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The Spalding Method is a total language arts approach that has been used by teachers and parents for nearly fifty years to teach millions of students to spell, write, and read. The Spalding Method helps train the right and left sides of the brain as children see, hear, read, and write. Recommended by Laura Berquist Syllabus Grades 3-6 Author: Romalda Spalding Pages: 496, Paperback Publisher: Harper Collins Publishers ISBN: 0-06-052010-8Price: $14.00
This guest post is by Aman of Ageofmarketing.comBasanti.
I have since the launch of my blog in mid May 2011, guest posted on a number of A-list blogs in the blogging and online marketing niches (including ProBlogger, MarketingProfs, and Daily Blog Tips). In doing so, I've learned some important lessons in getting guest posts accepted on great blogs.
But instead of boring you with the usual advice (choose the right blog, research of the blog, pitch quality content etc.) I will be a specific aspect of guest posting attack — preparation of the pitch. If you want to learn about other check aspects of guest posting out Ali Luke's post, How to get your guest posts accepted Every Time.
I have identified four important elements that can greatly increase your chances of having your article or pitch accepted.
I had been reading ProBlogger for over a year before I threw them a guest post. By any measure, I would had done my research. However, my opinion of what would be accepted was gone.
The post that I thought it would be best for ProBlogger was rejected, as was the one who I thought would be second best. The one I had least expected to be published was accepted. I hadn't pitched three post ideas at one time, I would never have known. I have similar experiences with other editors.
So the lesson here to pitch multiple messages. You cannot guess what the editor will find interesting. Cease to be a mind-reader. Place your confidence probability.
If you have multiple pieces of pitch, not only if they contain attachments. A-list blogs get a ton of pitches every week and don't have the time to read through them all. Make it easy for editors and write a short description of each piece.
Here is a sample outline:
The Pimp, the grocer and the assassin: Magnetise your headlines using the power of the unexpected
An article about how human attention to unexpected events are connected and how bloggers can use unexpected details to write more attention worthy headlines.
Send article pitches, benefits rather than articles, also you don't need to have the post written before throwing. You see the pitch, if the blogger is interested in, and then write based on their feedback.
Multiple messages with contours pitching is the single most important thing that has helped me get more posts accepted. It cuts the guesswork.
As editors are busy, they have not the time to imagine how your post relates to their niche. Your pitch must be specific to their blog from the beginning. The simplest way to get your post appear to make more specific is the use of the appropriate language.
This is where your research will come into play. Most sites specific keywords. ProBlogger, for example, is focused on blogging-related keywords. So if you are pitching on this site, use the word "blog" instead of "website" and "post" instead of "article."
Even cosmetic corrections like this can make your pitches more attractive. As Georgina explained it to me: "I, like the search engines, like [keywords] used in the posts I am revision. There are plenty of online content that is relevant to blogging, but unless it specifically and explicitly to blogging and bloggers is bound, we cannot accept it. "
Include in your submission samples of your writing from around the web. Ideally you want your top three pieces, with at least one of them (if not all) is on another site than yours a list.
This will help the editor get a better idea of the quality and style of your writing. Even if they do not read it, it shows social proof. It shows that other blogs have found your writing interesting.
Here's the email template that I use to serve my guest posts. This should bring the tips mentioned above together in an executable plan that you can use the next time you have a guest post to post to a blog.
Hello [name of editor],
My name is Aman Basanti and I am a consumer psychology writer from Australia. I am interested in writing a guest post for your blog.
Are you currently accept guest posts on your blog?
So yes, I have the following ideas for you to consider.
Christina Aguilera-The error: you say ironic if you chance mean?
An article about how many people confuse with accidental ironic. It defines what is ironic, gives examples of situations that are often mistakenly identified as ironic. It then goes on to discuss why this distinction is important for bloggers, especially for those who put their articles to other publications.
