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30 Quick Editing Tips Every Content Creator Needs to Know

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Inbox 0: in a bad way.

Has your brilliant content still not scored you that dream writing position, lucrative business partnership, or sweet recognition among your peers and target audience?

If you think your articles are top-notch, but there’s a lonely tumbleweed blowing through your barren website, it may be because you’re just a writer.

You heard me, Gloria.

If everybody wants you, why isn’t anybody calling? Once you create a blog or email newsletter, you need to also actively take part in its evolution.

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How to Nail the Opening of Your Blog Post

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The opening four notes to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony are the most popular notes in Western music.

Dun dun dun dum …

They are stormy. Heroic. Disorienting. Short enough to be remembered. Portentous enough to be memorable.

Today you’ll find those notes everywhere. In movies, commercials, and songs when the dramatic and foreboding are needed … And we hardly bat an eye.

We recognize them, we know them, and we love those first four notes. Not so for Beethoven’s opening night at Vienna’s Theater an der Wien in 1808.

One contemporary composer of Beethoven — one who represented the consensus — said, “That sort of music should not be written.”

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5 Things Every Copywriter Needs to Know About Their Prospects

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What do you really know about your prospect?

Their age range perhaps? Where they live? What they do for a living?

Useful definitely, but not enough to create copy that rouses emotion and compels action.

For that we need to take a journey much deeper into the dark recesses of our customers’ minds …

Want to join me?

Today’s article is inspired by someone who understood that in writing, how well you knew your ‘characters’ made the difference between captivating an audience, or boring them.

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14 Free Ebooks and an Updated 20-Part Internet Marketing Course

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5 Writing and Productivity Links You Can Use

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This week on The Lede …

  • How A Copywriter Evaluates A Great Website
  • The Unexpected Antidote to Procrastination
  • The Daily Rituals of the World’s Most Creative People
  • 4 Things That Lead to Success (or Failure) with Email Signup Forms
  • How to Do More By Planning Less: The Power of the Anti-Plan

Want to grab even more useful links (beyond those that make The Lede)? Follow @copyblogger on Twitter.

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How to Become a Content Marketing Expert

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You hear everyone talking about online content marketing, because with today’s Internet-empowered prospect, content marketing is what works.

And yet, you may be struggling with creating content that works for your business or your clients. Or maybe you’re just trying to take your game to the next level.

There’s a lot to learn, and even then you’re left asking potentially expensive and time-consuming questions:

  • How do I apply this particular strategy for my business?
  • Is this a solid idea, and how should I execute it?
  • Has anyone taken this approach before, and what were the results?

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Why We Still Need to Write, Even When We’re Scared

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Writing is scary.

Sometimes when we publish something, it makes us feel like our insides are hanging out, for all the world to see. We feel vulnerable. We feel naked. We feel … terrified.

But here’s the thing — we have to keep writing, in spite of the fear. If we let fear stop us, our content will have no spark, no life. And everything we write will be completely unremarkable.

Right now, I’m working on a blog post (on a different topic) that scares the living heck out of me. I am afraid of the strong opinions and passion that are rising from some long-buried place inside me. I’m worried that I won’t write well enough to clearly communicate what I need to say. I’m worried about what people will say when I publish this piece.

Bottom line — I’m scared.

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5 Ways to Bond with Your Blog’s Audience

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You’re smart.

You know you need to be helpful on your blog in order to grow your audience. You share useful tips. You give away free tutorials.

But somehow you’re not connecting with your readers. Your blog seems a little quiet.

Sure, you’re getting some traffic. But a certain spark is missing. It’s not the enjoyable party you’d imagined it to be.

Is it getting you down?

Today I’m sharing five tips to engage with your readers, make them feel at home, and to turn your blog into a nice and warm get-together.

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Could Mobile Responsive Website Design Hurt Your SEO?

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Allow your jaw to become unhinged at this statistic:

There are over 1 million more mobile devices activated every day across the world than there are babies born.

Yeah, mind = blown.

Indeed, designing with a mobile-first mindset becomes more important — quite literally — by the day. As does answering burning questions related to mobile design best practices.

For example: Is mobile responsive web design good for SEO or not?

This has become a hotly debated topic, even right here in the Copyblogger comment sections, with reasonable minds making reasonable arguments on both sides.

Depending on where you look and what you read, you might come away thinking that Responsive Web Design is in perfectly fine shape regarding SEO … or that it creates a mess that’s going to destroy your search results.

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11 Compound Word Errors that Might Make You Look like a Numbskull

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Even as a seasoned writer, I’m not immune to making simple but stupid mistakes. Take the word “jive” for instance …

Ever since I was kicking the slats out of my crib, I thought it meant “to agree with, to be in harmony.” But nnnnnnnnoooooo.

Jive is a language immortalized by the movie Airplane. The word that I should have been using was “jibe.”

Here’s the thing, the English language is full of pitfalls — simple errors that can alienate readers, turn off subscribers, and annoy buyers.

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