Create beautiful Click To Tweet boxes in your blog posts.

Today we are proud to release a brand new Click To Tweet plugin for WordPress!

You may have seen this plugin before as a regular feature on our own blog posts. Now, we are pumped to be releasing it for all of the world to use. The concept is pretty simple – create beautiful Click To Tweet boxes anywhere in your blog post.

This WordPress plugin allows you to easily create tweetable content for your readers. Use pullquotes and custom messages inside the body of your blog post to highlight your content for the reader and make it simple for them to share on Twitter.

Pretty cool, right?

You can learn more here, or download it now.

Create beautiful Click To Tweet boxes in #WordPress. New Click To Tweet plugin by @todaymade
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Also, be sure to tell your blogging friends!

Easily add click to tweets boxes with a single click.

Click To Tweet box on a sample blog.

Click To Tweet box on a sample blog.

Download the plugin now.

Congratulations! You’ve been invited to write as a guest author on someone else’s blog. But easy there, tiger! Before you start typing up that perfect guest post, there are a few things you will certainly want to learn first.

Be a good houseguest.

Writing for someone else’s blog is blog is kind of like visiting someone else’s house. You can’t just walk in, open the fridge, and start drinking straight from the milk container. You must play by the house rules. Blogging as a guest means that you must first get a lay of the land so that you are sure to offer the reader something of value that matches why they read that blog in the first place. If you follow these tips, your host is sure to invite you to guest post again and again.

Write about what they write about.

Sure, this one seems obvious, but it bears pointing out: stay on topic. Your guest post about your fantastic Disney Cruise isn’t going to be valuable to readers of your friend’s food blog. But if that cruise really inspired you, how can you adapt it to make it work? Write about the food on the cruise. Tell about visiting an island fruit market. You get the idea. Understand that your host has readers that come because they expect a certain type of content. You will need to deliver.

Mind your word count.

Some blogs value being succinct. Other blogs can be quite verbose. Most blogs tend to settle somewhere in the middle. When writing your guest post, you don’t want to land too far afield in either direction, so check to length of your host’s typical blog post to get an understanding of how long your post should be, and match that.

Watch your tone.

As a kid, my Mom used to tell me to watch my tone all the time, but as it turns out, this is also great advice for writing a guest post. Your host blog has a tone they typically use in their writing. It may be humorous, encouraging, informative, factual, etc. Familiarize yourself with the tone of your host’s blog by reading their posts before you start writing. Matching their tone will make your post seem like it really belongs.

Match their voice

In addition to tone, you will also want to match the existing voice. How does your host typically speak to their audience? Are they casual and friendly? Are they corporate? Do they use a lot of “we” language when talking about themselves, or do the authors freely talk about themselves in the first person? You should note these things and match the existing voice.

Know who you’re taking to.

Your host blog has readers. Who are they? What is the typical demographic? Are they young or old? Are they male or female? How knowledgeable are they about the topic–are they like Jedi’s or Padawan Learners? If you want to make a great guest blog post, you must speak to the people who will come to read your post, and you must meet them where they are. If you miss this, you will surely lose your readers.

As a guest blogger, you can't know your host blog too well. Learn who you're writing for.
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Go for bonus points

As a guest writer on your host’s blog, it is not enough to merely play by the house rules. You really want to impress, right? Here are three bonus tips for knocking the ball out of the park as a guest writer.

1. What books or products does your host typically talk about or recommend? If you can gracefully tie your post in with that, it is sure to gain the approval of your host and provide relevant information to the typical reader.
2. Be sure to read old posts on the blog. In particular, you may want to ask your host what have been their most successful posts. Maybe you can add or expound on those successful topics to create a well-trafficked post of your own.
3. Now that you have familiarized yourself with your host’s blog, as you write, look for opportunities to link your thoughts to some of their previous posts. This creates “stickiness” for the reader as they tangent from your post to peruse related posts of interest. And it results in great analytical metrics for your post, which is something that is likely to see you invited back to write again.

Finally, as you prepare to write your guest post, keep in mind that your host asked you to write for them for a reason: they think you have something of value to contribute to the topic. As you attempt to familiarize yourself with their typical topics, word count, tone, and audience, don’t forget to bring some of yourself to the post.

Whether you share an anecdote or otherwise tie in some of your own experience, be sure to have fun with it. Pour some of yourself into every post you write so that readers don’t just get to know the topic–they get to know you. This creates trust and is sure to see you invited back to write for your host again.

What should a guest writer keep in mind, first and foremost?

It is a customer magazine that has been published by the John Deere corporation since 1895. It is now available in more than 40 countries and in 12 different languages, and is widely considered one of the earliest examples of content marketing. The truth is, though, that that magazine was not alone when it came to content marketing.

One of the earliest examples of content marketing is The Furrow. Here is an issue from 1959.

In 1900, Michelin Tires released a 400-page guide geared at helping drivers maintain their cars. It coved basic maintenance, accommodations, and other travel tips. After 35,000 copies were distributed for free, the company began selling the books for a profit.

Early example of content marketing from Michelin Tires.

In 1904, the Jell-O corporation began distributing free copies of its own cookbook that suggested creative and useful ways to use its own product. Before this time, Jell-O was basically unknown and unused. After just two years of content marketing, the company saw it sales rise to over $1 million dollars per year.

The history of content marketing is rich, and brimming with stories of success. It includes companies like Nike, Sears, Lego, Sherwin Williams, Hasbro and Proctor & Gamble. It isn’t new. In fact, it is one of the oldest, and best, tricks in the marketing playbook.

What Is Content Marketing, Really? 

Content marketing is simply a form of marketing that focuses on creating and sharing content, or created media, in order to acquire customers. Basically, it is content that was created to help the customer, rather than sell a product. As it turns out, however, content marketing is actually pretty darn good at selling products.

An sample of the Jell-O cookbook, another early example of content marketing.

Just this morning I received a piece of direct mail from a local bank. Direct mail, also known as junk mail, is basically advertising that shows up in your physical mailbox. This piece was a magazine style advertising with multiple pages, and high quality printing. It had all the makings of a content marketing showpiece. But, it wasn’t.

It was only content marketing in disguise. It was really just another example of how to use the bank’s logo in 100 different variations. It was not content marketing.

The difference is simple. Jell-O, John Deere, and others were interested in educating me as a customer. My bank was not. They didn’t desire to improve my abilities as a customer or a personal money manager. They the just wanted to tell me about themselves. I decided that they could do that from my garbage can, because their marketing had nothing to do with me.

Good content marketing is focused on the reader.
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When John Deere released The Furrow, it did’t hope to sell more tractors, at least not directly. It desired to educate its customers on how they could use technology to make their work easier and run their businesses better. Content marketing was founded on the simple principal that says, “if your customers are successful, you will be successful.”

This type of thinking has been paying off for more than 100 years.

Content marketing believes that if your customers are successful, you will be successful.
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The Direct Mail Years

The most common distribution method for content marketing has always been by mail. Even examples like The Furrow and Jell-O guide were heavily distributed by the post office. This eventually morphed its way into the already popular mail advertising business.

Content marketing ad by Claude C. Hopkins designed to educated and help the potential buyer.

In the early 1900s Claude C. Hopkins helped pioneer direct mail advertising by using samples as a way to get potential customers to try a new product. He didn’t believe in a tagline’s ability to get people to try something new. That was the product’s job. While this method wasn’t directly content storytelling, it was the right approach for the customer. Like content marketing,  Hopkins desired to educate and help the potential buyer. Cramming a sale down someone’s throat was not on his radar.

Argue anything for your own advantage, and people will resist to the limit. But seem unselfishly to consider your customers’ desires, and they will naturally flock to you. – Claude C. HopkinsClick To Tweet

David Ogilvy, hailed as “The Father of Advertising” championed direct response advertising and long form copy throughout his advertising career (1949–1973). His ideas combined the principals of content marketing and direct mail advertising. He believed in advertising that drove sales by genuinely informing and helping the customer. His disliked general advertising that hallmarked “creativity” as its main virtue.

I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information. - David OgilvyClick To Tweet

Content Creates Movement

Time and time again, content marketing has earned the reputation of bringing results. Nike probably wouldn’t be what it is today without content marketing. In the mid sixties, founder Bill Bowerman published a booklet on jogging that basically brought the sport to America. The booklet never once mentioned Nike shoes. It didn’t need to.

Great content brings big movement all on its own.

Bill Bowerman and Eugene cardiologist Waldo Harris, M.D. wrote this 19-page booklet called “Jogging” in 1966 to help the average American get fit through running, not sell shoes.

Content creates movement because it focuses on distributing ideas and adjusting consumer behavior. One of the hardest roles in advertising is to educate the customer on the benefits of using your product. Educating your customer is a hard thing to do when you only have a tagline and a moment of their attention.

Content marketing is different.

It is long form, takes up more of their attention, and looks to help the customer more than the company. Potential customers are much more likely to read it, and much more likely to learn. That learning then leads to a change in thinking, which then leads to movement, the kind of movement that will likely result in a sale without even asking for it.

Using content marketing to sell without asking makes everything else look like begging. Begging doesn’t create movement; it usually has the opposite effect.

Now More Than Ever

So, why has content marketing lasted for so long? It comes down to a few simple things.

• It is good for the audience
• It is easy to create
• It engages the customer in a real way
• It can be tracked to actionable results
• It is worth saving and sharing with friends
• It it based on customer trust rather than begging
• It is reliant upon facts and information, not creativity and tricks

The publishing of The Furrow by John Deere was a historical milestone for the entire marketing and advertising industry. It introduced a new idea that is just as alive today as it was then. In many ways, the opportunities for content marketing are easier now than they have ever been. With our blog or social media feeds, we are all able to hit publish at a moment’s notice. The content we create is only a limitation of our ideas, or our understanding what our customers really want to know.

More than 100 years after it’s release, The Furrow and content marketing still works for John Deere.

