Tips and Tricks for an Effective Blog

(Don't let this be you.)

You invest your time and creative energy in it, your readers enjoy it, and your potential employers/clients require it.

Just as e-books are changing the way we read, blogging is changing the way we write—to some extent. As a freelance writer today, having a well-nourished, well-manicured, well-maintained blog is the key to standing out from the cyber crowd.

But with an influx of content creators all across the Internet, how do you know if you’re getting the words you write right?

Here are some quick tips to make sure your input maximizes your output, so you end up with a blog that’s not only successful in positioning you well, but also effective in terms of generating clientele.

1. Cleanliness, Clarity, and Consistency
Your reader is not going to stay on your site for more than a few seconds unless you keep them there.

 • All posts should be neat and well formatted
 • Avoid too many colors, distracting fonts, and pictures
 • Always include a title—titles are the first thing a reader will notice, and probably the only thing they'll retain
 • Break up large chunks of text, and use lots of white space
 • Offer your contact details clearly—if someone wants to speak to you, they should know how to get in touch

 • If you’re using your blog as a portfolio, organize different writing samples under headers, tabs, or tags

 2. Establish Your Brand and Quality Control
Whether you’re writing for the general public or are hoping your website will impress potential clients, your blog is a part of your brand. Make sure it represents who you are. 

 • Know your subject matter, your voice, and your structural style—and be consistent with it
 • Always (always, always) edit what you write before you post it
 • Be conversational and casual, but make sure you don’t sound inarticulate or unrefined

3. Frequency and Variety
Posting regularly is a great way to establish reader loyalty. If someone likes your blog, but sees no new posts when she checks in back next week, you will probably lose her. 

 • Set weekly goals for how many new posts you'll write—and stick to them
 • Plan for a series of posts or come up with themes for different weeks
 • Be creative with the ways you present or curate content

 4. Call to Action
Pushy salespeople are often instantly disregarded, so don’t demand interaction from your readers. Try to generate responses in other ways.

 • Do include a comments feature, but don’t pressure your readers to participate
 • Create easy-to-answer polls or comment and request feedback on other people’s blogs

5. Further Reading
For more tips and tricks on blog writing:
 • "10 Secrets of Professional Writers Every Blogger Should Know" by Jeff Bullas
 • "The 10 Commandments of Blogging" by Stanford Smith
 • "Blogging Statistics Per the Wall Street Journal" by Mark Penn
 • "How to Avoid Common Beginner Blogger Mistakes" on WikiHow

Guest Post: Why I Like Being a "Content Provider"

by Minda Zetlin

If you spend a lot of time around longtime journalists, you may have heard the term “content provider” used with something like a sneer—generally from what I think of as the old guard: venerable writers who built their careers writing great news stories for great news organizations and are aghast at the changes the Internet has wrought upon the world they thought they knew.

But “content provider” is a term many of us are embracing, because that old world of journalism is gone for good. I spent part of last week at a forward-looking conference where respected media guru Steve Rubel, executive vice president of global strategy and insights at PR giant Edelman, laid out, in a few minutes and a few slides, the forces that have changed media forever.

Content is infinite; time and attention are finite. We all know this as readers. I’ve often thought that I would like to read the New Yorker—if only it came out monthly instead of weekly. The days when people eagerly checked their mailboxes for that long-awaited magazine are over. These days, the magazine has a website where it publishes new articles or blog posts 20 times a day. All your friends have blogs they hope you’ll follow, and now that there are so many publishing venues, most have books out, too, that they’re waiting for you to get around to reading. Not to mention Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Digg, Flipboard, and StumbleUpon. There’s just too much good stuff out there for any of us to read everything we might like to.

Publishers can’t depend on subscription revenue. Right or wrong, most people assume that content on the Internet should be free, and very few companies have found a successful way to charge people for reading material online. As we’ve just seen, there’s enough good reading out there for free to make anyone wonder why they’d bother paying to read a website. As more and more people are turning away from paper, subscriptions just aren’t a great way for most publications to make money anymore.

Online ad revenues don’t amount to much. Advertising was supposed to be a viable business model for online publications, just as it’s always provided much of the revenue for print publications. Rubel notes that most online advertising is sold using automated networks rather than person-to-person, and at very low prices. Late least year, Forrester Research estimated the average cost per thousand page views of an online ad at just $2.66. The Atlantic reported that newspapers lost $16 in print ad revenue for every $1 they had gained in digital ad revenue in 2012, one reason why total newspaper employment in the United States fell below 40,000 for the first time since 1978.

