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Dear Steve*

Something’s bothering me, Steve.

Blog Well Written For You
Close enough. Right?

It’s about your article.

Remember the article that you submitted? You sent it to me. Then, after you didn’t hear back for a couple days, you sent me another note, marked “IMPORTANT.”

Steve, I know there comes a time in every writer’s life when they ask themselves, “am I good enough?” In fact, you might be asking yourself that very question right about now.

But, before I play the heavy and let you know what has been on my mind for the past 13 minutes since you sent that note marked “IMPORTANT,” I’d really like to talk about a few of the reasons why I don’t think your article is going to work for our site.

Maybe this will resonate with you, Steve; or, maybe you and your bloggy friends will continue to reach out to similar sites and hope upon hope that you’ll get the coveted “Article in Exchange for Link” that everyone wants.

Anyway, Steve, here’s why I’m saying no:

1. You Sent Me An Article With No Prior Relationship

This is probably the biggest mistake you made: you told me how great my site was (that’s a given; not that my site is great, but that you’d tell me that it’s great). Then you attached the article and that was that. I can use it if I want, or not.

But I don’t know you.

I’m not going to steal your article, Steve – but I could. And there’s nothing in it for you. And you have devalued your own content by sending it to me and just asking me to use it for nothing.

Build rapport, please. Then ask me if I’d like an article.

2. You Haven’t Sent Me Any Information About You

Steve, Steve, Steve.

If you’ve learned anything it’s that people can find out information about other people online. They use something called “Google.” And, if you don’t give them something to look at when you send them the first ever email…well, then they’ll either find out whatever they can about you using this Google site, or they’ll give up.

Table Stakes, Steve. Give me a link to published work that you’ve already done elsewhere. Or show me your LinkedIn profile. OR…

3. You Didn’t Create An Awesome First Impression

Even an okay first impression would have done okay here.

But the article you sent me had a title that didn’t make any sense at all.

It’s all in the setup – I’d love to have you guest blog on one of my sites, Steve, but now you had me wondering whether you’ve got the chops…and I was wondering this after the very first sentence you wrote.

4. And, About The Article Itself…

Steve, this is where I need to let you know something that maybe you haven’t heard before.

There’s a certain style for web writing: different from writing for a book, different from magazine journalism or for writing for a technical journal.

I, for one, prefer to read things that aren’t written with a heavy focus on words that will get the writing noticed by search engines. Sure, you have to put in some keywords – something you did – but I want to read “engaging copy.” Not copy where every other word looks like something someone would type into the Google search bar.

So, Steve, I’ve Got to Say No.

The door isn’t closed entirely. Maybe if you work on a couple of these things we can talk about your stuff getting on the site.

Maybe.

Regards,

Dave

P.S. This sort of thing DID happen. Just a bit ago. There was an article submitted for the New Frugality site. A site which you should totally check out.

*Steve is not his real name.

 

Can You Play Stick?

Does it sound like there’s a whole bunch of social media gabbing and not a lot of actual doing? Yeah. I think so, too.

Golfers Prepare to Play
Photo by oatsy40, used with Creative Commons license

There’s a phenomenal book from a few years ago – WARNING – NOT A SOCIAL MEDIA BOOK! – and it’s worth another look.

The book? Paper Tiger by Tom Coyne. [NOTE: I’m in Illinois and can’t make a red cent off of Amazon Affiliate Links; thus, there’s nothing in it for Area 224 if you buy that book or go to your library and check out a copy.]  The subtitle of this book probably tells you a ton: “An Obsessed Golfer’s Quest to Play with the Pros.”

I won’t spoil the plot of the book – it’s a true story about the author and his handicap index and whether or not he can get a tour card. It’s a great read.

A Story with Social Media Parallels

There’s a ton of gabbing in social circles about who is great and who is awesome and who is killing it or crushing it. And if you were to believe everyone you follow, tweet with, are friends with or subscribe to – the economy should have no problem rebounding.

Which brings us to the story from Coyne’s book. About a young golfer who showed up for his first day on tour bragging about how he wasn’t nervous because he had already been a winner at every other level of his career.

Amateur Champion. College Champion. And so on, and so forth – this was nothing by comparison.

The story may be a little apocryphal – but, as Coyne explains in the book…

“As the story was told to me, it was Craig Stadler who wandered over to where the rookie was hitting balls and gave the young man a few quiet words of advice.

