When it comes to great writing, less is more. But even if you’re familiar with the mantra to “omit needless words,” tightening your writing is harder that it looks.

Which words should you omit? How can you write more clearly? Danny Rubin, a national news consultant and former television news reporter, demonstrates—with examples—the power of brevity.

There is a common misconception when it comes to writing that is professional in nature that a person must write in a verbose manner to come across as intelligent.

I am sorry. Let me do that again.

People often make a mistake in thinking that writing long-winded sentences with big words makes them appear smart.

Actually, let me try this one more time.

You don’t need to write a lot or use big words to sound smart.

Now, that’s better.

Too often, people write sentences like the one at the top when they should choose version #3. The main culprit, in my view, is the loathsome college essay. Only in college are we forced to write a paper a certain length. We develop strategies that balloon our paragraphs so we can fill out eight, 10 or 12 pages and pick up our gold stars on the way out.

In the real world, most people don’t enjoy reading cover letters, resumes and presentations. It’s extra work and burdensome. Worst of all, trying to write beyond our skill level screams ‘I’m in over my head.’

When you write with brevity, you make your points quickly and shrewdly. You don’t waste words and, in doing so, you don’t waste a person’s time. An employer or hiring manager, for instance, then sees you as sharp and courteous.

The secret to brevity (and, in turn, clarity) is something we are rarely taught growing up and may appear anathema to a professor of English lit:

Write like you are talking to a friend.

Get the rest of Danny Rubin’s wisdom on lifehacker.com

Written by Robert Bruce.

Google’s been pissing people off lately. Panda, Penguin, Parakeet (okay, I made that last one up), who knows what’s next …

Then there are the social networking evangelists whose entire fortunes are deep in Zuckerberg’s asset.
And finally, the faithful content producers, who labor slowly and quietly to build their businesses one thousand words at a time.
It can all seem a bit much to keep up with. SEO isn’t bad. Social networking sites aren’t evil. Content marketing isn’t impossible. But it can feel like it sometimes.
To clear some of this confusion and frustration up for us, I’ve asked Lee Odden to jump on the show and tell us how the smart, systematic integration of search, social, and content can attract an audience … and keep businesses — both large and small — sanely profitable.

In this episode we discuss:

• The 3 phases of a holistic customer attraction plan
• What the changes in search algorithms really mean for online publishers
• How to intelligently plan a content strategy that works
• Why it’s now essential that you become a “holistic” content producer
• 5 content optimization audits you need to perform
• 3 steps to implementing your systematic content plan
• How to scale your content efforts on a limited budget

Listen to what Lee has to say about integrating content, social, and search on www.copyblogger.com

In every generation, there are game-changing advancements that redefine business. From the automobile and television, to the VCR and Internet, the evolution of technology drives our consumptive habits. Today, there are arguably fewer more engrossing, time-consuming habits than that of the world’s current phenomenon, Facebook.While more than 900 million people worldwide have active accounts, few businesses take full advantage of this enormous marketplace. For most, this is not due to a lack of desire—it stems from a lack of knowledge. When industry stalwarts such as Anthony Robbins and Frank Kern sought to leverage Facebook’s tremendous reach and recognized their limited ability for effectively making this happen, they turned to Jennifer Sheahan. Jennifer has cracked the Facebook code and created powerful strategies that are neither complex nor expensive. To affect a veritable Facebook frenzy and drive this powerful, captive audience towards your products and services, of her many strategies, Jennifer recommends beginning with these two.

See on socialmediatoday.com

Lynda McNutt Foster Delivers with Her Weekly Launch List

Lynda  overflows with brains, enthusiasm, creativity, and fun.

So, I wasn’t surprised to find her new weekly newsletter unique in its approach to its recipients. The ‘Launch List’ is a quick read that delivers much-needed Monday morning inspiration. Although it reflects Linda’s positive personality, it’s not all about her. It’s all about her customers, colleagues, and friends.

For example,  the headline of her April 30 newsletter was Will you make time for the people part of profits this week?  The content focused on improving high-level relationships and began:

A high level connection is one that empowers you and the other person.  Fast is slow with people and slow is fast in building empowering relationships. (Stephen Covey, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People).  Are you trying to be too efficient with people? Try some of these techniques this week to build stronger connections with the people that matter most and who will help you reap profits professionally and personally.

Lynda  then offered quick tips for optimizing relations with your team, your clients, your family, and yourself.  She also included a cool link to a TED talk  by Sherry Turkle that deals with how we make connections through technology.

Each of her newsletters is a quick read.  But, I’ve found that she often forces me to think about things that I could and should be doing better. That then leads me and, I’m sure, dozens and dozens of her readers back to  one of the things that Lynda does for a living.  She teaches leadership and business skills.  In the April 30 newsletter, she does mention a workshop that she’s doing with the appropriate link. But, that comes naturally and at the end of all the great content. Moreover, in many of her newsletters, there is absolutely no self promotion whatsoever.

