Give Hooptedoodle the Heave-Ho

There’s a great power in words,
if you don’t hitch too many of them together.

— Josh Billings

"Delete" is the key to sharper storytelling—and maybe the cure for Content Shock.

Or, as novelist Elmore Leonard put it, "Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip."

The web's awash with crap content, writing that confuses and bores and bogs down readers with too much "too much."

Prolix writing exhausts us; and writers who produce it, Leonard says, are "perpetrating hooptedoodle," a word coined by another novelist, John Steinbeck.

Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday (a sequel to Cannery Row) included a prologue that featured two characters speaking, Mack and Whitey No. 1.

One night Mack lay back on his bed in the Palace Flop house and he said, “I ain’t never been satisfied with that book Cannery Row. I would of went about it different.”

And after a while he rolled over and raised his head on his hand and he said, “I guess I’m just a critic. But if I ever come across the guy that wrote that book I could tell him a few things.”

“Like what?” said Whitey No. 1.

“Well,” said Mack, “like this here. Suppose there’s chapter one, chapter two, chapter three. That’s all right, as far as it goes, but I’d like to have a couple of words at the top so it tells me what the chapter’s going to be about. Sometimes maybe I want to go back, and chapter five don’t mean nothing to me. If there was just a couple of words I’d know that was the chapter I wanted to go back to.”

“Go on,” said Whitey No. 1.

“Well, I like a lot of talk in a book, and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. And another thing—I kind of like to figure out what the guy’s thinking by what he says. I like some description too,” he went on. “I like to know what color a thing is, how it smells and maybe how it looks, and maybe how a guy feels about it—but not too much of that.”

“You sure are a critic,” said Whitey No. 2. “Mack, I never give you credit before. Is that all?”

“No,” said Mack. “Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. The guy’s writing it, give him a chance to do a little hooptedoodle. Spin up some pretty words maybe, or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up in the story. So if the guy that’s writing it wants hooptedoodle, he ought to put it right at first. Then I can skip it if I want to, or maybe go back to it after I know how the story come out.”

Indeed, Sweet Thursday readers could encounter two fancy chapters inside, "Hooptedoodle 1" and "Hooptedoodle 2." They could skip them, if they wished.

Storytelling won't advance your goals if you don't recognize the power of well-chosen words. Don't burden readers with hooptedoodle; leave long-form flights of fancy to the poets.

There's power in your "Delete" key.

Use it.

Exorcise Adverbs

The road to hell is paved with adverbs.

Stephen King

Click-baiters adore adverbs:

• Powerfully Effective Content Marketing
• The Writing Resolution You Can Actually Keep
• The Amazingly Simple Anatomy of a Meaningful Marketing Story
• 8 Incredibly Simple Ways to Get More People to Read Your Content
• How to Immediately Become a More Productive (and Better) Writer
• What to Do When You Absolutely, Positively Must Know If Your Content Will Rock

But adverbs overpromise and add little; in fact, they weaken the words they modify.

Dressing up a word with an adverb is like "putting a hat on a horse," claims The Elements of Style.

Don't do it.

Don't overdress your words.

Understatement's the best way to put forth an idea, as the late copywriter Herschell Gordon Lewis insisted.

Good writers get this.

Adverbs rarely appear on pages crafted by Kurt Vonnegut, Elmore Leonard or Stephen King.

But look at a passage by an over-writer like William Peter Blatty (taken from his novel The Exorcist):

The Jesuit moved slowly forward, oblivious of Chris, who was gaping in wonder; of Karl, stepping lithe and incredulous from the study; of Karras, emerging bewildered from the kitchen while the nightmarish poundings and croakings continued. He went calmly up the staircase, slender hand like alabaster sliding upward on the banister.

Karras came up beside Chris, and together they watched from below as Merrin entered Regan's bedroom and closed the door behind him. For a time there was silence. Then abruptly the demon laughed hideously and Merrin came out. He closed the door and started down the hall. Behind him, the bedroom door opened again and Sharon poked her head out, staring after him, an odd expression on her face.

