Is writing an acquired skill or an in-built talent? I say it is a little bit of both. Most writers have the talent to observe their surroundings and provide a unique interpretation to it. They also have an active imagination. In addition to this, the ‘skill’ of writing undergoes a constant change. It gets influenced by what you read and eventually choose to adapt with your unique touch. The ‘skill’ also gets honed when you discover how you can improvise your efficiency over a period of time. The collective wisdom of the internet and its community of writers has propelled the creation of tools that can be helpful to all kinds of writers – beginners and experts, long form and bloggers – to write better. We bring you a list of 25 tools that makes your writing job easier. 1. Read-O-Meter Because the internet is inundated with plenty of content on the same topic, the first impression on whether someone should spend time on your content matters a lot. Telling them that the read is about 10 minutes and can be finished during a quick coffee break makes it a little more attractive. So how do you calculate reading time? According to The average reading time of an adult is roughly 275 words per minute. Add around 12 seconds to each inline image. Once you have the word count and the number of images, you can calculate the read time. Or, you could simply go to Read-O-Meter, copy-paste your text and get the reading time! Remember how you used to look at the scroll bar when the page loads to see how much time you’ll spend there? The time calculator tool not only makes it better but puts it out there and saves your brain from the additional calculation. Also see: WordPress plugins that calculate reading time 2. 750 Words / Penzu Every writer nurtures a dream of writing something that makes them happy. It isn’t for the world to see – necessarily. It is when you let words flow freely. When you vent out your emotions. It is when you are surrounded with confusing thoughts and want to write things down to get a sense of clarity. To record your thoughts and keep it private, choose a platform like 750 words. Another cool online journal used by 2 million writers is Penzu. The platform is home to several food diaries, pregnancy journals and dream journals. 3. IO IO is a good way maintain your online journal or blog with a certain degree of anonymity. You can publish online for others to read but do so anonymously. It is like putting your thoughts to words without attaching your name to it. It is like a platform where there can be a free flow of thoughts without attracting or distracting with attention to the thought-bearer. 4. Write or Die Ha! Now here’s a tool that will help kill your writers block… or you (just kidding). Set off your word count and add in a timer. You can also set a grace period. If you don’t reach your goal on time, off goes an annoying sound that’ll jar you into reality and make you get back to writing. You can choose the level of annoyance in the sound that can propel you to write. On the other end, you also get some positive reinforcement with a ‘good’ sound if you manage to reach your target word count. If you are the kind that loves to procrastinate then Write or Die will help you get over it. 5. The Most Dangerous Writing App Designed to fill a writer’s mind with fear bordering on terror, The Most Dangerous Writing App is for those with a strong heart and like a challenge once in a while. I wouldn’t recommend using it every day but for moments you are working with an extremely stiff deadline, the app may just do the trick of helping you reach it. Go to the app, set your word count. Let’s say you want to write 300 words, the clock immediately starts ticking. If you pause for more than five seconds, everything you just wrote will be gone – FOREVER! The app basically wants you to stop editing and just write and write and get everything out at once. 6. Tomato Timer Need something less intimidating but equally helpful in increasing your productivity is the Tomato Timer. You can set your word count and time and look to finish your project within the set timeline. This seems like a meek version of the Dangerous Writing App though. It won’t ‘kill’ you to use it but over time it can be helpful in increasing your productivity. Consider using this app if you are a freelance content writer, this tool will help you optimize your time on which projects you should drop and which you should continue working on. 7. Hemingway Editor Want your grammar corrected as you write? Try the Hemingway Editor. It’ll highlight your complex and lengthy sentences and let you correct them easily. The site has different colour codes for different types of errors. It can highlight words for which you can use better synonyms, or even sentences with passive voice that need rephrasing. First click on ‘Write’ and you can directly write here or copy-paste from your writing tool like Word. Next, click on edit to see suggestions from the tool. The tool presents a quick highlight of ‘hard to read’ and ‘very hard to read’ sentences that you can quickly consider rephrasing. 8. Google Docs Docs for writing? Yes. And it is a great tool at that too. You see, writing is not just about writing. It is also about ideating (sometimes as a team) and collaborating with multiple people on edits. Google docs is a popular tool used by many big content teams to easily share ideas and edit them. The tracking feature also tells you who made the edit and lets you
Month: May 2017
Corporate blogging: Eight things to remember
