Your spell checker doesn’t work so you must proofread

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Can you identify the error?

The picture shows the subject line of an email that I’ve edited to hide the identity of the guilty typist. It includes the kind of error that a spell checker won’t catch. Even Microsoft Word’s grammar checker didn’t catch the typo when I tested the complete sentence.

Proofreading is essential, if you want to avoid embarrassing yourself in your financial blog or other written communications. Tips for effective proofreading are included in my blogging class.

If you think typos don’t matter, read some of the comments this typo drew from my social media friends.

  • Oooh…That makes me not want to open that e-mail at all.
  • That kind of mistake makes me nuts.
  • Ouch!

In case you couldn’t identify the error

The subject line should have read “See who’s speaking this fall….”

Gosh, I hope I didn’t let any typos slip through in this post.

Note: This post was updated on May 18, 2015 to remove an outdated link.

Guest post: “How Seeking Alpha Can Build Your Professional Reputation”

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SeekingAlpha.com looks like a great way for investment professionals to share their opinions and market themselves. So when I met Geoff Considine and learned he’d done exactly that, I asked him to guest-blog about his experience.

How Seeking Alpha Can Build Your Professional Reputation

by Geoff Considine

Writing for SeekingAlpha.com has helped me develop my professional reputation and gain attention for my quantitative modeling software and consulting services. Financial professionals can build a substantial brand from SeekingAlpha.  Quite a few writers, advisors, consultants, and others have developed enormous reach on the basis of SeekingAlpha.  I am certainly not even among the most successful.

If I can do it, so can you, especially if you follow the six rules I give at the end of this article.

My experience publishing on SeekingAlpha.com

I have been writing for SeekingAlpha.com since January 2006.  At that time, I had fairly recently launched a software tool for financial advisors and individual investors and I was trying to drum up some attention.  All in, I have written 127 articles on SeekingAlpha.com, even though I have not written for them since September 2009.  I have written a lot over the last year, but I have developed a sufficiently deep audience that I have only been writing for advisor-focused publications such as Advisor Perspectives.  I am quite confident that I never would have been able to write for these professional publications without the experience and reputation gained from writing for SeekingAlpha.com.

Quantext, my small company, gets about 100,000 hits a month on its website in a good month.  I sell software and e-books, along with doing consulting on analytical models for portfolio management and asset allocation.  The only marketing that I have ever done for my business is writing—and SeekingAlpha.com was the only place that I published articles (aside from my own website) in the first couple of years of building out the software side of my business.

Once something is published on a site like SA, people will go back and look at what you have said in the past—it’s a fairly permanent record.  This can be great when your thinking is validated, but can pose reputational risk if you make some outlandish statement.  Back in 2007, for example, one of The Motley Fool’s best-known columnists came out and said that he risk measures such as Beta and volatility just didn’t matter at all, not matter what all the academics say.  His timing was very unfortunate.  Investors who ignored standard risk measures are likely to have suffered disproportionately large losses in the subsequent decline.  This type of reputational risk is quite easy to avoid if you stay away from making assertions in articles that strain common sense or that fly in the face of all standards of practice.

One of the ways to build credibility with articles is to identify thought leaders with whom your thinking is consistent.  One of my early articles looked at Berkshire Hathaway’s portfolio using my portfolio analysis software.  My software identified a number of ways that Berkshire’s portfolio looked very attractive.  If my analysis had suggested that Warren Buffett didn’t know what he was doing, I would have had something of a problem.  I have also analyzed portfolios and strategies proposed by David Swensen (head of Yale’s endowment), Mohammed El-Erian (co-head of PIMCO), and Jeremy Grantham.

The previous paragraph notwithstanding, I am not suggesting that writers steer away from controversy.  If you can make a really solid case for a contrarian theme and publish it in an open forum, you can really stake out territory for your thought leadership.  One of my major early themes that I wrote about in 2006-2007 was that there were a number of really robust reasons to believe that market volatility would skyrocket.  This theme in a number of my SA articles got the attention of an editor at Kiplinger’s and resulted in an interview that appeared in the magazine in early 2008.  As the market conditions have evolved, my writing on this theme has continued to get me very positive attention.

If SA is so great, why don’t I publish much there anymore?  The answer is that I have found that my audience is mainly professional advisors, there are better publications to reach this targeted audience, and I get paid to write these days.  There is a significant opportunity cost for me to write a piece for SA.  If I have more time on my hands in the future, I would certainly put more pieces in SA.

