Successful brands use visuals to jog the memory of existing and potential consumers. The visual element for writers publishing online is limited to the avatar picture in their profiles. Choosing that picture with care and making it memorable is one way of increasing recognition value for your present and future readers. Once established, you'll just have to be brave enough to stick with it.
When writing online, your aim is to attract as many hits or views as possible. Should you do it by writing about what everybody else is writing about as well? Or should you rather go for something nobody is writing about?
British media use abbreviations more and more sloppily. Standards are slipping there, in spelling, and in grammar. This is probably just a further fall-out from the excellent British education system where most pupils leave school unable to read and write. No need to blame lazy pupils when more than 50 per cent of teachers are unable to properly spell even basic English words.
Travel articles are among the most read articles on the web. Beautiful and interesting places are presented in travel blogs. Travel stories take you to strange and exotic views, into far away regions, and let you visit foreign cultures. They can serve in lieu of a holiday and hold attraction for just about anyone. Does that mean these places always need to be far away from your own home?
Miles and kilometers, meters and yards, Celsius and Fahrenheit, ounces and grams, liters and gallons; don’t we all get lost at times? Your readers will get lost as easily in your article when it contains measurements they don’t understand; and they might never come back. By using tools to convert your measurements you offer the readers a valuable service.
When writing, get into the habit of saving your articles and posts to your computer. Keeping a copy of all you write has several very good reasons. Your computer allows you to find them in a fast and effective manner. Articles sold to a third party are still accessible to you. And post on publishing sites are safe from loss.
Why do people avoid linking to other sites? This goes for writers, marketers and webmasters alike. Do you fear losing a reader to the other site for good? Surely, your writing is better than that? Do you think you are giving away your Google Page Rank? Or is it just laziness?
Writing well means using your vocabulary to the fullest. To become an even better writer, you have to keep on expanding your vocabulary. Writing doesn't do that for you, but reading will. Vocabulary is your writing muscle. It's like a real muscle. Membership in the gym alone won't train it, you have to do the work to stay in shape.
Success or failure of a company's online presence depends on Google's opinion of it. This may sound like one more conspiracy theory about Google ruling the world, but the statement is harsh reality. Google doesn't form an life opinion based on human decisions. Google's computer calculates a mathematical opinion called algorithm. Likes and dislikes based on human readers' subjective impressions are replaced by human programmers' likes and dislikes that are equally subjective.
Did you think that trolls are an invention of the internet age? They exist since humans first developed thought. The most vicious comments were written by writers about other writers. None of the net trolls so far has had that much style. And there is a trick to deal with these midgets, too.
Writers spend a lot of time thinking of ideas they can write about. Time goes into research of background information. They find time to write the article. Uploading the article to the publishing site of their choice, they barely remember to add a title. And that is what titles often look like: slapdash. But the article's title is the entry door to the real thing.
Fraud in product labels is usually committed by omitting crucial information. What isn't written on the label might be more harmful than what is written. The high art of labeling is not being caught at it while giving the impression of full disclosure. To make it more interesting, the final content of the label also has to be legal.
It takes 20 years to build a good reputation and 5 minutes to destroy it. This is one of Warren Buffet’s gems. The canny doyen of investors is right. Online reputation management is as important as never before. People are connected as never before. They can access any information with just a few clicks. A single negative comment may just be enough to ruin a good reputation built up over years.
Continuous blogging by companies is the norm if you want to write, shape, and lead the story. If not, you end up being part of someone's story with no way to influence it. Blogs run by companies offer them many opportunities to promote their business while retaining control over the content presented to the reader. There are certain principles in company blogging that should be adhered to if you want to be successful. And as a writer and author, you should think of yourself as a company.
While writing may be what you want to do, it is by far and wide not the only thing you have to do. If you want your articles or books to be read you need clout. Writing a book or an article may be fun and it is certainly a lot of work. But no matter how well written your work is, it does need readers to come alive and bring you money. If no one reads your work, what you have to say will go unheard. It becomes, in fact, the sound in an empty wood. It may be there, but is it?
How many times have you read or been given the advice: Use Google Translate to translate your articles into other languages. If you followed this advice, you've been had; someone is right now laughing their socks off over your article. All I can say to you: Don't do it. It will translate word by word, as it can't follow the sense of your article.
Before you publish your article online and hand it over to the readers, it is essential that you check it in every way possible. Make sure you deliver the quality consistent with the brand you are trying to build. When planning time for writing, always include enough time to check over what you have written. Nobody is perfect, but try to be as near to perfection as possible.
The eternal quandary faced by all online writers is the one of priority. Is quality more important than quantity, or is it just the other way round? As far as I know, no one has yet published a mathematical formula to get us all out of the fix; gut feeling has to fix it. Everyone has to decide for themselves how much they value quality over a generous output. And you can always blame Google if your articles don't find any readers.