Here the same passage again, with the adverbs exorcised:

The Jesuit moved forward, oblivious of Chris, who was gaping in wonder; of Karl, stepping lithe and incredulous from the study; of Karras, emerging bewildered from the kitchen while the nightmarish poundings and croakings continued. He went up the staircase, slender hand like alabaster sliding upward on the banister.

Karras came up beside Chris, and together they watched from below as Merrin entered Regan's bedroom and closed the door behind him. For a time there was silence. Then the demon laughed and Merrin came out. He closed the door and started down the hall. Behind him, the bedroom door opened again and Sharon poked her head out, staring after him, an odd expression on her face.

More chilling, no?

Out of His Skull

It’s not so easy writing about nothing.

                                                                         — Patti Smith

Recently I met Noah Scalin, who launched his career as a fine artist by creating a skull every day for a year.

"Creativity is a practice," Scalin said. His advice:

Pick something—anything—and make one every day for a year.

Scanlin's is the best advice on creativity I've heard.

Authors—bloggers, marketers and thought leaders—fret constantly over "finding their voice," "discovering their brand essence," and "achieving authority."

None recognizes "author" and "authority" share the same Latin root, auctor.

In Ancient Rome, an auctor originated. (In contrast, an artifex (artisan) labored to realize the vision of an auctor; he had less clout as a consequence.)

Want to find your voice? Discover your brand essence? Be an authority?

Originate. Something. Every. Day.

2,000 Maniacs!

Math classes mold our young minds to believe numbers.

Politicians exploit that.

• In 1950, Senator Joe McCarthy sparked a nationwide witch hunt by claiming 205 commies worked for the US State Department.
  
  
• In 2014, Representative Michele Bachman propelled cuts in food stamps for 850,000 US households by claiming 70 percent of the funds went into the pockets of Washington bureaucrats.
  
  
• In 2016, Member of Parliament Boris Johnson triggered Brexit by claiming EU membership cost the UK £50 million every day.

You might sway mobs with it, but does "proofiness" work in marketing copy?

No! says the late copywriter and filmmaker Herschell Gordon Lewis.

Lewis' legions of axioms included his "Rule of Statistical Deficiency:"

Readers respond less to cold-blooded statistics than they do to warm-blooded examples.

In On the Art of Writing Copy, he urged marketers to avoid statements like:

75% of the children affected might be saved.

Marketers should write instead:

We lost Jimmy today. His parents knew his pitifully short days were numbered. They never lost hope... until the end. But Mary, Karen, and Billy are still alive. We're fighting for their lives.

Fine for fundraisers. But what about B2B marketers?

Statistics are still deficient.

The following leaves you chilly:

71% of HR directors say our LMS is a very useful tool to enhance employee learning.

But doesn't this warm your blood?

We asked HR leaders from 10 companies if our LMS boosts enterprise learning. Execs from Acme, Spacely, Soylent, Wonka, Sirius, Clampett Oil, and Burns Industries said yes. Our clients experience the difference.

NOTE: Herschell Gordon Lewis departed this life September 26 at the age of 90. He wrote more than 20 books on marketing and produced over 40 films.

Soup Up Your Writing

There is but one art—to omit!

Robert Louis Stevenson

Many thinkers, including, Freud, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Pound and Koestler, have noted the German verb dichten—"to write"—also means "to condense."

The word stems from the Latin dictare, "to dictate." Ancient Roman poets used to dictate their verses to slaves, who wrote them down (hence, "condensed" them) on wax tablets.

The most persuasive writing is condensed.

Its strength comes from conciseness, what Hemingway called "leaving out*"—omitting everything that's irrelevant or obvious.

When you edit your writing, think of Darwin.

When only the fittest survive, what's left is stronger and better.

