28

Oct

5 Reasons to Start that Internal Blog

Blogging is contributing to a conversation – a conversation that’s happening with or without your input. Internal blogs are platforms for thoughts, ideas and perspectives pertaining to vital conversations at your business.

Whether you’re a professional, supervisor or executive, you have an abundance of knowledge, information and experiences. Blogging benefits your business by allowing you to share your thoughts, ideas and perspectives easily. You can tell anecdotes, recommend an insightful book, offer tips or address pressing concerns.

While an internal blogs’ return on investment cannot be measured quantitatively, blogging benefits your business by:

  1. Increasing morale and engagement: Your employees and co-workers will appreciate your candid discussion of their concerns and questions. Use an upbeat and positive tone – your optimistic attitude will be infectious. By sharing your advice and experiences, you’ll promote collaboration and equip your readers to tackle similar challenges more easily.
  2. Creating a feeling of connectedness: Employees and co-workers throughout the world will read your posts, and contribute their thoughts by commenting. By addressing internal concerns, you’ll promote transparency and openness. Also, you can blog about the corporation’s long-term objectives and projects or relate the business’s work to important events and trends, giving employees insight into the importance of their contributions.
  3. Raising awareness and promote change: By blogging strategically, your message will grow stronger throughout the organization. For example, if you are an executive implementing a new sales strategy, dedicate your blog to outlining the strategy’s goals, tips for improving sales tactics or stories about individual employee’s experiences selling under the new strategy.
  4. Showcasing your business’ resources and opportunities: Promote your corporation or business internally by highlighting why it’s a great place to work, exciting new opportunities and resources for employees to leverage. Blogging is one of the best ways to strengthen your business’ brand internally, which bolsters how your customers perceive your brand.
  5. Keeping employees coming back for more: Insightful and thoughtful blog posts will peak readers’ interest, so they’ll want to keep coming back again and again. Over time, your blog will become a hub for important information, resources and conversation.

Internal blogs help businesses grow, fostering more productive and knowledgeable work environments. Give your blog the attention it deserves; high-quality content is vital for it’s success. If you aren’t sure where to start or need help creating insightful content, be sure to hire an expert.

Have you read a business’ internal blog that impressed you? What did you like most about it? What made it successful?

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212 days ago Short URL Comments

Business Writing/Writing

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24

Oct

Mono-tasking

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Image by organprinter via Flickr

Focusing on a specific project is crucial to succeeding, whether it’s writing an email, report or strategic planning. Multitasking tempts us every day and threatens to take away this focus. Often, there’s so much to do that it seems impossible to get all of the tasks done one at a time. Yet, working this way often causes errors or just sloppy work, especially with writing. Worse, it leads to inefficiency and procrastination.

Thankfully, there’s a voice in my head that reminds me to just focus and complete the one project.

Mono-tasking isn’t easy – you have to deliberately focus on one thing and tune everything else out. With some diligence, this becomes easier and easier. Here are a few ways to improve focus:

  1. Set a timer for 50 minutes and focus only on one task throughout this time. Once the timer goes off, take a 10 minute break, then spend 5 minutes evaluating what you’ve accomplished and what still needs to be done. This technique is explained in detail in The Wealthy Freelancer.
  2. When working on computer, open only the documents and the pages you need to complete a specific project.
  3. Block time every day to answer emails. If you receive lots of messages in the morning, set aside 50 minutes to respond in the morning. This will improve your efficiency on other projects, and the thoughtfulness of your responses. When working on other projects, remember that your email will still be there when you’re done.
  4. When you feel rattled by the amount of tasks and projects that you need to accomplish, take some time to plan them out. Make sure you’re spending your time wisely and working on high-priority projects.

When we make the effort to focus on one task at a time, we write better, produce better products, serve clients better and solve problems faster. With fewer distractions, we accomplish more.

How about you? How do you tune out the endless stream of information, emails and other distractions? How do you keep yourself from multitasking? What are your tips for mono-tasking?

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215 days ago Short URL 1 Comment

Business Writing/Writing

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19

Oct

Write for Corporations Successfully

Read my tips on how to start freelance writing for corporations over at Fuel Your Writing.

221 days ago Short URL Comments

Business Writing/Writing

18

Oct

Keywords and Quality

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Image via Wikipedia

Bob Bly – a successful copywriter and internet marketer – recently wrote a blog entry “Articles By the Pound” about the challenges of writing articles and content for websites.

Bly argues that instead of opting for keyword-intensive articles that are churned out quickly and inexpensively, website owners and internet marketers should insist on high-quality and interesting articles.

SEO, keyword development and search analytics are very important for ensuring that your website gets found. Without the right search terms, your website, intranet page or blog won’t ever get found by your readers.

However, when writers focus solely on keywords, the language seems forced and, often, generic. Your site may be found more often, but the readers probably aren’t impressed with your content.

How can you improve your website’s content quality and still get found? 

  • Develop an extensive bank of keywords and search terms. Aim for 250 words for an entire website and 50 words for an article. By having a larger bank of options, your keywords won’t be repeated over and over.
  • Write the site’s content WITHOUT looking at the keywords. Write interesting, well-organized articles that speak directly to your audience so they’ll keep coming back to your site for more. This type of writing takes skill and talent, so make sure that it’s valued.
  • Review the website’s copy and replace any words that have a keyword synonym.
  • Review the website’s copy once more and check that you have at least one or two keywords per paragraph. Every title should include a keyword, as well as the footer and page description.

To craft a readable, clear and highly interesting website, your top priority should be the content’s quality and your second priority the keywords. People will easily find your articles and site – plus, those who are seriously interested in your thoughts will be impressed by your knowledge, understanding of your audience and clarity!

