Thought Leaders - Using Article Marketing To Entrench Yourself and Your Personal Brand
October 31, 2007
A “Thought Leader” is someone recognized as an authority in their field of expertise…also known as a visionary. Few people set out to become a “thought leader” or “guru,” but there is good reason to not only establish yourself as an expert, but as a higher-level expert or “thought leader” for your market.
How can you become a “thought leader” for your niche or industry?
Besides risk-taking, leading a company that leads an industry, being vocal in your own blog and posting comments on other blogs & top industry forums within your niche… the easy answer to saturate the market is via the use of syndicated articles!
Here’s a mini-course on how to get started to build your own “thought leadership” following via submissions of ezine articles:
QUANTITY: You’ll need more than 100 articles to really do this right, and as you approach the 500-1,000 article level, you’ll be closer to reaching a saturation point that builds a buzz around your name, your ideas, your articles and your expert opinions.
Writing the Denouement for Mystery Stories
October 31, 2007
Writing the Denouement for Mystery Stories
by: Mary Arnold
I’ve read many mystery novels in which the writer left out the denouement, but, in my opinion, a mystery without one is seriously lacking. Admittedly, I grew up reading Hercule Poirot, in which he always demanded to gather up all the suspects so he could demonstrate his brilliance in deducing the meaning of all the perplexing clues and fingering the murderer.
Poirot’s motive for such demonstrations may have been egotistical, but there’s no doubt he had a flair for the dramatic. And stories without the classic denouement leave me feeling cheated.
Tips on writing denouements
1) Include all the major characters/suspects
2) Make sure that the physical surroundings of the meeting place are inducive to comfort. Put the suspects at ease and the murderer will more likely act irrationally when he or she is accused.
3) Have the protagonist/detective start his or her narrative at the beginning and work to the end, explaining all the confusing details along the way.
4) Point out the motives each suspect had for doing away with the victim. It’s always a good idea to have at least two or three other people who gained something from the removal of the victim.
Rejection slips? Sock ‘em in the eye!
October 31, 2007
Rejection slips? Sock ‘em in the eye!
by: Mervyn Love
Don’t you hate rejection slips? If they make you despondent,
then here’s a way to deal with them: sock ‘em in the eye!
But first, you need to realise that the editor or publisher
who had the gall to send you this offensive missive is not
a vindictive, short-sighted, ignorant meanie, she’s most
likely a hard working, underpaid and possibly over
stretched individual who might just have a reason for
sending your baby back.
So, if rejection slips bring on an attack of the grumps,
also realise that this is just a state of mind, a perfectly
natural one, but one which you personally can quickly and
easily turn back into a success story. How? Sock those
rejections in the eye.
“How do I do that, Merv.?” I hear you say above the sound
of wringing of hands.
Simple. What you have to do is show your inner man or woman
that you are not beaten, you are a writer and you will
continue to write. Rejection means not a sausage to you
Beginning Your Memoir Despite Family Guilt and Critic Voices
October 30, 2007
Beginning Your Memoir Despite Family Guilt and Critic Voices
by: Linda Joy Myers
When we first decide to write, we feel good about it—we have memories and stories that form who we are. We want to explore ourselves, to capture times long gone and preserve them in story form. To leave a legacy about our lives. But other voices compete with our writing—“what will people think; you should be ashamed; you will embarrass the family. Don’t air dirty laundry; you know only part of the truth, so be quiet. Your mother will roll over in her grave if she found out you wrote that.”
We all know these voices. They make us throw down the pen, sit back and turn on the TV. We don’t want to lose our family. We don’t want to make them angry. Writing a memoir is an act of courage, even defiance against powerful family dynamics. We need to find a way out.
As a family therapist, I have worked with many families, and because of my background, I’m in a position to help my coaching clients understand the source of their resistance to writing their stories, and the source of the critic voice inside.
12 Copywriting Tips to Make Your Advertising More Profitable
October 30, 2007
Year after year people make the same mistakes in direct-response copy and advertising. You can avoid the most common and costly blunders by following these profit-enhancing tips…
1. WRITE IN DIRECT RESPONSE LANGUAGE:
* Use short paragraphs and short words. This article has 68% short words-five letters or less. Strive for at least 65%-75%. Never go under 50% unless you are writing to Ph.D’s.
* Make your sentences and paragraphs flow like a breeze.
* Ignore good grammar when you have a good reason.
* Keep the bucket brigade going: Start paragraphs with And, But…, So you see…, However…
* Use the freshest concepts and the most colorful language you can without disturbing the flow.
* Use hot words: free, profit, new, now, secret, easy, save, guarantee, today… and the hottest word of all: YOU!
* Use bullets… lots of them.
2. WRITE LOTS OF HEADLINES.
Always think up dozens of alternative headlines. Put your strongest benefits in them and test your best alternatives. When writing headlines for web sites make sure they include key search words and phrases along with the benefits.
3. DROP THE WARM-UPS…
Writing Articles - Six Mistakes To Avoid
October 30, 2007
Not writing articles yet? You really should try it, if you want a lot of free traffic to your web site. A simple “Top Ten…” Or “Six Mistakes” type of article can be written by anyone. When you’re ready to start writing, avoid the following common mistakes people make when writing and submitting articles.