"Like passengers in a lifeboat, all the words in a concise text must pull their own weight," says journalist Danny Heitman.

Your goal in writing shouldn't be to inform, but to suggest—to help readers reach understandings of their own.

And your goal should be speed—speed that comes only from condensing.

"Modern prose had to accelerate its pace, not because trains run faster than mailcoaches, but because the trains of thought run faster than a century ago," Koestler said.

Here's an example of persuasive writing (85 words) from a white paper:

The resounding message surrounding Millennials is clear: Money means less, culture means more. But that’s not to say money doesn’t matter at all. As the generation with the highest rates of unemployment, lowest earnings and record student loan debt, Millennials certainly care about their financial health. A recent study from Gallup found that 48 percent of Millennials find overall compensation “extremely important” when seeking new job opportunities, and one in two would consider taking a new job for a raise of 20 percent or less.

Here's the same paragraph souped up (condensed by 35%):

Millennials are loud and clear: Money means less; culture, more. But it's not that money means nothing: Millennials suffer high unemployment, low earnings and crippling student loan debt. In fact, 48 percent say compensation is “extremely important,” and 50 percent would change jobs for a raise of 20 percent or less, as Gallup recently found.

The One-Minute Millionaire

A corner has been turned.

I for one am pleased.

Content creators have begun to recognize their art is as old as Methuselah; that it's less about hoodwinking Google and automating posts, and more about intriguing readers.

The rules for generating good content are, in fact, the very same ones Associated Press reporters used in 1846, when the organization was founded.

I'm soon to reach my 10th anniversary as a blogger. The blogosphere 10 years ago was a trash heap of get-rich-quick schemers bent on selling stuff.

A few pioneers—Chris Brogan was one—proclaimed at the time content marketing was a permutation of PR; that it was all about educating customers, connecting with them, and earning their trust.

But that was the view of outliers.

The herd chased fads and went in for cheap and tawdry tricks.

My gut told me the outliers were right and that the rest of the crazy world would catch on one day.

It took 3,650 days.

"In a world of zero marginal cost, being trusted is the single most urgent way to build a business," Seth Godin says. "You don’t get trusted if you’re constantly measuring and tweaking and manipulating so that someone will buy from you.

"The challenge that we have when we industrialize content is we are asking people who don’t care to work their way through a bunch of checklists to make a number go up, as opposed to being human beings connecting with other human beings."

If you create content and haven't caught on yet, you still have time.

A little, anyway.

How Often to Blog?

Blogging isn’t about publishing as much as you can.
It’s about publishing as smart as you can.  

― Jon Morrow

When it comes to blogging, I'm all over publishing "smart" (who isn't?).

But how often is smart?

Hubspot asked 13,500 customers about their experiences.

The answers are eye-opening:

• The more posts a company publishes per month, the more traffic appears on the company's website.
  
  
• B2B companies that publish 11 or more posts per month drive 3 times more traffic than companies that publish only 1.
  
  
• The more posts a company publishes per month, the more leads it gets.
  
  
• B2B companies that publish 11 or more posts per month get 3.75 times more leads than companies that publish 3 or fewer.
  
  
• Blog posts pay off long after they're published.
  
  
• B2B companies that have published 400 or more posts get 2.5 times more website traffic than companies that have published 200 or fewer posts.
  
  
• B2b companies that have published 400 or more posts get 3 times more leads than companies that published fewer than 200 posts.

Employers Want People Who Can Write

This just in: Employers want people who can write.

The Wall Street Journal reports that a survey of 180 companies by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) found 4 of the top 5 skills valued by employers are "hallmarks of a traditional liberal-arts education."

Clear-writing skill was ranked Number 3 (following leadership and teamwork).

“It’s easier to hire people who can write—and teach them how to read financial statements—rather than hire accountants in hopes of teaching them to be strong writers,” head recruiter for the investment firm Morningstar told The Wall Street Journal.