Content maketing isn’t a thing for the history books. On the contrary, its best days are still ahead. Your customers will never grow tired of helpful information that helps them be better at what they do. The more you contribute to their education, the more they will contribute to your bottom line.

Content marketing is all about the momentum and movement that it naturally creates. Get behind it while you can.

How has content marketing helped your business?

Hopefully, this Mother’s Day will be a celebration of mom because she’s a great parent, and not because she’s your only blog reader. While it’s great if your mom loves what you’re writing, here’s hoping she’s not your only reader. And if she seems to be?

Why is it that only mom is a loyal reader? Where are the rest of the readers?

Mom and (maybe her friends) are an easy audience to nab. They know all about you and are just a wee bit prejudiced towards caring about what you have to say. The rest of the world does not inherently care; you have to prove why they should care. If only mom is reading your blog, then this where the rest of the world is:

1. They’re Fast Asleep

What kind of writing puts people to sleep?

• Blog posts on topics that have been written (and therefore read) a million times before by other bloggers.
• Blog posts without any “tension” in them that the reader wants to see resolved.

Is your blog putting to sleep? Stop sending your readers to Bedfordshire. Make some changes.

Rethink your niche. Are you an expert enough that you can write freely on topics, or do you struggle to come up with one meaty post? Adjust your niche so that you find that content that you can easily create.

Rethink the path to your goal. Are you choosing topics that are over-blogged elsewhere just because other bloggers are seeing success with those topics? Stop. Write what you think and write naturally. Your goal (recognition, followers, influence) might stay the same, but have a very different path to get to it.

Wake up your reader, one by one. Even if mom doesn’t like it.

Stop sending your blog readers to Bedfordshire. Wake them up if you want them to come back.
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They Don’t Know You Exist

People can’t read you if they don’t know you exist.

Making your existence known takes patience. Any other quick-fix-get-followers-fast route and you’ll come off as an obnoxious jerk. And exactly are those methods that take time and patience?

You already know.

• Social media matters.
• Reading and commenting on other blogs or in forums in a genuine, non-spam way, matters. Writing helpful blog posts on topics that you can share in those blog comment sections or forums helps, posts that answer people’s questions that give you a chance to share links naturally.
• Taking advantage of every opportunity to get your site in a system like StumbleUpon or other discovery sites.
• Creating ebooks, both to give away or even sell on Amazon, to bring attention to your writing.

The point is, you can’t just write and do none of the above and expect to be found among the millions of blogs out there. You’re not the center of everyone’s world, even if mom thinks you are.

It's OK if mom is your blog's biggest fan. It's not OK if she's the only fan.
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They Thought Your Blog Died

You only post a little bit, so readers figured your blog was dead.

While they might come around a bit at first, they quickly learned that nothing changed, the last post was dated a while ago, and their feed reader hadn’t been fed anything new from you.

Blog consistently. End of story.

Mom might know you’re busy with life and that you’re still intending to blog, and still hop onto your site to see if you’ve been writing, but the rest of the world sees your blog as dead. Don’t let your blog die.

Only Mom Could Love What You Made

Is your website a bit of a dog? Is your writing rather poor? Are you getting “your” ideas from everyone else?

Poorly written posts – spelling! grammar! structure! cliché-ville! – even on good blog topics, are destined to be forgotten. There is no shortage of helpful tips on making your blog better, and writing better, freely available online. Why not take the time to read and implement them?

Proof your posts before publishing. Meticulously finesse the post. Draft first, and pause on the publish until you can come back and review. Good stuff takes work. It’s not instant. Your first draft, first attempt, first effort, or gut writing ability might not be final-product material even if mom thinks you’re a “natural.”

Off-the-cuff writing is great for Twitter, but use draft and craftsmanship for full blog posts.
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Mom is great. She thinks you’re the most interesting person, the best writer, and an all-around swell human being, but unless she can parlay that into several thousand fans and readers, her opinion of your blog might not matter at the end of the day.

Does your mom read your blog?

For a blogger, defining the competition isn’t always an easy thing to do. At first glance, it would seem we’re competing against other bloggers. More often than not, that isn’t the case. That would be far too simple. Our real competition is all of the other things that our readers could be doing. Playing games on their iPhone, watching television, or heck, even sleeping.

How do we outshine such a massive field of competition? One of the most reliable methods is to develop a sprit of learning.

Yes, learning. A spirit of learning is one of the most important tools that a blogger needs for success, and it comes in two very different froms.

1) Learning By Reading

Did you know that the average millionaire reads a book a month? That may not seem like a lot at first, but consider that many of us only read when absolutely necessary. In that light, reading a book a month is put in perspective. We realize we don’t read 12 books in a year.

Reading, of course, is the most obvious form of learning, and it is a huge asset for bloggers. Books, blogs, white papers, and reports are all important forms of reading that we should be participating in on a daily basis. This reading helps keep our thinking and subsequent ideas sharp. Unfortunately, after college many of us lose the habit of reading to learn. We remember such books as boring and required – not overly motivating and enjoyable.

Realize that the most successful people are also avid readers.

The most successful people are also avid readers.
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Reading Is Thinking

We encourage reading here at Todaymade. I cannot tell you how many blog posts I have written after being prompted by a book. Just yesterday, I wrote a post about usability in web application design that was inspired by a book I was reading. Many times, the purpose and point of the book is far less important than the ideas that it generates in you. Great ideas, and therefore blog posts, come from reading.

Reading Is Writing

You may have heard it said that the best readers are often the best writers. I doubt there is a lot of hard evidence on this (maybe there is) but it certainly has been true for me. Practice makes perfect, and while the best practice is to simple start writing – reading is a great way to study the masters, and learn how to communicate ideas through the written word.

5 Steps To Making  Reading  A Habit

For me, reading wasn’t always a habit. In fact, like many of you, I had several years of absence from the sport of reading after my college years. Picking it up again wasn’t natural; it took concerted effort. At the beginning, I relied primarily on audiobooks. It worked with my time schedule and was a good place to start. This reliance soon grew into a new love for the written word that now encompasses all formats – audio, ebook, and print. There are a basic methods that we can all follow to make a reading a habit in our own lives.

1. Find Some Variety

At any given time, I like to have 2-3 books in my reading cycle. This usually includes one audiobook and two regular books (print or ebook). I have found that this system keeps me constantly engaged. If I am getting bored with one, I can simply switch to another for a few days. I also try to maintain a variety of topics. For this to work, I allow myself at least one fiction book per year (or so).

2. Select Your Topics Wisely

It is important to read the books that you will enjoy the most, not necessarily the ones that you feel you should read. That or, create a mix of the two. If you force yourself to read books that you aren’t that interested in right at the start, you will be much more likely to become bored and move to other things – like television.

3. Create A Consistent Reading Schedule

My goal is to set aside a bit of time at the end of each day to make progress of my reading. The length of time can vary, but I usually devote at least 20-30 minutes of reading in each day. The length of time isn’t all that important in the beginning. Is is better to start with what you’re able to manage, and then increase your reading time as you go.

4. Track Your Progress

For personal tracking, I keep a simple document listing the books that I have read so far during the year. The social network Goodreads can also be a good way to track progress and thoughts. This is an important step, particularly for those who are motivated by trackable results, as it will help you visualize your success.

5. Take Notes

A fellow Todaymade team member recently mentioned that he likes to take notes as he reads to keep himself awake and engaged. I have also found this to be true. I use Evernote to track thoughts and quotes from the books I read. This is an important habit, and it will help you see how reading and learning works itself into whatever it is that you do. As a blogger, you will develop great material for posts from those notes. When I am stumped for a topic, I often dig through my notes to find thoughts that I forgot I even had.

Reading is a habit that will feed your blog with ideas.
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2) Learning By Doing

The second method for learning is to learn by doing. As a blogger, developing new ideas and methods for growth is an important part of your job. You will constantly be finding, cataloging, and looking back on ideas for inspiration. You may get an idea for a blog post, a promotion or contest, or even another way to market what you do. Using what you have learned helps guide you in changes and solid experiments that will set your blog apart.

Change Stuff

Bloggers can easily become slave to their schedule if they aren’t careful. We all set goals – say, 10 posts per month, or week. Before too long, we fall into a rut and lose momentum. We’re writing merely to get the job done, and our blogging becomes one of just output, with no input refreshing the well. As bloggers, we need to realize that changing how we do things every once and awhile is an important part of the learning process. As you look to transform your blogging lifestyle into one of learning, make sure that you incorporate iteration and experimentation into your process.

Evaluate The Response

As you make changes, it is absolutely vital that you develop a method for tracking your progress. Are the changes that you are making resulting in viable growth for you and your audience? This could come from more readers, more comments, or even more shares on various social networks. The key here is that you need to know that changes are actually doing what they intended to do. If they aren’t, they probably aren’t worth your time.

Refine Your Methods

If you evaluate and track your methods and results, you should be able to formalize refined ideas that will carry you forward. You may choose to abandon some ideas that didn’t perform so well, but the ones that you keep should be refined and incorporated into your daily workflow.

Learn To Be Better

The big goal at the end of the day is to simply become a better blogger than you were the day before. This isn’t always easy, but it is possible, if we choose to develop a simple sprit of learning.

What was the last book you read that caused you to write a blog post?

You can’t rely on luck to get your blog posts read.

We’ve talked about having a good mix on your blog, and how you should create a regular blog schedule that takes into account different types of content. This time, we’re not talking about types of content, but the way in which you write the actual post.

There are four methods of approach for any topic or content piece, and understanding how best to use these four methods can make or break your blogging (and guest blogging) career. Readers will read your blogs based on your ability to use these four methods, not on luck.

The General Post

A general post is written for introductory purposes.

It might be the start for an upcoming blog series with the intent being to lay the groundwork for what will be explained in greater detail later. Or, it might introduce new ideas or trends that the audience hasn’t heard about yet.

