One of the marketers who have tremendously influenced me and every marketer of the current generation for that matter is David Ogilvy. Most recently on my trip to India, Cathay airlines played a movie on life and achievements of David Oglivy. The movie was amazing.
If Claude Hopkins was all about Scientific Advertising, then David Oglivy was all about “Modern Scientific Advertising”.
Enjoy this amazing video on the mad man of advertising.
When the video stops, make sure you check out other videos of David Ogilvy on Youtube.
Applying Common Writing Styles to Blogs
On this post, I want to answer a rare question that was raised by one of my subscribers i.e, How To Improve The Quality of a Blog Post?
The most common answer to a question like this is: just see what other bloggers are and try emulating them in a better way or develop your own writing style and stick to it.
As I spend more and more time writing many posts across many of my blogs..I have to come realize that there are multiple factors that influence the quality of a blog post beyond just writing style and intent such as form, free-flow, structure and stream of consciousness etc.
Let me elaborate with some small examples
you can improve the quality of your blog entries by studying the writing conventions characteristic of other forms. Blogs are generally fairly free-flowing affairs, some of them are downright stream of consciousness, but the best ones tend to take an existing structure and turn it into their own, as is the case with any good writing.
One of the easiest, and most readable, forms of writing one can use is called the “inverted pyramid”. This style is characteristic of newspapers. The basic idea is that the reader should, from your first sentence, be able to ascertain what the entire article is generally about. If they want to know more, they can read the entire article. The specifics of the article should be of diminishing importance as the article progresses. This article, in fact, is written in that format.
Sports writers are some of the best writers out there. One of their conventions can be very challenging, and rewarding, for the writer: telling the story backwards. Some sports writers will start an article about a particular game at the end and work their way to the beginning. It’s a very impressive feat when it’s done correctly and a very enjoyable way for readers to take in your writing.
A strong “lead” is as important to blog writing as it is to any other literary form. Your first sentence is your most important sentence. Make sure it grabs the reader’s attention, informs them of what the article is about and entices them to read further. Good newspaper stories, great novels and short stories almost always start with a sentence that almost forces the reader to dig deeper into the body of the story.
The very basic concepts of writing, of course, always apply. If you’re going for a journalistic or scientific feel, remember to always reference where you got your information and, if possible, to link it via hypertext.
Your paragraphs should have a topic sentence and should focus on defining and expounding upon that thought. Punctuation should be sophisticated and correct.
Too many writers “dumb down” their online entries by skipping such wonderful linguistic tools as semi-colons, colons and dashes. The English language allows its writers to engage in some of the most colorful language in the world. Learn how to use the tools with which your language is equipped and use them.
Enough said, let me confess…
While I make every effort to live up to these guidelines that I just mentioned myself. Not all my blog posts are perfect or they expound upon a given thought or idea. They are full of grammar inconsistencies and spelling mistakes. Needless to mention sophisticated punctuations are rare in my writing.
The idea is, When you apply all the above principles you effectively raise the quality of your blog to the next level. The whole internet is filled with average and below average blogs and its all filled with superiors blogs. We all have a role to play. Our ideas, our thoughts and our language, as long as they are ethical, moral and far reaching have a place despite their lack of sophistication.
That is probably one of the reasons why they say Bloggers are not Journalists.
Making Sure SEO is Useful
SEO is sometimes touted as a cure-all for every web business. In some ways, it is. After all, being listed prominently in search engine results can’t possibly result in less traffic being driven to a site.
However, the problem web sites often face are not directly related to low levels of visibility. Before laying out the capital for search engine optimization, make sure your page is worth visiting.
There are plenty of high-ranking pages on search engine results that are, frankly, kind of useless. Add to this that there are, by definition, only so many slots on the first page of any engine’s search results and the quality of a site becomes even more imperative to online success. Even if you are the first result on the most heavily-used engines, there’s no point in it if your visitors simply leave almost as soon as they arrive.
Fortunately, many of the practices of SEO and good site design are in accordance with one another. Good content tends to result in good rankings and good rankings tend to ensure that your efforts toward providing that content are not in vain, for instance.
Sites with comprehensive and well-designed inter-site navigation tend to fare well on search engines, and with visitors, as do sites that make the effort to add description tags to their images, a basic component of usability for websites.
If your traffic isn’t productive, you may as well not have it at all. Poorly-designed sites may remain at the top of search results for a time, but it’s unlikely that they’ll be there for long. There’s no shortcut to good search engine placement.
In essence, if your site doesn’t deserve it, it won’t get it. Endeavor to make certain your site deserves the ranking before you try to achieve it.
When you have your site developed to the point that you can’t see a single reason you shouldn’t be the number one result for your chosen keywords and phrases, you’re ready to start serious efforts toward SEO. This will reduce the process to one of achieving exposure, rather than a process of trying to trick search engines into giving your site good placement for keywords to which it has little relevance.
Strive for a good site. It’s the most guaranteed way to get good placement and, more importantly, a steady stream of engaged visitors to your site.