Successful Blog

Start in the Middle on Your Report, Blog Post or Presentation

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Put a Sock in It, Julie!

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Who hasn’t heard Julie Andrews sing it?

Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.
When you read you begin with ABC, When you sing you begin with do-re-me.

–the character, Maria, sung by Julie Andrews in
The Sound of Music by Rodgers and Hammerstein

Put a sock in it, Julie.

Starting in the beginning might work well when you know the story, but when you’re first forming your ideas it can really screw you up. By the time you figure out that clever beginning you might forget the what the story was going to be about. After all, when planning a special occasion, it’s not usually the best idea to start with what you’ll say on the invitation … we have to know what the gathering will be about.

Turn off, Julie Andrews and the tape recordings in your head that tell you what you’re supposed to do. They just get in the way. Unique problems require unique solutions.

Beginnings Have a Part to Play in Setting Up Your Conversation

Who cares about how the fire began if you need to get out of the building NOW? Get the facts and worry about how it started later.

When you’re creating something new, problem solving, or envisioning what could be, information is nebulous and coming from many directions. The challenge is to order it and give form–not to find the beginning. Here are some tips on how to get your idea going before the blank screen and the beginning knock you down.

  1. Write your idea as a compelling question you want to answer. Then write the answer as – bullet points.
  2. Describe an action that you’re looking to make happen.
  3. Write the list of important points that you want to share.
  4. Outline the steps of the how-to.
  5. Lay out the key point of the product review.

If you do one of those first, you’ll know what it is that you want to say.

Then, you can consider one of two things key to context:

  1. Connecting to prior knowledge: What will most of your audience already know about what you’re going to tell them? How can you connect that to what you’re adding to the conversation? That connection is the place to start.
  2. Building background: It might be a fair assessment that most of your audience won’t have experience with what you’re about to tell them. What information or analogy will give them a setting in which to place your conversation? Make that setting the beginning.

Now the beginning is an integral part to play in setting up your most important statements.

Do you ever start in the middle when you’re preparing a report, a blog post, or a presentation?

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Construct Your Post or Presentation Like a Three-Course Meal

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How to blog series

The Key is Know What You Want to Say

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Recently someone told me that he’s been trying to write a a blog post for almost a week now and every time he tired he ended deleting it.

“Everything I write sounds like a valley girl talking to alien first grader. Nothing makes sense. It’s all over the place.”

“What is it that you want to say?”

He started at me and then admitted, “I don’t know.”

It’s hard to write clearly if you don’t know what you want to say.

Try constructing an idea like a three-course meal.

Construct Your Post or Presentation Like a Three-Course Meal

If you think of an article or a presentation as a fine meal, the middle is the main course. That’s where the fine dining is. It’s the centerpiece. The entree takes the longest time and the most care. The executive chef is the one who plans it and prepares it. Put your best effort there–where it counts.

So decide what you’ll be serving as the key part of the meal first thing.

  • Is it something you’ve just learned, observed, or read about that’s set you thinking?
  • Is it a pattern of behavior that keeps appearing that you want highlight and encourage or discourage?
  • Could it be your view about an event you’re about to be attending?
  • Have noticed something in another industry that seems to apply to the one that you work in?
  • Have you found a solution to a common problem or a problem with a commonly promoted solution?

Gather the thoughts and proofs that will make the message of your post or presentation delicious to take in. Once you’ve got that underway, you can choose the appetizer and the dessert.

Maybe you’ll whet the audience’s appetite with a story that brings them to the problem you’re solving or a question that you’ll answer fully in a very satisfying ending. Take the time to see how the beginning and end compliment each other to tie all together.

In this manner …

  • Course 1: Give readers a taste of your topic. This gives you a chance to capture their attention and focus their minds on your ideas. You can draw them in and prepare them for what you are about to say. By starting in the middle you already know what that is. So writing this part is much easier.
  • Course 2: Serve up your ideas with facts and details to support them. By starting in the middle, you can spend your time polishing the finer points and placing your brand in the best light for readers to discover its value on their own.
  • Course 3: Leave your audience satisfied with tidbits of why your ideas are important to them or give them reason to reflect back on what you said. Show that you fulfilled your promise. Let your audience savor the fact that your article was a service to them, and they’ll understand why coming back to see you is a good idea.