If not connected to a specific series or with the intention of continued blogging on a subject in an informal series, general posts run the danger of being vague and useless. Weak blog posts that seem to be little more than fluff and formula are usually poorly written general blog posts. They might sound good, and even contain true generalized ideas, but they rely on broad concepts and statements without injecting them with value. They do not take use research, facts, or examples to substantiate. They tell, but don’t show.

Generic guest posts don't work. You can't just tell the reader. You must show.
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General posts are not necessarily bad, however.

They can be well-written, particularly in the context of the whole blog and if done by a writer who envisions how this general post will fit into a larger, regular blogging program. A blogger firmly ensconced in regular writing for a blog knows both the content that has been published and the content that will be published, on the editorial calendar. In this situation, a general post can be extremely useful.

The Specific Post

A specific post is exactly that: a post filled with specific detail.

It might be a how-to post, or a post with code snippets and screenshots. It might be about marketing with links to helpful sites or a five-step list of what not to do in a PR disaster. Nearly any topic can be broken down into a specific post.

A specifics post dives deep into the subject matter. It does not focus on a broad topic (e.g. “marketing”) but instead delves into something more narrow (“small business tips for marketing with Tumblr”). Just as teachers tell students to not choose too broad a topic for a final paper, bloggers need to do the same for this kind of post. A detailed and meaty post that’s headed past 1000 words might work as a series and eventual ebook.

A weak version of the specific post happens when the topic is narrow but the blogger doesn’t have enough knowledge or content to fill it out, and instead veers into generalities to cover for this. Specific posts do not use abstract phrases like “they say” or “it has been shown” or other similar phrases as proof without backing it up with a link, research, or screenshot.

You must show, not just tell. If you say “users should choose a good design” and don’t provide readers the details that would help them follow your advice, it isn’t helpful to the reader.

The Philosophical Post

Philosophical posts are “idea” posts.

Their main goal is to further the culture of the brand or team writing the blog. These posts are as much for the writer as the reader, helping to clarify the thought process and leading on to other posts that come to mind as the writer is working through the initial idea.

Some blog posts are about the newness of an idea, and are as much for the writer as the reader.
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Philosophical posts good in that they reveal the writers as real people. They don’t generally come from a place of hierarchy (i.e. teacher-down-to-student), but are instead on the same level. The reader is walking beside the writer and working through the idea. These posts are great discussion starters. They get everyone thinking and talking. They often stem from books or other outside influences that have caused the author to think about new things and apply them to a current situation.

The Action Post

An action post could be any of the above three, but with one difference: it always includes something actionable for the reader can do.

It should leave the reader feeling that yes, they can do something about the problem described. These work well if you’ve written your post with the plot triangle in mind, presenting a problem, the proof, and a conclusion which gives the reader a chance to be part of the problem’s solution.

What do we mean by “action”? It might lead your reader to sign up for your email newsletter, get an ebook download, or maybe even three life changes they can make today. It is anything that takes them beyond passive reading into action.

Do you think there are too many general blog posts on the web right now? Why or why not?

It’s spring. The weather is warming up, people are out and about, and that can only mean one thing for homeowners in a quiet neighborhood – door-to-door salesmen.

This weekend, I was approached by the second salesman making a quick pitch for a home security system. As an entrepreneur I can respect the hustle of door to door sales, but in reality, it feels like the worst version of the cold call. It appears to miss the boat on so many levels, so why is it that it can actually work?

Emotions For Sale

The art of buying is by definition an emotional process. Door to door sales work, because they play on all of the right emotions.

The current state of the world, combined with an oil-boom (and rising crime rates) in my state have caused a great deal of fear. While much of this fear is perceived rather than actual, it is more than enough to cause some misappropriated spending.

You see, my state prides itself on safety and friendliness. Newscasts filled with gory details of a recent shooting are unsettling. It makes us nervous. I am absolutely sure that security system sales are at an all time high. The local sense of security has been altered, probably forever.

This is the primary emotional tug that home security salesmen are using. They are playing on my emotions, and both my perceived and real sense of a loss of security. They are offering to give me something that requires an emotional response.

Donna

Quickly into our conversation, the salesman mentioned the name of my neighbor who recently made a purchase.

“Do you know, Donna?” he said.

I did.

“We’ll, she recently had one of these installed in her home,” he was really gunning now. “So have several others on your block.”

“You know, you do live very close to the interstate.”

I do.

The emotions of fear were not the only ones on the table during this short-lived sales attempt. He was also playing on my pride, or my need to  ’keep up with the Jones.’ If everyone is doing it, surely I must!

This salesmen knew what he was doing. He wanted me to make an emotional decision, and sometimes that works. In fact, it works a lot of the time for most of us, to be honest.

It worked on Donna.

Raw Emotions

For the door to door salesmen, every aspect of the sales pitch plays on the emotions of the buyer. In addition to the environmental emotions, we also have the added pressure of a salesmen standing at our door, begging us to impress him. And why shouldn’t we – we’ve know him for a whole 30 seconds. But, we don’t like letting people down. Even those that we don’t know. Sometimes writing the check is easier than sending them on their way.

More emotions.

This is precisely how snap purchases are made. Before this salesmen came I was on my couch reading. I was in no state of mind to be spending thousands of dollars on something I didn’t need. This salesmen knew that. He knew that using my emotions was the only way to get me to consider a purchase, so he triggered them as quickly as possible.

Spending cash hurts, while using credit cards feels less painful. Selling and buying is emotional.
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The Emotion Of Pain

It should be painful to spend money. Financial advisor and radio talk show host Dave Ramsey knows this. His entire system is designed to help followers learn to control the emotions of spending money. This is why he is such a strong advocate of the cash-based spending system.

When we spend money using cash, our brain triggers a pain response. To our brain, spending cash feels a lot like getting a paper cut. When we spend money using a credit card, our brain triggers an opposite response. It triggers a pleasure response. Buying with cash hurts, while buying with credit feels good.

Our emotions are at work again.

Marketing Is Selling, Selling Is Emotions

I didn’t buy the security system like Donna did. I wasn’t any less safe after the salesman left despite not buying the system.

I know better, and I know how to control my emotions when it comes to spending money. Part of that knowledge comes from understanding the sales process and knowing the tricks of the trade. Once you learn to recognize what a salesman is up to, it is easier to avoid falling for the tricks. On the other hand, is it really a trick?

We're here to serve the emotional needs of our customers, not take advantage of them.
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Is using the emotions of the buyer really all that bad? 

Yes and no.

The reality is that most spending decisions are emotional, no matter what we do. To make a sale, emotions will have to be involved. At the very least, we must feel we need something.

The problem with the door-to-door salesman is that he uses these emotions to the maximum degree. On-the-spot purchasing decisions like this are usually not well considered. They are highly emotional, usually to the salesman’s unfair advantage. In a way, we are all in sales, and will have to decide how we feel about using emotions.

The thing is, we don’t really need to use emotions to their maximum degree if we don’t want to. Sure, we can trigger the appropriate responses to make a one-off sale if we take a lesson from my door-to-door salesmen. But if we do, one sale here and there will likely be all that we accomplish. Highly emotional purchases tend to bring on regret, and buyer remorse. This makes repeat sales to the same customer difficult. It is not a long-term sales strategy.

Emotions still matter, but they can be used in a much more ‘genuine’ way. They can be used to build trust. If we choose to genuinely serve other people, and serve their emotions, we will build trust with our customers. As marketers, we need to understand and serve the emotional needs of our customers, not take advantage of them. We need to be there to help, not hurt.

Sales and marketing will always need human emotion in order to exist. If we use them to their maximum degree we will definitely make a sale or two. If we use them carefully, and with genuine motives, we will see even more. It may take a bit longer, but the right way of doing something usually does.

The first step is learning to recognize the emotional aspects of sales. The second is learning how to use them wisely.

What techniques do you use when selling to clients?

Most of the information you find online regarding negative publicity is how you should respond to it if it is directed towards you. What do you do, however, if it is directed towards a competitor?

Everything is a response, now, even a non-response.

What do you do when a competitor has a stumble in the public eye?

We each have a preference and limit to how willing we are to getting our hands dirty, and partaking in the misfortune of others isn’t palatable to most. That doesn’t mean silence is always the best option.

Capitalize On Their Mistake

It doesn’t seem very nice to capitalize on the misfortune of others, but Caribou Coffee did exactly that back in 2006 when Starbucks offered a free iced coffee coupon via email. The coupon went viral, Starbucks hadn’t planned for the overwhelming use of it, and soon refused to honor the coupon. Caribou Coffee stepped in and offered to honor those Starbucks coupons for a limited time.

Play off of your competitor's flaws. Don't play to them.
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What Caribou Coffee did is redirect the anger of their competitor’s customers to lure them to try a new coffee place. What they didn’t do is come right out and bad-mouth Starbucks. Some situations are perfectly set for you to capitalize off of the other guy’s bad press, but not everything. If you can, in some way, convince the faithful customers that they should be switching loyalties to you without overtly stating “the other guy is bad” it will work. Play off of the flaws of your competitor, don’t play to them.

When To Steer Clear

Some incidents, particularly tragedies or maybe just an embarassing faux pas on social media, are best to steer clear of.

If it doesn’t involve an incident where customers have been wronged or outraged in a way that you can fill in the gap, stay out of it. Your competitor uses a bad hashtag promotion and it backfires? Leave it alone. At best, you could only say “we would never do that” but it doesn’t gain you any new customers and it sets you up as a target. It appears as if you’re trying to whitewash yourself.

Monitoring Your Competitor’s Brand

In the same way you monitor your own brand, you can monitor your competitor’s brand. Using Google Alerts and social media sites like Twitter, you can find out what’s happening for your competitor and what and when you should respond.

If you are a small local coffee shop, it might not make sense to monitor Starbucks corporate. You’re not competing on an international level. Why bother?

Being small means you can move quickly. If Starbucks has a sale or a promotion, so can you. If Starbucks customers are complaining about something, you can quickly move to offer a solution to that problem.

You don’t have to say anything inflammatory about a competitor, but if they leave a gap in the service they offer, by all means, step up and offer to fill it.

