Open a Dozen Doors to Getting People to Digg Your Articles
Yesterday, the funniest thing happened… my site finally felt like it was happening! People were reading my blog and digging what they read… but for some techy-hitch-y reason, I had had no idea I have had about 40 comments awaiting my approval for some time… Gotta love da machines! : )
Reading your comments, I felt like I was at some kind of rock concert or banquet laid out in my honour. All of a sudden, I must have hit a button in a way I’d never hit it before and there was all this appreciation from you guys out there either for information I was providing or for how I write. It was a truly amazing and wonderful experience. So for all of those people who kindly commented: Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! One thousand times. You folk lifted me up. Truly!
The recent few weeks have been a bit of a quest to focus myself professionally again, after running around in the wilderness for a little while and tripping over and accidentally jamming my head into a very dark place as I tumbled over myself and met myself coming! Suffice to say, you all swelled my head so much, it miraculously popped out into daylight yesterday and in the light of day, I saw that great mirror of life in front of me… and there across it were written digitally all these words like: “We want more”, “Keep it up”, “At last, I found what I was looking for”! And even “I believe!”
OK OK! So there’s a little of a Messianical hysteria creeping in here on my part! But, allow me my moment of sheer joy and pleasure to bask in success here! : ) It’s just, that in the past 24 hours there have been some of my greatest Eureka moments, thanks to the generous sharing of comments by readers of my blog, (for which I am eternally grateful to you all… especially the lady who was inspired enough to go off and start to write her own afterwards).
Here’s the thing… I have written the odd piece on how to write a good article or about compelling copywriting, but I have not particularly focussed on the subject. In fact, reading and writing have actually been life long passions, yet the subject of writing copy is not something I talk lot about. If the truth be told, in all these years of using my ability to connect to people with words, compelling them to take actions they had never considered previously, or writing promotional material for employers and getting little or no appreciation for it, experience of using my communication skills has made me feel like one of those people who amaze the crowd with some seemingly impossible feat and then stands there after-wards saying, “What’s the big deal?”.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not one of your (hugely) attention seeking, insincere types who fishes for compliments with feigned humility (unless my tongue is planted firmly in my cheek). Nor am I a person who feels particularly unworthy. No, in spite of some of the rubbish I have had to deal with in life, I feel pretty blessed and lucky by comparison to others’ lives. The point is, I simply do not believe I am THAT special… There are so many great writers out there!
Then, this morning, I went online, to find that my work has been syndicated by another copy-writer onto their sales pages. Within hours, Tanya, my business partner, whose opinion I highly value, told me that my writing skills were actually quite rare. Now I am feeling like, not only did someone turn on all the lights for me yesterday, (perhaps to read someone else’s book better), but then they proceeded to take me out into the blinding sunshine today to show me all the pretty colours and tell me to wake up and smell the garden and “Now go write about it, woman!” (Nature always does it for me, more than coffee ever could!)
You see, I have always asserted the adage that ‘there is nothing new under the sun’ and so how could anything I have to write about really be that special anyway? All I am doing by writing articles and copywriting is ONLY re-packaging what other people say and I am not so bright, so nor can I be truly original either.
To some degree, I would maintain that I am right, but now I am forced to believe that actually, I can take unoriginal, tired and worn material and recycle it into something of value and perhaps more’s the point is that HOW I do this is actually pretty unique. Hell, that’s why people like me laugh at Oscar Wilde’s ironic quote about liking to take his diary on long journeys, so that he always had something interesting to read!
So, now that the doors to my perception are well and truly busted open right now, I want to open a dozen doors to nudge some of you through into finding your ‘thing’ and having the conviction to just go ahead and do it. So this blog is a somewhat long-winded getting-it-off-my-chest pre-amble to my latest witch’s dozen doors to better article writing (which, incidentally I stole and re-packaged as my own from Suite101.com (who incidentally binned me yesterday too, just to keep my feet firmly planted on digital terra ferma):
Witch’s Dozen Doors Through To Amazing Article Writing
1. Take a deep breath. Seriously… If writing is not your strength…remember no parent is born with the gifts of being perfect parents automatically; we learn by doing… So just be as ready as you can be by staying calm and not listening to all the doubts and questions you might have running around your brain about your ability to put pen to paper / fingers to keyboard and produce amazing results.