“‘You see the guy next to you, and the guy next to him? Every one of them, All-Americans…hell, some of these caddies were All-American…nobody here gives a damn if you’re All-American, or even if you went to college at all. All anybody here wants to know is…can you play stick?'”

Can YOU Play Stick?

There’s humble-bragging a plenty on the interwebs. It’s getting annoying – sorta like showing up at the tournament as a seasoned pro and having to listen to the guy brag about how he just won the college championship.

And the scary thing is – a good many of the braggers haven’t done anything of substance. They talk a good ballgame but, when it’s time to execute, they’re big on excuses – and small on actual work product.

Consider the precarious position of some social media types with no actual inside-the-ropes experience. (“Inside the ropes” being a golf term, as in…those inside the ropes are playing in the tournament. Those outside the ropes are spectators.)

They may have watched and reported on the business world from the get-go – and they may even have a blog with hundreds of subscribers, or a flirtatious Twitter presence that draws you into their lifestream.

But have they actually been inside the ropes?

AND, those who throw the darts at those who are “doing it wrong” may have never actually built something.

Organizational Dynamics On Tour

If you think pro golf involves showing up, hitting a bunch of balls, being awesome and winning tournaments – consider a good chunk of the behind-the-scenes stuff that has to happen. I’m not talking about practice, mind you. I’m talking about playing in the qualifier to make the US Open field. I’m talking about writing the letter asking for a sponsorship exemption so you can play in the smaller event.

I’m talking about being the type of tour pro who has a great time at the Pro Am – not because it’s required of him, but because he’s playing golf with some people that he truly wants to have fun playing golf with.

And the list can go on, and on.

Because word spreads.

Play Stick at the Office

We’re not asking for you to suck up to everyone you meet, hoping that there’s an eventual payoff. We’re not asking that you put in extra hours creating white papers that show that you know what it is you’re doing.

What we ARE saying is this:

There’s “table stakes” in business and life. Eventually, you will be found out as the person who is all hat, no cattle.

You might be bloody awesome at whatever it is that you do. Great. You know what we want to see?

Evidence. Of you being bloody awesome.

That’s All We Want To Know: Can You Play Stick?

 

Real Work Takes Time

New to this site? We’d love for you to check out our book: Six Biggest Mistakes.

Real Work Takes Time
Photo by simpologist, used with Creative Commons license

The payoff of your online efforts is proportional to the amount of effort that goes into it.

Spend an hour working on your link-building, and get a few people to visit your site. Spend some spare time on launching a business – and get that sort of spare-time quality traffic.

And so on, and so forth.

No Shortcuts to Online Success

Here’s a for-instance: Let’s say you’re launching a blog called “New Frugality.” It’s not an overnight success, because it takes real time. Time for you to build relationships, time for you to get real quality content, time for you to carve out your niche.

We’re in our Fourth Month over at New Frugality HQ. And it’s taking some time to get over the hump – as expected.

But here’s the thing: we’re actually in this for the long haul.

The Tactics to Definitely Avoid

If you’re new to the online space – or you’re a veteran marketer but are just now getting into blogging – you can easily get sucked in to some shortcuts that are disguised as strategic moves. They’re actually just tactics that are kinda lame – and will end up giving you headaches as you build your online empire. And here are a couple:

1. The “Can I Guest Post?” Email

These can be great – and you need a healthy reliance on guest posting (as you will read in this awesome “Noob Guide” on the SEOMoz site). But we have had a few requests over at New Frugality that gave us some serious pause.

Quoting an email: “This is Jack…I went through your site while surfing in Google.com, am very much impressed with your site’s unique informations.”

AVOID.

We HAVE had some great guest posts on that site – but they came to us from legitimate people with legitimate social presence. (Hint: they had last names.)

2. The “Same Stuff, Different Site” Post

We have watched a couple bloggers of note make this mistake – and they may NOT be paying attention to words like “Panda” or “Penguin.”

“Penguin” is Google’s Algorithm Update. This controls search like nobody’s business. And this can affect your business like nobody’s business.

In brief, you can’t copy and paste content that you used on one site and put it on another site you own WITHOUT making changes to a good percentage of the text.  (Estimates we’ve heard: 70% of the content can be the same.)

3. The Over-Reliance on Facebook Likes

“Engagement” by big brands on Facebook – that means how many times stuff the big brands say gets shared, commented on, or has the like button clicked – is as high as 0.2% in the auto industry, according to this report by “All Facebook.” (This study looked at “daily page engagement.”)

Wait. WHAT?