One Morningstar employee—the firm's expert on more than a dozen well-known equity-strategy funds—was a philosophy and classics major who earned a PhD in theology.

Want to improve your job or promotion prospects?

Go back to school and study philosophy (expensive), or read Writing Tools and The Art and Craft of Feature Writing (cheap).

HAT TIP: Thanks to Kevin Daum for informing me of NACE's survey.

4 Writing Defects You Should Eliminate

Writing is 1 percent inspiration, and 99 percent elimination.

― Louise Brooks

Your boss demands you do more with less.

Start with your writing.

Slow down and try to write more concisely; in particular, eliminate these four common defects:

Roadblocks. Cut needless words and phrases like "very," "actually," "I think" and "in my opinion." And replace modified verbs with strong verbs; for example, replace "consider thoroughly" with "evaluate."

Jerks. Smooth the breaks between sentences by using transitional words and phrases like "because," "for example," and “in contrast.” Use short introductory questions like "Seem reasonable?" to ease the transition into new paragraphs. Use phrases like "Let me explain why" to end paragraphs.

Clichés. Replace clichés with vivid descriptions. Instead of saying "we raised the bar in customer support," say "our Help Desk is hyperfocused."

Monotony. Give your writing some rhythm. Alter the cadence with a mix of long and short sentences. And don't forget those sentence fragments. Yes, fragments.

Believe it or not, elimination adds. It adds spark to your prose readers will notice.

Here's an example:

Before

In my opinion, we substantially raised the bar for responsiveness in customer support last quarter. I think the team was very careful to consider thoroughly the numerous challenges customers routinely experience whenever they called our Help Desk seeking assistance. I would like therefore to offer a big thumbs up to the Sales Operations team for the can-do attitude they demonstrated in tackling this really difficult issue.

After 

Sales Operations streamlined a number of critical Help Desk procedures last quarter, improving the customer experience. Without exception, my kudos to team members. You tackled one tough job―and succeeded!

Unmistakable

If you can't explain something in a few words, try fewer.

― Robert Brault

When Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage appeared in 1895, reviewers sang the writer's praises.

"They all insist that I am a veteran of the Civil War," he told fellow journalist John Hilliard, "whereas the fact is, as you know, I never smelled even the powder of a sham battle."

The story succeeded, Crane said, not because he wrote from observation, but because, "I endeavored to express myself in the simplest and most concise way."

He told Hilliard his goal, following Emerson's advice, was to leave unsaid the "long logic beneath the story."

"My chiefest desire was to write plainly and unmistakably, so that all men (and some women) might read and understand. That, to my mind, is good writing."

Don't Make Me Brake

Web designer Steve Krug pronounced the "Three Laws of Usability" in his decade-old Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. The three laws stated:

Don’t make me think. Make every element of a web page obvious and self-evident, or at least self-explanatory.

It doesn’t matter how many times I have to click, as long as each click is a mindless, unambiguous choice. Make choices mindless for ease of use.

Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left. Be ruthlessly concise.

I now pronounce the Three Laws of Readability:

Don’t make me brake. Strive at every turn to help the reader maintain her preferred speed. Use common words to say uncommon things. Avoid empty, exhausted idioms.

Adding more imprecise words doesn't increase precision. Ambiquity can be lessened with a picture, and our language is rife with picturesque words and phrases. Find them. Use them.

Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left. No, not an error; the Third Law of Readability mirrors the Third Law of Usability. Be ruthlessly concise. You will capture readers' interest. As Voltaire said, "The secret of being boring is to say everything." So obey Hemingway's Iceberg Theory.

Results are In: Fast-growth B2B Companies Blog

A new study by Mattermark of the 50 fastest growing B2B companies in the country finds 80% blog.

According to The State of Sales & Marketing at the 50 Fastest-Growing B2B Companies in the US, "content has become the cornerstone" of fast-growth companies' marketing—and blogs have become the cornerstone of content.