How YOU can thrive on SeekingAlpha.com

There are a few guidelines that I would offer for financial professionals who want to use Seeking Alpha to develop their professional brands:

1)     Make sure that you have something to say, and good arguments to support your ideas

2)     Craft your writing carefully

3)     Use feedback on your articles to develop your writing style

4)     Respond to comments—be an active member of the community

5)     Write regularly and consistently

6)     Learn your special niche

Seeking Alpha can be a powerful channel for reaching your audience, but you need a long-term strategy for how to tap this channel.  If you simply plan to write one article, SA won’t do much for you.  If you write a consistent series of articles that is well articulated and make sense, SA can be enormously powerful.  When I started writing there, I thought of SA as a somewhat narrow channel for getting my ideas out there.  Whether or not I was correct then I am not sure, but this is certainly not the case today.  SA has enormous reach.

Guide to e-newsletters

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If you have questions about e-newsletters, mosey on over to “The freelancer’s guide to e-newsletters” on Michelle Rafter’s WordCount blog. I’m quoted extensively in answers to questions including

  • What’s so great about e-newsletters?
  • How long should it be?
  • What kind of software can I use?
  • How can I get subscribers?

If you’re a financial blogger, you can recycle your blog posts in your newsletter, perhaps adding one unique bit of content for your subscribers.

It takes time to build an e-newsletter email list. Even if you don’t think you need one yet, start building your newsletter now.

A top technique of financial advisors who blog successfully

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Financial advisors, don’t post it and forget it.

If the only thing you do with your blog posts is upload them to your blog, you limit your audience. Instead, recycle your content and make it available in other formats that your target market enjoys. Recycling is a powerful technique that helps financial advisors’ ROI on blogging.

It’s easy to expand your audience with a little extra effort, including

  1. Offering an email subscription to your individual blog posts–Many people still prefer receiving their reading matter via email instead of visiting your blog, Twitter, or an RSS feed. Google Feedburner is a popular choice for bloggers who want to offer this option. Feedburner delivers each post individually.
  2. Offering a monthly e-newsletter made up of articles from from your blog–This allows you to emphasize the posts of greatest interest to your target audience. You can also add content that appears only in your newsletter, to give blog readers an incentive to subscribe. You can use a service such as Constant Contact or MailChimp for newsletters.
  3. Packaging posts into an e-book or special report–This is how I create Investment Writing Top Tips, the e-book that my new e-newsletter subscribers receive in appreciation of their subscriptions.
  4. Post links to your posts via social media, including LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. You’ll find some of the details of how to use your LinkedIn status line in “Reader question: How do I post my investment commentary to LinkedIn?“
  5. Printing out appropriate posts to share with clients, prospects, and referral sources–If you’re meeting with a client whose main concern is saving for her children’s college education, you’ll make an impression if you can hand her some of your blog posts on that topic.
  6. Turning blog posts into audio or video–I expanded on my original blog post content when I created my audiocast on “How to Guest-Blog on Personal Finance Or Investments.” I may pick up some audience members who prefer to listen to content.
  7. Turning your content into presentations–I remember the first time I turned my former employer’s quarterly client letter into PowerPoint slides with graphs. It was the same old words, but the salespeople and relationship managers responded with such enthusiasm I felt as if I’d invented something brand new.

Do you recycle your posts in another way? Please share in the comments section.

If you’re not already reusing your financial blog posts, start today!

Poll: Should you make investment predictions that can backfire?

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The investment strategies of Bill Gross, founder and co-chief investment officer of PIMCO, influence the asset allocations of investment professionals around the world.  Should he also influence your approach to your market commentary?

“Vigilante on the move,” a profile of PIMCO that appeared in The Economist, got me thinking with the following paragraph.

“Some colleagues might welcome a lower profile for Mr Gross, whose utterances occasionally backfire. In a typically punchy commentary in January he recommended avoiding British government debt, which was ‘resting on a bed of nitroglycerine’. But gilts failed to explode, and PIMCO was forced to reverse course.”

When you make investment predictions, you’re bound to be wrong some of the time.

Is this embarrassment something that you should avoid at all costs by shunning predictions and strong opinions? Some managers hedge their bets with wording such as “a continued recovery is more likely than a double-dip recession, however….” Or, should you embrace controversy?

What strategy will help you most with clients, prospects, and referral sources?

Please answer the poll that will appear in the right-hand column of this blog until I take it down next month. I’ll comment on the results in my September e-newsletter. Or you can leave comments below.