2. Write / type in some key words and ideas you want to talk about. The write a sentence or two about what you are going to talk about, so folk know what to expect from you.
3. By now, you will have some idea of what your heading or title is going to be. Make your article heading as informative about the subject as possible; your headline needs to reflect the key search terms or phrases people might be using when searching for answers about your subject. Alternatively, generate curiosity by intentional ‘oblique hints’ at your material; make people want to find out what the heck you are being so cryptic about! Use comedy to entertain or provoke and invite your reader in; folk love to laugh or at the very least have a crooked smile! 
4. Get to the point in the first paragraph and offer an insight into what you will be writing about and what the reader can hope to gain by choosing to continue to read your article rather than something else; be compelling and convincing. You have to get past their cat miaouwing around their legs for food, their children demanding to know where their clean socks are, the phone ringing, the bills on the mat… you get my drift… Grab their attention as QUICKLY as you can…
5. Stick to the point. Write highly focused, concise articles, that demonstrate your authority on a subject and acknowledge your sources. Showing you have done your research and quoting others, gets you quoted in turn; but never shoe horn in authoritative research for the sake of looking good. Content should not be repeated unless necessary, least of all other peoples’. You neither impress or convince anybody. Your readers smell lack of panache and integrity and hit the back button or turn over the page faster than you can say, “Was it something I said?”
6. Ensure your copy style is unique, fresh, balanced, and pure opinion or free of sales pitches – unless you explicitly acknowledge, the content is merely your perspective and that you may benefit from what you write. Or, depending on your audience, perhaps you can be more whimsical and opinionated. Being yourself and ‘spilling a gut’, as the King of Copy, Craig Garber, says, allows people to connect with you.
7. Spell It Out. Assume a reader’s basic knowledge of your subject, but write for the layperson to understand WITHOUT patronising them. Just because a person does not know all about your speciality does not make them less clever than you. However, do not assume that everyone knows what you are talking about either. If you must use jargon, explain its meaning. (Personally, I love a bit of jargon, but then I confess to being slightly geeky like that… but if I ever inflict it on you unnecessarily, I expect a strong comment of discontent in my inbox here!)
8. Write in the third-person, in a neutral style; this maximises potential for syndication because it’s what academic and theoretical types can use for discussion. Any personal anecdotes can be shared in your blogs or if you write for certain magazines or keep a column in newspapers and journals.
9. Break It Down. Make it easy and enjoyable for the reader. Bite-size chunks allow your messages to get through all the reader’s daily distractions competing for their attention. Use 50-75-word paragraphs maximum. Use bold subheadings, and bulleted lists for easy reading on screen. Break text up with graphics.
10. Link to up to 5 related on- and off-site articles, if writing online, do this with keyword ‘anchor text organically embedded’. This particular techy jargon for the uninitiated is choose some particular word or phrase that links directly with copy written elsewhere on that topic. If using hyperlinks with anchor text, make sure you do this by making your hyperlink html code generate a NEW pop up page, which sits above the page they got the link from, versus taking the reader away from your site to someone else’s.
11. Proof read for spelling and punctuation errors, lazy words which do not reflect your intention, or general / weak statements that are throw away and have no basis in fact, or you simply cannot be bothered to back up with necessary information. This is a must for all you busy professionals out there who may already have an eye to your next task on your to-do list. Me? Yup… I hold my hands up to this one… (I blame it on my A.D.H.D. and the lack of prescription Ritolin in the UK for us struggling adults! But I digress)
12. People love images. Attach clear and appropriate colour images, properly credited and captioned. Images are both light relief and can sum up a lot of words and help to imprint your messages.
13. (It’s a witch’s dozen remember reader! )Summarise your main points and come to some conclusion. If your writing has a business purpose, offer some call to action by giving your reader a simple next step to take, like asking them to DIGG what you say, or comment on what you have been talking about and being so kind as to share their contact details with you, to keep the communication going.
And breathe… Easy… Just takes regular practise and LOTS of consistent, habitual reading of quality material or addictive listening to the BBC! Now stop worrying about what others may think or even judging yourself. Learn from my mistakes and go write something inspirational of your own, even if it’s only a job specification for a copy-writer to do it for you! (For any British readers: “Gizza Job!”)
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