1. Too short. If it won’t fill a page, webmasters won’t want it. Write articles of at least 200 words.
2. Too long. Articles that are too long won’t be picked up by newsletters or most web sites. Keep it under 700 words.
3. Poor Title. “Air Safety Information,” could be the best article on air-safety ever written, and “I Survived A Plane Crash” the worst, but the latter would still get more readers. Get their attention with the title, or they’ll never know how good your article is.
4. No keywords in the title. If you call your story about Barrow, Alaska, “Ten Days In Hell,” people looking for information on Alaska won’t find it in the search engines, and won’t know from the title that they may want to read it.
The Romantic Spirit of the Harlem Renaissance: Countee Cullen
October 29, 2007
The Romantic Spirit of the Harlem Renaissance: Countee Cullen
by: Mary Arnold
Like Nella Larsen, Countee Cullen is also “something of a mysterious figure” (Early 194). The place of his birth is unknown, and not much is known of his childhood, except that he was adopted by Frederick Cullen, a Methodist minister, and his wife sometime before 1918. Cullen was enormously popular in literary circles, and the Negro intelligentsia hailed him as a “major crossover literary figure” since
Here was a black man with considrable academic training who could, in effect, write ‘white’ verse - ballads, sonnets, quatrains, and the like, much in the manner of Keats and the British Romantics, (albeit, on more than one occasion, tinged with racial concerns) with genuine skill and compelling power. (Early 195)
Thus, Cullen was viewed as a man who could be “assimilated” while still maintaining his “racial self-consciousness” (Early 195). It may be, however, that Cullen didn’t manifest a struggle with his identity as an African American in the world of white intellectualism because he had a more pressing identity conflict: that of his unorthodox sexual desires (homosexuality) against the Christian insistence of heterosexuality.
How to Create an Amazing Author Website
October 29, 2007
Without a website, an author is unknown.
Without a website, an author sells fewer books.
Without a website, an author has limited web presence.
Without a website, an author has limited media presence.
Without a website, an author can’t maximize his or her creativity, expertise and talent.
You get the point. An author website is crucial. But too often, authors are simply told to set up a website, yet rarely are they given specific tips on how to make it AMAZING. This article will offer several key elements for successful author websites, in addition to various links to existing author websites that personify those elements.
But before you begin designing your website, remember WHY authors create websites:
*To sell books and/or products
*To be viewed as experts
*To accumulate fans
*To maintain a baseline of all marketing communication
*To be easy to get in touch with
*To maximize their web and media presence
While there are many other goals specific to each author, each of the above goals is paramount in ALL author websites. And if you want to accomplish these goals, consider some of the following tips.
Want To Start a Publishing Revolution?
October 29, 2007
Calling all publishers, editors, journalists and freelance writers. It’s time to breathe more life into your copy. Turn your articles into living pieces that spark measurable debate, get closer to your readers and engage their mind and soul - we’re talking revolution.
As it was in the beginning
Publishers have for many years relied on letters to get feedback from their readers and although email has opened up this method of communication it is still time consuming and difficult to process with only a fraction of the received correspondence ever being used.
Let’s face it, as well as being an overhead for the publisher, to most people it is an unrewarding medium in terms of effort required and response received, just think of the number of letters that go unpublished and unread.
As it is now
The Internet has brought new channels of communication and has opened up opportunities that allow us to challenge traditional methods. The Internet is now a mature technology, no longer the preserve of the new fad brigade but a technology that has been embraced by a global population, young and old alike and it allows us now to re-evaluate the way things are done. Newspapers, trade journals, magazines and ezines now have the opportunity to change the mental process.
The Romantic Spirit of the Harlem Renaissance: Jean Toomer
October 28, 2007
The Romantic Spirit of the Harlem Renaissance: Jean Toomer
by: Mary Arnold
In his only novel on African Americans, Jean Toomer also found beauty in the “vernacular culture” among the people in Sparta, Georgia, where Toomer spent two months working as an interim principal at the Sparta Agricultural and Industrial Institute in 1921 (Byrd 733). Nathan Pinchback Toomer (1894-1967) changed his name to Jean after his move to Greenwich Village and reading Romain Rolland’s Jean Christophe (1904), in an effort to “solidify his emerging identity as a writer” (Byrd 733).
Toomer’s experimental novel, Cane (1923), is described as “a record of his discovery of his southern heritage, an homage to a folk culture that he believed was evanescent, and an exploration of the forces that he believed were the foundation for the spiritual fragmentation of his generation” (Byrd 733). Although Toomer continued writing after the publication of Cane until the time of his death, he did not have any other works of fiction published during his lifetime (Byrd 733).
 |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
Latest Stories
- Mozilla Firefox 3.0 Is Here
- Top Six Lies About Book Marketing: (And the Truths to Set Your Book Free!)
- Talking Pictures Are the Go!
- Sales Headline Copywriting ? Two Quick Steps to Success
- 5 Plus One Internet Marketing Strategies to Improve Article Quality to Increase WebTraffic
- How Can You Find Out The Salary Of A Freelance Proofreader?
- How to Write a Resume That Stands Out From The Crowd
- Depression Can Turn into Joy
- The Best and Fastest Way to Get Unlimited Free Back Links Guaranteed!
- 7 Keys to Writing a Children’s Book that Sells Like Hotcakes
