Every group, every profession, even every family has its own special words: Lingo. When you prepare marketing materials—email, print brochures and newsletters, web content—be sure you’re communicating in a language that the uninitiated will understand.

What do I mean by uninitiated? When I was becoming a fan of baseball, I was flummoxed by lingo such as Texas-league single, dinger, blooper, the other way, southpaw, and frozen rope. The more I learned about the game (initiated into its finer points by my college pal Jack, baseball’s biggest fan), the more fluent I became in baseball-ese.

Your business uses particular terms:  You know the …

Want to know what a blog really spends time talking about?  Wordle.net provides a fun, visually appealing, and easy to understand way to do just that.

Just type the URL for a blog into the appropriate field and Wordle will create a “Word Cloud” just for you.  Wordle looks through the most recent blog posts, and the more often a word is used, the larger it appears in the cloud.

Here’s what the recent Gold Mine posts look like:

Online Content Management Systems allow you to consolidate the entire back-end of a website into a single secure yet easy to access location.

Traditionally any time you wanted to make an alteration to a website you needed to contact your Webmaster, who would in turn render your changes into code and and then use specialized programs to upload this code onto the servers which shared your information with the rest of the world.

No matter how responsive or dedicated your webmaster, the need to work through an additional person would build in a lag - one which would only be exacerbated by …

What is it about an online article that makes people forward it on to their acquaintances?  Is it a feel good story? Practical advice? The unexpected?

According to a recently concluded study of the New York Times  all three play a factor, but the most important element is whether or not a story can evoke a feeling of awe.

There is no science to evoking awe, but there are some patterns that you can look for.

• Does your writing evoke a feeling of vastness, that there is something greater than you and your reader?
• Does your article tell the reader …
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At a marketing workshop I attended recently, the subject of web sites naturally came up. One attendee was feeling the pressure to create a web site for his insurance business. Although he knew he “ought” to have one, he was obviously reluctant (indeed, suspicious) about the need, the cost and the benefit.

His reasons for not getting a site boiled down to:

Today, I’m going to examine reason #1. I’ll address reason #2 next week.  So let’s …

Time to freshen up your web site? I’ve just finished updating mine! I’m delighted with the new and improved Blue Ribbon Writing.Com but-whew!-getting it done was a challenge. Oh, MB/I did a sterling job on the design and production. My challenge was with the content. And I was the writer.

I write Web site content professionally but preparing my own was an eye-opening experience. Now that I’ve been my own customer, I offer you three pieces of advice as you work on your site:

Know Thyself. If you are planning to write your site content yourself, please sit in front of …

As I mentioned last time, I’m updating my web site. And, as I mentioned last time, it’s slow going.

For those of us with existing web sites, it can be tough to find time to update it. It’s there; it exists. With other demands on our time and energy, we put effort into things that are urgent. That’s perhaps not a wise …

There’s a reason why old sayings become old sayings: Their pithy truth.

The cobbler’s children have no shoes because the cobbler is just so darned busy stitching up shoes—for everyone else.

I’ve been busy writing web copy—for everyone else. I enjoy the work: With each customer, I met a new and interesting person and learn about a new and fascinating business. The earning a living part is very nice, too.

But I want even more work, and I’ve decided that updating my web site will be the best next step toward expansion. Making that decision wasn’t hard. Making …

You’ve been there… eyelids growing heavy, mind wandering, sitting through another boring business presentation. And what happens when it’s your turn to speak? Chances are you are committing some of the same presentations sins as everyone else. One of the greatest of these sins is the misuse of presentation software like PowerPoint.

Slides laden with bulleted text are not ingredients for a powerful presentation. But many of us don’t know any better. The templates provided by the software seem to beg for bullets and text and slide titles and logos and clipart. What were meant as tools to make …

Who Are You Writing For?

Writing for your own enjoyment makes total sense on a personal blog.  However, when you are writing for a professional website you should be writing for an audience that has a professional relationship to you.  Regardless of whether you are writing for peers, employees, clients, or vendors you need to speak to your audience for them to engage with what you say.

Writing in the second person helps.  The real world is not like grade school, and you will not be marked off for acknowledging that you have a reader and that they have personal and professional …