Are you struggling to make money out of your corporate blog? Are you wondering about where you are going wrong with it? Are you not being able to justify the time and effort your company is spending on its official blog? If you answered yes to all these questions, then stop worrying right now and read on. In the following post, I will discuss a few things that you should keep in mind to make your corporate blog work for your cause. Chances are that if you start with these ideas, very soon you will be raking in big blog moolah. So, fasten your seat belts and enjoy the ride! 1. Giving it a human voice The most crucial thing about any blog is its human voice. Corporate blogs, which are generally hosted on the newsroom microsite or media or pressroom page of any company’s official website, can generally be distinguished from the rest of the website by nature of the content. While the rest of the webpages might contain plain, business-like language and information, setting the tone for the company in general, with blogs you can have a slightly free hand. Your tone can be informal, for a change. The blog page is where you can actually let some of your creative juices flow. Talk about personal experiences, inside stories, individual accounts – anything that will attach a human angle to the staccato business your company is associated with. The personal touch that your content posts on the page is to let the reader know that the company is real and human. No matter what your product or service is, servicing the consumer or interacting with him or her is usually considered a critical aspect of any business plan. So, keep your ideal consumers in mind while writing the blog and ‘talk’ to them. Give them the feeling that you know them, understand them, and only want to help them. For example, with this Justwords blog, the writer shares her own point of view about how to make editing or proofreading easier for any writer. By talking about her own problems regarding the task, she gives it a human voice and brings the content on a rather boring topic closer to the reader. Find content proofreading boring: Here are 7 brilliant ways to get the job done Planning your topic So, how do you help your consumer, who, in this case, is also your potential reader? This question brings us to the first question that you face while thinking about your corporate blog, – “what topic should I write about?” This is more than a legitimate issue, because without this, you cannot proceed further. Most blogs end up being about topics that other people have already written about or are constantly writing about. The following are a few topics that might turn out to be unique, when you think about them from the perspective of your business. When you attach your company’s issues related to the points I mention below, you will be able to forge out unique content. If the topic not unique in their generality, the content at least will definitely be one of a kind, because the new light you are focusing on the topic is related to your company’s particular issues, different from any others’. 2. Pain points of customer My go-to topic for most blogs is almost always the pain points or needs or requirements of the target audience of your company or your business. These are also your ideal readers. If you are trying to win over customers, here readers, the best thing to do is to tell them how you might also be facing the same problem or how you sincerely feel for their struggles or issues that concern them. When you start writing in that vein, your reader will associate the text with the empathy in your tone, and will be egged on to read more. This is because they will think that since you understand their problems, you will most likely talk about a solution to that problem and that is definitely to their interest. For example, in this Justwords blog, the writer talks to her target audience – readers concerned with generating content – about tackling a crucial issue, writer’s block, that affects the best of them at some time or the other. Check it out here: 10 Tips To Get Past The Writer’s Block Here is another example of a blog which talks about a solution to a common issue that affects most people who transact using the Internet. In this Paytabs blog, the company gives pointers about the various ways a consumer can protect himself or herself online and stay protected from hackers, who are a constant threat. How To Fully Protect Yourself Online 3. Highlights and customer success stories If the customer’s pain points do not fit into your plan, then there are other topics you can try to lure in your ideal consumer- reader. You can talk about anything from company highlights – (this could be a particular achievement of your company in the last quarter or maybe a year- ) to customer success stories -(this could be the account of a particular case in which a customer has found tangible benefits from the solution that your company’s product or service had offered them). Your reader will associate the positive results recounted in such blog posts with positivity and faith in your product or service, and that goes a long way in turning a blog into a money-making machine. Remember, the success of a corporate blog lies in catering to what your ideal consumer wants to know more about. Only, this can convert mere interest in your business to an actual sale, which in turn will lead to a loyal following or relationship with the ideal customer – the ultimate goal of most corporate houses. For example, check out how Adobe markets the success stories it has had with its various customers through
