Make the most out of your time and blog more often

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, marketers, managers, journalists, general public.

One thing I’ve learned from years of blogging is that a blogging process saves time and headaches. My approach uses creative momentum at the beginning to blow through tasks that require linear thinking.

Above you’ll find a 6-minute video demonstration of exactly what I do, step-by-step, for each blog post:

Make an Outline – Assuming you’ve selected useful topic to write about, all you need at the beginning is a basic framework to support the copy. I use MindMiester to map out an outline.

Dictate Copy – I use the built in speech translator in my Macbook Pro to write copy. Begin with a brain dump, and then edit what you’ve written.

Edit the Copy – Eliminate as much copy as possible without eliminating your voice. Write like you speak, but keep it short and sweet.

Transfer the Copy – Copy the content from your plain text editor, and copy it in your blogging software. Most people use WordPress.

Tweak SEO – It’s my belief that when you write content that’s highly specific and useful to your audience, the SEO takes care of itself. That said, here are a few bonus tips on ranking higher in search.

Add Tags and Categories – Next, select the appropriate categories and tags for your blog post. Categories should represent the larger topics within your blog, and tags should represent specific elements that are within various categories.

Add Images – Images are honey, your readers are bees. They should trigger readers on an emotional level to stick around and read more.

Add links – Depending upon your goals, you might link to internal pages, or link to external pages. For example if you’re trying to promote an event, you might write a series of blog posts linking to the registration page.

Schedule the Post – Finally, schedule the blog post for a morning within the next day or two (bonus points if you know what time is best for your community).

The post Time-saving tips to write more blog posts (with video) appeared first on Socialbrite.

Target audience: Bloggers, nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, educators, journalists.

One thing I’ve learned from years of blogging is that a blogging process saves time and headaches. My approach uses creative momentum at the beginning to blow through tasks that require linear thinking.

Above you’ll find a 6-minute video demonstration of exactly what I do, step by step, for each blog post:

1. Make an outline – Assuming you’ve selected useful topic to write about, all you need at the beginning is a basic framework to support the copy. I use MindMeister to map out an outline.
2. Dictate copy – I use the built-in speech translator in my MacBook Pro to write copy. Begin with a brain dump, and then edit what you’ve written.
3. Edit the copy – Eliminate as much copy as possible without eliminating your voice. Write like you speak, but keep it short and sweet.
4. Transfer the copy – Copy the content from your plain text editor and copy it into your blogging software. Most people use WordPress.
5. Tweak SEO – It’s my belief that when you write content that’s highly specific and useful to your audience, the SEO takes care of itself. That said, here are a few bonus tips on ranking higher in search.
6. Add tags and categories – Next, select the appropriate categories and tags for your blog post. Categories should represent the larger topics within your blog, and tags should represent specific elements that are within various categories.
7. Add images – Images are honey, your readers are bees. Photos, illustrations or infographics should trigger an emotional response from readers to stick around and read more.
8. Add links – Depending upon your goals, you might link to internal pages or link to external pages. For example, if you’re trying to promote an event, you might write a series of blog posts linking to the registration page.
9. Schedule the post – Finally, schedule the blog post for a morning within the next day or two (bonus points if you know what time is best for your community).

What’s your process? What chu got?

The post 9 time-saving tips to write more blog posts appeared first on Socialbrite.

Create blog posts that speak to an individual, not an audience

Regardless of how many people visit your website, there’s one person you need to be paying attention to:

The person reading your blog post or Facebook update right now.

I know what you’re thinking. “We get thousands of visits per day on our website – surely more than one person is reading our content at any given moment.”

This is true, but people don’t gather around a laptop to view your website.

Back when television was our main media source, it was not uncommon for people to participate in consuming its content in groups: Families, roommates, parties.

But consuming Web content is a personal activity we participate in as individuals. And this is why social media conversations should be considered as essentially being one to one.

Making content personal

Content is more effective when it’s perceived as “written for me.” Try these tips:

• Try writing your posts or updates in the second person (“you” instead of “I” or “we”).
• Think of someone you already know and write to them – as if you’re writing a personal email to them.
• Write to that person and that person only – don’t worry about alienating people.
• Write with a human, conversational tone – the way you would talk if they were sitting right in front of you.
• Try using Dragon speech-to-text tools to achieve this conversational tone.
• Read what you’ve written out loud. See how it sounds when you hear it.
• Keep practicing. Learning to break the rules of writing might take time.

What else would you add?

The post Tips for making your Web content personal appeared first on Socialbrite.

How cause advocates & citizen journalists can be more effective

Target audience: Nonprofits, social change organizations, educators, journalists, foundations, businesses, individuals. This is part of Creating Media, our ongoing series designed to help nonprofits and other organizations learn how to use and make media.

Guest post by Spencer Critchley
O’Reilly Network

Starting a blog for your nonprofit or organization and don’t know where to start? Write what you know — and what you care deeply about. Over time, you’ll develop your own style. As you do, follow some of the best practices that journalists and writers have long employed.

Here are 10 tips on how to write an effective, authoritative and persuasive blog post:

Respect the value of people’s time

1Anyone who publishes is making a deal with their audience: This will be more rewarding than real life would have been. Know your point, get to it quickly, and make your content dense with value. We live in a narcissistic age, and free access to world-wide distribution is not helping. We all need to remember: It’s not fascinating just because I said it.

