Your marketing writing doesn’t need to be all sell, sell, sell.  Your writing can speak to your customers pre-sale and then post-sale.

I’ve mentioned before the differences between marketing writing and technical writing. You can use both on your web site, in your newsletters, and in various communications to customers and potential customers.
Think “Post-Sale”
After you sell your product or service to a customer, the work was performed and paid for, he still needs to hear from you.

Depending on your business, your customer needs instructions or opinion. If you sell garage door openers, provide installation and how-to-use instructions. If you sell mortgages …

What do Good Presentations and Good Websites have in common?
It’s simply satisfying to attend a really good presentation. Although you may be one of many audience members, the speaker seems to connect directly with you. You leave, not just persuaded, but inspired to take action.

Now think about what business owners want to achieve with their websites. They want to connect with their web-surfing audiences and inspire them to action. Since the goals are similar, it only makes sense that the underlying principals are very much the same.
Attention to Audience
Too often, presenters fail to venture outside their own head as they …

We communicate with other people every day. Over the course of our lives we’ve developed verbal, written and visual communication skills that help us convey our thoughts. From time to time, we find ourselves in a position to share these ideas in a business context, often in the form of a presentation. And, it’s usually at this point where we completely forget how to talk.

I remember in 4th grade, I desperately wanted to ask Jenny Grubb to dance at a school event. Like every other 4th grader, I was plastered against the wall with the boys, while the girls giggled …

We all need a place to start when embarking upon a creative endeavor - and make no mistake about it, a good presentation is a work of creativity.  However, there are some concrete steps we can all take to make sure that the underlying core of our projects are solid.  I hope mine can speak for themselves…
10 - Stick to your Central Message
A presentation is not a survey course.  You cannot cover everything.  Make sure you know what you’re going to talk about and ruthlessly remove all subject matter which deviates from that subject.
9 - Have an Objective
As a professional, …

Twitter, Facebook, Buzz, LinkedIn, Flikr, Photobucket, Ning, Xanga, WordPress, …. The list of social media platforms goes on and on.  Some overlap with each other, others have no channels of compatibility, and most of the services that would allow you to synchronize the content of multiple services are annoyingly piecemeal.

Enter Ping.fm.

Ping.fm has compiled a list of 40 blogging sites, social networks, online status recorders, social bookmarking services, and photo sharing sites - each and every one of which can be updated individually or in groups from within the Ping.fm interface.

See a service you don’t yet use?  Ping.fm will …

If you use the Web to market yourself, you probably think in terms of marketing writing. But there are ways in which technical writing has its place within your Web presence.

Today, let’s consider the definitions of,  and differences between, marketing writing and technical writing.

Pre-Sale and Post Sale
Marketing writing helps you communicate pre-sale to potential customers, to get their business.

Technical writing helps you communicate post-sale to existing customers, to reduce training time, customer support time (and avoid lawsuits).

Of course, an existing customer, let’s say she hired you to renovate her kitchen, is also a …

Have you ever been looking for that perfect fact that helps you translate a statistic from your presentation into a language your audience understands?  Well this week’s vein of online ore will help you do just that.

For example, 1 in every 8.5 American children under the age of 18 is without health insurance.  The same portion of the California population filed for personal bankruptcy in 2008.

Book of Odds has been online for close to a year offering articles and odds statements on topics from sports and relationships to health and death.  And once …

I belong to a few groups on LinkedIn. This last week, I’ve been amazed to see group members pose questions written using initial capital letters. Here are a couple of examples, altered slightly to avoid too explicit finger-pointing:

What’s A Reasonable Hourly Rate For..?

Best Service for Access to On Line Publications?

Not only are initial capitals incorrect within a sentence, they are not easy to read. And (not that there are correct places to write incorrectly), this was on LinkedIn, where a professional should want to appear at her or his best!

So let’s review the …