How to write for the distracted modern reader: 15 ways to master that
This blog will take a good reader around seven minutes to read. Why am I telling you this? Well probably because if you were the average reader, you wouldn’t waste more than 8 seconds on any web page. And woah, I caught your attention because I mentioned this will take than 7 minutes to read. Now that we have got your attention, let me come to the actual news. The average human attention span has declined from 12 seconds in the year 2000 to 8 seconds now. This is much shorter than the attention span of a goldfish (at 9 seconds)! This was revealed by a 2016 study by Microsoft Corp. that surveyed 2,000 people and monitored brain activity of 112. Juxtapose that with the way people consume content online and on mobile and you’ll see a further drop in the attention span. With unlimited content and limited time, you’ll see that 50% of mobile users will abandon of web page if it takes more than 10 seconds to load, and 60% won’t return to the site. Further, multitasking with social on the side means that there is something very eager to pull you away the second your content becomes less interesting. Did you know that half of all pageviews are under a minute in length. Now comes the tough part on what you do about it. As a marketer, you want your content to work for you. At the same time, it is important not to overload the user with information. Here are some ‘quick’ tips to write for people with short attention spans. 1. Use adjectives / superlatives like ‘short’, best’ ‘most’ or ‘quick’ in the title A blog’s title plays a major role in telling the user if it is worth investing time in reading the whole blog. It is an important factor that will also drive traffic from search when you are competing with other blogs on the same / similar topic. When searching for running shoes, Google’s first three search results follow this rule. And that rule is that Google wants to deliver the ‘best’ content to you in the ‘fastest’ way. The wikihow article even provides part of the answer within the search result itself. Want to know more about what Google wants from you content? Read this completely free ebook and get an in-depth understanding on content writing for the world’s largest search engine. 2. Do a list A listicle or list article works wonders in the online world. Because there are a finite number of points to read, the mind works more in a countdown mode knowing that it will reach the finish line soon. Take a look at the homepage of Buzz Feed and you’ll know exactly what we mean. Almost every other article is a numbered list and all of them work like perfect click baits. Even a list with an odd number like ‘37 photos that prove that Bae is the real queen’ works because of the nature of the list. 3. Write for ‘you’ Addressing your reader directly as a single person instead of a generic group can help them directly realise what they will gain from reading the article. You’ll find several articles titled “10 things you should know about xyz’. Inquisitiveness on what ‘you’ should know makes it easy for someone to click and read the article. 4. Give an approx ‘reading time’ for the article One of the key things you note when you load a video is its total run time. Knowing how long it will take binds the mind into a finite timeline for the activity. Just after the article headline, mention an approximate reading time required for the article. For example “6 minutes read” seems like something that can be done during a coffee break. This blog is a 7-minute read, which safely falls under the avg. human attention span! 5. Use images to replace a thousand words Written content is important for two reasons – it gives out details and search engines love it. If you were to post an image or infographic, it can do an amazing job too. For example, while your content can talk about all the efforts and research, your infographic can give out the actual data. Again, the ‘finite’ nature of the content makes it easier to fit into our timelines. Images, especially viral and controversial ones can do wonders in attracting traffic. 6. Improve your page speed All that magic that you have planned with your content will collapse before take off if your page takes too long to load. Page speed is one of the key determining factors of your bounce rates. Because this matters to your whole website and not just the particular page, you’ll have to use multiple measures to improve your page speed. What is your current page speed? Know it here They also share a number of ways to improve it. While it may be difficult to follow it all, you can easily do the following If heavy images are increasing your loading time, compress your images without losing quality using Shrink-o-matic. If you use WordPress, use a plugin like BWP Minify to automatically optimize your media uploads. And while we are on the topic, it is absolutely imperative that your website is mobile responsive. If it isn’t, it will get the ire of both users and search engines. 7. Say it with a video While images do work, a video works better for your overall content marketing. It is all about grabbing attention and keeping the engagement going. Research shows that landing pages with videos have a 64% improvement in conversion rate. How-to videos can give your audience a better understanding about your product and your visitors can be guided to the next step of becoming your customers. And here’s something that’ll surprise you – 92% mobile consumers share videos with others! Which means, not only do they watch and pay attention, they get their friends to do