Poll question

Clients and prospects will respond best when asset managers’ market commentary…

  • Never makes predictions
  • Makes qualified predictions that give them an “out”
  • Sometimes makes predictions
  • Always expresses at least one strong opinion
  • None of the above (Please leave a comment)

Financial ad in plain English: Another one from BNY Mellon

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Financial ads that speak plain English are unusual, so I was delighted to find another example from BNY Mellon in the July/August issue of the CFA Institute’s magazine. This ad does an even better job than the ad I discussed in “BNY Mellon: I liked your ‘truth ad’ until you used that word.”

Here’s the text that opens the ad for BNY Mellon Asset Servicing.

“Our tools measure performance, monitor exposure, and analyze risk. You get all the glory.”

The text is jargon-free. Plus it appeals to readers’ interest in promoting their careers. It’s a nice combination. The rest of the text is also free of jargon.

How do YOUR written materials measure up?

Three writing lessons from “One Trader’s Binge on Cocoa Wraps Up Chocolate Market”

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Some of us will read about hedge fund managers even if they’re written about in prose as dry as the Sahara. But many people won’t. This is why I’m discussing “One Trader’s Binge on Cocoa Wraps Up Chocolate Market” by Julia Werdigier and Julie Creswell in today’s New York Times (free registration may be required for access to the article). As I type this blog post, this article on the front page of The New York Times is its “most emailed.”

Photo by Profound Whatever

Here are three writing lessons from the article.

Lesson 1: Use colorful images. “To some, he is a real-life Willy Wonka. To others, he is a Bond-style villain bent on taking over the world’s supply of chocolate,” write the authors in the opening paragraph. This immediately draws in readers who may not care about hedge funds. Of course, the fact that hedge fund manager Anthony Ward is buying cocoa, an essential ingredient in chocolate, lends itself to tasty images.

Lesson 2: Explain numbers in everyday terms. “”By one estimate, he has bought enough to make more than five billion chocolate bars,” says the article. That’s a much more colorful image than “7 percent of annual cocoa production worldwide.”

Lesson 3: Get your main point across quickly. By the end of the first column, I learned that “.. hedge fund manager …named Anthony Ward has all but cornered the market in cocoa….and rival traders are crying foul, saying Mr. Ward is stockpiling cocoa in a bid to drive up already high prices so he can sell later at a big profit. His activities have helped drive cocoa prices on the London market to a 30-year high.”

Bonus suggestion: If you’re looking for writing tips, especially for short articles such as blog posts, analyze newspaper articles. The best newspaper articles offer great role models.

How NOT to toot your horn about your investment publications

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Getting financial media recognition for your investment research enhances your credibility. It may even help you win new asset management clients and keep the old ones. However, I suggest you take the time to make your announcement about media coverage compelling, rather than boring.

To help you understand the difference, I’ve written a article closely modeled on a real article. This is the “before” version. Then, I tweak it in the “after” version.

Before Susan’s editing: So what?
We published a XXX Investment Company Report on Diversification, which you can read here.  This research was the topic of an Investment Professional article, “Diversification for the Ages,”  and was featured in Investment Manager Journal magazine article, “Hotshot’s Groundbreaking Diversification.”

After Susan’s editing: How this helps you
Did the 2008-2009 market decline make you worry about whether portfolio diversification is as effective as your business school professors told you? It can be effective. You’ll learn how we’ve boosted the power of diversification in our latest XXX Investment Company Report. We’re proud that our research is interesting enough that it has been featured in “Diversification for the Ages” in Investment Professional and “Hotshot’s Groundbreaking Diversification” in Investment Manager Journal.

What’s the difference?
The first version is heavy on “we.” The message seems to be “We are great. You should be impressed.”

The second version addresses readers’ concerns. It tells them what benefit they’ll get from reading the XXX Investment Company Report. They’ll learn that their worries about diversification may be misplaced because of the new approach developed by XXX Investment Company.

The bottom line for asset managers? Whatever you write, take the time to put yourself in your clients’ shoes. Appeal to their self-interest first. Put horn tooting last.

Related posts

NOTE: I updated this article in Jan. 2017.

 

Image courtesy of vectorolie at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

Guest post: “Adding Video into the Communications Mix”

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Video makes a great complement to your written financial communications. This is the message I took away from the guest video post below by Samantha Allen of Investius.

Until I watched Samantha’s video, it hadn’t occurred to me that video’s short format can attract readers, so they’re willing to read publications that go into greater depth on the same topic. I’d been thinking of video as a competing format that appeals to people who prefer visual learning.

Thanks, Samantha!

Thomas Jefferson’s writing wisdom

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“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”

Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, had the right idea when he wrote this line, which I discovered thanks to Better Business Writing by Sue Brock.

Happy Independence Day!

Photo: cliff1066TM