In case you don’t have time to read it in its entirety, I’ve summed it up for you:

• Avoid the Obvious.“Say the assignment is college football. Say that you’ve decided to be against it. Begin by putting down the arguments that come to your mind. Now when you write your paper, make sure that you don’ t use any of the material on this list. If these are the points that leap to your mind, they will leap to everyone else’s too. Be against college football for some reason or reasons of your own. If they are keen and perceptive ones, that’s splendid. But even if they are trivial or foolish or indefensible, you are still ahead so long as they are not everybody else’s reasons too.”
• Argue the Other Side. “One rather simple way of getting into your paper is to take the side of the argument that most of the citizens will want to avoid. They are intellectual exercises, and it is legitimate to argue now one way and now another, as debaters do in similar circumstances. Always take the that looks to you hardest, least defensible. It will almost always turn out to be easier to write interestingly on that side.”
• Quit with Abstraction. “Look at the work of any professional writer and notice how constantly he is moving from the generality, the abstract statement, to the concrete example, the facts and figures, the illustrations. For most the soundest advice is to be seeking always for the picture, to be always turning general remarks into seeable examples. Don’t say, ‘Sororities teach girls the social graces.’ Say, ‘Sorority life teaches a girl how to carry on a conversation while pouring tea, without sloshing the tea into the saucer.’”
• Remove the Padding. “Instead of stuffing your sentences with straw, you must try steadily to get rid of the padding, to make your sentences lean and tough… You dig up more real content. Instead of taking a couple of obvious points off the surface of the topic and then circling warily around them for six paragraphs, you work in and explore, figure out the details. You illustrate.”
• Call ‘Em Like You See ‘Em. “If he was a fool, call him a fool. Hedging the thing about with “in-my-opinion’s” and “it-seems-to-me’s” and “as-I-see-it’s” and “at-least-from-my-point-of-view’s” gains you nothing. Delete these phrases whenever they creep into your paper. Decide what you want to say and say it as vigorously as possible, without apology and in plain words. Writing in the modern world, you cannot altogether avoid modern jargon. But you can do much if you will mount guard against those roundabout phrases, those echoing polysyllables that tend to slip into your writing to rob it of its crispness and force.”
• Beware of Pet Expressions. “Other things being equal, avoid phrases like ‘other things being equal.’ Those sentences that come to you whole, or in two or three doughy lumps, are sure to be bad sentences. They are no creation of yours but pieces of common thought floating in the community soup… No writer avoids them altogether, but good writers avoid them more often than poor writers.”
• Colorful Words. “Some words are what we call ‘colorful.’ By this we mean that they are calculated to produce a picture or induce an emotion. They are dressy instead of plain, specific instead of general, loud instead of soft. Thus, in place of ‘Her heart beat,’ we may write, ‘her heart pounded, throbbed, fluttered, danced.’ Instead of ‘He sat in his chair,’ we may say, ‘he lounged, sprawled, coiled.’”
• Colored Words. “When we hear a word, we hear with it an echo of all the situations in which we have heard it before. The word mother, for example, has, for most people, agreeable associations. When you hear mother you probably think of home, safety, love, food, and various other pleasant things..The question of whether to use loaded words or not depends on what is being written.”
• Colorless Words. “A pet example is nice, a word we would find it hard to dispense with in casual conversation but which is no longer capable of adding much to a description. Colorless words are those of such general meaning that in a particular sentence they mean nothing…Slang adjectives like cool (‘That’s real cool’) tend to explode all over the language. They are applied to everything, lose their original force, and quickly die.”

No Visual Interest. Don’t make your ad look like every other ad. Since the ad is stuck in between several other square ads, it needs to have some kind of visual interest. Skip the dull colors, boring graphics, and loads of text.

No Hook. While I’ll be the first to tell you that the hook probably isn’t as important as attracting the viewer’s eye in the first place, you still have to have it. After all, without the hook, how will the viewer know what you’re selling? Unfortunately, I’ve seen far too many small square ads forsake the hook altogether in favor of a cool logo or some other type of branding. The point is you have to do both.

No Branding. As more and more advertisers turn up on websites from around the globe, you need to have something to set yourself apart. The visual appeal and the hook will do it for awhile, but wouldn’t you like to take your product to the next level? Make it a household name? (Or at least a recognized name on the internet). Branding’s the only way you’ll be able to do it. You want clicks on your ad, you want traffic to your site, and you really want conversions. Make the product known to the masses, and you’ll accomplish the trifecta.