This is all terrible news for traditional media, for the state of American journalism in general, and for writers determined to make their livings from pure journalism. When some of the biggest names in media are faltering, and all of them are scrambling to compete in an increasingly overloaded market for readers’ attention—well, that’s not a good thing.

I wish I could say that pay for good writing is going up, but it isn’t. I wish I could say that all the writing I do is meticulously researched and fact-checked, but it isn’t. I wish real news and media outlets were still willing and able to pay for serious investigative journalism, but they aren’t, which is why we need nonprofits like Pro Publica to support it instead.

Amid these grim developments, Rubel sees a big silver lining for public relations, because struggling media outlets are desperate for other revenue, and that’s created an opportunity for companies like Edelman to place “sponsored content” on their websites. Meantime, companies are more comfortable than ever creating their own content, because most have been doing it already, aiming for the content-rich, frequently updated websites that Google’s ranking algorithms favor.

That’s where we come in, those of us who make our livings writing—if we’re willing to be content providers as well as journalists. There’s an immense hunger for fresh material to be posted on traditional media sites, corporate sites, and hybrids of both. If you’re already full up with work or committed to never writing anything but purely journalistic stories, that may not much matter to you. But if you’re looking for ways to create easy revenue and gain regular clients, then the Web’s endless appetite for content is definitely a good thing.

Rubel stressed in his talk that effective custom content must be high quality and journalistic. This is one way custom content can offer an advantage over some of the low-rent Web-writing opportunities out there. Content mills may offer laughably low payments for laughably bad articles and have little to lose if what they publish is poorly researched or written. A company trying to build up its brand, however, will think twice about putting its name on pieces like those. It’s the brand-conscious companies that are more likely to hire professional writers and offer pay professionals will accept.

How do you get into the custom content market? One place to start is ASJA’s Content Connections conference taking place November 7 and 8 at Columbia College in Chicago. We’re bringing writers together with experts in content creation and also hosting an event called Client Connections. It’s similar to Personal Pitch (meetings with agents) that is a regular feature of our annual conference in April, with two big differences: the short meetings are with content buyers who may represent corporations, advertising, or PR agencies. And it’s open to all writers, not just ASJA members.

I, myself, have included sponsored or custom content in the mix of how I make my living for the past dozen years. Most (but not all) of the time, the material I write for these corporate clients is highly similar to what I’d be writing as a journalist. It’s always some of the easiest and best-paid work I do and usually provides regular income. And in the uncertain world of a freelance writer, regular, steady, easy, well-paid work is a very nice thing.

Minda Zetlin is president of ASJA, a columnist for the Inc. magazine website and author of several books, including The Geek Gap: Why Business and Technology Professionals Don’t Understand Each Other and Why They Need Each Other to Survive (Prometheus Books, 2006), co-authored with her husband, Bill Pfleging. Connect with her on twitter at @MindaZetlin.

This article original appeared in the November 2013 issue of the ASJA magazine, and online here.

Around the Word: Major Publishing Trends for 2013

With explosive developments in technology, readers and writers are struggling to re-construct an understanding of how to “be” readers and writers as the industry moves away from traditional publishing formats.

Here are some snapshots of major publishing industry trends of 2013 that are forecasted to continue:

 • The Multimedia Wave. Book publishers are investing more time, energy, and resources in designing applications for e-books, given the dramatically increased use of tablets for reading. Conventional publishing protocols—designing book covers, re-printing new editions, choosing bookstores and other channels of distribution—have been neglected in favor of making online readability more interactive with music, pictures, search features, and other multimedia tools.

In a Guardian article, Victoria Barnsley of HarperCollins UK says, “We can’t think of ourselves as book publishers anymore. We have to see ourselves as multimedia content producers.”

 • The Return of the Subscription Model. With growth in piracy arising from free-floating creative content in the Internet universe, many magazine publications are looking to protect their content by reviving the subscription model. Readers will have to subscribe to the magazine and select an option for "digital issues"—at an additional cost—before they can access content on their tablet or smartphone.

In May 2011, the New York Times published an article about the digital birth of the New Yorker on the iPad. New Yorker editor David Remnick excitedly explained, “If you are going to get thousands of readers that you didn’t have before, or maybe even hundreds of thousands of readers, you’d be foolish to complain about the work that went into coming up with something they found compelling on the iPad. It is a very big opportunity for a magazine like the New Yorker to find whole new audiences.”