When is it best to stay clear of competitor's bad press?

The best part is almost certainly the wide grin that Steve Jobs displays at the 4:18 mark. He was busting with pride. He loved the Mac, like a father loves a son.

Isn’t this how it should be for all of us? Shouldn’t we love the things that we are selling? Shouldn’t we love our content?

Write What You Love

There are two ways to create content.

The first way involves careful research, regular study, and an attentiveness to readers. It delivers content that is focused on a particular goal. Sometimes this content is referred to as ‘evergreen content‘ or even, if poorly written, ‘link bait.’

It can be hard to love this kind of content.

The second type of content is content that comes from the heart. As cheesy as that may sound, it is content that comes out of us because we simple need to say it. It is what we are already thinking about and what we enjoy writing about the most. It’s what’s often in our head.

It is our content, and it is easy for us to love. But, can it still sell? Can it still meet the demands of our content marketing goals?

When Content Wins

The numbers don’t lie. Some of the most popular posts on our blog are the ones that we are the least proud of. These posts are regularly top performers in the daily stats, but lack the love that Steve Jobs so eloquently displayed. How does a content creator reconcile this divide?

To start, we need to consider quality over quantity. Some of the best posts I’ve ever written have gone almost completely unnoticed, or at least that is what it feels like. While they may not perform the greatest in daily traffic, they have made a difference in other ways.

• They have contributed new ideas into the world.
• They have helped me solidify my own thinking and ideas.
• They have actually been read, even by the right people.

Sometimes the big win with content isn’t in the traffic or the sharing. Sometimes it is about being read.

Sometimes the big win with content isn't in the traffic. Sometimes it is about being read.
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Passion, Failure, and Victory

The Macintosh was accomplished through sheer willpower by Jobs and his team. The project was severely long on time, and way over budget. It even caused a divide within the company that would eventually get Jobs kicked out. It wasn’t always pretty, but the story is full of what mattered:

Passion.

The Macintosh team had a passion for what they were building, and eventually for what they were selling. Guy Kawasaki, a former Mac Evangelist has even made note of the high-passion coming from the Macintosh team.

The two most important things about people on a revolutionary team are their ability and passion. Their educational level or work experience is meaningless--most of the engineers who did ground-breaking work of the Macintosh design didn't even graduate from college. - Guy KawasakiClick To Tweet

The point is this – every product needs a spokesperson with the passion to sell what they are making. Even your content.

Sure, the content with the best SEO-driven headline will beat out your favorite blog posts on the daily traffic totals. Sure, it may go unnoticed by all statistical standards, but does that really mean it accomplished nothing?

I recently wrote a guest post about how our highest trafficked pages were also some of our worst performing. These daily traffic hogs were bringing in eyeballs that didn’t spend much time actually reading our blog. By tweaking a few things, we were able to double our conversion rates. As great as this was, these high traffic pages are still some of our least important. In all reality, they do the least to share the real ideas behind Better At Marketing.

I don’t know that a good blog fits into a formula. I have seen such formulas. I have listened intently, expecting to hear something life changing. I have even sketched a few formulas out on my own.

In the end, they are less useful than they initially seemed.

Sure, you can get traffic. But, can you really contribute new ideas? Can you really inspire new thinking?

The Macintosh did.

The Mac served as the starting point for the next 25 years of computing. It changed the conversation, and left a dent in the universe. It also didn’t sell the greatest (though Apple figured out how to solve that problem eventually).

And, so can you.

Write what matters, or at least a mixture of what matters and what brings traffic. Above all, make sure you honestly love what you’re selling. Your audience can smell a liar.

How are you bridging the gap between what you love, and what your customers want?

That’s where TweetCaller comes in. Instead of sending a tweet to your friend using Twitter, TweetCaller lets you send your tweet over the phone, fax, or in the mail. And, not only that, but it gives you different options on how you want that to happen.

Let’s back up the truck for a second, and start from the beginning.

Why Make Such A Service?

It has to do with TodayMakeDay.

TodayMake Day is a day when we set aside all other projects and, as a team, create something from start to finish. It’s like a super-compressed cycle of idea development, and what we came up with was TweetCaller. An entire day (and perhaps a tiny bit more) went into making a service that makes using Twitter a bit fun.

Getting a bit sentimental about old school methods of communication and mixing it with Twitter seemed like a surprising way to let people have some fun.

Setting Up Your Account

Once you authenticate your Twitter account with TweetCaller, you’ll find yourself inside TweetCaller’s dashboard. You’ll be given 50 cents to try the system out, and the option to add more money to your account to pay for additional TweetCaller services.Your account has a main dashboard where you set up your contacts and send your tweets.

The “Send Tweet” area of your account is where the action happens.

For each of your contacts, you’ll need to assign whatever hashtag you want to use for them. Next, you’ll add their phone number, Twitter account, fax number, or mailing address to each of your contacts. Not all are required, but some are necessary depending upon how you intend to send your messages.

You don’t have to have a fax number or mailing address unless you intend to use those methods.

Once you have a contact or two, and have added funds to your account, you can try out TweetCaller!

The Many Tweeting Methods

We offer you a chance to send your tweets in the following ways:

• Phone ($.25) – Your message will be read to your recipient(s) with an automated system. The phone option is automatically selected by default. If you choose something else, it will no longer be used unless you specify it again.
• Mail ($4) – Your message will be hand-written on a postcard and mailed to your recipient(s).
• Shout ($10) – We’ll videotape one of our team shouting your tweet out on the street and get it to the recipient.
• Video ($15) – We’ll make a video (up to 30 seconds) of our interpretation of your tweet and get it to the recipient.
• Sketch ($8) – We’ll draw an interpretation of your tweet on a postcard and mail it to your recipient.
• Fax ($.25) – We’ll fax your tweet to your recipient(s).

Add-ons are free, but you will pay for the method of delivery.

• Morse – Your message is interpreted in morse code. You must choose mail, phone, fax or video. Phone is selected by default if you do not choose another.
• Roll – Your message has the chorus to Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” appended to it. You must choose mail, phone, fax, or video. Phone is selected by default if you do not choose another.

You can choose as many methods and add-ons as you want for each method.

Composing A Tweet

When you compose your tweets, you’ll designate who will get it, how they will get it, and the message you want them to get. For example, let’s say you wanted to send a tweet to the user you designated as #jwl. You wanted it to go as a phone call, but also as a sketch in the mail.

You can create tweets within your TweetCaller account.

You would add the hashtag for the person you wanted to receive this tweet. You’d also add #phone and #sketch. The phone message would go out right away. We’d receive the sketch request, draw it on a postcard, and mail it to the recipient using the address you provided in your TweetCaller account. If you did not specify an address, you won’t be charged for the sketch because we will be unable to complete the request.

We’ll draw an interpretation of your tweet and mail it to the recipient(s).

You can send the same message to multiple recipients in multiple formats, as long as it fits within Twitter’s 140 character count.

You can do this within the TweetCaller dashboard, or from within Twitter (or any other Twitter app).

The thing to remember is that when creating a message outside of your TweetCaller account, you need to start your message with @TweetCaller first, and then include the hashtags of your contacts and the message format you want for delivery. Inside your TweetCaller account, messages have the @TweetCaller included automatically.

You can also use TweetCaller from any Twitter interface.

In your TweetCaller account, you can see a full listing of the history of tweets you’ve sent and how much they cost, whether you sent them from within TweetCaller or another Twitter interface. If you have errors in how you’ve set up your contacts or you don’t have a high enough balance to cover your tweet, TweetCaller will send you an error message via Twitter to let you know.

We’ve been having a lot of fun with TweetCaller here at Todaymade. We hope you have a little fun with it, too!

Have questions about TweetCaller? Ask them below!

A style guide is meant to keep multiple authors on the same page, which could be a complicated thing.

It could have every last bit of information your blog writers need to know, answering every question they might ever have. It could be complex and complete and, unfortunately, a reason for your team to blog terribly.

Why would blogging suffer because of a comprehensive style guide?

A Style Guide You Can Work With

Whether you call it your editorial guidelines, editorial policy, or a style guide, it should make your blogging better, for both the writers and the readers. It gives the writers the guidelines and the readers a sense that there is congruency across the blog(s).

When To Use An Informal Guide

You may be a large brand with a large team, and need a style guide that encompasses blogging, magazine or other print writing, public relations, and so on. A more traditional style guide is probably what you’d prefer, with more detail and use case scenarios. Most blogs, however, favor the personalities of writers coming through a bit, since they want to avoid that “corporate speak” and uniformity that sometimes comes from a strict style guide. A more informal set of guidelines allows personality to show through in the writing.

An informal guide also works well if you have one person handling the proofing or copyediting. That person can make sure the important things, as well as any grammatical issues, are taken care of. Understand that you don’t have to re-invent the wheel, and that you can use other style guides that are already available for things like grammar and punctuation, if necessary. Refer a writer who seems to need those tips to an established guide instead of recreating it for everyone within your own. Not all writers need the burden of that level of detail.

A Low Barrier To Entry

A low barrier to entry is especially important for something like blogging where maybe not everyone on your team is comfortable with writing. Getting them to agree to blogging was difficult enough. Do you really want to drop a 12-page style guide on their desk and tell them they need to follow it?

Reduce as many creative and courage barriers as you can for your blogging team. Don’t let a complex style guide get in the way of team members trying to creating content.

Reduce the barrier to entry for your blog's writing team. Remove anything that gets in the way.
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What Your Style Guide Looks Like

Now that you’ve decided on a broad and informal style guide that preserves the personality of your writers, there are few things you should include and a few to leave out if you want it to work well.

Things To Include In Your Informal Style Guide

Your style guide includes those general things that make your blog unique.