There’s added value in presenting your information as a three-course article. Starting in the middle establishes a clear structure that’s easy to follow. It frees your audience to concentrate on the information that reveals your story and shows your expertise.

How do you structure your blog posts and your presentations?

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

7 Real Ways Writing Increases Expertise

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Each morning, I greet the Internet with my coffee and a clear purpose. I say “Good morning, Twitterville!” share the view in the harborhood, and check in with my friends. I find lots of opportunity — information, ideas, and input — offering itself.

If I’m not focused my head fills with thoughts, energy sparking and flaring in every direction.

Fast and fun, but too shallow to be satisfying in the long hall.

Real conversation offer more than a sound byte. Real ideas are worth more than a passing thought.

It’s one reason Twitter never will win out over my blog.
Of course, Google is another.

7 Real Ways Writing Increases Expertise

Writing is one way to share thoughts with many folks efficiently. Publishing makes the connection more natural and accessible. The words stay available through time for anyone who wants to access them.

Sure we get visibility and offer value when we write, but we get a huge payoff ourselves.

By recording our thoughts we make them more.

Here are 7 real ways that writing increases our expertise.

  1. Writing clarifies what we know. If you know something and can’t explain it, do you really know it? We tell ourselves that we know what we know how to do laying it out. Writing won’t let us do that. We have to find words to articulate our ideas.
  2. Writing moves become familiar with degrees of difference. Want to be more fluent on a subject? Write about it. Every time we write we choose words to express a thought or an idea. Writing teaches us how words communicate meaning. The more we practice the more we learn which word choices connect people to what we mean.
  3. Writing leads us to explore different answers. Leave ideas in your head and you can shut them down before you’ve fully considered their possibilities. Writing brings us to see what we think. When we find words to articulate what’s on our mind, we take the words out of our heads. We make them more real, more transportable, and more memorable. When we put ideas on the page they take form –we can shuffle them, change them, improve them.
  4. Writing helps us develop a voice that is natural and consistent, strong and confident. Talking to yourself might not be … um … acceptable, but write and you’ll know your and how to express them. Even when we write for ourselves, we go back to read, listening to what we wrote. We question. We consider. We critique our choices. We start to recognize what’s our own way of saying things.
  5. Writing challenges us to set fear aside, yet maintain discipline. A clear sentence requires structure. A sentence that moves people is expression. Once we find our voice, we see how expression needs structure, and that structure without expression is listless and boring. Over time writers learn to value our thoughts and hold the editor quiet until feedback is useful. The act of writing builds thoughtful integrity. Putting thought into words builds confidence.
  6. Writing offers us opportunity to share our expertise. Everything we write has an audience. Every time someone shares something that we write they add value to our ideas — when they change them and when they don’t. Writers get the space of mind to show what we know in ways that can help people we’ve never met.
  7. Writing makes us more thoughtful readers and more aware responders. Write for a while and you’ll find you bring the insights and appreciation of a writer to what you read. You’ll start to notice that the way a writer writes makes a message stronger, weaker, more meaningful to you. You might even begin to recognize their *voices* in what they write. Writing gives us understanding of nuance and a sensitivity to what we read. We ask better questions.

As efficient as Twitter is for conversation, it’s not enough for working out ideas. 140 characters can’t express a full-on deep thought. A soundbyte might get attention, but it doesn’t show depth of knowledge.

Writing is clear thinking made visible. — Bill Wheeler

We meet more people in print than we can ever possibly meet face to face. Many people will know our written voice as well as they know our names. Writing is a huge opportunity in a noisy world to share what we know and to learn from the best of the people we meet.

What sort of thinking have you shared today?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Buy the ebook. Learn the art of online conversation.

3 Writing Mistakes that Erode Trust in Your Small Business

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Careful or Careless?

In today’s social media-driven society, where more interpersonal interaction takes place on the Internet than ever before, one of the best things a small business can do to steer themselves toward success is develop a strong Internet-based presence. From a functional webpage to well-managed accounts with top social networking sites, consumers need to access and learn about your business from their laptops and smart phones during their busy and often Internet-focused lives.