-The Pimp, the grocer and the assassin: Magnetise your headlines using the power of the unexpected
An article about how human attention to unexpected events are connected and how bloggers can use unexpected details to write more attention worthy headlines.
-Idea 3
A brief description of the blog post.
Also, you can see samples of my writing at:
-4 secrets of the success of notorious British author, Jeffery Archer
http://www.problogger.net/archives/2011/06/18/4-Success-Secrets-of-Infamous-British-Author-Jeffery-Archer/
-The method Joe Girard: what's the world's biggest seller can teach you about sales and Marketing
http://www.dailyblogtips.com/The-Joe-Girard-Method-What-the-Worlds-Greatest-Salesman-can-teach-you-about-Sales-and-marketing/
-The Effect of Margaret Thatcher: does familiarity BREED contempt or content?
http://www.ageofmarketing.com/the-mere-exposure-effect
I look forward to hearing from you,
Aman Basanti
AgeofMarketing.com
There are no magic bullets to guest posts. Quality posts threw to the right publications in the right way will increase your chances of scoring a guest post and reaping the associated benefits. You send pitches to sites that you want to guest post on? Let us know how you approach of pitching in the comments below.
Aman Basanti writes about the psychology of buying and you'll learn how you can use the principles of the consumer psychology to boost your sales. Visit www. Ageofmarketing.com/gratis-ebook to his new ebook —Marketing to the Pre-Historic opinion: how the hot new science of behavioral economics can help you Boost Your Sales— free.
The Spalding Method is a total language arts approach that has been used by teachers and parents for nearly fifty years to teach millions of students to spell, write, and read. The Spalding Method helps train the right and left sides of the brain as children see, hear, read, and write. Recommended by Laura Berquist Syllabus Grades 3-6 Author: Romalda Spalding Pages: 496, Paperback Publisher: Harper Collins Publishers ISBN: 0-06-052010-8Price: $23.99
This guest post is by Marci Reynolds of marcireynolds.com.
The July 2011 WordPress wordcamp Boston rocked! Hundreds of excited WordPress users gathered to look at more than 40 speakers who presented on topics of social media to themes shortcodes for safety.
I took detailed comments as I listened, watched and network with blogging and WordPress geniuses and have collected what I consider the most interesting tips and tricks.
Plugins were a hot topic in each session, but only three rose to the top as the "recommended":
yoast seo: can you optimize page titles, meta descriptions, keywords, sitemaps XMLhubspot plugin: you can leverage HubSpot lead nurturing, website analytics and "call to action" message typesGoogle Analytics for WordPress: you can synchronize information with your Google analytics account and you can custom variables and meta-data tracking.In addition to the hearing on the importance of fresh, high quality content ("content, content, content") strengthened a number of experts this WordPress SEO tips:
Change the default Permalink to blog posts to end up with the name of your post, not the number of the post.Use images to your content, engage readers break down and help with SEO. Make sure you have the image themselves, or they choose in "creative commons", with appropriate credit (one of my favorites is http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/).Use relevant keywords in the image name and alternative textAdd a XML sitemap.Measuring and improving your site loading speed. Google's Matt Cutts has stated that, "We want the web to be faster, we want sites to load fast," so it is quite possible that Google would want to encourage and reward this via their ranking of sites.Google added in May 2011, a Report of the speed of the Site in Google Analytics.For more detailed info, check out the recent blog post on Search Engine Watch, Why marketers should care about Site speed.Build link juice. Not random back links, but high quality links to and from other sites that provide relevant content. (A technique that worked well on my Blog sales operations, is to build a page dedicated to links to other sites with relevant, high quality content. For example, consider this other sales Ops articles . )I think it is necessary that each 2011 Conference, whether it's about real estate, insurance, or cat food, should include multiple sessions on the use of social media, and WordCamp (WC) part of that group.