• How you reference your own products. We have had a few product name changes, as well as new products introduced, and we had to be sure the team was referring and spelling them in the same way on the blogs as well as on social media.
• What you write about. If your team is large enough that not everyone is aware of the content your blog covers, first you should require everyone to read your blog, and then you should summarize the content found on your blog.
• How you use your blogging platform. We use WordPress, and we have several plugins that must be used for each post. Writers should know about designating a featured image, SEO plugins, CoSchedule plugin, etc.
• Any code or in-post techniques you use. We have code that we use to create a click-to-tweet, quote, or question box. You might have some classes or callouts that you use in a certain way. For example, blue boxes for information, or yellow boxes for a call to action. Include the code necessary to use these systems.
• How you handle links in posts. Do you want writers to find an older post on your blog to link to? Do they need to be careful of what kind of sites they link to? Give them some guidelines on what you expect.
• How you handle social media and conversation. We like to have the writers of our blog posts respond to the comments of their own posts. Give your writers a guide on how they should respond not just in the style of writing, but the manner and attitude they should use, too.
• How the blogging process happens. Give your writers a general feel for what the editorial process of the blog is. It helps them understand deadlines, requests, and changes to their writing that they may see and put it into perspective.

Some of these things might be taken care of by your copy editor. Even if your copy editor handles most of these tasks at the end, it doesn’t hurt to at least let the team know how things work in general. You can leave out detail, but give them a heads up so they understand how the post they wrote ended up looking as it did on the blog.

Things To Leave Out Of Your Style Guide

There are things your writers don’t have to know, and shouldn’t be included in the style guide.

• Design or visual elements. These are things the designer needs to know, not the writers. Colors, fonts, and other design decisions will have an effect on the final product, but your writers don’t need to be bothered with it. Again, remove barriers and make the writing process as straightforward as possible. Make a style guide for designers, and leave the writers free to write.
• Pages and pages of details. Again, you don’t need to instruct them on nouns and verbs, or the proper spelling of the most commonly misspelled words. Frankly, they have access to online search. They can look that up. Don’t drown them in details so their writing freezes up.
• Talking points. It’s not unreasonable to put constraints on content as far as appropriateness is concerned. You do not want links or references to things that are offensive. On the other hand, be cautious in how you restrict your writing team. Find a way to be positive about it instead of negative, i.e. “we write about this” as opposed to “do not say this.” You likely have team members with differing opinions on things. Different view points give your readers value. Forcing the same view point is less about cohesiveness and more about restriction.

As always, consider your editorial process.

If you have team members that proofread and edit all blog posts before publishing, let them handle the more detailed issues. They’re going to finalize and clean it up anyway, so remove as many barriers as possible from your writers so that they can get into the business of writing.

Your blogging style guide should make it easier for writers to write freely, not more complex.
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What Our Style Guide Looks Like

Our style guide here at Todaymade is less about specifics, and more about a general structure that allows the personalities of the writers to show through. We don’t have a style guide with a complex set of guidelines. We don’t tell the authors how to choose categories, how to use SEO plugins, and how to set up our CoSchedule plugin. Why?

We’re a small team, and have a copy editor (me). The goal is to get everyone writing and thinking. The editing and final tweaking of the post will be handled at the end by one person. That means we remove as many barriers to entry, when it comes to blogging, as we can. The main thing that the writers on our team need, according to our guide, are solid ideas, substantial and unique content, and a heads-up on what might happen to the post on its way through the final editing process. That’s pretty much it.

You want a level of uniformity to your blogs so there is cohesiveness, but you don’t want to kill personality and flavor. That’s where an informal and encouraging style guide comes into play. Use your style guide as a way to give your blog posts your brand’s particular flavor, not kill it.

What does your team use when it comes to a style guide?

In business, the goal is has always been to outdo the competition. It may be through a better price, better customer service, or a better product. Every business has to find its secret weapon in order to succeed.

Is a blog really any different?

Nope. Every blog is in competition for readers, even your’s. So, how do you compare to your competition? Do you stand out?

The things that set a good blog apart from other blogs aren’t that much different from those things that set a business apart from its competition. While you can’t offer a lower price (free is free after all), you can offer better customer service. You can also offer a better product.

Blogging Is Customer Service

The good news for bloggers is that great service and great products go hand-in-hand.

That is, your customer service is your product. Great customer service, for a blogger, happens when you pay close attention to the personal needs of your readers. You find out who they actually are.

Do You Know Who Your Readers Are?

We must get down to the individuals. We must treat people in advertising as we treat them in person. Center on their desires. Consider the person who stands before you with certain expressed desires. However big your business, get down to the units, for those units are all that make size. - Claude C. HopkinsClick To Tweet

Usually, when thinking about our audience, the focus tends to be only that we want more of them. More likes, more tweets, and more hits. In other words, the numbers. We love watching the numbers.

Too often, bloggers treat their readers just like the numbers they are looking for. We use demographics such as age, location, and browser-type to determine how to go about our business of acquiring readers. Does any of that really matter? At the end of the day a person, not a number, will do the subscribing.

How do we become content creators that truly serve our audience?

The “Them” Question

If you haven’t asked yourself the question “what’s in if for them” yet, then now would be a great time to get started. Why that question? Because that’s the question your reader is asking themselves:

“What’s in this for me?”

It’s all they want to know. They came to read your blog not their benefit, not yours.

People came to read your blog for their benefit, not yours
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Think Usability

Make sure that the design, layout, and workflow of your blog fits their needs. This is more than a great design or a new WordPress theme. Your blog should be welcoming, easy to read, and mobile friendly. You should create an experiences that makes reading and sharing easy wherever your reader chooses to do it.

Your content should also be accessible, broken up into small chunks that are easy to follow and understand. Bulleted lists, block quotes, and great images can go a long way in making things readable.

The idea is that you have to create a pleasurable experience for your audience. Your blog should be:

• Mobile friendly.
• Great design that’s easy to read.
• Well formated posts that are easy to follow.
• Include images, charts, and visual elements.

How does the usability of your blog stand up to your competition? Are you barraging your visitors with pop-ups, ads, and sharing buttons? Is your sidebar distracting, full of too many things they could be doing other than reading your blog? Is this really what’s best for them?

Put your reader first, not your subscription list.

Your obligation is to your readers. Put them first, not your subscription goals.
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Think Readability

Great blog posts are easy to read, and this isn’t just because they are written at an 8th grade level. Great blogs are readable because they are full of information that readers care about. As a publisher, your content should be easy to understand. New visitors should quickly understand your topic, and understand why they should be paying attention to what you have to say.

Headlines are also a major factor on a great blog. They should be directed at serving the particular needs and interests of your reader. When it comes to reading your blog, it should be:

• Conversational and easy to read.
• Topical and well-focused.
• Focused, with great headlines.

Bloggers often hear people say that proofreading and grammar just don’t matter when they blog, that it’s more important to generate content rather than get tripped up in those details. That’s wrong! You already know you have to make your blog easy to read. This includes correct spelling and grammar so your reader isn’t distracted. Poor writing style will hide your great ideas.

Always think back to your readers. Do everything you can to make your blog more readable to them.

Your blog has a job: help your readers achieve their goals.
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Think Helpful

To be geared towards a human audience, your blog must be focused on being helpful. This doesn’t mean that every post has to be a step-by-step how-to guide, but it should help your readers accomplish a goal. That goal might be one of staying informed on the latest information within a particular industry, making them laugh, or helping them stay motivated. It doesn’t have to involve a how-to guide.

Whatever you write, just remember that you are in the business of serving your audience.

It’s easy to make the mistake of selling while you’re writing. On a good blog, this has no place.

• Stop selling, and be helpful instead.
• Serve your audience’s actual needs.
• Help readers accomplish a goal, whatever that might be.

You blog has a job. It needs to help your readers achieve a goal. What is yours helping them do?

Out-Serve Your Competition

Your readers have no shortage of options when it comes to what they should spend their time reading. The web has made content publishing easy for us, but it’s done the same for everyone else, too. There’s no shortage of competition. It takes hard work to know and focus on your readers. To succeed, your content has to do more than merely exist.

Reading comments, developing discussions, and visiting other successful blogs are other great ways to better understand our audience. The key to success is learning to see past the surface and getting to the core of what motivates your readers. What are you really helping them do? Are you helping them grow their business, improve their writing, or maybe mend a fractured business relationship?

Once you understand the purpose that your readers see in our blog, you beging to understand how to serve them best, and that’s what brings better customer service, and a better product.

How do you use these methods to make your blog stand out?

We remind ourselves of our goal, every day.

UPDATE: We are no longer accepting guest post submissions at this time. Thank you.

We love great content.

It’s what motivates us. In fact, our goal is to help the world create and distribute content. And that’s where you come in.

Are you passionate about content marketing? Do you read our blog and have ideas of topics that you’d like to share with our audience?

What We’re Looking For

We’re looking for great writers who are:

• Readers and fans of our blog
• Already familiar with the kind of content we feature.

We like excellence in writing, unique ideas that aren’t a re-hash of what’s already out there, and content that is, quite frankly, amazing. It might be a how-to, a tutorial, something inspiring, or great advice. We like blog posts that:

• Are well-written.
• Not shallow or too short (Intro, body, conclusion. 800 – 1000 words).
• Have at least one incredible image.
• Are useful to our readers (tell a story, use example, or give specific actionable things they can do after reading).
• Fit with the content of this blog and include several links to our own blog posts (means you’re spending time and reading our blog).
• Are written first and foremost for sharing incredibly useful information with our readers, with linkbacks and SEO secondary motivations.

If you’re not sure if your post fits, review the posts on our blog. Read several posts. Read about our Todaymade blogging style guide to get a feel for how we write and what we want from blog posts.

You’ll get an idea of how long our posts are, the topics we cover, and the detail and content quality we’re looking for. We’d love it if, inside your guest post, you could link back to a previous post or two here on our blog. It gives our readers a chance to connect with our other content.

What We’re Not Looking For

It’s simple, really. We’re not looking for:

• Shady get-rich-quick or get-300%-increase-in-followers-in-one-day type posts.
• Recycled, over-used, same-old same-old content.
• Generic non-specific posts you are shopping around to anyone who’ll bite. If you’re not sure, please read this blog post.
• Posts made of content found somewhere else on the web, even if it was your previous content and you change a few words.
• Sloppy grammar and writing.

