in writing, copywriting (or at least copyblogger) does a better job of addressing because of the “it needs results/it has to sell” necessity.

However articles like these also highlight the problem with applying some (not all) of these advises.

What if I know I’m not an authority but “I don’t want to be a wannabe”?

With if I don’t want to sell an advise (because I’m not an authority) but prefer to attract people who have more authority-level knowledge (but less authority-level ego) to the articles I’ve written?

What if succinct to me are posts of these lengths because shorter posts may not get me as detailed a reply or may not even make me seem as hungry to learn and listen to a person’s comments?

What if because of my ignorance, I would prefer an ambiguous posts that touches on several related subjects but still prefer to sell to a reader the point that I want to share something and not that I want to make something cryptic for the sake of eloquence and intentional lengthening to seem smart?

I think things like “How to Be Interesting” are a good start but at the same time, what if it fails not because of the criterias presented in this article but because readers feel like the post just has no direction or is intentionally being prolonged for no reason or egoistic reasons??

I think situations like these are problematic because even at it’s worst, a long copy is about selling a product. A mass linkbaiter has no issues with making it seem like their articles are for social media. (and they have no issues with attracting commentors rather than generating a community) Even loyalty to a blog is hard to manage because there’s no product or expertise that attracts readers to such a blog.

These situations are fixable if not historically bypassable through luck and passion but as copyblogger articles often allude to: there are sometimes specific ways of fixing things especially when the whys and hows are explained.

Copyblogger advises though are still often about “maximizing the hook” and I’m not saying they should go against that. It is after all what made the blog well known and an authority. However, forgive me if this particular article makes people like me feel guilty.

I think there is a certain niche of bloggers who wants to maximize their writing — but they don’t want to maximize towards writing for maximum exposure. They just want to maximize their writing towards exposure and readability but they don’t want to maximize the marketing or completely move away from reducing the substance of their articles into lists or other more digestible components. I’m not sure how much that makes sense and I don’t really know of a group, it’s just me but I’m using a group for the sake of generality.

Now Copyblogger, based on what I have read, does have those articles and it’s not like the advises aren’t open-ended enough that you must follow them to the letter. (For ex. I’ve been lurking at these articles for a while and I still don’t have the discipline to totally morph my writing style into one that’s suitable for social media nor do I often think of how much hook my headlines has.)

What the premise of this article shows though is that maybe there’s a way to streamline advises in such a way that an article can be written specifically about dropping certain actions in favor of other actions to satisfy this “I don’t wanna feel like a Wannabe” niche. (For ex. linkbaiting would obviously be less important to someone without a product or care for ad-clicks so maybe there can be an article that advises on ignoring this aspect of copyblogger’s advises and tailor making it instead for stumble-lasting. But of course copyblogger also has advises on how to make a reader stick to an article so maybe instead of sticking because of a catchy headline that’s “product” or “howto” friendly, the specific article could focus more on giving examples for generating emotions — but there’s a copyblogger article on that too. It’s all so confusing. This is what I mean by the dilemma of the ignorant who doesn’t want to feel like a Wannabe but doesn’t want to be an authority.)

Btw my apologies for linking my friendfeed instead of an actual blog url in the website area of the comments section. From my short time at lurking here, it seems copyblogger has a friendly enough community to test whether my question here: http://ff.im/94nTN could be seen as spam because the FriendFeed for Beginners group appears to have no one replying to other newbie questions there.

(Btw the question is: Is filling the website link in a blog comment with your FriendFeed link considered spam? I have a blog but it’s not aimed at a general audience. : for those who don’t want to click on the link.)