Projecting the Wrong Image. This one’s simple. Do a quick search of other small square ads until you find one that looks like its promoting a scam. Make a note of how it looks. Now design your ad to not look like that.

Too Much Text / Too Many Animations. I don’t care how good your product is. If I have to sit at my computer and read ten lines of text at point 4 font size, I’m never clicking on your ad. The same goes for lengthy animations. Keep your message simple. Keep your message short.

Wrong Site. Know the demographics of the site you’re advertising on. If the people who visit that site are only interested in a few small niches, and you’re product isn’t in those niches, you’re out of luck.

But what kind of ad? Vertical banner? Horizontal banner? Or what seems to be the most popular ad: the 125 x 125 pixel (small square) ad that you see on sidebars everywhere. Protip: Look to your right. We’ve got a few here.

Now that you’ve decided to make your ad, you’re going to need to design it. Here are a few good tips.

Advertise on the Right Site. Even if your ad is amazing, you’re not going to find any success if you’re selling your product on the wrong site. Selling Ferrari steering wheels on a writing site? Wrong. Selling a sleek new word processor for the iPad on a writing site? Right!

Make it Eye-catching. No matter what you’re selling, your ad needs to be visually interesting. While making it beautiful helps, it only has to stand-out from the other ads nearby. Remember, these types of ads are usually contained in grids of four or six. Just be sure to stay away from making your ad look cheap with animation and gaudiness.

Have a Hook. You must motivate the viewer to click on the ad so she can get to your product page. Attractiveness may draw their eye, but they won’t click unless they’re enticed to. Try including a special offer or expound the benefits of your product.

Keep it Short. Viewers aren’t going to dedicate more than a second or two to any ad. Remember, they’re visiting the site for the content, not for your beautifully designed ads. Grab the viewer’s attention, hook them to click, and be done.

Brand It. Ever drink a Coke? I bet you can tell the logo from just a small sliver of the can. The amazing marketing teams at Coca-Cola have spent years, decades even, branding their product so consumers will instantly recognize it. You want to do the same thing with your ad. Don’t fall into the trap of designing for nothing more than clicks–make your viewers lust after your product.

Stay tuned for our followup: The Mega-Guide to the TERRIBLE Small Square Advertisement.

Whether we like it or not, our subconscious shapes our behavior. Sometimes we notice it, but most of the time we don’t. And that’s where it get tricky, because our subconscious reveals itself most often through our writing.

At this point you’re probably wondering how to shut your subconscious off when you write. That would be all well and good–if it wasn’t impossible.

Instead, there are a few things you can do to help manage your inner feelings so they don’t pop up in your writing when you least expect them.

First off, know that at some point–maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday–you’re subconscious is going to spill out all over a page like water from a broken pipe.

Second, be on the lookout when you’re reading someone else’s work or listening to their conversations. The better you become at picking out the hidden, unintentional messages from what other people are saying, the better you will become at recognizing when you’re doing the same thing. And, as an added benefit, the more you can learn about someone by listening to their underlying messages, the better you will get to know them. It could blossom into a beautiful relationship that turns out to be prosperous for both of you. After all, a little collaboration never hurt anyone.

Third, learn how to bend your hidden messages to your benefit. Obviously, if you can have unconscious hidden messages, you can have conscious hidden messages.

But ultimately, it all boils down to the fact that you need to be aware of what you’re doing. Cut down on the unintended hidden messages and start capitalizing on the intended hidden messages. You may just find your work growing more and more popular.

Blogger’s block is a bit different. After all, with writer’s block, your deadline may be weeks or months away. That’s fine because you have time to recover later on down the road. If you’re the kind of person who runs a blog with daily posts, though, you may find that blogger’s block can be especially problematic. With the necessity for daily posts, blogger’s block can be fatal to your subscriber counts. After all, keeping up with the posting rhythms is of the utmost importance–especially for a daily blog.

But blogger’s block doesn’t have to ruin your posting routines, though. Here are 5 steps to help you alleviate the problem.

• Build on Ideas Ahead of Time

If you’ve got a good idea, write it down and expand on it later. Maybe it’s something you dreamt about last night. Or something you read on some other blog. But when an idea comes to you, jot it down somewhere so you can come back to it later. When you find you’re all out of original ideas, check your list for some inspiration.

