Tag Archives: content

business, Consultancy

Republish and Publishing

One of the great things with online media and publishing is that you can change it at any moment you would like to. You can go back and update it, give it a revamp. If the blog post you wrote a year go seems out of date, go back and change it.

Revamping is not just limited to wanting to update your blog posts. It can be used also when inspiration does not strike as a filler while you are preparing a new blog post.

Here some tips you can look at when updating material: 

  • New perspectives: If the blog post is over a year old. Think about new angles that you can bring to the content.
  • Check your links: Make sure that pages you have linked to are still there.
  • Add internal links: What better way to build traffic. Link and link to your other blog posts.
  • Keywords: As time has passed hopefully your understanding of keywords and meta tags and the relevance it has with search engines has increased. Make sure your blog post is optimally balanced.
  • Blog about your updates: If you have updated an old blog post make sure that you publish it on the front page of your website and let people know through twitter etc. This will probably also mean updating the date.
  • Blog post series: A series is a really good way to keep your visitors coming back. It generates interest and allows you to write about more complex subjects.
  • Past the sale by date: Sometimes a blog post  is not possible to fix and pruning it will not help either. For a number reason you might  feel the material is not relevant. Maybe you have changed your views, maybe the company is no longer selling the product. That is when the time has come to delete that blog post.

 

That is this byte seize post. Any others you would add?

brand, business, development, E-Commerce, work connexions

Content is Timeless

1 Comment

As with the last couple weeks I have been blogging about why communities and online social media groups are going to grow significantly more and will change all forms of media in the next 18 months. Is this really interesting? Well the change could be, as advertisers are going to have so much choice to reach their target market that marketing departments are going to be expanding and working overtime to understand and use this technology.

There is nothing essentially new in blogging, in the old days you had magazines and papers where people submitted or where commissioned to write news pieces about relevant issues. The readers than replied to that by sending in a letter to say what they thought about any relevant topic. After about a month that whole particular topic would pass and the readers would move on to discuss a new hot issue. In the online media if you can write one good article in theory that article can be discussed for 6 months, a year, two years. So from one piece of advertising/writing you can get so much more advertising milege. As the article sits on the internet it can become internet real estate growing in value over the months as traffic comes to the site and comments increase. If you are going to say something on the internet, it is good to remember that although it may be a fast form of communication, your writing contribution will be there possibly for a long time.

I could write about the new year now as I am typing this on the last day of year but that would limit its market. So to gain the maximum affect, It is good to take the long term view. Whoever would have thought that about online media?

Consultancy, Guest Bloggers

Proofreading – My Top 12 Tips

proofreading1

If you’re producing any kind of professional writing, proper proofreading is essential. As a freelance copywriter, nothing looks worse than if I make a basic error or leave in a typo. So here are

my tips for getting it right

  1. It’s a tough job. So get someone else to do it. Especially as a fresh pair of eyes are more likely to pick up what you’ve missed. Once you’ve written something down, it can be hard to read what you’ve written clearly. Instead, you only see what you intended to say.
  2. Failing that, wait a few hours or preferably till the next day after you’ve written it before you proofread your own work.
  3. Avoid distractions – try and proofread in a quiet environment.
  4. Read what’s written aloud to help spot missing words or dodgy phrases.
  5. Common errors include inconsistencies of style, changing tenses, extra spaces, different font sizes, irregular line spacing or other formatting and repeated full stops.
  6. Put yourself in your target audience’s shoes. Are you really clear in what you’re saying?
  7. Be suspicious of every word if you want to catch all the mistakes.
  8. If you tend to make the same errors, be extra careful when you’re checking those particular words or phrases.
  9. Check and check again. Professional editors may proofread a piece up to ten times.
  10. Be especially vigilant when it comes to any text in capital letters – it’s harder to spot upper case errors.
  11. Print out pages for the final check – it’s often easier to see errors on paper than on screen.
  12. Never, ever just rely on your computer’s spell checker. For one thing, it can’t work out what spelling is right for a particular context – “two” or “too”, “who’s” or “whose” and so on.

Happy poofreading! (Whoops.)

© Peter Wise