Deb Hemley

The Yahoo! Style Guide: Write Digital Content Everyone Will Read

There’s a lot of information packed into The Yahoo! Style Guide a new book from Yahoo!. While other style guides and manuals have kept the topics of writing, user-interface, webpage coding, and SEO separate–The Yahoo! Style Guide brings it all together–making it a one-stop-guide for every member of your digital team. –Read more

Article first published as The Yahoo! Style Guide: Write Digital Content Everyone Will Read on Technorati.

There’s a lot of information packed into The Yahoo! Style Guide a new book from Yahoo!. While other style guides and manuals have kept the topics of writing, user-interface, webpage coding, and SEO separate–The Yahoo! Style Guide brings it all together–making it a one-stop-guide for every member of your digital team.

One of the most useful chapters in the book is on copywriting for search engine optimization (SEO), and includes tips about keywords, links, page titles and metatags. People and search engines don’t scan pages in the exact same way but there are some similarities to keep in mind, e.g. both need to know: what a page is about, what’s important, options for acquiring more information.

There are excellent suggestions too, about how to “write for the world.” We’re reminded that the Web is a worldwide medium and “site visitors probably come from more than one country and more than one culture. Collectively, they probably speak several languages. It’s a good practice to make the text on your site clear to as many people as possible.” Five best practices we’re urged to put into practice are: 1) Keep the sentence structure simple, 2) Include “signposts”: words that help readers see how the parts of a sentence relate, 3) Eliminate ambiguity, 4) Avoid uncommon words and nonliteral usages, and 5) Rewrite text that doesn’t translate literally.

You can read through the style guide from beginning to end and use it as a reference when stumped with a punctuation question, wondering how to write a perfect title for your email newsletter or streamlined text for mobile devices. The book is filled with loads of great tips. One of my favorites is on editing with screen-reading software so you can hear the page read aloud to you. (In Windows, Narrator or Ease of Use in Windows Vista and on the Mac, Text-to-Speech.)

The Yahoo! Style Guide is also available online with a companion website and includes additional resources and updates. You’ll find a good companion in The Yahoo! Style Guide.

10 Steps for Writing a New Blog Post

Recently I was at a get together with a group of writers. Since it was a beautiful June day the conversation turned somewhat unexpectedly (for me) to the topic of gardens. It seemed that everyone was an experienced gardener and not only that, they all had a great love for gardening. When it became apparent that I wasn’t joining in the conversation, a friend suggested that I tended to my blog and writing the same way others tended to their garden. Hmm, I thought. Interesting. What is the connection between planting a garden and writing a blog post?

Article first published as 10 Steps for Writing a New Blog Post on Technorati.

Recently I was at a get-together with a group of writers. It was a beautiful June day and the conversation took a sudden, unexpected turned to the topic of gardens. It seemed that everyone except me was an experienced gardener and not only that, they all had a great love for gardening. When it became apparent that I wasn’t joining in the conversation, a friend suggested that I tended to my blog and writing the same way others tended to their garden. Hmm, I thought. Interesting. What is the connection between planting a garden and writing a blog post?

I did what I often do in situations like this and turned to Google where I discovered this post by Marie Iannotti,with ten steps for how to start a new garden— and discovered much to my surprise—there are great similarities. So, with that in mind, I offer you gardening as an analogy for how to write a new blog post:

1. Start Small: Like the backyard gardener your post doesn’t have to be that big (or long, in this case). A blog post isn’t a white paper, a research report or a treatise. It can be a few lines and possibly a few paragraphs. Some suggest keeping the word count from 250-500. If you decide to write a longer post you can always format so the post will be more readable e.g. chunked content in lists, shorter sentences, utilizing “read more” to move the content to a second page.

2. Evaluate and Choose a Site: This step is akin to choosing your topic. This can be influenced by questions your customers have asked you, conversations you’ve heard discussed in the blogosphere, something you’ve been thinking about writing, a response to another post which inspired your thinking.

3. Check the Soil: I think of this step as being similar to searching the internet to see what else has been written about the topic and coming to the topic with knowledge and your fresh perspective.

4. Prepare the Bed: Not too dissimilar from taking the time to read the posts and giving yourself ample time to incorporate and synthesize what you’ve read.

5. Choosing What You’d Like to Grow: After reading posts on the topic now comes time to narrow down what you’d like to write on the subject, what points you’d like to make.

6. Planting: This step is really a lot like the actual act of writing. It’s the time you spend composing the post, tending to the words, asking yourself if the words are optimized for search engines. Paying attention to grammar, punctuation and how well the sentences read.

7. Mulching: Ah, this sounds a lot like editing to me. What can you pull? What’s not necessary to be there in the post. Even though it started out as a healthy line it may ultimately crowd the post. When it doubt, take it out. This step also includes checking your links and spell checking.

8. Label your Plants and Keep Garden Records: This gardening step makes sense to the writer in me since blog posts require tags and assigning categories. It’s also similar to keep records or in mind what posts did better than others. That’s where looking over your analytics on a regular basis will pay off.