"Blogging drives top-of-the-funnel traffic to a company’s website," the report says. "From there, calls to action encourage visitors to download content (e.g., ebooks, white papers, and templates) so they can learn more about a particular topic.

"This process can be repeated and scaled by marketing teams to include a wide variety of tactics at every stage of the funnel, but the end goal is always the same: to add value and build relationships that drive revenue for your business."

Does your company blog?

If not, what on earth are you waiting for?

Can Customers Find You?

"Blogging is my front door," says marketing maestro David Meerman Scott.

Replete with posts as much as 12 years old, Scott's blog is the power magnet that attracts him new business.

"I'm always surprised at how effectively this tool helps me accomplish my goals," he says.

"There are many posts I wrote a decade ago, back when George W. Bush was President, that are still indexed highly by the search engines and are still driving people who do not know me into my content."

A new study by Mattermark of the 50 fastest growing B2B companies in the country shows 80% of them blog.

If you're among the B2B marketers who don't, please, check your excuses at the door.

Without Wallander, We Don't Care

Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.

Robert McKee 

Henning Mankell, the creator of Wallander, said his crime novels—like your company's products—took root in an idea.

Returning to his native Sweden from a stay in Africa in the spring of 1990, Mankell noticed racism had taken a stranglehold on the nation.

"It soon dawned on me that the natural path to follow was to write a crime novel," Mankell said. "This was obvious because in my world racist acts are criminal outrages."

Writers like Mankell understand: while ideas alone don't compel audiences, stories do.

But what makes a story a story? How do you tell one? 

You have to find a hero. Forget about Citizens United v. FEC. Corporations aren't people. Your story can't be about your damn company. It has to offer us a flesh-and-blood hero who struggles to overcome a cruel world. Without Wallendar, we don't care.

You have to create suspense. Page-turners, plays, movies and TV shows grip audiences because of suspense. The setup teases and you want to know, What happens next? No tease, no story. Right away, you have to put Wallander in a mysterious jam.

You have to appeal to emotions. Most facts are unmemorable. And most people aren't fact-minded. Stories tug at emotions. Fear. Uncertainty. Confusion. Ambition. Greed. Admiration. Wonder. The soft stuff.

You have to personify. An idea like "racism" is intangible, difficult to understand, and not especially gripping. Not so Wallander combatting victimizers of people on the margins. Convert ideas into characters and storylines.

You have to paint pictures. "Show, don't tell." Lightly sketch each scenario as your story unfolds and let your audience connect the dots. Don't feel compelled to lecture. You're a storyteller, not a preacher or teacher.

You have to find a niche. Long-term success comes when you find a niche you can own. Wallander tapped the popular niche known as "Nordic Noir." Every novel in Mankell's series is propelled by a backdrop where mean streets are walked by morose Swedes who themselves are neither mean, nor tarnished, nor afraid. You can tell stories—endlessly—when you find a niche that appeals to your audience.

Businesses Need to Avoid Schlocky Content

Erik Deckers contributed today's post. Eric is the president of Pro Blog Service, a content marketing agency with clients throughout the US. He is also the co-author of Branding Yourself and No Bullshit Social Media. He has been blogging since 1997, and has been a newspaper humor columnist for over 20 years. Erik was recently writer-in-residence at the Jack Kerouac House in Orlando.

A couple years ago, when Buzzfeed and Upworthy first started making a digital splash, we all saw the headlines on Facebook.

17 Life-Changing Travel Hacks: #14 Will Take Your Breath Away

12 Super Foods That Will Make Your Jaw Drop 

87 Photos of Cute Baby Pets That Will Give You All The Feels. #63 Will MELT YOUR FACE OFF! (Slideshow) 

Most people soon blocked the two "news" sites from their Facebook streams, and now Facebook has even begun looking for ways to block all Buzzfeed-like headlines from their news feeds.

