Seplling, ldiaes and gnetleemn, is not the seupr imroptant tighn we wree led to bleieve it is.

And if you understood that sentence above, then you’ll understand what I’ll be talking about today.  But for the benefit of those of you who didn’t, I’ll be a bit more clear.

Spelling, ladies and gentlemen, is not the super important thing we were led to believe it is.

It’s an oft-quoted study from Cambridge University that says we don’t read words one letter at a time, but rather, we read the whole word.  So as long as the first and last letters of a word are in place, we are more than likely to be able to understand the word.

Now, of course, you want to avoid misspellings where ever you can.  It’s just a mark of good solid professionalism and once again goes toward credibility.  You present your work as a reflection of yourself, with as few errors as possible.  But don’t worry when you catch that occasional unedited misspelling or two–chances are you won’t have affected anybody’s experience.  In fact, it may have just made your work a little more accessible.  Because everybody makes mistakes, and small ones like spelling will always be just that, small.

Thus, I say to you all: Bad spellers of the world untie!

…oh, wait….

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I think we’re all pretty much aware by now that nothing draws in the herd like the offer of free stuff.

Even the savviest of college kids will cheerfully sign up for a credit card with almost illegally high rates if you give them a t-shirt or free cable or something.  So why not take advantage of that yourself?

And we’ve talked about the value of giving away your own merch, such as pens and coffee mugs and whatnot with your name stamped on it, but here’s a new idea you may not have thought of, and even I didn’t, until last night.

If you’ve been writing a blog for any length of time, chances are you’ve written other stuff to.  Maybe some articles that you couldn’t get published or something.  Well, now’s the time to take your castoffs and sew them into a big technicolor dreamcoat and call it a “special report” or even a book.  Then you turn around and offer your detritus in a fancy new package for free! …to subscribers.  Or anyone who leaves their email address.  Or to anyone who does what you want them to do.

Everybody wins here, of course–you get readers, your readers get free stuff, and as long as your free stuff is of halfway decent quality nobody comes out behind here.  So next time you’re looking for a way to boost readers or start a newsletter or get a subscription drive going or something, offer access to a “special report”.  Nothing gets people quite so interested as insider information.

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Some of you who’ve been around a while know that’s just one of my great attention getting headlines, but we’ve had some new folks on recently so this is more for them.

While the headline itself is true that if you steal other people’s work you will get LOADS of attention, and most of it the bad kind in the form of scorn and flames and lawsuits, but what I’m talking about is the generally accepted form of theft, quotes.

There are light years of difference between stealing work and quoting it, though it all ends up basically the same way.  You’re taking work done by other people and inserting it directly into your own.  But the difference, of course, is ATTRIBUTION.

This is done basically one of two ways, with a link, which you’re all familiar with by now, or by simple attribution, or, “So and so said this: (replace this with whatever they said and take out the parentheses)”.  Both can also be done at once.  You’ve probably been taught that attribution requires footnotes and a works cited page and whatnot, but in blogging, we don’t care for those asinine rules here, thus links or direct attribution is cool.

This in turn does two things, one, it jacks your credibility up a notch by showing that you’re not some ranting loon saying stuff because people agree with you and you’re willing to supply proof, and two, it jacks your credibility up again by showing you’re never afraid to give credit where credit is due.

So next time you find yourself at a loss for something to say, go find something someone else said and talk about it.  You’ll be surprised what it does for your own work.

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Okay, so I’ve been seeing some huge response to the idea of using fiction in your blogging, and reading a comment from Kevin’s Promotional Products reminded me of something big.  He said this:

Back in the nineties, there were a series of commercials for the Taster’s Choice coffee company, revolving around two neighbors who met and eventually fell in love thanks to a common shared love of Taster’s Choice coffee.  Sure, it may sound a little outlandish, but as most any college student will tell you, romances have been started on less.

They were called the Taster’s Choice Couple, and people were so engrossed by this that, when the commercials stopped airing, people were actually CONTACTING THE COMPANY, demanding to find out what happened to the couple!