9. Garden Maintenance: A blog post does require some work after it has been written and published. The maintenance assures that people will find the post which requires tweeting it out, updating your facebook page, submitting to directories. In other words helping to promote your piece as best you can.

10. Enjoy: My gardener friends like to think of this as “stopping to smell the roses.” Hopefully bloggers take the time to kick back and enjoy reading and responding to comments, and seeing the viral nature of their posts.

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Getting Started with Mobile Marketing Campaigns

It is estimated that 4.6 billion people worldwide are using mobile phones. With a growing industry>>Read my full post on MyAdEngine.com, http://myadengine.com/blog/index.php/2010/06/getting-started-with-mobile-marketing
campaigns/

It is estimated that 4.6 billion people worldwide are using mobile phones. With a growing industry>>Read my full post on MyAdEngine.com.

Keeping Business Audiences Engaged with Social Media

In the past several years, we’ve seen businesses adopt social media into their marketing and customer support practices. And naturally, there are still laggards. There always will be. But what about the businesses who have created presences? Now what? >>Continue reading

Article first published as Keeping Business Audiences Engaged with Social Media on Technorati.

Maybe customers and online visitors heeded your social media call. Maybe you can even say that your analytics are up. Perhaps, the quality of the visits demonstrate more engagement than six months ago. But now the question we must ask ourselves is– if we built our social media presences, will they keep coming?

Maria Ogneva’s post, How to: Better Serve the Social Media Customer takes a look at how each department can “blend traditional social media to drive business goals and collaborate on a seamless customer experience.” Maria demonstrates how businesses need systems and “a flow for easy and consistent information dissemination.”

Content is key as it moves across an organization and as Maria points out businesses need to have many touchpoints with their customers, of which social media is one.

For businesses who have climbed over the social media hump, I think Maria has the right ideas when she suggests: 1) Don’t forget about the corporate website, 2) Remember thought leadership and content creation (blogging, guest-blogging, webinars, whitepapers, e-books, presentations, and videos), 3) Participate in online and offline events, 4) Monitor your social media activity for engagement, 5) Build relationships with partners, resellers, and blogger outreach.

Which customer touchpoints have proven to be most effective for your business?

Image credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com ‘s photostream

Survival of the Digital Fittest

It’s hard to keep up these days. iPhone this. Android that. App for this. Location-based for that.
I for one was happy to come across the Digital Journalist’s Survival Guide: A Glossary of Tech Terms You Should Know which was posted on PoynterOnline. The glossary provides terms related to Web standards, programming, online tools, social networking, online advertising and basic technology. >>Continue reading

Article first published as Survival of the Digital Fittest on Technorati.

Chances are that you’ll find you’re familiar with a good number of the terms and recognize others by name but would be hard-pressed to define them if you had to. Since links and Google have simplified what you have to save to your brain’s hard drive and recall with your personal memory chips, bookmarking the list and knowing you can call upon it when you need to should give you the reassurance you may need.

Take a look at the glossary. What terms would you add to the list?

Image by Toban Black via Flickr

Running an Online Daily Deal: Factors for Businesses

We’ve been thinking more about the one deal a day business model since our post last week, “Who’s Buying In to Groupon, LivingSocial & the One-Deal-a-Day Business Model,” which explored the demographics of users. >>Continue reading

In a recent post by Barrett Lane, a blogger for Yipit, he looks at considerations for businesses who are contemplating running an online daily deal. We also found a post by Jim Moran, co-founder of Yipit, which sheds some interesting light on the psychology of persuasion and what motivates individuals to act on a purchase.

Last but not least, a discussion of one day a deal offers wouldn’t be complete without looking at how engaged a business is in social networking.

Continue reading under my byline on Impressions through Media.

Feeding the Blogger’s Muse

Most writers I know tend to be passionate about writing. They write often, read a lot and even read about writing. There are some excellent how-to books about blogging out there but I don’t think you need to stop there. >Read more

In Dave Clarke’s recent post, “So You Think You Can Blog?”, he says that as “social media marketing proliferates and permeates consumers’ consciousness that entrepreneurs wrestle with the content thing.”

Clark states “some folks can write stuff people want to read, and some can’t.” Which is it for you? Do people want to read what you write? And, is there room for improvement in your writing?

Most writers I know tend to be passionate about writing. They write often, read a lot and even read about writing. There are some excellent how-to books about blogging out there but I don’t think you need to stop there. In fact, I don’t think you should. Blogging is a form of writing and good suggestions about writing can be applicable to the blog post.

There are four writing periodicals which I read on an on-going basis: The Writer, Poets & Writers, Writer’s Digest and The Writer’s Chronicle. Each of the magazines has a slightly different feel and slant. Generally you’ll find a wide selection of articles on craft, revision, inspiration, how-to’s, author interviews, books about writing, promotion, and networking.

The summer is a great time to feed the muse and if yours is like mine, she’ll appreciate the nourishment.

Which periodicals or books will you be reading about writing this summer?

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Image credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com ‘s photostream

Image by Toban Black via Flickr

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