 • The Rise of Self-Powered Curation. Social media presence and prowess is one of the key features of the modern man’s (and modern company's) identity. The integration of Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Twitter into our digital behavior suggests that users are interested in personalizing the presentation and experience of content online.

Many apps (like Pocket, InstaPaper, Readability, Read It Later, etc.) allow users to find, download, and save online content to read later, offline. While such online-bookmarking tools, the idea of self-powered curation is sure to change reading habits and expectations.

Happy Halloween: Trick or Tweeting

Halloween is a great holiday for creativity! There are crazy costumes, creepy stories, and lots of strange decorations to come up with.

But here at GG, we have an extra-special Halloween trump card: GHOSTS! What better time is there to recognize the art of ghostwriting?

So here's a fun, ghostly Halloween challenge:

Come up with a creative hashtag for what being a ghost(writer) means to you, and tweet it to us at @GothamGhosts by Thursday, October 31st.         

We’ll round up the wittiest, funniest, cleverest ghostly tweets in a BloGG post next week.

And have a happy and safe Halloween!

Guest Post: How to Get Your Speakers to Sing

by David Murray

Last month in Europe I got asked the same question I get asked in the States: How do I animate and effervesce my wooden, flat speaker?

Bring in a speaking coach, is the easy answer.

Too easy, in many cases. Coaches can polish a rough speaker, but teaching a stiff speaker to act animated is like tying ropes to the arms and legs of a corpse.

Speakers are stiff because they are scared. And they are scared because they should be scared. For they have permanently stolen an hour from the lives of many human souls, and they know full well they don’t have anything to say that is of real importance even to themselves, let alone to this innocent crowd.

Fear and public speaking have gone together since the first fourth-grade teacher forced the first fourth-grader to choose from a list of five weary topics on which to give a speech to the class. And the fourth-grader felt like a fraud because he was made to be a fraud, forced to pretend he had a genuine, studied, heartfelt, unique, and useful opinion about “How does pollution affect society?” Or was it, “Are zoos good for animals?”

And so the fourth-grader stood, shame-faced but brave, in front of classmates with whom he or she had exchanged fart jokes that very morning and pretended to be an authority on the benefits and drawbacks of cloning (while the classmates, with mixed success, pretended to care). And said the expected things for the required amount of time and sat down and hoped that the next such assignment would be proceeded by death.

And that’s pretty much exactly how public speaking went down for the fourth-grader, as he or she passed through junior high, high school, and college, where the phony passion was applied to mouthing rote arguments for or against euthanasia, raising the drinking age, and the legalization of drugs, exactly in that order.

Then a merciful decade or two passed—during the fourth-grader’s early work life, when most of the speeches were being given by the elders—and the fourth-grader’s oratorical participation consisted mostly of pretending to be interested in other speakers who were pretending to be interesting.

But then one day the fourth-grader became a manager. And soon an executive. And then a senior executive. And finally the call came: Would the fourth-grader honor a faceless audience by appearing at a random leadership forum and delivering a speech on an unspecified topic? 

That’s when the fourth-grader became your client. And you wonder why your client is elusive and would appear to prefer to focus on any aspect of her work rather than the speech that’s coming up. Don’t be surprised! Your client is a fourth-grader! And do you know who you are? In the fourth-grader’s mind, you are the teacher who is trying to get the fourth-grader to choose one of the five weary topics that you have suggested!

Long before the fourth-grader understood his or her own mind well enough to have anything genuine to say that could be sustained over more than a single minute of oratory, he or she had utterly disassociated public speaking from true candor and intimate communication. So if you are to recouple these two concepts in your fourth-grader’s fully grown (and thus half-ossified) mind, you will have a hell of a job ahead of you.

You have to ascertain something true and deep about what motivated the speaker to climb all the way from the fourth grade to the position of CEO of your company. Are we dealing here with a brilliant or dogged engineer? A passionate financial analyst? A natural motivator of people? An idealistic believer in the industry? Or just a gasoline-driven ambitious maniac? Whatever the qualities that got the fourth-grader all the way to this exalted position (far ahead of all of the fourth-grader’s classmates)—well, you’ve got to understand something about where those qualities came from, and how they connect today with the fourth-grader who’s still inside.

And now you’re threatening to write a speech that’s outside of the five suggested topics. A speech that feels like something only your fourth-grader could give—because it’s about his grandpa, it’s about what she did over the summer, it’s about why he doesn’t like to get a haircut, or why she thinks it’s better to be a tomboy than a girly-girl. And suddenly, the fourth-grader isn’t so focused on the PowerPoint deck. Suddenly the fourth-grader is up for trying it without a lectern. Suddenly the fourth-grader is laughing on stage, and wondering aloud whether you should maybe be videotaping this speech, to send to all the employees.

