Tag Archive for: writing tips

Rethinking the traditional content process

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John Refford’s tweets and posts about marketing technology caught my eye before I ever met him. I’m glad that Twitter connected us for some interesting conversations about the intersection between marketing, technology, and investments. At our last meeting, I thought, “I must ask John to guest-blog for me!” This post about content creation is the result.

Rethinking the Traditional Content Process
By John Refford

Just a few years ago the traditional content development process was really a “print” process, although it wasn’t called a “content development process,” but more likely “getting something up on the web.” Content producers slightly adapted their styles and processes and turned brochures into PDF documents placed on websites. These methods still exist today for some organizations (especially those not focused on e-commerce), but are in steep decline. However, a better process is emerging, as I’ll explain.

What’s Wrong With the Traditional Process?

The traditional content process, as shown in my diagram of “Content Creation – Old Way,” fails to deliver on several important measures. Let’s review four of them.

  1. It takes too long. Content is locked away inside your organization undergoing multiple revisions. And the longer it stays inside your organization, the more revisions are needed because the information has become stale.
  2. The information never gets customer-tested. Long content development cycles mean a lot of resources are sunk into one project. If you misread your target audience and the information does not resonate well with customers – that’s a large waste of resources.
  3. It tends to focus on one deliverable, such as a whitepaper, therefore missing numerous other communication vehicles such as video.
  4. Studies show fewer users are visiting corporate websites. If you’re not posting information in social media outlets, you’re not getting in front of your customers.

content creation - old way

QUIZ: Is My Organization’s Content Process Out Of Date?

Here’s a quiz that will help you to assess whether your content development process is keeping up with the times. Answer this question: How many of the statements below hold true for your organization?

  1. PDFs hold a large portion of content on my website
  2. Our social tactics include sharing links to PDFs and press releases
  3. The organization does not take advantage of social media outlets

If you answered “yes,” to one of these questions, then your process needs some work.

A Better Way to Create Content

Things have changed with the rise of the social technologies. Platforms originally used by individuals—such as YouTube, blogs, Twitter and Facebook—are now used by brands as part of their broader communication strategy. The range of options, strategies and tactics have made online brand marketing much more complex.

With the rise of social media marketing, traditional content development processes go from old-fashioned to antiquated. Let’s look at a more contemporary content development process.

content creation - new way

Given the wide array of options available, your content development process will undoubtedly be different than the image above. However, if you’re still developing content the old way, it’s time to rethink how you are creating content to support your brand objectives. The process in my diagram, “Content Creation – Better Way,” has four steps.

  1. Start with an idea. No change there from the old-fashioned approach.
  2. Validate the concepts of your ideas publicly. The value of sharing ideas early is that it gives organizations a chance to test them in the market before further developing them internally. Some vehicles for testing ideas include blog posts and discussion threads on social media sites like LinkedIn. This step provides feedback useful for fine-tuning a concept.
  3. Create multiple pieces of content that illustrate the concepts. Rather than a single deliverable, such as a whitepaper, create a series of pieces. This allows individuals to process the material several times in different formats. We know people learn differently; they learn by reading, seeing, hearing and doing. By providing different content formats you increase your audience’s ability to consume the information.
  4. Share the content socially. Sure you can share links to the content but you can also use the content to drive conversations. You might be in a position to allow your employees to share the content with their networks as well.

The Next Content Development Process?

Indeed, what does the future hold for content development? It remains to be seen but it will be shaped by today’s forces. Data will play a big part in content’s future. Consumers throw off tons of data from their online activities and as more devices come online (cars, appliances, offices, etc.), expect the amount of data collected to grow. This data will be analyzed in real-time and consumers will receive content that is highly contextual, personalized and provided just when they need it.

And what will become of traditional processes? In a recent Harvard Business Review article, Dana Rousmaniere predicts advertising will be replaced by new content processes by 2020 – that’s in less than seven years. You’d better start now.

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John Refford writes about marketing technology on his blog, you can also follow him on twitter at @iamreff.

Keep it short, but mix it up

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Short sentences are easier to read. But many of us learned to write long sentences in what Natalie Canavor, author of Business Writing in the Digital Age, calls “pre-20th century writing.” The best writing mixes sentence lengths for variety, rhythm, and better comprehension.

Modern and historical sentence lengths

Canavor lists the following sentence lengths in her book:

  • 7-10 words for spoken sentences
  • 14-22 words, on average, for the most understandable written sentences
  • 23 words in the late 19th century
  • 29 words in Victorian times
  • 45 words in Elizabethan times
  • 50 words in pre-Elizabethan times

Sentences are getting shorter. As they shrink, so does readers’ patience with long-winded writing.

Variety is good, too

Short is good, but line after line of short sentences may bore your readers.

I agree with Canavor’s advice to keep your sentences short on average. In an example she cites in her book, the sentence length of several paragraphs averages 17.9 words. However, “one sentence is 41 words long and a few are less than 10 words.” This can work if the long sentence is properly crafted.

Test your writing

How long do YOUR sentences run? Take something you’ve written recently and calculate the average sentence length. It’s easy to do in Microsoft Word using its readability statistics. Other word-processing software offers similar capabilities.