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222 days ago Short URL 1 Comment

Business Writing/Writing

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14

Oct

When You’re the Office Proofreader

Downtown LA's office skyscrapers. Including th...

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Do your colleagues and employees’ rely on your writing and editing skills? Are you frequently asked to look over others’ writing or give projects a “quick look”?

Congratulations! Your co-workers obviously respect and admire your writing skills and keen eye for small errors. You should feel flattered. However, this can quickly become frustrating. When others ask for your help, it’s hard to refuse, despite having a full work load.

Poor writing skills in business can cause larger problems, too. If employees frequently sends out poor communications or produce documents peppered with errors, you clients, customers and competitors may believe that your business isn’t concerned with details. Worse, if your emails or proposals to clients are unclear, they may think that your business doesn’t fully value the relationship.

How can you improve communications skills at your office or business? Here are a few ideas:

  1. When a co-worker approaches you to edit some of their writing, offer to sit down with them and go through the document together. Your co-worker will appreciate the opportunity to learn your editing process.
  2. Create an “editing checklist” for your office or department. List errors that you see frequently, spelling and grammar mistakes. Include other questions for the writer to ask themselves, such as “Is the tone appropriate?” or “Will this make sense for someone with no prior knowledge of the topic?”
  3. Offer writing workshops – or webinars – for your department. Workshops will offer you and your co-workers the opportunity to assess writing skills, identify areas to improve and practice new techniques.
  4. Emphasize high-quality writing as vital for your business’ success. Ask your managers and executives to do the same.
  5. Hire professional writers and editors to craft and polish high-priority projects and communications. This investment will help improve your company’ reputation and even bring in more business.
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226 days ago Short URL 1 Comment

Business Writing/Writing

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12

Oct

Why it’s Difficult to Edit your Writing

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Image by Xaverian Hawks via Flickr

Why are we so much more likely to miss simple mistakes in our own writing than anyone else’s writing?

Proofreading or editing something that you’re so familiar with poses several challenges:

  1. You have a deep understanding of the information and project’s goal. This makes it harder to judge how well the writing conveys the information or reaches the goals.
  2. While crafting the project, you become immersed in the nuances of your personal writing style. As a result, you may lose sight of small errors or ways to make the writing clearer to others.
  3. Crafting great writing is hard work! You may not have the necessary energy to edit the project well.

Many people that I work with say that they are so focused on the “big picture” that they don’t see the small errors of their own writing. Not only is this frustrating, it can be embarrassing! Here are a few tips for editing and proofreading better:

  • Don’t look at the writing for at least one full day. You have to take a break to gain a fresh perspective on the writing and the details. This is the most important thing you can do to catch spelling, grammar and punctuation errors, as well as reevaluate the writing’s flow.
  • Print it out. Editing a hard copy is more effective – especially for checking grammar and punctuation. Plus, it’s easier on your eyes.
  • Read every word out loud. “Listen” to your writing to determine if it’s clear and flows smoothly. This is the best way to improve sentence structures and transitions.
  • Edit multiple times. Go through the document once to improve syntax, organization and sentence structure. Second, check the details, including spelling. Then edit once more for good measure.
  • Have a professional editor or trusted colleague proofread the project. This is the best way to ensure your writing is clear and free of any errors.

Sign up for my e-zine to practice your editing and proofreading skills with the “Error Challenge” section.

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228 days ago Short URL 1 Comment

Writing

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10

Oct

Email Subject Lines that get Results

If you are like many employees and supervisors, you find it challenging to get others to respond to your emails as quickly as you need or want. It’s no wonder; they probably receive dozens – even hundreds – of emails each day.

Sign up for my e-zine for practical tips to write better subject lines. Help your email get noticed and speed up response time!

230 days ago Short URL 1 Comment

Business Writing/Writing

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04

Oct

Organizing your (Blog & Newsletter) Ideas

Evernote Screenshot

Image via Wikipedia

How do you come up with new ideas for your business’ blogs, newsletters, e-zines, intranet site or magazine articles?

If you’re like me, ideas sometimes pop into your head. Other times, reading an interesting article may provoke some ideas or topics that you want to write about. Then these ideas turn into articles, generating more and more ideas.

But how to remember all of them? How can you store all these ideas to write better and faster?

Here are a few of my favorite ways to organize ideas and concepts for my website, blog, e-zine:

1. Create a large mind map of what you want to write about. Organize around one central theme that your articles will discuss in detail. If your blog or e-zine focuses on improving the Work-Life balance, for example, you can break this topic down into sub-themes (exercise, stress relief, nutrition, prioritization, etc.), and then into article ideas. Mind maps are fun to create and great for focusing on the big picture.

2. A word document. A classic organization tool for a reason, word allows you to organize notes easily and keep tabs on the topics you’ve already written on. Write down larger concepts, then break them down into smaller ideas. Capture your title ideas and include a few key points that the article will discuss. I like to have one document dedicated entirely to ideas, but some people prefer having a folder filled with multiple documents.

3. Write on index cards. If you have great ideas while running errands or waiting for a meeting to start, try a portable method. I like writing on index cards (and filling out as many ideas as I can) and transferring them to my main idea folder when I’m back at my computer.

4. Use Evernote to save thought-provoking articles and sites. If articles, websites, blogs or online discussions inspire you, Evernote can help you store those great articles that you’d like to write about.

How about you? What’s your favorite method for organizing your ideas? How do you prevent that terrible feeling that you have no ideas?

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235 days ago Short URL 3 Comments

Business Writing/Writing

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