Can I get a 'hallelujah?'

But that doesn't mean you can escape them completely. There's still Twitter and even LinkedIn, where some people share this dreck.

The problem with it is, it's still popular, and still gets traffic, which means people think it's okay to do. And if people think it's okay to do, I'm worried businesses will begin to adopt this kind of writing. They're already well on their way with schlocky content and Buzzfeed-like headlines.

It's Some of the Worst Writing Ever

I've read some pretty bad writing in my day, but Buzzfeed and Upworthy have been some of the worst-written content I've ever had the misfortune of looking at.

And I say that as someone who read the Star Trek/X-Men crossover book.

Imagine an article composed entirely of 18 full-motion GIFs and their 5-word captions, and you have an idea for some of the things that pass as "writing" on these websites.

I had never actually seen someone use "(lol)" in journalistic writing until I read some Buzzfeed articles while researching this post. I'm waiting for them to punctuate their sentences with some damn emojis!

Now I'm sure your business' blog is not going to have anything as terrible and soul-crushing as a Buzzfeed "18 Times 'The Walking Dead' Referenced 'Saved By The Bell'" (not a real article), but that doesn't mean businesses haven't put out schlocky business writing before.

Here are a few ways you can avoid schlocky content for your own writing.

Get GOOD writers. Writing may be a skill we all learned in school, but don't assume everyone can write. Everyone who played a recorder in middle school music isn't in the symphony. Everyone who played softball in gym class isn't a professional ball player. So don't assume that everyone who can string two sentences together is magically a good writer.

If you want good content on your website, get good writers. Get people who are passionate about the written language. Get people who understand the importance and gravitas of language, and would never add "(lol)" to a professional article. Find employees who love to write as a hobby. Better yet, hire or outsource to a professional writer. These are the people who will make your content amazing, and attract people's attention.

Keep list posts to a minimum. I'm a big fan of list posts, because I know it brings in readers, often more readers than my "normal headline" posts. But that doesn't mean I'm going to make every article I write a list post. If I limit those to only once every 8, 10 or 12 blog posts, they have a more dramatic impact.

Remember, "if everyone is special, then nobody is special." So don't overdo it on the special content that people clamor for, or you'll dilute its effectiveness.

Avoid 101-level content. Content marketing has been around for many years, but I'm still seeing basic "Five Secrets to Content Marketing" articles that still include "write good content" as a "secret." You can find the same five secrets on thousands of marketing blogs, and they all say the same damn thing. No one has said anything new on this subject in years.

You're going to run into the same thing in your industry. So many companies will try to be thought leaders that they'll publish the same basic content as everyone else. That means everyone will only cover the basics and never really say anything new or of any consequence. Talk about new regulations. Respond to other blogs or trade media articles. Tell success stories about your clients. Just don't try to educate people like it's their first day at work. That's been done to death.

Dive deep into a subject. I've often said, if you want to blog about a large, generic topic like "marketing," you'll run out of things to say in three weeks. But if you write about something specific like "content marketing for the manufacturing industry," you'll never run out of things to talk about.

Use your blog to explore your industry and your specific niche. Your blog is an opportunity to establish you and/or your company as an industry expert and a thought leader. You're not going to do that by only scratching the surface of your field and writing 101-level content. Get deep into your subject, explore the nuances, and talk a lot of inside baseball.

Businesses that truly want to have an impact on their industry, and want to reach their customers effectively, need to avoid being a Buzzfeed-like source of information. Skip the easy, low-hanging fruit of list posts and animated GIF stories; there are hundreds of other writers already plucking at it. Hire some real writers who have a respect for language, as well as their readers. And sink your teeth into your topics and explore them the way the schlock writers would never dream of doing.

This is the best way to make your blog and your content marketing campaign be a true success. And you can do it all without a single cat GIF.

Where's the Thought in Thought Leadership?

Thought leadership is to leadership as fast food is to food.