By the way, the average sentence length in this blog post is 11.5 words.

Good book for novice business writers

I like Business Writing in the Digital Age as a resource for novice business writers. It has lots of practical tips, examples, and writing exercises.

Margin analysis to improve your writing

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Like belongs with like in your writing, as I discussed in “Key lesson for investment commentary writers from my professional organizer.” In Help! for Writers, Roy Peter Clark suggests a way that you can analyze and then reorganize your drafts so that your information goes in the right places.

Step 1: Print and write in margins

Print your draft on paper and then list in the margin the main topics of each paragraph. This helps you to get some distance from your draft so you can analyze it.

Step 2: List most important topics

On a separate piece of paper, list your draft’s most important topics. Assign each topic a color. Use colors of markers that you have handy or of highlighter colors in your word-processing program.

Next, color each section or paragraph according to its topic. If you see one color scattered throughout your draft, you can assess whether to leave it that way or, as Clark says, “bring those elements together in a single coherent passage.”

If you try this technique, I’d like to hear from you about how it works for you.

 

Note: On July 2, I added a clarifying phrase to this post.

Top writing tips from CFA Hartford, FPAMA, NYSSA, and PAICR

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Participants in my four May writing workshops expressed their opinions on my most helpful tips. I share their favorites below, along with related links.

1. Use mind mapping to organize your thoughts before you write.

You can create a mind map focused on the topic you’d like to tackle in your investment commentary, article, or other written piece. Put the topic in the middle of your page, then start mapping ideas. Once you have everything down on the page, it’s time for analysis. Don’t forget this key step!

Here are some of my blog posts on mind mapping:

Mind mapping was the favorite tip of my CFA Hartford and New York Society of Security Analysts participants.

2. Use the first-sentence check on your articles, blog posts, and more.

The first-sentence check is a great way to assess how well your article flows. The method also gives you a sense of how much a skimming reader might absorb.

The basic idea is to read the first sentence of every paragraph. I explain the details in “Quick check for writers, with an economic commentary example.”

This was the favorite tip of participants in my PAICR RFP Symposium presentation. In general, they favored my tips for simplifying sentences. By the way, if you’re a PAICR member, you can find my handout from the presentation on the members-only website.

3. Improve your email subject lines.

Your email subject lines will have a greater impact when you put your action items and deadlines in them. Also, pay attention to line length, or you may experience the problem I describe in “Don’t make this mistake in your email subject lines!”

The topic of subject lines clearly resonated with the attendees at my presentation to the Financial Planning Association of Massachusetts.

 

Want to learn more about these techniques? Stay tuned for the release of my book, Financial Blogging: How to Write Powerful Posts That Attract Clients.

June 28 update: I revised this post to add a link to “Photo + Mind Map = Blog Inspiration,” which is one of my favorite posts. Also, I made one small word change.

Simplify and clarify to write better

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how to not write bad ben yagoda“The road to not writing badly starts with simplifying and clarifying,” wrote Ben Yagoda in “In Writing, First Do No Harm.” Yagoda is the author of How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and How to Avoid Them.

Here are some steps you can take to apply Yagoda’s advice to your writing:

  1. Use the first-sentence check method to make sure your article flows logically.
  2. Ask yourself if every sentence of every paragraph supports the paragraph’s topic sentence.
  3. Shorten your sentences.
  4. Delete excess words.
  5. Replace jargon with plain English.
  6. Test your writing on a member of your target audience.

 

Don’t write like a spiny cedar!

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The triangular spikes that studded the tree’s bark caught my eye along the Costa Rican trail. They’re the spiny cedar’s protection against sloths who would scale it. When you write, please don’t put spikes on your text. They’ll turn away the time-pressed readers who are your sloths.

What are the spikes in your writing?

In many cases, the spikes in advisors’ writing are ten-dollar words: fancy-schmancy jargon or Latinate words that could easily be replaced by plain English.

For example, I’ve long disliked the word “mitigate,” as I wrote in “Can you make a case for mitigate?” “Financial writers clinic: Getting rid of ‘mitigate,'” and “BNY Mellon: I liked your ‘truth ad’ until you used that word.”

By the way, if you’d like to see a genuine spiny cedar, my husband and I took this photo on the Teak and Canal trail of Hacienda Baru on Costa Rica’s Pacific coast.

Maintain your draft’s momentum with these tips

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If you’re too busy to complete a draft in one sitting, these tips can help.

When you return to a partly written draft, you may feel as if you’re starting from scratch again. You have lost your momentum because you have no idea what comes next. You can beat this “blank page” feeling by leaving yourself some hints for your next words.

Here are some techniques you can use:

1. Stop after you write the first sentence of your next paragraph. If it is an effective topic sentence, the rest of the paragraph should flow easily.

2. Jot down bullet points outlining what you’ll write after you return. It’s easier to turn bullets into sentences than to pull ideas out of your head in an organized manner.

3. Pull out your mind map, outline, or other notes. If you organized your ideas in writing before you started your draft, you can pull out your notes to ease you back into your draft. For me, this usually means looking at a hand-drawn mind map. You might prefer an outline or some other form of reminder.