However, there was a clear division of labour in the toilet-audience. Some participants TOILET like me, were well versed in the social media 101 and 102 and were looking for something new and advanced. The remaining participants (50% of humans seemed) were beginners and were looking for advice on how to get started. An attendee of the Conference was skewered on Twitter, hashtag # wcbos, to ask how to spell "Mashable". Understandable!
The general themes about how to use social media to support the efforts of your WordPress were:
Make it easy for readers to share your blog content by including parts of buttons in your posts. There are many options of the plugin to facilitate that.Use social media to share your content. You should only share with 50 or 100 followers, but you need to consider the power of the retweet. Per HubSpot have blog posts that are shared on Twitter more page views, while blog messages shared on Facebook more comments.Try to test three headlines on Twitter and see what gets the most click-throughs.Overall, WordCamp Boston was a great experience, and worth the time and money investments. I saw some very talented speakers, network with other WordPress users and learned many new things. I look forward to attending next year.
Have you participated in an event WordCamp? What have you learned?
Marci Reynolds, based in Boston, MA, is a leader operations per day and an active blogger outside office hours.
She loves writing about social media best practices, sales support, service operations and process improvement. More information about Marci.
The habits and attitudes associated with critical thinking are transferable to consumer, medical, legal, and general ethical choices. When our surgeon says surgery is needed, it can be life sustaining to seek answers to the critical questions encouraged in Asking the Right Questions This popular book helps bridge the gap between simply memorizing or blindly accepting information, and the greater challenge of critical analysing the things we are told and read. It gives strategies for responding to alternative points of view and will help readers develop a solid foundation for making personal choices about what to accept and what to reject.Price: $48.20
You’ve probably heard of usability. Back in the day, when the web was wild(er) and free(r), usability proponents like Jakob Nielsen encouraged site owners to stop doing things like displaying yellow text on black backgrounds, shun the Blink and Marquee tags, and focus on helping users do what they wanted to do on websites.
These days, usability is crucial to the success not just of blogs, but of online businesses—much of the information we read about reducing friction and improving sales pages, for example, is based on usability principles. So are the layouts of popular blog themes, online image albums and video players, and so on.
But we can go further than this, to look at the usability of our content. Content usability isn’t often talked about, but as content creators, bloggers should get their heads around this idea.
Content usability focuses on making the information we publish as usable a possible to the users our blogs target.
Copyright Yuri Arcurs - Fotolia.comAn example: if your blog targets people with dyslexia or other reading and comprehension difficulties, you’ll tailor your content to their needs. That might mean tweaking your layout, avoiding certain color combinations, changing your default fonts, altering your writing style, and so on. Another example: if you run a blog that’s focused on promoting special offers (like a deal-aggregation blog, for example), you’ll want to make sure that every aspect of your content is targeted to readers achieving the goal of taking up those deals. Maybe you’ll make the deal links stand out through color choice. Perhaps you’ll also provide the details of each deal in a sidebar so that users don’t need to scroll through your content to find the links. Perhaps you’ll pull out the key aspects of each deal into a “vital stats” list that appears at the top of every post, for the same reason.
As you can see, the notion of content usability is closely tied to your audience and your blog’s purpose. That said, there are some general usability principles that you should consider in formulating your content.
Aside from the most basic ideas of content usability—accurate spelling, good structure, and so on—there are a few content usability principles that bloggers often ignore.
Darren’s provided some detailed formatting advice for bloggers, and formatting is a big deal for usability.
The real key to formatting usability is to use formatting consistently, so that headings of the same level are given the appropriate markup (second-level headings are all H2s, for example), emphasis is always used in the same way, and so on.
This matters for a range of reasons that aren’t limited to the fact that human beings are reading your blog posts—SEO and screen readers, for example. But at its most basic, formatting tells readers something about the nature of the content you’re presenting, and about its component parts.
If I use italics for emphasis here, and bold here, you may well become confused, even subconsciously. Why are those two items (they could be headings, or titles, or images, or buttons) presented differently? Are they different? Okay, so that formatting might not make my content unusable, but it does reduce its usability. How? By increasing confusion.