While the stuff served daily through most B2B marketers' Tweets, videos, blog posts and e-books looks tasty and can be consumed quickly, it isn't particularly satisfying. Or good for you.

Although there are thousands of exceptions, most B2B marketers rush out junk, contributing to the deafening "content shock" Mark Schaefer describes.

Plainly, simply, thought leadership shouldn't be advertising. It's supposed to be content that's authentic and that articulates leading-edge thinking, not your marketing department's  social media strategy.

And thought leadership shouldn't be about media. It's supposed to focus on thought, not LinkedIn or Meerkat or Snapchat.

B2B marketers are hacking the system when they publish non-nutritional content, however carefully it's dressed to resemble food for thought.

Ironically, every B2B marketer could contribute thought leadership, if only she trusted the few thoughtful individuals inside her organization—and they trusted themselves. Sadly, neither do.

"Thought leaders focus on crafting ideas, not audience reaction and reach," says digital marketer Walter Adamson in Firebrand. 

He's 100% right. Thought leaders don't lean on vapid videos and tricked up infographics to entreat customers. They rely instead, TEDishly, on "ideas worth sharing."

"Being a thought leader means putting your own personal thoughts out there in whatever form appeals to you," Adamson says. "It’s not about the medium. It’s about the message and it’s about filling in the white spaces which teams of content producers don’t even know exist."

15 Ways to Write Headlines When You Can't Write to Save Your Life

If the headline doesn’t stop people, the copy might as well be written in Greek.

—John Caples

Q. Where, besides the copywriter's over-caffeinated brain, do eye-stopping headlines come from?

A. The copywriter's under-rated bag of tricks. 

In Content Marketer, copywriter Josue Valles opens his bag of tricks—15 in all—for inspection. Here they are:

1. Steal ideas from clickbait sites like BuzzFeed
2. Lean on "psychological triggers"—specific numbers or razor-sharp benefits ("Reduce payroll 23% by automating absence management")
3. Promise super-fast results
4. Enter keywords into Google and steal ideas from the organic search results 
5. Use proven words (here's a list)
6. Use Portent’s Content Idea Generator
7. Steal words and phrases people frequently use to ask questions on Quora
8. Enter keywords into BuzzSumo and steal ideas from the search results
9. Include the name of a big brand in your headline ("Richard Branson's 15 Hacks for Punctuality")
10. Test the emotive power of your headline with Advanced Marketing Institute's EMVHA
11. Test the responsiveness of your headline with Twitter and Facebook (use an A/B test)
12. Leverage the power of an image
13. Steal ideas from newsletters 
14. Evoke curiosity (hint: use Linkbait Generator)
15. Steal ideas from HARO searches

Bob James' Bonus Hack: Steal this book.

Birds Sing from the Heart

Author and content marketer Erik Deckers recently invited me to discuss "My Writing Process," a dead-horse topic if there ever were one.

But I'll beat that horse anyway, just because Erik asked. Here you go:

Where I find ideas. The wellsprings of ideas are many and inexhaustible. The ones I return to again and again are:

• Other writers—from the sublime (e.g., Emerson, Faulkner, Sartre, Updike) to the ridiculous (names withheld) 
• Pop culture (songs, movies, TV shows, blogs, etc.)
• Current events (AKA La Comédie humaine)
• Memories, dreams, reflections 
• Other people's observations (Take my wife's. Please.) 

How I write the ideas down. My secret sauce is no secret. Writing isn't thinking. It isn't even writing. "Writing is revision," as Tracy Kidder says. "Write once, edit five times," David Ogilvy urged office mates. Priceless advice. Your fifth draft may not excel, but it will beat your first by a long shot. And, as you edit five times, be like the birds. An ornithologist mentioned during a recent NPR interview that birds' voice boxes are lodged deep within their chests. "Birds sing from the heart," she said. You should, too. Readers like it and respond accordingly.