 6 Lessons We Can Learn from Lynda’s  Launch List

1.  Make sure that your communications with your customers and prospects are all about them–and not all about you.
2.  Develop content that that is so engaging and enjoyable that it becomes must reading whenever it arrives.
3.  Find a way to demonstrate your knowledge and skills–in Lynda’s  case it tends to be about leadership–through the quality of the content that you are delivering.
4.  Don’t be afraid to include meaningful links to other thought-provoking content that reinforces what you yourself are providing.
5.  Make your content easy and fun to read. Lynda writes in short paragraphs with colorful highlights that emphasize important points and just the right amount of graphic images that support her topic.
6.  Let your content reflect your personality. The Launch List certainly reflects Lynda’s  and makes it obvious that she is the kind of person we would surely want to do business with.

I was impressed with Lynda before her new newsletter began to arrive.  Now, I’m blown away and newly inspired to improve my own communications.

Rethink Your Content Marketing by Aiming at Billions of Buyers on the Move

For those of us who been around computing since the early days of PCs, the consumer move to mobile devices and away from desktop and even laptop computers is astonishing–and maybe a little terrifying.

Smartphones Soar

First, smartphones such as the Blackberry, Nokia, and iPhone entered the picture. But, as recently as 2007 total smartphone sales were only 122 million. Alex Cocotas of BI Intelligence predicts that annual smartphone sales will hit 1.5 billion units by 2016. That’s 10X growth in less than 10 years.

Tablets Triumph

In the first year of its existence, 1981, the IBM PC sold 100,000 units. Most of those buyers were geeks or leading-edge business users. Apple’s new iPad sold 3 million units in its first weekend and more than 50 million units since the introduction of the first iPad just 2 years ago.

As Tim Bajarin reported in Techland.Time.com in April of 2012:

While the iPod and even the iPhone have been groundbreaking in their own right, it is perhaps Apple’s iPad tablet that may have the most profound impact on the world of personal computing since it is the first computer that is truly portable and easy to carry with you everywhere you go. Yes, the iPhone and smartphones are more portable, but because of their small screens, their computing capabilities are limited. But with their larger screens, the iPad and similar tablets deliver much of the power of a laptop (minus the keyboard) and almost as much flexibility as you can get from bigger portable computers — but in a much smaller package.

IPad users still include geeks and business types but they’re just as likely to include your six-year-old and your grandmother. When I visited our local Apple store, the average customer was a senior citizen who really wanted to learn how to use their iPad effectively. Of course, they all seemed to be carrying iPhones, too. You can bet that their mobile devices will soon–or may already have displaced their PCs.

Social Media Goes Mobile

In research released April 13, 2012, eMarketer predicted a massive shift to mobile devices:

… by 2014, 33.3% of the U.S. population will visit social networking sites using their mobile phones at least once per month. That’s up from 18.7% at the end of 2011. Most of those visits are expected to go to Facebook. In fact, eMarketer estimates that the number of mobile Facebook users in the U.S. will jump from 49.4 million at the end of 2011 to 93.9 million in 2014… In other words, not only will people consume more content via mobile devices in the coming years, but they’ll find much of that content through mobile social networking activities.

IPad and Its Mobile Cousins to the Information Rescue

The iPad, iPhone and their competitive cousins are what we really want from our information devices. They turn on immediately. They’re super responsive. They connect easily to the Internet. They are both powerful and portable. And, perhaps best of all, they don’t rely on a resource hog of an operating system that hangs up when you most need it.

For those of us who do a lot of writing, building complex spreadsheets or other very sophisticated applications, we will probably have to hang on to our desktop or laptop computers. But for many of you and, most importantly, for many of your customers, the use of computing devices is primarily:

• to connect and communicate wherever we are whenever we want
• to consume information via the Internet, including e-mail, news, web-based content
• to get our social media fix
• to consume locally based information from word processing documents, spreadsheets, PDF files, etc.
• to write a e-mail or text messages
• to listen to music, watch videos, watch TV or movies
• to play games
• to research purchases.
• to shop online
• to pick a local retailer so we can buy right now.

We can do all of that with an increasingly rich and robust set of mobile computing devices that include not only the iPad, the Kindle Fire, Android tablets but the iPhone, Blackberry, Android smartphones.

That means that just when you thought it was safe to go back into the content marketing water, you will have to do substantial rethinking. But I think it’s more a matter of adjustment than a dramatic change in your approach to your customers.

How to Take Advantage of This Content Marketing Mobile Inflection Point

You are almost certainly using the Internet as a primary content marketing weapon.  And, it is probably delivering significant a better results than many of your traditional advertising and marketing practices. Now, begin to think slightly differently as your customers go mobile for much of the information they consume.