• Join and Be Active on Forums

No better place to get new ideas than from forum members. Whether you’ve gotten yourself involved in a quick Q&A session or a heated debate over something like healthcare reform, chances are you can take tons of inspiration away from it all.

• Write a Deluge of Posts When You Feel Like Writing

Having a good day? Feel like cranking out tons of posts? Go for it and post the rest later. Even if you’re a one post a day kind of blogger, write two or three. Then you’ll always have something there to fall back on when your brain just isn’t working like you hope it would.

• Subscribe to Related Feeds

Good artists copy. Great artists steal. Well, I’m not saying that you should steal from other bloggers, per se, but you can certainly draw inspiration from other people’s feeds. Maybe your favorite design blog just posted about 10 hot new blog templates. Find 10 more, maybe throw in a few from his list, and make your own post on the same topic. Though you may want to wait a while before posting–especially if most of your readers subscribe to the other blogger’s posts too.

• Do Some Polling

Slap a poll to the sidebar of your blog. People love polls because they’re so quick and easy. If you’ve got enough traffic flowing in, you can get a minimum of two posts out of a single poll. One to announce the poll and talk about it a bit. Another to announce the poll’s results. If you’re crafty, you can even extend the poll’s benefits by writing posts about the breakdown of each response.

• Crowdsource

When in doubt, ask Twitter. So long as you’ve got followers a plenty, you’ll find tons of information just waiting there for the taking. A quick question, a couple of retweets, and you’ll have your answers in no time.

Photo credit: Rennett Stowe

I’ve also created a new Twitter account. It’s all the rage right now, so I figured it’s time to really jump on the bandwagon. You can find me @contentedniche.

Over a year ago, I wrote a blog post about Ubuntu for another site. (If you don’t know what Ubuntu is, its the most popular Linux distro around.) The post was not meant as a Linux bash (no pun intended) but as a simple list of seven things that the developers could do to make their operating system better. Harmless enough. Well, every few days or so, it seems that some new raving lunatic Ubuntu fanboy happens to the site and leaves a scathing comment insulting my intelligence, my family, my dog (may he rest in peace), my blog, and just about anything else that pops into that disturbed little brain of his.

The comments always make me chuckle. People who don’t have the guts to leave their real email address but think its perfectly OK to hurl nasty remarks my way. Ah, only on the Internet. If you’ve never received such a comment on your website before, here’s one of the latest examples, unedited and left in its entirety for your pleasure:

OK, what teh f*** is youre problem. Ubuntu isn amazing os that is widely popular in the mainstreem world. the fact that most survers are running on linux shows only one thing, it is reliable. unlike windows, This os actually works. NOW, i dont give a dam about your failing nowlege but critisising ubuntu only shows that your a noob and cant wrok teh terminal. Only a**holes that want to be spyed up on by bill gates use windows. all tehy can handel is point and click. NO, you a**, the server you are running probably runs linux. so b4 you go about saying how bad linux is, lern to use it!

But these comments lead me to a predicament. What do I do with them? Hit the delete button and pretend they never existed? Approve them and then reply with a defense? Edit them to make the commenters sound even more moronic? Post the really funny ones on another blog so my readers can share in the laughter? It’s a real conundrum, though when I do approve savages like these, I always always remove their website address.

So what do you do when comments on your blog go bad? And what was the most scathing comment you’ve ever written or received?

And even better…it didn’t break my blog.

If you’ve been feeling like blogging is a lot of work, takes a lot of time, or is just too much of a consuming effort to make it worthwhile–think again. Here are 9 ways to find the time to keep your blog at the top of its game.

1. Set Aside Time to Blog
They always say the first step’s the hardest. They’re right. If you don’t have a lot of free time on your hands, forcing yourself to allot even a half an hour a day to blogging is going to tightly constrict your daily routine. However, there are two easy ways to go about giving yourself time to blog. First, you can add more waking hours to your day by getting up earlier or going to bed later. Second, you should evaluate what you do every day and see if there are times you can shave a few minutes from your activities. For example, if your favorite TV shows come on at a certain time, TiVO them and start watching a little later than when they start. You’ll save yourself at least ten minutes on an hour long show when you don’t watch commercials. Devote that time to blogging instead.