How I assure quality. Copy's never error free, but I try hard to check my facts. In fact, I often spend more time fact-checking sources than writing and editing. (Don't hem and haw: fact-checking is enlightening.) And I proofread, both twice before I hit publish and twice afterwards. Boring task, but my reputation's on the line.

How I spread ideas. Outposting has helped aggrandize my scribblings more than any of my other activities. Adman Gary Slack advises clients to invest in "other people's audiences" more than their own. He's 100% on the money.

For more advice about writing. If you're hungry for sound advice, listen to Paul Simon and Chuck Close discuss the creative process in a podcast for The Atlantic. You'll learn more than you will by reading 50 how-to books, with these four noteworthy exceptions: 

• The Art and Craft of Feature Writing by William E. Blunder
• On the Art of Writing Copy by Herschel Gordon Lewis
• Secrets of a Freelance Writer by Bob Bly
• Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark

Oh, yea, don't forget No Bullshit Social Media.

NOTE: This post originally appeared in Erik Deckers' blog.

5 Keys to Creativity

Red Smith was asked if turning out a daily column wasn’t quite a chore. Why, no,” dead-panned Red. “You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.”

—Walter Winchell

We link creativity to talent, but blogger Greg Satell insists "talent is overrated" and says the least talented among us can find the keys to creativity. For Satell, they are:

Habit. Rain or shine, Satell writes every day. A friend calls it , “Letting the muse know you’re serious.”

Experience. Satell brings a wealth of experience in different businesses, countries and cultures to his writing. "That gives me a lot of raw material to work with."

Productivity.  "The more work you produce the more likely you are to come up with something truly creative," Satell says. "The more you produce, the more skilled you become and the more you can experiment with different combinations."

Serenity. Writer's block can be overcome by finding a distraction that calms your mind. Exercise, walks, coffee with a friend, reading or movie-watching all work.

Compromise. "When you start something it’s always crap," Satell says. "I dare to be crap, knowing that it really doesn’t matter what my first draft looks like." It's easy to fix a first draft, he says. "The only problem that can’t be fixed is a blank page."

How to Conquer the Robowriters

By 2020, 75% of news coverage will be written by bots, says content marketing guru Mark Schaefer.

"When it gets to the point that a computer can consistently generate content at a level that passes the Turing Test, the economics of content in every form will change forever," Schaefer says. "The freelance writer will become an endangered species."

Schaefer offers freelancers four strategies to beat the bots:

Emote. Good writers transcend their content by connecting emotionally with readers. It hardly matters what they write about; we still want to read it.

Dive. Position yourself as an expert and a "trusted voice of experience," because no bot can "corner the market on true insight."

Engage. Express some original thoughts, or at least express others' thoughts originally. If you only offer commodity content, "it’s going to be game over." Cede content like "10 Twitter Tips" to the bots.

Rebel. Be a part of readers' "bot-free zones." Just as consumers pay a premium for organic, local and artisanal, readers will prefer writers who shun "bot-speak." Keep your content human.

My view is that skilled freelancers needn't fret:

• Mathematician Émile Borel said a century ago, if you provided an infinite number of monkeys typewriters, eventually they'd produce Hamlet. Bots may not represent an infinite troop, but they're 'still a boatload of monkeys. As Uber will do to taxi drivers, bots will soon disintermediate low-skilled writers (it's funny that both are called "hacks"). The great social sewer will awash in robowriting—a genuine improvement.

• But while bots can produce passable news stories, it's hard to imagine them attracting followers. The reason is simple. As great writing teachers (Donald Hall, for example) have always told students to rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, because the good writer is full of doubt; she knows her prose isn't inviolable and that the good stuff only emerges from the fifth or sixth or seventh draft. But computers aren't writers; they're robots. They'll never rewrite their stuff, because they lack self-doubt. Have you ever met a computer that doubted its own solution to a problem?