No one’s really sure how much coffee sales it drove, but it definitely established an interest in the commercial, and as any marketer will tell you, there’s no such thing as bad buzz.  You can see some of them over on YouTube to this day,

You, much like Kevin’s Promotional Products and Gomez The Windshield Monkey, can take this particular ball and run with it yourselves.  Next time you’re wondering what to write, try and tell a story.

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I’m going to give you a great example here with this first sentence of the kind of thing you will probably want to think about when setting up your blog, as it’s the kind of thing you might easily forget about doing when you’re writing your blog posts, or when you’re getting material ready to be looked at, or anything similar to that.

That sentence had sixty three words in it.

Which of those two above sentences do you think had more impact?  The short, declarative sentence? Or the huge, wordy one?  If you said the short one, then congratulations, because you just got a fast and easy lesson in blog writing.

The quicker your sentences, the better the memory of them lasts in your readers’ mind.  Just like when you were trying to stumble your way through that sentence above, you’ll get much better results out of short, declarative sentences. Naturally, not all of your sentences can be short ones.  Sometimes you’ll have no choice but to bust out a long one, just to get your point across.  But that shouldn’t stop you from trying.

The more shorter sentences you can get in a post, the better.

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I once heard, without attribution, this story in which Charlie Manson asked for a television in his jail cell so he could, obviously, watch TV.  The irony was that he asked for this television in the midst of the summer rerun season, and everyone was starting to figure, like they did back in those days, it’s summer.  Who’d want to watch TV in the height of summer rerun season?  To which, when asked that, Charlie replied:

“Well, if I haven’t seen it yet, then it’s new to me!”

You might wonder why I led off with an anecdote about a charismatic lunatic, but you know I don’t just tell stories for fun.  At least, not here.  This is from a comment from reader Indiasafaries who left this comment on “Boost Traffic by Sharing Discoveries“:

This is not so easy to discover or produce any things universal or unique which is not preexist in the world.

And my answer to that is the same thing Charlie said of his summertime TV.  If they haven’t seen it, Indiasafaries, it’s new to them.  You don’t have to find something universal or unique.  You just have to find something your readers haven’t seen before.

That’s easier than you might think.

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First off, I’d like to thank reader Consolidation School Loan for giving me this idea, because it really is rather timely.

We’ve talked at length here about capturing attention, and Consolidated School Loan finally broke down and basically asked which one is the most important?

The simple answer is neither.  But when in doubt, err on the side of your readers.

See, the whole reason to appeal to search engines is to GET you readers.  If, in the beginning, the search engines aren’t happy with you you’re not likely to get very far.  But once the search engines start bringing in readers, that come back regularly, well, then there’s not much point to the search engines any more, is there?

Search engines don’t buy your merch.  Search engines don’t click ads or leave comments. All a search engine does is BRING READERS, that in turn, do all those things.

Search engines take territory, to misquote the military parlance, but readers hold it.

So if you MUST decide between the two, choose readers.  Do what you can to keep the search engines happy, because they bring more readers.  But don’t sacrifice your readers’ happiness for the search engines. What does it profit me if I have the highest-ranked blog on Google, but spend all my time screaming keywords and racial epithets?  Who’ll stick around and read THAT?

Don’t ignore the search engines.  That’s a move you make at your own peril.  But neglecting the search engines a bit in favor of your readers, a sixty-forty split, say, will not go unrewarded.

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Now, I know you’re all wondering what the deal is with me titling a post the EXACT SAME TITLE that I just titled one with.  You’re all caught really off guard right now.  Some of you have even wondered what the points of ellipsis are for.

Simple.  the whole thought there is: Stop linking to Wired…start writing about it instead.

Now, this is actually an interesting notion.  See, every blog you see out there, every web site, every service, has two faces.  The face you see, and the behind the scenes face you’ll never see.  That “behind the scenes” face is what some people end up writing about.  Here, for example, what we put up every day is the public face.  But what you don’t see is what goes into each of these posts.

So next time you’re strapped for a post topic, try writing ABOUT the thing you’d link to.  Write about business news at Google or Netflix or even, yes, Wired.  Don’t just take something they wrote and rewrite it with your own spin.  That works great, sometimes, but do it all the time and you’ll wear your welcome thin with your readers.  Instead, write ABOUT the thing you get your links from.

It’s much more original, and thus, much more credible, than the alternative.

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