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What Web Writers Can Learn from the Writer’s Strike

Writer's Guild Strike

Back in the summer of 1997, I walked into the managing partner’s big corner office of the downtown Dallas law firm I worked at and resigned. I wasn’t certain what I wanted to do with my life, but I knew I didn’t want to practice law.

So I packed up and headed south to Austin. In addition to being a Mecca for live music, Austin has a very cool film community, especially for writers. So, the plan was to become a screenwriter and just tough it out until I made it.

You know… tend bar or something. Starving artist stuff.

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The Problem with Waffly Headlines

Waffle

Headline writing is an art, right?

No it’s not. But you can’t have waffle.

So how would you define waffly-headlines? Waffly headlines have terms like this:

Does your office have workplace-stress?

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Five Easy Steps to Editing Your Own Work

Proofreader

In a perfect world, you’d never have to edit your own work, but well, you know the drill. The world’s not perfect, life’s not fair, yada yada. So spend a little time now or a lot of time later trying to convince your boss to let you keep your job as a “pubic relations director.”

Step One: Just walk away, Renée (or Kevin or Amy).

We all know that when we’re too close to things, we don’t see them clearly. This can be good for relationships, but hazardous for the editing process.

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Jazz and the Art of Improvisational Blogging

Jazz

Can jazz musicians really teach you a thing or two about effective blogging?

Absolutely.

The skills that make a jazz artist legendary are also a big part of what bloggers need to succeed. On the other hand, some bloggers are hurting themselves by emulating what many jazz musicians inadvertently do to lose the audience.

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Are You Writing With Clarity?

Clarity

If readers don’t understand what you write, you might as well have written nothing at all.

Ground-breaking ideas don’t count for much if you can’t express them clearly, and your incisive opinion won’t carry much weight if it can’t be followed.

Worthwhile writing should contain new, interesting and complex ideas. It should challenge the reader and, hopefully, resonate. To be effective, this kind of writing must be crystal clear.

In this post, I want to outline a few simple things you can do to make anything you write easier to understand.

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Six Common Punctuation Errors that
Bedevil Bloggers

Question Marks

Proofreading your text for misspelled words and grammatical mistakes is essential. What about the punctuation, though?

Despite being more subtle, these errors can equally hurt your credibility. I’m going to point out six common punctuation errors that you shouldn’t be making, and give you examples so you’re sure about the right way to handle these situations.

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No Really… Thanks Google!

Well, apparently Copyblogger’s Page Rank will not be dropping from 6 to 4, and is instead showing as 7 across 39 of 45 datacenters. Even though it likely means nothing from a practical standpoint, it’s nice to have my name cleared.

I didn’t have anything to do with talking to Google, as I was way too busy with Teaching Sells. But here’s what I was told about discussions between b5media and a Google representative.

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Landing Page Makeover Clinic #7: Mindmap-Ebook.com

Landing Page Makeover

Today’s makeover is for Chuck Frey’s ebook, Mind-Mapping Software: How to Select the Perfect Program for Your Needs. Chuck lives and breathes this stuff. He’s the Mind-Mapping “Man” but he’s been struggling getting a handle on his target market. (In fact, this is the second ebook effort I’ve reviewed. The first, I thought, needed an entire marketing plan “re-think”, hence the quick side-step to a project that lent itself to this format far better.

Chuck actually has some pretty good marketing language throughout this page. Unfortunately, it’s buried under ho-hum heads and subheads. You’ll see what I mean when you take a look at the current page.

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Teaching Sells is Live

Teaching Sells Logo

After much work and not much sleep, the Teaching Sells training program is open for business. Hopefully the combination of the free report and the site copy will stand on its own, but I thought I’d take a moment to address some of the questions I got in comments and emails.

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Thanks Google!

Imaginary conversation going on in the blogosphere right now:

Dude 1: “Hey man, did you hear that Google lowered the Page Rank on a bunch of popular blogs?”

Dude 2: “Yeah, I did… Engadget, ProBlogger, Copyblogger…

Dude 1: “What’s up with that? Copyblogger? That guy has never bought or sold a link!”

Dude 2: “I know. As far as I know, he’s done nothing but put out valuable, original content like Google says to do.”

Dude 1: “Yeah… he even preaches about writing for people first.”

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