Using underlines on web text wasn’t cool in Jakob’s day, and it’s still not—even though web design, and web users, have both come a long way since then.
In the good (or bad, depending on how you see things) old days, underlines on text were reserved for hyperlinks—that was the signal to web users that the text was linked to another resource. It still is on many sites, and many of us still regard an underline as the standard form of web link.
Underline your text without a link—for the sake of emphasis, say—and you’ll confuse more than a few of your readers.
The web offers us a great benefit over every other communications medium in that when we refer to something or someone, we can show readers what that is without breaking the flow of our engagement with them.
Let’s imagine I’m talking to you about content usability, and I want to mention readability, but I’m not sure if you know what that is. Instead of that nice, subtle link I just included in the previous sentence, I’d probably end up saying something like this:
“So, yeah, content usability includes factors like readability and … oh, so readability’s about how easy it is to read and take in—like, comprehend, really—your stuff. So there are these online tests that let you paste in your content and they’ll tell you how readable it is; they’ll give you a readability score that corresponds to school grades and—what’s that? Oh? You know about readability? Cool. So … what was I saying again? Oh yeah, content usability…”
The web offers us the ability to suggest further reading and deeper insight without breaking the flow of communication, or telling readers things they don’t want or need to know. Links make your content more usable, because they make it more useful. Links help your readers to achieve their goals through your blog. Don’t just mention brand names, individuals, or websites: link to the them. And link to them in a way that helps readers predict what they’ll get if they click on the link.
If your content is going to be useable for your audience, surely speaking to those readers is a big part of the communications picture.
You’ll notice here on ProBlogger that we refer to bloggers a lot. We frequently refer to your blog, your audience, and your niche, as these are all terms that are part of the blogging vocabulary, and we all understand what they mean. As a secondary term, we do refer to your site, but only to avoid repetition. First and foremost, we call ourselves bloggers.
This isn’t about SEO—although of course it helps. This decision is about talking to our audience in the terms you understand—terms that resonate with you. Another example: when I first started with ProBlogger I asked Darren specifically if he (and you) referred to your blog visitors as “readers.” This is standard terminology on this blog, but it wasn’t for other publications I’ve worked on.
This may seem like a minor issue. But imagine you read three articles on ProBlogger, and not one of them contained any mention of blogs or blogging or readers. Imagine if all they referred to was sites and end users. You might start to question whether the content was really suited to you and your needs. You’d probably wonder how applicable—or useful—it was to your situation.
Use the words your readers know, understand, and expect. And use them consistently, so users aren’t jarred by a proliferation of terminology. This will help to make your content more usable, though again your readers may not realize it consciously.
Content isn’t just words—we have at our disposal diagrams, photographs, video, sound, and interactivity in various forms. Often, written content should take a supporting role. It’s up to us as bloggers to discern those moments, and to use the tags, captions, and other tools available to us to augment, rather than replace, the appropriate content form.
In all cases, we should make the most of those possibilities, even at a text level. If your blog post doesn’t fit into list format, don’t write it as a list post. If as you’re writing, you find that your post becomes a list, go back and make that clear in the title and opening paragraphs. Telling users what they can expect—and then meeting that expectation—is vital to usability.
I’ll admit that I can be a bit slow on the uptake as a web user. That’s not good, because I use the web a lot, and I get grumpy when things don’t go as I expect. I can think of plenty of examples, off the top of my head, where usability could be better.
Each of these examples arises as a result of the point I made above: that on the web, we, as bloggers, can link to resources. That’s the up-side; the down-side is that we, as readers and users, can get confused about what can be clicked on, and where it will lead. Very confused, in some cases.
Like Darren’s Workbooks page—I really want to be able to click on the book titles there! I was looking for a book there today (ProBlogger’s Guide to Blogging for Your Business). I scrolled down, found the title, clicked! …aaaand nothing. I had to go all the way to the scroll bar again, drag it down, and click on the link.