25 things I learned about content that should make you a better writer
What’s common between an established writer, a new writer, a freelancer and someone who just writes casually? Everyone faces a writers’ block. All writers are used to staring at a blinking cursor on a blank page wondering how they are going to fill it with 3000 original words that can engage the reader, draw traffic and earn some ranking love from Google. Over the years, I have come face-to-face with this dreaded blinking cursor (or its pre-historic equivalent) several times. With age, I have understood this and now have the wisdom of making this blinking cursor my friend – who waits patiently while urging me to get the words flowing. And just like that, I want to share a few more words that I know in my heart from years of writing. 1. If you don’t write it first, then you better write it well The world has exploded with content. There are over 2M blogs published each day. Take a minute and re-read that sentence. Unless you are writing about a newly-discovered scientific phenomenon, it is likely that the topic you are writing about has been written by quite a few people. What makes you think that people will want to read the 21st person writing about a topic? The only reason they’ll do so if your piece is authoritative, completely original and adds more value than all the collective wisdom from before. You’ll most likely not write about the same topic twice – so ‘Make it count’. 2. Write everyday Being a writer means that you’ll have to write everyday. You’ll have to write on things you haven’t heard before. If you are writing for someone else, you’ll also have to adhere to tone guidelines and word count. While it sounds good, like any other job, it will get boring after a while. The only thing that can keep you going is a few cups of coffee and the chance to write what you like once in a while. 3. Sometimes writing what you don’t like can make the difference between just bread and bread with butter and jam There have been several occasions when I was given topics that were totally out of my comfort zone. But the work came in bulk and the pay was good. So without a lot of thought, I got down to writing them. It meant I had a few months of bills taken care of. The ease of knowing this helped in my work overall. So, if you get a topic that is too ‘technical’, don’t give up on it. You might just end up learning something in the process. 4. Share sleepovers with your writings – always Most clients like to rein in writers on a deadline. Thousand words by ‘yesterday’ is mostly where it starts. But always remember that bad writing and edits can make you lose your credibility. When you take work, always give it an extra night so that you can sleepover what you’ve written and re-read the whole thing the next day. This has been the single biggest factor in making my edits better. 5. Only new experience will grow you as a writer Writers provide their unique point of view on things. Be it travel, art, tech or any other topic they have expertise in. But in order to keep their content fresh and relevant, new experience is a must. I write a lot about digital marketing. But I’m able to do so only because I actually handle customer accounts and gain first hand insight on how things work. Advice that is copied or regurgitated doesn’t hold water too long. Take time out to hone your expertise, only then will you be able to write about it. Writers often draw inspiration from real life so keep things interesting outside the laptop. 6. Read other writers’ advice And while on the topic of honing your skills, the collective wisdom of the horde does come handy. Writers are notorious about not taking style advice easily but it does help to know how other writers are using writing hacks to get around things. Most advice comes from years of experience so do listen to your peers. From ways to find inspiration to tools that can get things done faster, read what other writers have to say. 7. Eat right and exercise if writing is your long term goal Elaborating on the earlier point, here’s one piece of advice that I would like to share with all writers. Unless you choose to get up and take a walk every half hour or keep a check on your sitting posture, you are going to end up an obese writer with back problems. In the long term, that’ll not help you or your readers. With a laptop and wireless modem, it is easy to get a change of view. Move away from your workstation and sit out in the open. It is fresh and inspiring. 8. Self-editing / re-writing is the toughest thing to do When you submit a piece of writing to client scrutiny, it is a super tough job if the work needs a re-write. Most writers are already in love with what they’ve written. Re-writing involves thinking of a new angle to write something and added research. It is not the easiest thing to do especially when you think you are done and over with a piece. But as a writer, you’ll just have to bite the bullet sometimes and get it over with. 9. There will be bouquets, brickbats and no comment days – accept it all When it comes to writing, praise is like fuel for the soul. It gives a sense of accomplishment and helps you keep going when the days aren’t as glamorous. But when it rains brickbats, it can be an equally frustrating nightmare. In this day and age of social media and trolls, a controversial piece of content can even cause legal trouble. The damaging piece of comment / review / rating can even bring