Most guest posts are rejected because of poor writing, or overly generic content that has nothing new, nothing specific, and no real value to readers. If your post has nothing specific for readers to take away, is full of generalities, and adds nothing new that hasn’t been said before, do not submit it here.

Publishing Guidelines

Any content that you submit to us for consideration must meet these extremely important guidelines. As a serious content creator, we’re sure you will understand:

• No paid-for content, including affiliate links, paid-for links, anchor-text-keyword shenanigans, sponsored posts, paid-for reviews, press releases, advertorials, excessive self-promotion, et. al.
• Your content must be completely original.
• You must own the copyright to all associated images or other materials.
• Your content must never have been (or will be) published elsewhere.
• We do not pay guest writers for their content.
• We do not accept payment to run your post on our blog.
• Posts must be written in good English.

We will not accept posts with any questionable content. We will remove links from the body of your post if we feel that they are suspect.

Prepare Your Post

It’s important to submit a post that’s ready to go.

Post: You should email the HTML of your post as a plain text file (no Word files, please), including any image(s) with it. It should be formatted and ready to be put directly into WordPress. Your post should have no H1 tags within the body, but should use at least H2. It should have paragraphs, headings, and be proofed. Spelling, punctuation, and grammar should be impeccable.

Headline: Include a headline. Please read this post for ideas on creating great headlines.

Bio: You may include a bio of up to three sentences. We allow you to include two links. These two links should link to your blog or a legitimate website of similar content of our site that you are a part of, or a social media account. They should not link to any site you are being paid to promote, or any site promoting loans, shopping, etc. We reserve the right to request a different link if we find the link questionable.

We reserve the right to edit your headline, post, and bio so that it fits with our blog. We will also edit the formatting to fit our blog style for tweets, quotes, and questions. If we like your post but feel it needs work, we’ll give you an opportunity to do so.

If you accept these publishing guidelines, and have a great blog post ready, send an email to julie@todaymade.com and attach the post to the email (not in the body) as a text file in HTML, as well as the image(s) that need to accompany it.

We can’t wait to work with you!

Are you blogging for your reader’s benefit, or are you just wanting to use them for your benefit?

This is not a post about writing tips.

It is not a post about making your writing last. It is not going to tell you how to refresh a stagnant blog. I’m not going to tell you about social media, or marketing, for your blog. It is not a post about creativity, or writer’s block, or using your blog to change the world. I’m not here to give you a kick in the pants to get you writing, or tell you how to shape up your writing habits.

That stuff has already been covered.

This is a post about three things you must understand before you begin to blog. Three things that, if ignored, will find you squirming uncomfortably in your blogging chair.

You Are Writing Publicly

You’re not just writing in your private journal, for your co-workers, or for a controllable semi-private audience. You’re writing for the world.

This shouldn’t terrify you and keep you from writing. It shouldn’t make your writing stiff and formal. It shouldn’t trap you in that black hole of editing and proofing a draft over and over and never having the courage to click publish.

But it probably will.

Your job, as a blogger, is to click publish, and keep improving from then on. Performing in front of a huge audience is terrifying, so focus on the real people you actually know and write as if you were writing for them. The world will read it, since the world is made up of real people. Thinking of real people when writing helps you defeat the blank screen and conquer irrelevancy.

Write for the world with real people in mind. Make your content interesting for them all. You are writing publicly.

Defeat the blank blogging screen and conquer irrelevancy: write for real people.
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You Are Responsible

Write responsibly.

That doesn’t mean you have to water-down your message. But, because you’re writing for the world, you must be aware of the effect your writing will have.

I’m not just talking on how your content affects people on a personal level, but also how it affects you legally. This includes issues such as copyright and trademark infringement, libel, deep linking, paid-for posts or content, privacy, content theft, and even, though you might be blogging in another country, an understanding of U.S. law. Your innocent blogging intentions have legal ramifications.

You can’t steal content, you can’t make up quotes, you can’t falsify information, you can’t lie and say you didn’t, and you need to be able to back up your claims. It’s easy to get a blog; there are free options everywhere. A low barrier to entry doesn’t negate these responsibilities.

You are responsible for the content you create. Understand that.

Blogging is great power. With great power comes great responsibility. #YouAlreadyKnow
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You Must Be Honest

Usually when people talk about honesty in relation to a creative activity (which writing and blogging is), they tend to point it back towards self. As in “you must be honest with yourself.” Fine. Write honestly so you can live with yourself. Write honestly, but don’t let it be an excuse to be a jerk. So yes, be honest with yourself.

But you must be honest with your audience above all.

Don’t let marketing trends ever come before being honest with your readers. Don’t let what a social media marketing guru-ninja-expert-maven tells you to do ever supercede your responsibility to be honest to your audience. Don’t hook, snare, or deceive your reader in any fashion and use them merely as a means to an end. What you write, how you engage, what you present, and what you promise – it must be done honestly. You must have an audience that trusts you, or you have nothing.

How do you build trust?

There is no app for building trust, no gimmick, no formula. Trust is built over time by being honest. If you say something will work, it had better work. If it doesn’t work for your reader, you’re a liar to them. If you get paid to review or write a blog post, you had better tell your reader up-front. You do all of these things not because you don’t want trouble with the FCC or other bloggers, but because you care about your audience.

If your first inclination isn’t to be honest with your reader, but to make money off of them or use them as a springboard for personal gain, do everyone a favor and stop blogging.

What else should a new blogger understand before making the leap into blogging?

UNDER A BRIDGE, SOMEWHERE – Internet users rejoiced on Monday, April 1, 2013, upon hearing that the International Troll Registry was opened up to troll registration.

“Internet users have grown tired of dealing with trolls,” said Garrett Moon, one of the founders of Todaymade, a content marketing and web development company. “You try to ship something and make some forward progress and trolls do their best to take you down.”

While no surprise to Internet veterans, new users to the internet are often shocked at how innocent comments and requests can bring down virtual fire from above into their router and onto their screen.

Trolls, and their patented “trolling” techniques have wreaked havoc on many online industries.

“It’s a real problem,” said Moon. “Whether you’re writing about food, politics, or social media, trolls are on the alert. They have a well-developed artillery and are skilled at human psychology.”

Trolls are often found in locations where people expect to transact business or get help, such as Craigslist, Apple/Android forums, reddit, hackernews, and Yahoo! Answers. Unsuspecting Internet users stumble into elaborate traps, unaware that they are dealing with a troll.

“What we hope to see happen with the troll registry is at least let trolls form some kind of a cohesive group for their own internal support while simultaneously alerting the public to who they might want to avoid engaging online,” said Bert Morgoth, an admitted troll and vocal supporter of trolls. “Eventually, we’d like to see levels of certifications based on trolling ability, and possibly a forum dedicated just for training trolls and helping them improve their skills.”

Currently, the registry only allows for the creation of a database of trolls and the saving of kittens. Future benefits, such as Morgoth’s certification and training, are in the works.

Interest in the International Troll Registry has been growing. Though the creators, Todaymade, have been unwilling to release the proprietary algorithms which they claim perform the kitten-saving, they have made registration free and open to anyone in need.

Register as a troll: The International Troll Registry

Google+ has a huge user base. Wouldn’t it be perfect for blogging?

Lately, I have been hearing a lot of noise about using Google+ for blogging. I love Google+. It’s big, and it’s growing rapidly. It’s shaping up to be a serious online contender that moves beyond just another social network, but blogging? Is this really a good idea?

Probably not.

Blogging is something that I care about deeply. It is how we’ve built our business and audience, and it is something that we teach others to do. The power of content isn’t lost on me, and that is precisely why the idea of blogging on a social network brings such a cause for concern.

The Lure Of The +

I am first in line to say that Google+ is a compelling platform.

There is a lot to love, and businesses should be taking it seriously. I have praised its SEO value, and it we’ve cataloged its superior events capabilities. Google+ is a great social network, and though it has flaws, it deserves more mainstream attention.

Google+ Helps SEO, But Doesn’t Define It

One of major hallmarks of Google+ is its deep integration with search results. Google+ authorship adds author photos that can dramatically increase click-through rates from routine searches. There is also Google+ Local, which helps prioritize local listings as searches are performed.

On the other hand, we also know that one of the major benefits of blogging is the search engine value that it can bring to your site. In fact, we have seen traffic to a site increase by up to 70% with the addition of a blog.

The point here is that search engine value comes when a traditional blog and Google+ are used together, not when Google+ is used exclusively. SEOmoz makes this point brilliantly with 10 Dead Simple Tips to Take Advantage of Google+ for SEO. The SEO value of Google+ isn’t in the social network itself. Sending visitors to your Google+ profile isn’t the goal. The goal should be to increase website traffic.

Keep Your Content Yours

As increasing amounts of content are created and distributed through digital channels, questions about ownership have become more and more necessary  There are serious reasons to consider archiving Twitter and Facebook posts – just in case.

Remember, there are no guarantees your content is safe. First it was Google Wave, then Google Buzz, and more recently Google Reader. By this point, I think that we should have learned our lesson: Google is not beholden to anyone, or our content. We need to be careful about where we invest our energy.

Content vs. Community

Google+ is great at community. Hangouts, circles, +1s, and simple sharing make it the premiere network for social conversation. This is an important role for any brand, but conversation shouldn’t be confused with content.

Content is something different. Content is your stake on the world. It is your beacon for others to find and follow. It is your voice, while conversation is the voice of others.

No one is devaluing community and conversation. Many brands need more of it. But in the end, content rules, and it deserves a higher place of value than conversation.

Keep Your Assets Close

The most important digital asset that any company has is their content. Whether it is a blog post, article, white paper, video, or podcast, it should be protected. SEO is driven by such content if it is handled with care. Using Google+ as a blogging platform is a dangerous proposition because it separates your content from your source, even if you aren’t a “serious blogger.”

