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New Media Blog by Ken Aucremanne

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SnowDay Book Review: Everybody Writes by Ann Handley

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After an uncommonly mild December, it is finally snowing! And armed with a valid excuse to stay in my pajamas by a crackling fire, it is time to submit a review of one of my favorite books of this past year.

 Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content (affiliate link) by Ann Handley, represents a very solid instruction manual for folks facing an ever-present fear of writing. This is her second book on content creation. The first, Content Rules (affiliate link) by Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman, covered the whole gamut of content creation (short of game creation). Both books were epic (in a nerdy kinda way), but I’ll limit this review to Everybody Writes.

The whole book has a conversational, “besties having coffee” tone that separates this from your standard academic, dry tome on grammar efficiency and journalistic best practices. While both subjects are indeed touched upon, Ann focuses on the mindset and strategy behind writing from a content marketer’s perspective. This is not surprising… Ann Handley is reputed to be the first person to hold the title Chief Content Officer with Marketingprofs.com

Part I: Writing Rules: How to Write Better (and How to Hate Writing Less) prepares you to get beyond the paralyzing effects that staring at a blank page can muster. This, for me, has been difficult to overcome. It’s always easier to write when given an assignment or asked to write on a particular subject. When it’s my own blog and I’m the writer, editor, and final approval authority, it was tempting to stew forever on an idea without actually putting ink to page (or digits to screen). Several tricks in this section helped me a lot. One, in particular, was a story about the process Chris Penn uses to flesh out entire articles from sentence fragments on his Awaken Your SuperHero blog.

Part II: Writing Rules: Grammar and Usage is not your standard high school grammar lesson. This section addresses the critical flaws indicative of amateurish business writing, including the excessive use of buzz words, passive voice, and Weblish. Chapter 36 is a personal weakness of mine (like right there.) It covers key mistakes that marketers make, including wordiness and redundancy. If I break copyright law and copy this list to a wall plaque by my iMac, then I apologize Ann. It’s that good, and definitely an area I need to address.

This is a 6 Part book, but I don’t want to bore you or spoil the book. Just buy it. Ann Handley is an undisputed expert on the written word… and she brings back the librarian look with style :)

 

If this review helped you make up your mind, please buy it from the link above. Otherwise, please use Amazon Smile and pick a good charity. My personal favorite is International Justice Mission.

IFTTT: #2 on My New Year’s resolution this year.

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If you’re not familiar with If This, Then That (IFTTT), then let me be the first to introduce you to a profound time saver on the web. It allows you to cross-post automatically from over a hundred sources, and create productivity-enhancing shortcuts to do many of the mundane tasks that waste so much time on the web. Each task automation is referred to as a “recipe”, and there are thousands to choose from.

PC Mag came out with a list of 100 top last year, and I’m making it a New Year’s resolution to incorporate at least 2-3 a week throughout the year into my own workflow.

Does anyone else use IFTTT? If so, what are your favorite recipes?

 

5 Tools to Build a Blog with Real Reach

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Disclaimer: This is how I did it… it’s definitely not the only way, nor is it likely the perfect setup, but I like it. If you have suggestions for improvements, I’d gladly take them.

Tool 1: The Right Host. 

Bluehost is my personal favorite. I’ve hosted on and off with them for 10 years now, and have never been let down. The prices are good, uptime is solid, and customer service is great. I have helped several friends transfer their sites from hosts such as GoDaddy, and every time customer service staff at Bluehost has been exception. Single IP addresses, SSL certificates, and other premiums are reasonably priced. Give them a call, and check yourself. They’re legit.

Tool 2: The Right Blog Software

WordPress is capable of operating truly global websites, due to its scalability and plethora of add-ons. a WordPress.com blog is free, but it’s limited. A self-hosted WordPress installation allows full control of the system, its structure, and what you can do with it. If you’re on a budget from $10 a month to $10,000 a month for your website, this is great. For a blog, it is everything you’ll likely need.

Tool 3: The Right Template (Framework)

Studiopress is the creator of what Mashable calls the “best of the best of premium WordPress frameworks.” It’s framework, Genesis, is a template system that offers responsive design, HTML 5 code system, and a set of SEO tools that could be all you need to keep your blog search-friendly (although this particular feature I prefer to run via the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin, below.) Genesis uses a set of child themes that can be completely customized for a very unique personal theme. I’m using the News Pro theme without any significant mods… it’s pretty sweet as  is.

Tool 4: The Right SEO toolset

The Genesis framework’s built-in SEO capabilities are pretty good, but they require using an external toolset like those from Moz to gauge how well you do with metatags, descriptions, etc. Instead, I really like the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast. This tool offers everything that Genesis does, but also includes a set of built-in guides that let you “greenlight” a post for its search-engine-friendliness. This is a great tool, if you haven’t tried, it’s lots of fun… in a geeky sort of way.

Tool 5: The Right Social Sharing Tools

There are a metric tonne of social sharing tools on the market. But why not take it a step further? Super Socializer is a plugin that allows social sharing, social commenting, and the creation of social feeds. When people sign in to comment with their Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Google+ accounts, you will get their email, and their information. Your commenters can also add themselves to a mailing list with a single click. It’s a win-win. Readers can comment easily, and you get a streamlined way to gather a mailing list, increase social shares, and get your information directly into social media timelines and inboxes everywhere. I’m fairly new to this tool, but so far it’s quite promising. There will be a follow-on in a couple months to keep you updated on this one.

Tool 6: The Right Time

Professional journalists and bloggers often write posts based on annual events. Whether it’s New Year’s Resolutions, Tax Season, a trade show, or Black Friday, there are certain events that come every single year. Editorial calendars help a writer to plan their seasonal content, intermixed with perennial offerings, to keep information flowing to the reader year round.

Editorial Calendar is a WordPress plugin that lets you write blog posts as drafts, and drag-n-drop them around on a calendar for publishing at a later date. If you need to submit a weekly blog update every Tuesday, this plugin makes it easy to ensure you have content ready for rollout. You’ll see each draft’s title on a calendar, so you can be confident something is coming out on a regular basis. Add time-sensitive blog posts and your multimedia offerings on top of that, and your content stream is full. Scheduling seasonal posting months in advance becomes child’s play. Write it, get the editor’s approval, set, and forget.

Conclusion

There are (as of January 2015) 13.4 bazillion WordPress installations on this planet (that may be a stretch). As of 2014, 48 of Technorati’s “Top 100 blogs” ran on WordPress, and 19% of the world’s websites are self-installed WordPress sites (even more astounding, 70% of the websites do not use a CMS at all, so the 11% left covers all other content management systems, combined, according to managewp.com )

If you’re going to go at it on your own terms, this is, by far, my favorite.

Question for all of you… What are your Favorite WordPress Plugins for Building your Audience?