YOUR tips?

I’m sure some of you have discovered other tips that make it easy to dive into your incomplete drafts. Please share.

Image courtesy of Zuzzuillo / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Stars aren’t only for Morningstar: How to cut your draft

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Sometimes you have to limit yourself to a specific number of words when you write. This is often true when you write for someone else’s print or online publication. If your draft runs too long, and you have trouble cutting, consider starring your content as Roy Peter  Clark suggests in Help! for Writers in his chapter on “Making it Better.”

Rate each section of your content, considering its importance and interest to your readers. “Strongest sections earn a grade of three stars; the next get two; and the weakest get one star,” says Clark.

Start your cutting with the one-star sections. Depending on how many words you need to lose, you may achieve your goal by eliminating a word here and a sentence there from your one-star sections.

On the other hand, if your piece is way too long, you may need to delete all of your one-star material and start hacking at your two-star material.

Does this approach seem helpful to you? I haven’t used it because I usually cut based on what my gut tells me to do. Still, I can see how it might help writers without this instinct.

Image courtesy of Master isolated images / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Got Metaphor?

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Metaphors can make your communications stand out from the crowd. Anne Miller’s perspective on using metaphors was well received when she spoke on a corporate writing panel that I organized for the American Society of Journalists and Authors. I’m delighted to share her thoughts on this topic.

 

Got Metaphor?

By Anne Miller, @annemillerny

 

I’m a big fan of Pimco’s Bill Gross, not just for his obvious investment acumen, but for his communication savvy. He repeatedly uses a writing technique that every financial blog, tweet, column, or book writer would do well to emulate. He uses visual language to seduce his readers before he presents his arguments. Consciously or unconsciously, he knows that without that initial seduction, there is little hope for getting undivided attention to what he has to say.

What is visual language? Metaphors and analogies that create mental images and instantly resonate with listeners.

Here are some examples from Pimco “Investment Outlooks”:

Feb. 2013. “Credit Supernova!” complete with a beautiful photo of the universe and T.S. Eliot’s quote “This is the way the world ends…Not with a bang but a whimper.”

He carries through on this image to frame his argument: “…And too, the advancing entropy in the physical universe may in fact portend a similar decline of “energy” and “heat” within the credit markets. If so, then the legitimate response of creditors, debtors and investors inextricably intertwined within it, should logically be to ask about the economic and investment implications of its ongoing transition.”

December, 2012. “Strawberry Fields – Forever?” This title is followed by a riff on John Lennon’s song, which ultimately leads to the subject of his newsletter: “But whoever succeeds President Obama, the next four years will likely face structural economic headwinds that will frustrate the American public.”

And one example from Twitter…

March 6. “Rule Britannia? Nah. Maybe the waves once upon a time but their economy is now a lifeboat. Sell the pound-Aggressive QE ahead.”

All of these are immediate attention grabbers. Why? Because they speak to the way our brains work. We are wired to respond to images. We notice images, particularly when they are used unexpectedly (Credit Supernova!). We remember images (where were you when JFK was shot, or when you attended your first rock concert?). We react emotionally to images (Hurricane Sandy’s devastation).

From cave drawings to advertising (Prudential’s rock, Nike’s swoosh) to the internet (files, desktop, trash cans) to Wall Street (bulls, bears, white knights), to current events (fiscal cliff), mankind’s communications have reflected this primal reach for images to communicate. Even Einstein acknowledged the centrality images play in how we process information: “If I can’t see it, I don’t understand it.”

As a financial advisor in a world of too much, and often complex, information, too many similar sounding competitors, and increasingly shorter and shorter attentions spans, skill at using visual language is increasingly necessary to stand out. Visual language is the fuel that drives your ideas forward. Without it, it’s like driving a Ferrari on an empty tank. You won’t get very far on the road and you won’t get very far with your readers.

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Anne Miller, business communication specialist, helps professional service providers increase business by sharpening their sales and presentation skills. She combines best practices with client psychology and the latest brain research to ensure her clients have maximum impact on their clients.

Bust the clutter in your writing!

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My writing is better organized than my personal possessions, so I sometimes read books about organizing. But I unexpectedly found an insight for writers in Julie Morgenstern’s SHED Your Stuff, Change Your Life.

Here’s the quote that caught my eye:

Something doesn’t have to be disorganized to be clutter. A perfectly arranged dresser filled with clothes you haven’t worn in years is still clutter.

The same goes for writing. Perfectly punctuated, grammatically correct content that is irrelevant to your readers is useless. Toss it.

For example, let’s assume you’ve written a compelling, plain-English blog post about the need to use low-cost mutual funds or exchange-traded funds (ETFs). This post won’t benefit from a long, technical explanation of the origin of ETFs. You may be intrigued by the topic, but your readers won’t give a darn.

Yes, I know you may be emotionally attached to that content. After all, you probably slaved over it. But it’s not doing anyone any good. Not you, nor your readers.

Of course this is easier said than done. I’ve been reading books about clutter for years, and I’m only slowly seeing improvements at home. However, every little bit helps.

Image courtesy of Bill Longshaw / FreeDigitalPhotos.net