Professional writing coach Daphne Gray-Grant says that when writing for the Internet, you should consider the advice public speakers are often given: slow down. In writing terms, this means focusing on being as easy to read as possible. This is because people read differently at their computers than they do when faced with any printed document. You may not always be conscious of it but when we're reading at our computers, a light is shining in our eyes... This is the backlighting from the screen and we usually don't notice it -- except if we're sitting on a beach in the sunshine and suddenly discover we can't read at all. But there are other challenges with computers. The typefaces we like on paper often don't work on screen. Each letter is represented by square pixels on a grid rather than by lines of ink on paper. This makes them harder to read. As well, our computers have less control over spacing, hyphenation, justification and column width. Furthermore, the width of a … [Continue reading...]
Score your ideas to boost your content marketing
Right now I have at least 40 blog post ideas sitting in my queue. The potential topics include: Is LinkedIn’s premium for-pay service worth the money? How to market a blog post How to make your public relations and marketing efforts useful Better email subject lines Basic online tasks all marketers and PR professionals should be able to do And many more. Given my non-blogging commitments and my focus on generating unique, high quality content, rather than just cranking out copy, there is no way I’m going to get all 40 written anytime soon. One of my biggest challenges is deciding which one to tackle next. If you’ve ever finished up a brainstorming session with a whiteboard covered with ideas, you’ve probably faced this problem, too. Since coming up with ideas is pretty easy, this can be a huge obstacle to actually executing an effective content marketing campaign. So what do you do? Which ideas do you choose to execute on and which do you … [Continue reading...]