2. Let Your Computer Work for You
There are a number of ways to let your computer do the work for you. If your blog posts are formulaic, make a template of your average post and use that each time you draft a new post. If you manage multiple blogs, use blogging software instead of visiting each site’s dashboard one by one. If you maintain a general blog, bookmark all of the trend sites you use so that you can pop them open at once instead of doing it manually. The point here is that even though each little task may only take a few seconds, they can add up to save you plenty of minutes during a full day’s work.

3. Live By a Schedule or Calendar
We all tend to establish routines. Wake up in the morning, go to work (or school), come home, have some dinner, and so on. While your routine may be deeply engrained in your mind, if you actually map it out in a calendar program or on a piece of paper, you’ll often find that you may have more large breaks in your day than you thought you did. By maintaining a real calendar, you can plan your time more effectively and free up some valuable blogging time even though you thought your days were packed from morning to night.

4. Set (Realistic) Goals for Posts, Readers, and Subscribers
If you’re pulling 80 hour work weeks, don’t expect to be able to post 10 times a day. Easily the most common problem with blogging is that you end up setting these amazingly unrealistic goals when you first start out blogging and you find that you can never hope to keep them. I’m speaking from personal experience here. This started out as a daily post blog, if you’ve been with me from the beginning. In any event, it’s important to keep your head level and not fall into the trap thinking that you’re going to post way more than you could ever possibly hope for.

5. Find Images Before You Write
Finding images takes time. Lots of time. Do it well in advance during the time between when you think up a good idea for a post and when you actually draft that post.

6. Knock Out Several Posts Each Day You Blog
Have a day with a particularly long amount of free time? Use it to your advantage to plow through several posts at a time. Long, short, whatever. The more posts you can do in a sitting, the more backups you have in case you are unable to get a post done later in the week. This tip goes hand in hand with using the publish at a later date feature built into WordPress. Schedule your posts as necessary to avoid missing your self imposed deadlines.

7. Take Notes and Save Bookmarks
Whenever you think of a great topic to post about, write it down. Did someone else think of it first? Save their post as a bookmark and incorporate some of their ideas into your own posts. Just don’t plagiarize their ideas or their verbiage. Being able to maximize your time means minimizing the amount of time you sit in front of your computer trying to think of what you should write about next. You’ll never have to fear writer’s block again if you write down ideas well before you write about them.

8. Spread Out Your Research Over Time
This goes with point #7. If you’ve been writing multiple posts a day and thinking up ideas for posts in advance, then there’s no reason you shouldn’t be doing your research in advance too. Once you have your idea in hand, do whatever research you need to in order to write your post. Heck, you can even do research for posts while you’re at work, talking on the phone, or watching your favorite sitcom.

9. Brainstorm On the Go
Finally, brainstorm about your blog, your theme, your posts, and your pages while you’re away from your computer. Then bring those ideas to fruition when you finally sit down at your computer. If you’ve finished up with all of the tough mental work before you get to work on your blog, you’ll find that the ideas have a lot more room to run. Changes to your theme come faster. Posts flow better. And you might even experience that magical moment when you realize that this whole blogging thing you’ve been trying out may just be successful yet.

Photo: Malenkov in Exile

Great news for Tiger and Elin Woods–but this is a blog about blogging, writing, content, and the like. Not about sports stars and their children.

But what can celebrities like Tiger and Elin Woods teach us about blogging?

Sometimes you have to jump on the bandwagon and jump on it fast. Riding the trends is a great way to get your blog out there into the limelight and even stir up a new audience while you’re at it. That’s exactly what I’m trying to prove with this post.

So why did I choose Tiger and Elin Woods and her pregnancy as my topic of choice? I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading about the positives of using tools like Google Trends to help boost traffic to a blog. For some people, it seems to work like a dream–possibly bringing in thousands of unique visitors in a matter of hours. Just as good as social bookmarking without all of that high school popularity contest crap to go along with it.

By capitalizing on what’s hot at the moment, you can cash in on the hoards of visitors looking for a specific topic. Just give your piece its own unique spin and see where it goes from there.

However, a word of warning. Do try to keep your blog posts on topic when you’re recruiting ideas from Google Trends. Otherwise you may risk alienating your readers–which will ultimately show that you care far more about attracting uniques than keeping people coming back time and time again.