• Make sure that your website is fully readable on the most important mobile devices which would include the iPhone, the Android, and the iPad. That may mean giving up Flash. At a minimum, it’s critical that any flash on your website takes a secondary rather than a primary role on your home and on your landing pages.
• Consider working with a developer to create an iPhone or an iPad app that will take advantage of the unique capabilities of these two pervasive computing devices.  In particular, think about how the touchscreen might improve your users interaction with your content.
• Get social with Facebook, Twitter or other applications that can reach out to your customers with special offers while they’re on the move and in a buying mood.  
• Provide special offers, coupons, or dedicated discounts that mobile users can bring with them directly on their smart phone or iPad.  Don’t make them print something out if they can to show it to you on their mobile device.

We are at the beginning of a fundamental transformation in the way that we all consume information. Our customers and their computers are on the move as never before.  Just as you may have tried to reach traveling prospects with billboard ads on the highway, now it’s time to make sure that you’re connecting with them on the virtual highway.

The good news is that, unlike driving a Corvette on Route 66, your prospects can slow down to pay attention to what you have to say. Just make sure that the new mobile information you’re providing is still relevant and compelling as all good content marketing must be.

The new Facebook Business Page is not only a visual transformation of the site, it is a game changer for the marketing function.

The fact that Facebook will automatically transition existing business pages to the new format over the next thirty days means that marketers will have no choice but to evolve from the static “tabs” mindset to a “Timeline” mindset based on continually fresh, engaging, and authentic content.

As part of the redesign, the company has effectively shelved Facebook tabs as default landing pages, a strategy which many large corporations, small businesses, and social marketers had spent time, energy, and significant budget building out. These default tabs, while effective in certain cases for driving “likes” and other calls to action, were essentially landing pages like what you see on traditional websites.

Never content to settle for the status quo, Facebook is shaking things up by moving to a timeline design. While specific posts can be “pinned” to the top of the page, these get automatically unpinned after seven days. The idea is that continually fresh content will engage fans — that the best way to drive fan engagement is to make marketers more engaged and having to post, monitor, and respond more often on their Business Pages.

Grab the rest of the article at adage.com

Written by Brianne Carlon

A good goal for headlines is to evoke emotion in some way. Whether it is amusement, curiosity, joy or sorrow, intriguing a reader is the biggest responsibility of a headline. And there have been some good ones over the past few years:

• “No Happy Ending” from Daily News when Brett Favre got himself in trouble with a former Jet’s masseuses
• “Battle of the Bulge: Weiner Exposed” and a slew of others when the Anthony Weiner scandal erupted
• “Linsanity!” after Jeremy Lin came out of nowhere to lead the New York Knicks to several straight wins

Admittedly, these are amazing headlines. They are clever, intriguing, and evoking: Shame. Humor. Inspiration. These headlines get the job done.
So what’s the problem? Well unfortunately, this only works for print.

For the rest of the story go right to Kuno Creative

Here is an overview of the changes and how brands can take advantage of some of the new features.

Cover Photo and Profile Image
Obviously one of the biggest changes that we all knew was coming was the cover photo. No more photo strip across the top. You now have one large image to showcase your page. This image must be a minimum of 399 pixels across to be used as the cover photo. But you can have a photo cover designed to take advantage of the extra space you get. The cover photo maximum dimensions are 850 pixels by 315 pixels.

The new Timeline cover photo.
One of the biggest restrictions is the fact that you can’t have any calls to action in your cover photo. You can’t tell people to like or share your page or have any contact information at all, including your web address, phone number or mailing address. Get the full details about cover photos here. These restrictions will require some creativity in drawing attention to your business without some of the methods that have been used in the profile pictures recently.
Via www.socialmediaexaminer.com

Written by Heather Lloyd-Martin.

Looking for some writing inspiration? Why not check out some Dr. Seuss books. Learn what Dr. Seuss can teach you about good copywriting.

Confession time: I love Dr. Seuss.

The words to One Fish, Two Fish are stuck in my brain. I have a Dr. Seuss watch. I have Dr. Seuss books on my iPad. I watch “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” ever year. I even have a limited edition print hanging in my bedroom.

Why? The words that Theodor Geisel (otherwise known as Dr. Seuss) wrote had an impact on me. Yes, his books taught me how to read (and they always bring back fond memories of my mother reading them to me.) But it’s more than that.
His books taught me that reading (and writing) is fun.  And engaging.  And interesting.
(I’m guessing that many readers feel the exact same way.)

What makes Dr. Seuss so great? Back in the day of Dick and Jane, he rejected the “normal” children’s book style and blazed his very own path. Heck, Geisel even made up words that are part of our every day vocabulary. Ever wonder where the word “nerd” comes from? The first reported usage is in the 1950 story “If I Ran The Zoo.”
Via www.seocopywriting.com

Home pages. If you have a website, you have one of these bad boys.

And no matter whether you’re selling real estate or racoon prevention (that’s really the entire spectrum there, right?) there are certain things that your home page MUST do if you hope to sell your product or service.

Let’s break it down.

The 6 Things Your Home Page Must Do

• Needs to speak the users language
• Needs to communicate who the customer is
• Needs to communicate the core benefits
• Needs to show passion for the product
• Needs to build trust
• Needs to push user into the sales funnel

Via abetteruserexperience.com