Your website should be a snapshot of your business, introducing clients and consumers to your brand and influencing them to trust in your services. Because of that, it is imperative that you avoid these common, easy-to-make writing errors that may broadcast your business in the wrong light.

  1. Incorrect or no punctuation. A missing or improperly placed comma can change the entire meaning of a sentence, and over-zealous use of exclamation points may read as campy or unprofessional to your website viewers. Have a member of your team who is well-versed in the rules of punctuation look over any copy before you hit “publish.”
  2. Mixing up homophones. They’re, their, there. Two, too, to. Than, then. Your, you’re. Affect, effect. When typing, especially in a hurry, it can be easy to mix up these homophones and use the wrong one. When you do that, not only does your sentence take on a new meaning, but also, people notice. For many, mixing up those words is the visual equivalent to running nails across a chalkboard.
  3. Writing chunky blocks of text without any visual appeal. Though not a grammatical error, improperly forming paragraphs or not minding the visual structure of a paragraph can be just as irritating for a reader. We tweet in 140 characters, update our statuses in a sentence or two, and skim the book jacket before opening up to the first page: we’re busy, and we want our information quickly. When visiting a business’s website, readers don’t want to read a novel. They want quick, accessible information that gets to the point and tells them what they need to know without searching through blocks of text to get there.

The problem with these errors is that they send the message of carelessness or neglect to your readers. While we’ve all made mistakes, such as misplacing an apostrophe or writing who’s instead of whose, consumers want to bring their business to companies who take care of the details of their brand. It isn’t uncommon for consumers to even leave a webpage after finding a few of these errors.

The subconscious thought process for many consumers is that if the business can’t even proofread their webpage, why should I trust them to give me the best service possible?

To ensure your small business’s website and online content is presenting potential clients and consumers with the best possible image of itself, take care to avoid seemingly small writing mistakes and blunders. People will see how much you care about your presentation as an indicator of how you will care for them if they decide to bring their business to your company.

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Author’s Bio:
Amanda Valenti is a writer and content editor for College.com She also writes and publishes for a variety of other blogs/websites on the topics of traditional campus schools as well as accredited online colleges

Thank you, Amanda.
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Be Irresistible

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

The Inverted Pyramid — A Simple Approach to Catch Audience Attention

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A Guest Post by
Rahil Muzafar

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What Is the Inverted Pyramid

Inverted Pyramid is a term well known in the field of journalism, and it refers to a particular structure of laying out a story. While following the Inverted Pyramid structure, you need to start from the most important part of the story/news. The idea is to give the crux of the story in the headline, or the first two three lines.

You might not have noticed this approach because you are used to this style. However, imagine if journalists weren’t employing this approach, and taking the route of story tellers, they will have to start from the scratch and the culmination will come in the end. And even though, reading the newspaper (or watching a news channel) might not have been such a gloomy experience if this approach wasn’t at play, but it is this approach that provides the journalist or reporters what they are looking for, and that’s … reader’s attention.

Is the Inverted Pyramind recommended for all types of writers?

The approach is commonly used by journalists, but not all types of writers. For example the novelists can’t start from the conclusion and then follow it with the rest of the story, but they’re lucky in the sense that their targeted audience is ready to devote some time in reading the novel. But in case of journalists, they don’t get the audience with such leisure time (nobody would prefer going through the doom and gloom news in their leisure time). However, web writers can learn a thing or two from the approach.

What’s in it for web writers?

If you notice, web surfers are actually more in rush, as compared to someone with newspaper in his/her hands. In their bid to scan through hundreds of Google results or web pages in a matter of minutes, they usually just glance through the titles or headlines. And if it fails to grab their attention, they are gone. Thus, one of the most important skills a web writer can learn is to form a headline that will be a magnet for clicks. Now, I’ve worked with a number of writers and some of them are naturally gifted in this regard, and they can come up with more interesting and catchy titles as compared to their counterparts, who might be equally good at writing, still not able to churn out good titles. But if you lack in creativity, you can simply use the “inverted pyramid” approach to overcome this weakness.

How to use the “Inverted Pyramid” approach?

