Courtesy of a tweet from Mack Collier comes word of aide rss, a number-crunching site that allows you to check your own blogs and see which posts are the most popular. No, that’s not its main purpose, but that is what immediately sprang to mind when I visited it. Bear in mind that the site [...]
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Those of you who are thinking of dabbing in video might like to watch the movie Joe Jaffe took of the brief call he and I enjoyed the other day, whilst he was en route to somewhere. For reasons that are technically way beyond me (I’m still banging the rocks together, guys), I cannot screen [...]
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“The place behind the old church in Puteaux, along the quai de Seine (Quai de Dion Bouton), has been beautifully restored and all the facades of buildings that overlook the square was painted in trompe l’oeil. Order at the moment the place is not open to the public, which is a great pity. It is [...]
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As Chris Barraud tweets, Australia isn’t even a blip on the TwitterTraffic Radar. Yet. Technorati tags: twitter, traffic, australia, chris barraud, business communication, lee hopkins Tweet
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Lifehack gives a great set of tips on how to not give yourself grief from your partner or kids… Remember: in email, the small things are the big things. If you can cut an exchange from six to three email messages, that’s a 50% reduction in your inbox volume over time. This can make the [...]
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Courtesy of ReadWriteWeb I came upon Tangler. Tangler is a free forum service, allowing you to create your own community based around your own site, blog, podcast, etc. Visit the Better Communication Results forum and start a discussion! Cool stuff and just what I was looking for with regard to something rather exciting coming soon [...]
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So, at the request of Connie Benson I’ve been trying out the photo editing facilities inherent within ACDSee Pro2. I’ve mentioned before how I had been impressed by the way it ‘saved’ a photo of my youngest stepdaughter. Here’s some examples of how it can take an average shot and make it that bit more [...]
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UPDATE: Just received this email, from a country I taught a 5-day workshop on business writing in two years ago: “i wanna know how to write good letters” Yes, that’s all it said. Yes, that is a cut-and-paste including the spelling. Now I know why English teachers are in despair… Perhaps answering “Read some classic [...]
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I received this request from someone working at a company in a foreign country. That’s about as much information as I’m going to give away as to their identity, but see if you can spot the reasons why I might not spend as much time helping them out as I otherwise might have… I am [...]
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As you can see, I’ve got the ‘Noisy Notebook’ [with the fan that permanently runs flat out and sounds like a 737 on take-off], the main pc and my little Asus Eee pc. The main pc runs ooVoo, skype, Seesmic and other video tools (and other memory intensive apps like Outlook); the notebook runs my [...]
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I recently picked up a copy of Bob Bly’s excellent ‘Super Productivity for Writers’ e-book and wanted to share with you some of his gems.
Here’s his seven common time wasters that he says writers (and I say everybody) should avoid:
1. Excessive blogging (more than 10 minutes per day) – unless that’s your job, of course!
2. Random web surfing (continuing to surf after you’ve found the information you need)
3. Attending meetings of writers groups, marketing clubs, etc. You can learn and network, but you lose half a day
4. Social or business lunches with other writers, editors, publishers, clients. A waste of time and you can lose nearly half a day
5. Volunteering for committees and similar activities. Every hour you spend on administrative nonsense is an hour you don’t write
6 .Sending or receiving jokes, photos, videos and other junk content via email (or my pet hate – Facebook requests to add time-sucking applications or join groups of no interest to me). Stop wasting other people’s time and yours
7 .Letting a ringing phone interrupt your writing. Get caller ID and call them back when you have finished (or better yet, set the phone’s ringing tone volume to ‘silent’ and get an answer machine to take the call for you)
Even though Bob is focusing his material on writers, of which he is a superb one, the advice found on page 22 of his book applies to all of us methinks.
As he points out on page 21, with an average lifespan of seventy- five years, we have only 27,375 days from the time we are born until the time we die. And since we’re asleep for a third of that time, we have only 18,250 days we’re actually awake and active.
How you spend this finite amount of time is mostly up to you. To maximise your productivity, income and output as a writer, writing must be a priority.
If you prefer to garden, that’s perfectly fine; but don’t complain that your colleague who spends those hours in front of the pc is getting more work done than you are. It’s your choice.
Wise words, indeed. Get a copy of this brilliant book and be careful out there…
I love Bob’s material – as I write I have 26 of his publications, each a worthy addition to my knowledge library.
Bob Bly is the man McGraw-Hill calls 'America's top copywriter.' Bob has written copy for more than 100 companies including Boardroom, Phillips, IBM, Medical Economics, AlliedSignal, and Lucent Technologies. He is the author of more than 60 books and a columnist for DM News and Early to Rise.
Making Social Media Work for Your Business - just published!
Social Media: The New Communication Landscape - for Ark Group
How to get started with podcasting in your organisation - for Melcrum Publishing
Contributing author to:
How to use social media to solve critical internal communication issues
How to communicate with hard-to-reach employees
- for Melcrum Publishing
How to use social media to engage employees - for Melcrum Publishing
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Tactical Transparency by Shel Holtz and John Havens.
A belter of a book and a 'must read' addition to any communicator's bedside reading table if they are serious about introducing social media into their communication plans. It includes a fabulous chapter on transparency and business (hint: you want to photocopy it and give it to your CEO!)
Qualitative Communication Research Methods by Thomas Lindlof and Bryan Taylor.
Not just a book for academics, it's chock-full of great ideas on how to effectively and efficiently research your employees, customers, the marketplace and other stakeholders
The Twitter Book by Tim O'Reilly and Sarah Milstein.
A fabulous book that gives a clear, clean overview of what Twitter is and WHY you should be engaging with it. THEN it goes into depth with so many tips and ideas that they should have sold the book for twice the price!
Practical SEO Copywriting: a ‘must get’ book. My mate Glenn Murray has written a bottler of a new book on search engines and copywriting.
In a cunning twist of bizarre nomenclature, he’s titled it Practical SEO Copywriting. The cheeky little fox! It’s a DIY guide to writing online copy for both human readers AND for that 400kg gorilla we lovingly call ‘Google’.
The danger, Glenn quite rightly …err …writes is that focusing too much attention on all of the supposed SEO ‘tricks of the trade’ will make your copy all but unreadable by the human brain. You know, all that stuff bandied about by the so-called SEO (search engine optimisation) experts: keyword frequency, exact string versus individual words scattered across the page, page length, alt tags, header tags, and so on.
Not that this stuff isn’t important – it all is, and more besides – but Glenn argues persuasively that by far more important is the ability to write copy that people will actually want to read – and link to!