With Google+ you lose control and you give up most of the value.

The reality is that social networking has been proven over and over again to do a better job at keeping current customers rather than acquiring new ones. This idea alone should persuade would-be Google+ bloggers to move on to better things. Use your blog for inbound marketing, content delivery, and long-tail search. Use Google+, and other social networks, as a way to distribute your content.

Social networks are invaluable. Google+ is important, and it is rightfully rising in popularity. But at its bare bones, it is a social network – that’s it. You are always better off if you keep your content your content.

Have you seen blogging over on Google+? What did you think?

Freelancers struggle with pricing.

They might be new and uninformed about their market. They might be desperate for income. The temptation is to price low in order to get the maximum amount of work. They think they can’t say no to any job, and undersell in order to get as many jobs as possible.

Wrong move.

First, understand one thing: shoddy work doesn’t work. If you’re not providing an excellent service or skill set, your financial situation will reflect it. By “underselling” we mean high quality work without equally high and valued pay, not low-quality work for high-quality pay.

1. Tying Price To Self-Worth

What people pay you is in exchange for goods or a service, not a reflection of your worth or value as a human.

It’s not a reflection of your confidence level in the given moment. Women are particularly notorious for basing pricing structures on factors that are outside of the goods/service realm. A 2006 study (A Behavioral Study of Pricing Decisions: A Focus on Gender) found that one of the reasons women tended to earn less than men is because they tied pricing into feelings about clients and themselves.

Your feelings towards your client should not affect your pricing structure. Determine the rate you’re willing to exchange goods and services for, and stick with it. While there are some exceptions, straddling the fence between building loyal relationships and undercharging is a very difficult place to make a comfortable living. You’ll grow to resent customers (even ones you like) that grow used to getting something cheap. Train them from the start what you charge.

Remember, what you offer is not who you are. The value of each is separate.

2. Ignoring What The Market Is Doing

Trying to be the cheapest person for hire doesn’t do you any favors. Do you really want to start a price war with your competitors when it means you won’t even earn enough money to make a living?

Prices that are too low in respect to their high-quality work might only attract customers that want great things for cheap. While that doesn’t mean they are bad people or unimportant customers, it does mean they come with a different attitude than a client who says “You’re the expert. I’m happy to pay you what you ask.” What works in a retail world is not necessarily great for a freelancer.

For whatever reason, clients who pay the least often demand the most in return. Underselling the market attracts those who aren’t actually in your market. Stay competitive in your market, and don’t seek a lower bracket.

3. Undervaluing Your Experience

If you’ve been doing something for a decade, you’d better not be charging the same rate you started at.

That decade of experience? It’s valuable. It is made of time, mistakes, hardship, self-taught skills – and it’s worth something. All of that time you’ve spent learning and becoming an expert have carry-over value. That is, it isn’t too much to expect future customers who benefit from your experience to pay for it, even if it means you can actually work faster than you did early on. The better you get, and the less time it takes you, the more you charge. Your rate increases.

Your experience has value. Charge customers if they want to make use of it.

Pricing too low only means you'll be exhausted, disillusioned, and unhappy. You'll quit.
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4. Too Many Free Lunches

Do you find yourself practically giving things away?

It’s fine to give back to your community. Donate to worthy causes, teach others how to do something, write useful tips on your blog. But if you find most of your time dedicated to work you aren’t seeing any financial return for, and instead are getting more requests for something for free, the balance is way off.

Is what your doing for free going to build your business later? Will it build loyalty?

You’ll know you’ve been giving away too much of value for free when your clients start demanding the premium service or product but always for next to nothing. That’s no surprise; you’ve trained them to expect things for free instead of teaching them that they need you and will pay for it.

Give enough away to keep them hungry. Keep the thing that makes you money behind a pay wall.

5. Extreme Frustration

Asking too little creates frustration in your life that manifests itself in strange ways.

Being tired, irritable, or unmotivated are common. You’ve hit your tipping point for work and you can’t even find a clear focus anymore. Feeling anger about your situation, towards your clients, and towards your work can often be traced back to the fact that you aren’t charging enough to live on and it is having a destructive effect on your life.

Time Frustration

When you undersell yourself, you willingly give up more time. Because your cost of living is at level X, you must work and earn enough to meet it. Underselling means you must work more, and work harder. Do you have to work an 55-hour work week just to make ends meet? Or could you work 40 hours and charge more?

Client Frustration

While it’s not unusual to be frustrated with clients once in a while, there are few things more angering than a needy client you know you didn’t charge enough. They still have the same demands as any client, but you’re getting paid much less for your time.

Do you find that even in the most frustrating of client situations, you feel a sense of relief at the amount of money they are paying you? Or do you instead feel cheated and have anger towards them for “trapping” you?

Make Some Changes Now

Are you underselling yourself? This is the perfect time to stop.

1. Research. Grab a pencil and paper, and start doing some research. Find out what market rates are. Call around if necessary. Look online. Increase your prices and alert your clients. You’ll know which ones were with you because they love your work (they’ll stay) or because you were cheap (they’ll put up a fuss and go).

2. Look Inward. Take stock in yourself. Look at your skills, knowledge, and experience honestly. If you can’t, find a trusted colleague that can do the evaluation from an outside perspective. Write it all down. See your value and worth in professional terms, and you’ll quickly see you have a legitimate right to charge more than you are.

3. Separate. Force yourself to separate your worth and identity from your work. Otherwise, every rejection of your work becomes personal, and makes it too easy to drop your price in order to get the client and regain your “self-worth.”

4. Practice No. Practice both saying no to jobs that don’t fit this new plan, and practice living with yourself after you’ve said no to a few projects. The first couple of times you’ll struggle, always calculating the money you turned down. Find a way to turn that extra time and focus towards something more productive.

When you set yourself up to work more with less income, you’re asking for exhaustion, disillusionment, and unhappiness. You’ll eventually give up on freelance work, or quit and find a “regular” job with a “livable” wage. Be sure that the dream you gave up was because you wanted to, and not because you didn’t charge enough. Underselling yourself poisons dreams and makes them monsters.

Have you been guilty of underselling yourself? Where did it lead to?

Claude C. Hopkins, an original ad man.

Hopkins, an advertising pioneer of the early 1900s, is probably best known for his book Scientific Advertising (published in 1923). Through his book and his lifetime of work, he became a pioneer of the modern advertising industry. I suspect, though, that he would be appalled with what he saw now. In many ways, Claude wasn’t nearly as much of an advertiser as he was an expert on human psychology. He understood how we think, and that is what made a message from 1923 completely relevant today.

How we think hasn’t really changed, even though we might think we’re more “modern.”

There are dozens of useful nuggets on marketing and sales in his autobiography, a book that I would recommend for just about anyone. While the methods of advertising have changed, the principles of how we market and sell our products to consumers hasn’t changed at all. In fact, in this “new” era of content marketing, I believe that they resonate more than ever.

Ditching The Pitch

In our day, most advertising is just a new take on screaming ”buy me” to the customer. Sure, we use humor, celebrities, and loud music on occasion, but at the end of the day, isn’t most advertising just begging for a sale? Hopkins says that this method doesn’t work. “[We] have to consider the woman at the front door.”

In other words, we have to ditch the pitch, and put our customer first.

One must know what buyers are thinking about and what they are coming to want. One must know the trends to be a leader in a winning trend. - HopkinsClick To Tweet

Here are ten rules of advertising that I learned from Claude C. Hopkins.

1. Consider The Man

Business is human. Hopkins says that we have to learn to consider the man. “Men are more approachable than corporations,” he says, and isn’t he right? More and more, we are skeptical of advertising and the corporate tone. Our audience appreciates the personal face on the corporation. This is why social media matters for all of us. Just think about Tony Hsieh.

2. Let Your Product Do The Talking

In part, Hopkins places the credit for much of his success on great products. He says that you have to let your product do the marketing for you. As advertisers or marketers, our job is to simply get someone to try our product once. If the product is what you say it is, it should take it from there. In his autobiography, Hopkins describes his willingness to refuse service to many products that were simply not that good. Bad products are hard to sell. Good advertising cares about great products.

Never seek to amuse. That is not the purpose of advertising.
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3. Coupons Work

Just like blogging is all about getting the reader to read the next sentence, selling is all about getting the customer to take the next step (buy). This is exactly why Hopkins was such a spokesmen for the use of coupons. In his day, these were generally sent using direct mail, but they highly resembled the blog post of today’s age: helpful information, along with a simple offer in the form of a coupon.

On this point, Hopkins was insistent that free isn’t the right price for a coupon. According to him,  you have to give people a reason to take a chance on you, but it can’t be free, or they will never appreciate you.

4. Don’t Sell Uphill

Most of the time, when we start our first blog or Facebook page, we anxiously await an onslaught of new customers. It rarely happens. This is usually because we are doing it wrong. We are trying to ‘covert new users’, a hard game in advertising.

Hopkins advises us to sell to people already using similar products first. This method costs less money, and expends less time, making it far more profitable. We should be building audience trust with current customers, and let them to do the talking for us.

5. Test. Test. Test.

One of Hopkins most powerful points was in regard to what he coins ‘scientific adverting.’ He believed that good advertising always came with an ability to test its effectiveness. I love this, because with digital marketing such testing is actually easier then ever before (even though we occasionally ignore it).

Tests are important and help us understand our customers. Good selling is based on good testing. - Claude C. HopkinsClick To Tweet

To make this point, Hopkins cites his work with Pepsodent toothpaste, which according to him, was successful only after many failed campaigns. Because of his strategic testing (on a weekly basis), he was able to turn sales around in just a few short weeks.

6. You’re Really Doing Sales

Most of us don’t consider ourselves a salesmen, but as Hopkins says it, “advertising is simply salesmanship in print.”

An ad-writer must never forget that he is a simple salesmen, and the more he sells the better he will prosper. - Claude C. HopkinsClick To Tweet

The reality? Everyone is marketer, and everyone is selling to someone.