It’s quite straight forward, all you need to do is to think of the most important part of the story, article, blog post, or marketing copy. It’s the part that you think can catch the attention of your targeted audience, and then use that particular information in the title. Note that it is not some revolutionary idea. In fact you see this approach being used a lot while surfing through the web. Remember all those headlines promising overnight riches or miraculous results, that’s inverted pyramid for you and you can use it as well in your writing, from now on.


Bonus Tip:

At times, writers get obsessed with SEO and goes to the extent of spoiling the titles in a bid to add certain keywords in the titles, especially the dry ones like Norton 360 Discount or System Mechanic Coupon. Whilst having keywords or key phrases in the title can surely boost your chances for getting ranked for those keywords, you should make sure that the inclusion of the keywords is not done the cost of ruining the main purpose of the title i.e. attracting the readers.

Rahil Muzafar

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Author’s Bio:

Rahil is an Internet Marketing expert. He works for various coupon codes and discount websites, for example www.verybestsoftware.net that shares different types of deals and discounts for software like Norton 360, System Mechanic, or Acronis.

Thanks! Rahil!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Hunter S. Thompson and Which Is Easier: Learning the Tools or Leading the Team

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Writing and Leadership

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A couple of weeks ago in a meeting with Tim Sanders, (@SandersSays) Carol Roth (@CarolJSRoth) and Mark Carter (@MJCarter), Tim brought up a writer I hadn’t thought about in the longest while — Hunter S. Thompson, the King of Gonzo Journalism.

Hunter S. Thompson
Hunter S. Thompson, Miami Book Fair, 1988

Hunter S Thompson has been haunting me since.
In 2005, I wrote about the night my husband and I watch a television rerun of an interview with Hunter S. Thompson. . . .

It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. That someone says something so profound. So true. That it’s your own truth. Even though you’ve never put the words together, you’ve known their meaning deeply for what seems all of your life. I can’t tell you anything about the interview with Mr. Thompson, except one question and his answer.

The interviewer, who sat off camera, asked the reporter/writer which he thought was easier — writing or researching?Thompson, sitting on the back porch in what was his work area and speaking in a writer’s frugality with words, said without hesitation, “Researching is much easier, because no one can help you write.”

I’ve spent years working with young writers. I could coach them. I could say what wasn’t working. I could make suggestions on how to approach the problem. But at the end of the day, I couldn’t help them write. I had to stand back and watch them struggle.

A writer is a batter standing at home plate waiting for the pitch, a tennis player waiting for serve to come over the net. A coach can watch and report, but the coach can’t hit the ball. Comments marked in whatever color I choose are meaningless if a writer can’t interpret or internalize them. I can suggest technique, but I can’t teach heart. I can’t fix the writing. If I do, I become the writer.

It takes heart, soul, intuition, understanding, and flexibility to be a writer. It takes practice, persistence, and patience. It takes trust. It takes an artistic ability to blend structure with expression in the way a composer brings notes together to move people to feeling. It takes tears. Writing is hearing the music of the language and the nuance of how words come together to make meaning. Writing is talent teamed with trial and error. Writing is more than putting words on paper. It is experience and problem solving. It takes life to make a writer.

I wonder at how we have the same experience with so many things, yet we reach a faulty conclusion about writing. We drew in school, yet few of us say we are artists. We played ball, yet few of us say we are athletes. We did mathematics, yet few of us say we are mathematicians. Still so many of us say we are writers.

It’s no wonder that I am so aware of my differences.

I know that no one can help me write.

No one else can be the writer I am.

As I sit here today, reflecting on this, I realize that precisely same is true of leadership.

It takes heart, soul, intuition, understanding, and flexibility to be a leader. It takes practice, persistence, and patience. It takes takes trust. It takes an artistic ability to blend competence with compassion in the way a composer brings notes together to move people to feeling. It takes years.

Leadership is hearing the music of work that reaches into people’s hearts and the nuance of work that reaches out to make meaning in the world. Leadership is talent teamed with trial and error. Leadership is more than pulling people together. It is experience and problem solving. It takes life to make a leader.

I keep thinking that Hunter S. Thompson were asked which he thought was easier learning the tools or leading the team, he might have said,

“Learning the tools is much easier, because no one can help you lead.”

Do you see what that means?
No one else can be the leader you can be.

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!