Because she suddenly realizes: Shc can’t remember giving a speech that sounds so much like herself.

Actually, this doesn’t happen suddenly at all. A speaker for a Danish government minister came up to me after my talk in Copenhagen last week. “He doesn’t like to tell personal stories,” she said about her client. “But I’ve gotten him to do it, and he knows they love it when he talks about the old car he bought and loves. And he knows that’s always the part they remember.”

Could she have a straight-up conversation with him about beginning to choose the topics he speaks on based on the issues he feels most personally connected to? So that, to whatever extent strategically advisable, every speech he gives is about his beloved old car—or his mother, or his freshman history professor, or his political mentor, or an intellectual revelation or a personal turning point or anything that’s as as true to the fourth-grader as it is to the man?

Yes, she said. She actually thought she could have that conversation.

I told her to keep me posted. She looked at me skeptically but could see that I meant it. The speeches they generate together will all be in Danish. But if she succeeds, the communication they achieve will speak to us all.

I’ll keep you posted on her work with her fourth-grader, if you keep me posted on your work with yours.

David Murray is the editor of premier online speechwriting magazine Vital Speeches of the Day. This article was first published on VSOTD here.

Guest post: End Procrastination Now!

by Arielle Eckstut, one half of the Book Doctors

This past August, we had the honor of attending a conference hosted by behavioral economist and bestselling author Dan Ariely. He studies why human beings make the predictably irrational decisions that they do.

Dan invited a number of writers to the conference because he contends that behavioral economics is often best elucidated through stories. And through Dan’s own stories, we learned so much about the ridiculous decisions we make as writers—as well as how we can become more productive by putting into practice the principles he teaches.

Over and over, we talk to writers with great ideas for books. But these very creative people just can't seem to finish writing them. If we say it once, we say it a bazillion times: In order to get successfully published, you have to actually write. To do so, here are three principles of behavioral economics that will help slay the procrastination beast:

1. Set real, concrete, achievable deadlines and schedules. Instead of saying you're going to write three days a week, actually name the days—Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, for instance. This way, you don’t get to say, “Oh, I’ll just do this tomorrow.” Map out a draft of your book in your calendar, not just in your head. Put in deadlines, along with reminders of those deadlines.
2. Find a buddy (or buddies.) Join a writer’s group or seek out a partner, and check in with each other to make sure you meet your deadlines. For example, Arielle and her dear friend Laura Schenone were both working under tight deadlines to finish their books this summer. They were struggling. Then they made a pact: They would both write 500 words a day and then email their word count to each other at the end of each day. It was amazing what this simple social motivation achieved! The knowledge that they would have to check in with someone else produced enormous traction. Day after day after day, they wrote their 500 words. And even when they didn’t get to 500, they did write something—which was a hell of a lot more than they had been doing previously.
3. Reward yourself, whether negatively or positively. For example, if you finish a week’s worth of reaching your word count, arrange for a romantic date with your loved one, or a relaxing evening on your favorite golf course, or buy yourself that fancy doodad you’ve been craving. Or you could go the other way: Set up an account with a charity you hate, and if you don't meet your goals, send them $50.  Losing something valuable to someone you hate turns out to be a great incentive!

Do you have other great tips to end procrastination? Share them in the comments.

GG’s Oriana Leckert Featured on TechHive

“Whenever someone sounds drastically more coherent in a tweet then they do in person, they probably had some help.” 

—Oriana Leckert 

A recent article on TechHive, a site that focuses on gadgets, trends, and other tech news, features GG Director of Operations, Oriana Leckert, on growing ghostwriting trends in the social media celebrity-sphere.

In “Who’s actually writing your favorite celebrity’s tweets?” Evan Dashevsky illuminates “ghost posting” on social media among high-profile personalities. From celebrities to politicians, ghostwriting has become a common phenomenon in the maintenance of public profiles on social media. “Having worked in this industry for a few years, I just assume that everyone has a ghostwriter,” Oriana says.

So whose writing are we actually reading? We will never know. Dashevsky interviews a celeb ghostwriter for the inside scoop: from negotiating per-tweet rates to client (non)interaction to the legalities of staying anonymous. 

“Ghostwriting [for social media] is definitely gaining ground; the stigma around the whole thing is being lifted,” Oriana says. Fans are going to have to become comfortable with the idea that social media profiles are prepared for, not by, their favorite celebs.