Have a strong focus, and relate everything to it

2A good focus is a simple idea that people care about — in a newspaper story, it’s the lede. It’s a hard discipline to learn, but you can really only get one good idea across in any one article or program — everything else either supports and develops that idea, or it conflicts with and confuses it. Think of Beethoven’s Fifth as a model: The whole first movement is based on four notes.

Look for the heat in your subject

3Appeal is emotional, not intellectual. Even theoretical physicists get excited more by primal motives like pursuit, struggle and triumph than they do by abstract concepts. Look for what people will really care about in your content and use that as a guide.

Write about people, physical objects & actions

4Whatever your subject, make sure you focus on people or concrete things. These are what engage the imagination and the emotions, and concentrating on them has the added benefit of aiding clarity (see next item). Avoid abstractions, generalities, jargon and cliches.

Use plain speech and talk like a real person

5Too many people have been trained to use big words and complicated sentences to build an edifice to hide behind. If a simpler word can be used with no loss of meaning, use it. Same goes for fewer words vs. more. If you can’t say it plainly, that may mean you don’t understand it well enough yet.

Avoid adjectives and adverbs wherever possible

6Adjectives and adverts dilute your writing and seldom have any impact. It works much better to find the right nouns and verbs. As Mark Twain said, “If you find an adjective, kill it.” Adverbs are even worse. Try it, you’ll be amazed at the difference it makes. Compare “The widow Douglas was sanctimonious and hypocritical” with the way Twain wrote it in The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn:

The widow she cried over me, and called me a poor lost lamb, and she called me a lot of other names, too, but she never meant no harm by it.

Opinions are not facts — even your opinions

7Opinion makes blogging lively. But be sure you know the difference between opinion and fact, and make it clear to your readers as well. It’s all too easy to jump to conclusions when you’re predisposed to believe something. Readers thirst for reliable information. Make your blog a source they can trust.

Identify your sources

8Just asserting a fact is unpersuasive — even in ALL CAPS with lots of exclamation marks!!! — and it contributes nothing to a discussion. Your audience needs to know where this information comes from, so they can judge its credibility.

Be transparent: Identify interests

9If someone appears to be an expert, that’s one thing. If they also have a financial or other interest in you believing their version of reality, that’s another. Be skeptical of the claims people make — even allies — and be transparent about your relationship with them.

Check your facts

10Many magazines and national news organizations use professional fact checkers, and they still manage to make mistakes frequently. People may be citing you as a source, so try to get the details right. Related to this: Don’t forget to spell-check!

The post 10 tips for writing an impactful blog post appeared first on Socialbrite.

Enhancing website accessibility from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

A few weeks back, at SOBCon busniess school for bloggers in Chicago, I met Glenda Watson Hyatt, a remarkable trainer and conference speaker who gave a presentation on how to make websites and blogs more accessible to the disabled. Glenda, who has cerebral palsy, deals with computer accessibility issues on a daily basis. I wrote about her advice on Socialbrite: 7 tips for communicating with people with disabilities.

After Glenda’s talk and one by Lorelle VanFossen, author of “Blogging Tips” — Lorelle has occasional memory lapses because of traumatic brain injury — I captured some of their advice regarding how to make sure your website or blog accessible to disabled people.

Lorelle says that fully 60 percent of all sites on the Web are not accessible to the disabled — so pay attention, yours may be one. They discuss specific steps website operators and bloggers can take to make their sites and blogs accessible, including adding simple things like alt tags, captions and underlined links.

Tips to make your site more accessible to disabled users

• Include “alt” tags (alternative descriptions) and title tags in all images and videos.

• Make your links look like links. Use colors that distinguish them from regular text and use an underline to set them apart.

• Make your body text legible. The 0.8em default on some blog platforms is just too small for millions of readers out there. Usability should be your paramount concern — not all your readers are under 30!

• Also, make sure your stylesheet permits variable font sizes. If you’re using a fixed font, older browsers don’t let users adjust text size. (In Firefox and IE, you can hit command + or – to increase or decrease the size of the text on screen.)

• Give your photos captions, so the vision-impaired can know what they’re looking at.

• Provide a paragraph of summary for your videos and audio podcasts — or, if possible, a transcript. Because search engines can’t see or hear but can only “read” text, your posts will do better in search results, too. And don’t forget to add relevant links to your post.

• Don’t use “click here” as a link. Instead, offer context about what it’s about and link the relevant words.

We made sure to launch Socialbrite with these features in mind, but if you see some shortcomings on our site, let us know!

Lorelle told of one deaf friend whose children are also deaf. “Her kids are growing up in a world filled with video, and they can’t participate.”

About one in four people on the Web is disabled in some way, Lorelle says. And yet 60 percent of all sites fail basic accessibility tests. She and Glenda will be working with @Beanfair on an “Integration Camp” to break down the able-disabled mythology.

“Let’s quit the labels, let’s quit the judging, and find the value in the human being,” she says beautifully.

The video’s lighting and sound are not optimal, but I knew there was something special about capturing Glenda and Lorelle on video together. It’s 15 minutes long.

Watch, embed or download the original video from Vimeo

Related

• 7 tips for communicating with people with disabilities (Socialbrite)

• How POUR is Your Blog? Tips for Increasing Your Blog Accessibility (free ebook from Glenda Watson Hyatt)

• Doitmyselfblog (Glenda Watson Hyatt)

• lorelle.wordpress.com (Lorelle VanFossen)

• Sue Center is a communication environment designed specifically for people who cannot use a keyboard or mouse

The post How to make your website more accessible appeared first on Socialbrite.