Can your blog’s users click on the things they expect to?
Or, take Google’s page header (it’s not a blog, but it deserves a mention). When I started using Google+ I had some questions and started looking for Help. I saw that little cog in the top-right corner, but I thought it provided access to my settings, not help. Even the page footer, standard location for Help and Privacy links, lacks a link to Help!
I expected to see a Help link in this menu bar. Is that so wrong?Does your blog clearly indicate what’s what, and what leads to where? You might need to do some user testing to find out the truth on this one.
And what about this shot from Copyblogger? This box appears at the bottom of Copyblogger’s right-hand sidebar. I don’t know about you, but I’m a lazy clicker. The box has one link. So (my whiny-teen-alter-ego whinges), why can’t I click anywhere on that box to access the link?
Copyblogger kudos box: not so clickyDoes your blog make users work harder than they need to?
These kinds of issues may require some lateral thinking—or some user testing—to uncover, but correcting them could make your blog, your newsletter, your sales pages, and your content in general, a whole lot more usable.
Okay, so people don’t talk much about content usability. But people who create content and publish it should have a firm grasp and consciousness of the concept and what it means for their users. We’re not always going to get it right, but we owe it to ourselves and our readers to strive constantly to improve content usability.
How can you do that? You could review some of your content using the ideas I’ve mentioned here, and see where you could make improvements. You could play around with wireframing software like mockingbird to create different presentations for your content. Perhaps you know a usability professional who you can speak to about the principles of usability—or you could just pick up a book on the topic at your local library. Once you get started, you might like to do some user testing to see if you are actually making your content more usable for readers.
If you need a little extra impetus, consider that in many cases, better content usability means better content reusability. Format your posts well, use reader-appropriate language, link wherever you can, and employ the appropriate formats for the message you’re delivering, and you’ll be much more easily able to repackage that content into a saleable format down the track.
How usable is your content? Are you conscious of usability as you write and prepare posts for publication? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
When the delegates left the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in September 1787, the new Constitution they had written was no more than a proposal. Elected conventions in at least nine of the thirteen states would have to ratify it before it could take effect. There was reason to doubt whether that would happen. The document we revere today as the foundation of our country’s laws, the cornerstone of our legal system, was hotly disputed at the time. Some Americans denounced the Constitution for threatening the liberty that Americans had won at great cost in the Revolutionary War. One group of fiercely patriotic opponents even burned the document in a raucous public demonstration on the Fourth of July. In this splendid new history, Pauline Maier tells the dramatic story of the yearlong battle over ratification that brought such famous founders as Washington, Hamilton, Madison, Jay, and Henry together with less well-known Americans who sometimes eloquently and always passionately expressed their hopes and fears for their new country. Men argued in taverns and coffeehouses; women joined the debate in their parlors; broadsides and newspaper stories advocated various points of view and excoriated others. In small towns and counties across the country people read the document carefully and knew it well. Americans seized the opportunity to play a role in shaping the new nation. Then the ratifying conventions chosen by "We the People" scrutinized and debated the Constitution clause by clause.
Although many books have been written about the Constitutional Convention, this is the first major history of ratification. It draws on a vast new collection of documents and tells the story with masterful attention to detail in a dynamic narrative. Each state’s experience was different, and Maier gives each its due even as she focuses on the four critical states of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Virginia, and New York, whose approval of the Constitution was crucial to its success.
The New Yorker Gilbert Livingston called his participation in the ratification convention the greatest transaction of his life. The hundreds of delegates to the ratifying conventions took their responsibility seriously, and their careful inspection of the Constitution can tell us much today about a document whose meaning continues to be subject to interpretation. Ratification is the story of the founding drama of our nation, superbly told in a history that transports readers back more than two centuries to reveal the convictions and aspirations on which our country was built.
Price: $30.00