7. Long Copy Is Good

For decades, we’ve been told that people don’t like reading long copy. They’re busy. They don’t have time to read our ads.

Maybe.

Long copy can work, as long is it matters to your reader.

What if the truth was that people just didn’t have time to read long ads that didn’t provide them with much value?

The Hopkins approach took this old adage to task time and time again. Long copy can sell, as long as it is helpful to the customer.

8. Platitudes Are Lame

Let’s be clear, the platitude “we’re the best” isn’t winning new business for anyone. If we trusted those ads, every business would be the best. Hopkins knew better. He believed that superlative claims like “best in the world” meant nothing and were a waste of space.

Form him, actual figures count. The reality is that customers prefer facts over platitudes. He proved this selling tungston lamps.

Say that it gives more light than other lamps, and people are but mildy impressed. Say that it gives 3 ½ times the light of carbon lamps, and people will realize that you have made actual comparisons. They will accept your claims as par. - Claude C. Hopkins

9. The Call To Action

Printing an ad is one thing. Printing an ad that actually does something is another. Hopkins was well know for his work that inspired immediate action. This is partially why he was so likely to use a coupon or limited time offer. He believed that it help consumers avoid procrastination.

This is also a major requirement of his scientific advertising method. If there is no call to action, there is nothing to test. We need to know where our success comes from. It really is the only way.

10. Tell The Truth

[Quote "Brilliant writing has no place in advertising. A unique style takes attention from the subject." - Claude C. Hopkins]

When marketing, we should always use natural language and we should never try to show off. “You are selling your product, not yourself. Do nothing to cloud your objective,” says Hopkins.

Most advertising these days is just a show of creative bravado. Ad agency against ad agency  trying to show their worth through humor and creativity. This is all fine and good, but it doesn’t usually lead to sales. People remember the ad and forget the product.

For Hopkins, advertising was selling. Nowadays we like to think of them as two separate departments, but what if they were one and the same?

They were for Hopkins, and that just may be why you brushed your teeth this morning.

What is the biggest mistake you see repeatedly happening in advertising today?

We’ve started a subtle series here on the this blog about something called adaptive content. Adaptive content has a relatively simple goal: put great content in as many places as possible. In part, this is a definition for the future of content creation tools. In reality, it is also a workflow mentality that all content creators must adopt.

TV Guide created chunks, and they are glad they did.

To start, we content creators need to start thinking about our content in ways that go beyond the typical article or blog post. We need to think about where it is going, and where it will be used in the future. The premise is simple. Ten years ago could you have imagined how content would be consumed today. On smartphones? From tablets? Through a 140 character tweet?

At this point, we have no idea where, when, or how our content will appear in another decade. The publishing tools, readers and devices will all change. The big question is, how should responsible content creators prepare? How do we keep it from taking us by surprise?

We have no idea where our content will appear 10 years from now. How do get ready? #ContentMarketing
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The TV Guide Success Story

In her presentation, “Adapting Ourselves to Adaptive Content“, web content genius Karen McGrane tells the story of TV Guide’s big win when it came to adaptive content.

When many of us think about TV Guide, we remember the pint-sized magazine that graced our mailboxes. While it contained a great variety of content, the primary goal was always the same – show America what’s on TV. While you probably haven’t seen the magazine for years, it’s likely you are still interacting with its content.

From early on TV Guide knew that it wasn’t in the magazine business. Sure, they published a magazine, but they didn’t allow that specific act to define them. TV Guide realized that they were in the content business, and because of this mindset, TV Guide did something smart: they didn’t focus on making a magazine. They focused on making content.

When content went online, TV Guide’s adaptive approach to content made a lot of sense.

TV Guide writers weren’t tasked with creating a television schedule for a magazine only. They were tasked with creating an index, or a database, of information about television. While others would have created the bare minimum of content necessary for a print magazine, TV Guide went further. They created their content using Chunks.

What Are Chunks Anyway?

There are two ways to create content according to McGrane. There are BLOBS, and there are CHUNKS. Chunks are better, but before we understand the difference between the two, we need to understand the problem with blobs.

To start, blobs are presentation-specific, meaning they were meant for a single purpose or device. A magazine spread is a perfect example of this. The text, story length, images, and callouts are all baked together in one perfectly sized space. The design and text are one. This method isn’t isolated to only print, though. It is also seen online.

Stop thinking about your content like one big blob.

Think about your typical blog software or content management system. What is the hallmark of these systems? The WYSIWYG editor of course. Some of the really fancy ones go even farther with slick drag-and-drop page creation tools. On the outside, these tools look great, but they have BLOBS lurking within.

WYSIWYG editors and page creation tools make a lot of assumptions about how your content will be used. Most of them return formatted and completed HTML that is specifically designed for the web. This is fine if you are on the web, but what happens when you need to port that content to a mobile device? That’s when things get messy.

Chunks treat content like content, separating itself from how it will be presented (i.e. its design). Rather than the addition of inline HTML, chunks include something called metadata. You can think of metadata as a series of instructions regarding how to interpret specific chunks of content. Rather than including information about the font, color, and size of a headline (like a blob would), chunks pass the headline as plain text while simply informing the device that it is a headline. That leaves it up to the device to interpret how it would like to handle that headline. The difference may sound subtle, but the implications are huge. TV Guide learned the importance of this early on.

Chunks treat content as content, separating your content from its presentation. #ContentMarketing
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Chunks Save The Day

In the early 2000s (or even earlier) things began to change. People stopped subscribing to their TV Guide magazine. They didn’t need it anymore. With the dawn of digital cable and the satellite dish, TV information was now beamed directly into our televisions, rather than through the magazine on our nightstand. In 2008 TV Guide actually sold its full magazine production rights for the lofty price of $1. What were their writers to do?

Well, the same thing they had been doing, actually.

You see, TV Guide  had been creating chunks before this, which means that they created content about television shows. This included images, short descriptions, long descriptions, dates, times, actors, and all kinds of additional metadata. Because they created valuable content in a flexible way, they were able to repurpose their business to something more current. Rather than using their content for a magazine, digital televisions were now using their content to populate the digital TV guides.

TV Guide created chunks, and easily scaled the digital divide. #ContentMarketing
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A dying print business still had two legs to stand on, all because of adaptive content.

Are You Creating Blobs Or Chunks?

It is unlikely that many of us already create content in chunks, or even think that way. That is exactly why this is such an important topic. It goes against the grain of our current content-creation habits and content management systems. The software that we use to power much of the web locks us into blobs. WordPress, the software that powers this and many other blogs is know for is dual-input system. A headline plus a WYSIWYG editors is the status-quo when it comes to online publishing.

NPR gets the chunk mentality.

Are You Creating Blobs Or Chunks? #ContentMarketing
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There are (limited) methods to use WordPress in an adaptive way, but few of us do. The simple two-input system teases us all to think in terms of blobs without making us aware of the downfalls. Adaptive content is all about seeing what your content can become, not what it is right now. It is an idea that embraces the ‘content is king’ mantra to the fullest. Great content can live forever, but only if we start replacing the blobs with chunks.

Is your content currently being created using blobs or chunks?

But this entire ordeal has me thinking about RSS in general. Does this mean that RSS is dead? How will this affect bloggers?

There is no doubt about it – RSS is slipping, especially at Google. Feedburner is on the back burner, and Google Reader is already on its way out the door. It sure looks like RSS is dying or dead.

I think we have to ask ourselves if it was ever alive. Sure, RSS had its heyday back in the mid 2000′s, but it was never an idea that hit mainstream popularity. The question of ‘what is RSS’ has been uttered more than a few times in my conference room. In short, RSS was never something that our mothers used.

And now it is officially going down in flames. Google is to RSS what Apple is to Flash.

So, what is a blogger to do now? I think we need to be doing what we should have been doing all along. Push subscriptions to email.

Email Has Always Been Better

I find it interesting how often we try to replace email. You often hear about a new software that will be the new, better alternative to email. Our own CoSchedule even aims to do just that. The question is if we really need to replace it email. Often times, these replacements fail in their attempt. And, oddly, most project management software clogs every artery in my email inbox. Do we call this organized?

The reality is that email always wins because it is simple, handy, and has a low barrier to entry. People already use email. They get how it works. Besides, email delivery is better than RSS delivery for both the reader the blogger.

Don't sweat RSS. Email already wins. It's easy and has a low barrier to entry. #GoogleReader
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For the reader, it helps them focus on fewer feeds – just the good ones – rather than everything.

For the blogger, it helps us focus on readers that are actually reading our posts. Every post counts.

Not only that, but email has a much better conversion rate than RSS. Always has. Why not push things in that direction?

Here at Todaymade, we have been pushing email subscriptions over RSS subscriptions for several years already. While the number of RSS subscribers continues to grow, our major growth happens with email. No doubt about it. To be honest, I would prefer an email subscriber over an RSS subscriber any day. This shift away from RSS is a good thing for bloggers.

I prefer email subscribers over RSS subscribers any day. This is good for bloggers. #GoogleReader
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Social Channels As A Replacement

There are of course the social channels as well. Part of the slow death of RSS has been the rise of social networking. Twitter, in particular, acts as a quasi RSS reader for many people. There are scores of blog posts out there about users ditching Google Reader for their social network feeds.

Maybe Google was onto something after all. Ditch Google Reader for Google+ (or Facebook)?

That kind of switch is hardly good enough for the serious RSS user, but it just might work for mom.

What Success Looks Like

I use RSS every day. I loved Google Reader, but most of the people that read my blog don’t.

In this era of blogging email delivery is the best option, and really the only one that we need to push. The RSS readers and social media followers will find their way to our content if they really want it. They always do – most of them are nerds. A focus on email subscriptions is pretty much the only way to go. And as a footnote, it is probably best to not rely on Feedburner for this ominous task. Things don’t look good for that system, either.

Are you a blogger or a reader of RSS feeds? What do you think about Google killing Reader?