Ford is considered the industry standard for its social media presence – and they have 1,400,000 fans on Facebook. They should expect 4,200 of those fans to be engaged each day. A tiny number.

This isn’t to say that 4,200 is a BAD number for Ford.

But for you…that percentage of engagement multiplied by your number of Facebook fans (or people who click the like button) isn’t going to give you much. And the amount of time to get those fans – well, your efforts might be better spent elsewhere. Now, the last thing to avoid:

4. Posting Stuff That Isn’t Good

Chris Brogan had a great piece on this the other day – though we think the title of the post doesn’t match the content.

Upshot? Write Good Stuff.

Not everyone is an awesome writer – we get that. But that doesn’t mean that crap needs to be put on the page just to have the page filled. You’re not running a daily newspaper here – if you don’t have something good, productive, well-thought out, clever or (here’s that word again) “engaging,” don’t publish it.

Real Work – Online AND Off – Takes Time.

 

 

The Power of the Third Person

Challenge: Write a blog post about marketing and business. Don’t use the First Person at all.

Roman Numeral One
Roman Numeral One, Thanks, chrisinplymouth, used with cc License

Easy, right?

Here’s the thing: people love to talk about themselves. People love to point to the awesome stuff they’re doing – and, with the dawn of Social Media Marketing, it’s so much easier to be self-centered.

Because you have to connect with someone else, and they have to connect with you.

But How To Avoid Crossing “The Line?”

You know “The Line,” because it’s rather garish these days. Everyone has a book coming out, it seems, and they’re doing the mass market promotional thing. Everyone has expertise that they want to tout – for a fee, of course – and it’s tough to separate the value from the pablum, the pitch from the meat.

Even the uber-engagers – the ones who call their fans “community” – have to point to themselves as the examples of pure awesomeness…in a bottle, or on a blog.

Don’t Fall For It. Don’t.

Pretty soon, you can separate the wheat from the chaff.

The valuable posts start going away, the “Buy The Book” posts start arriving. Maybe there’s an F-bomb for effect, or maybe it’s just an old idea disguised by new social media buzzwords.

Don’t. Fall. For. It.

Don’t.

Third Person Credibility

So, here’s a list. Some blogs that aren’t all First Person. Ones that aren’t overly promotional – and, instead, give you a taste of knowledge that you can take and do something valuable with.

Go forth. Avoid the First Person.

  1. Olivier Blanchard, The Brand Builder. This is worthwhile for the past couple posts alone: a frying pan to the face of conventional business wisdom.
  2. Marjorie Clayman, MargieClayman.com. She’s just cool – but her insights, which DO sometimes involve the First Person, are spot on.
  3. Shelly Kramer and Team, V3im.com. People from Kansas City are just really nice. Down-to-earth. And focused on helping you.

Done. One List, No First Person. What do you think?

Why DID We Launch New Frugality?

If you’re new here, great to see you. We’d love to have you join us starting March 6 for our series of Webinars on Marketing and Business. Learn more about FORWARD:MARCH here.

New Frugality Blogger BadgeIf you haven’t seen Dave’s side project called New Frugality, that’s okay. We – Dave and Indigo21‘s Heather Acton – spent the month of February in beta mode – which is the way people say “soft launch” or “private open” these days.

But we’d certainly like you to come visit – it’s not a “work in progress” anymore.

Why DID We Launch New Frugality?

It might seem counter-intuitive for Dave from Area 224 to work on something so…well, “consumer-y” – but here are a couple reasons.

1. Frugality is More than “Being Cheap”

Everyone can learn a thing or two about how to best spend resources – and, I’ll be honest, I’ve learned more over the past few weeks researching articles and reading up on things people do to be frugal than I would have expected. (A month ago, there’s no way the thought of ditching shampoo would have crossed my mind.)

2. Frugality Can Help You in Business

Yes, Area 224 prides itself in sharing Marketing knowledge – but we have to get better at the whole allocation of resources thing. Who doesn’t?

Plus, if anyone claims to have all the answers, they’re wrong – and I picked up some great tips from Heather in this post on the low-cost small business.

3. And, Let’s Be Honest…New Markets

Frankly, while I’ve spent some time in consumer marketing, I can always learn more about how consumers think. What’s on the minds of shoppers? Who is looking for what, and when?

The insights from this site have already shown us what sorts of things the visitors want to know about, and what things they’re not that interested in. Expect to see more of what you actually like to read.

So, yeah, this is a self-serving blog post inviting you to visit another blog. Here’s a link to New Frugality. Thanks!

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