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News & analysis on digital marketing & analytics
Why a Killer Headline Just Isn’t Enough
You’ve spent hours deliberating over the title of your next blog post. You’ve taken polls among your friends, tried it out on your co-workers, and even thought about having it tattooed on your arm. But even with a killer headline for your next blog post, you could still lose your audience if you don’t have a killer introduction paragraph.
So, now that you have an amazing title, leverage it by making your introduction paragraph just as captivating. Try one of the following five techniques to improve your blog introductions:
- Ask a Question
While it may seem cliché, opening your blog post with a rhetorical question can help generate curiosity in your readers. By actively engaging in your blog post from the first paragraph, your readers will be more likely to continue reading until the end.
- Shock with a Statistic
Beginning your post with a shocking statistic or unusual fact is a great way to capture your readers’ attention. Plus, a statistic can be a great way to emphasize the point of your specific blog post.
- Incorporate an Analogy
Analogies, metaphors and similes are an important part of storytelling. Using these devices within your post can be equally as effective at capturing your audiences’ attention.
- Start with a Quote
Starting your post with an interesting quote from someone famous or influential can be a great way to grab your audiences’ attention while also adding credibility to your post.
- Tell a Story
Encouraging your audience to use their imagination and picture themselves in your post is a highly effective technique. This storytelling technique is a great way to get your readers engaged and interested in what you have to say.
While these five techniques are effective ways to make your opening paragraph engaging, there are other ways you can grab attention with your content creation. Use your imagination and create a post that is more than just a catchy headline, create a post that grabs your reader’s attention, and keeps it!
What are some techniques you use to make your blogs more interesting?
*Photo courtesy of jmoneyyyyyy through FlickrBlogging to Broadcast Your Expertise
At Fathom we have several education clients who have programs involved with fashion merchandising and fashion design, so I guess this blog post is for you, fashion students. Here’s a motivational story on the power of onlinemarketing – particularly blogging – as a way of establishing your industry authority among your peers.
Tavi Gevinson started her first blog when she was eleven years old and quickly gained the attention of adults involved in the industry – including entertaining fashionistas Courtney Love and Lady Gaga and Italian designer Miuccia Prada, among others. By the old age of 13 she was being invited to Fashion week events in Manhattan – covering the shows for her blog, which now features 4 editors and 40 freelance writers and photographers! Tavi comes across as smart, confident and youthfully humble in this BBC interview about her blogging “hobby.”
What intriques me about Ms. Gevinson is not so much that she accomplished this early in her life, as many kids are prodigies and technology levels the playing field in many milieus, but that her practice of blogging established her as a recognizable voice in the world of fashion, and after that others in the industry began seeking her out. This is exactly what we tell many of our clients on an ongoing basis – that content marketing strategies like blogging are an excellent way to carve-out a space in their industry that establishes their expertise as well as provides ongoing information and education to their readers. “Value-added, ” you might say.
Are you a business owner looking to harness and leverage the power of the Internet? We can help you do it. Reach out to us today and we’ll gladly discuss your needs and the best strategies for your particular business and industry. It’s what we do everyday for clients all across the country.
What Ohioans Are Saying About SOPA and PIPA
This post is from John Roscoe, Senior Director at Strategic Public Partners Group.
What Ohioans Are Saying About SOPA and PIPA
On Wednesday, dozens of websites including Wikipedia, Mozilla and Reddit “blacked out” in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), which are both under consideration in Congress. The PROTECT IP Act is scheduled for a vote in the Senate on January 24.
Here’s what Ohioans are saying about SOPA and PIPA:
“While I support and respect Intellectual Property rights, SOPA and PIPA are fundamentally flawed bills which I do not support. Both of these bills would restrict Americans’ ability to access sites on the Internet, impose burdensome and costly new regulations on web companies and expand the powers of the federal government to police the Internet.”
–Congressman Mike Turner, (OH-3)
http://www.facebook.com/RepMikeTurner?sk=wall
“Please know I have concerns about the legislation and I do not support SOPA in its current form; it could infringe on first amendment rights.”
–Congressman Steve Stivers, (OH-15)
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Rep-Steve-Stivers/116058275133542
“Therefore, I do not support SOPA in its current form and I am waiting to see what the final product will be when it comes before the full House for a vote. If I believe it infringes on the 1st Amendment I won’t support it.”
–Congressman Jim Renacci, (OH-16)
http://www.facebook.com/notes/congressman-jim-renacci/where-i-stand-on-online-piracy-updated/364778993536958
“While I agree that online piracy is a growing problem, like many of you, I have serious concerns that SOPA could have serious unintended consequences. Some provisions would allow companies to force internet providers to shut down site without any judicial approval as well as hold third party providers, like universities, responsible for what individuals upload onto sites.”
–Congressman Bob Gibbs, (OH-18)
http://www.facebook.com/RepBobGibbs
“SOPA and PIPA are well-intentioned proposals that attempt to address online piracy concerns; however, in their current form the legislation goes too far. The proposals can present damaging ramifications to free speech, global cybersecurity and Internet functionality. At this time, I do not support SOPA and Protect IP Act in their current form, and I hope further committee hearings will be held to resolve these concerns.”
–Congressman Bob Latta, (OH-5)
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Bob-Latta/115988005143254?sk=wall
“Basically what this bill does is put too much of a burden on companies like Wikipedia to start really policing the vast majority of info that are on their sites.”
–Congressman Tim Ryan, (OH-17)
“I am against SOPA and PIPA because it would censor the Internet. This legislation would affect innovation of online marketers and how we do business. Overall, I think it’s unlawful to allow an IP owner to shut down a website without even a legal hearing or trial with the alleged copyright infringer.”
– Jonathan Levey, co-chair of SEMPO Cleveland & Online Marketing Specialist with Fathom, Valley View
“These bills will absolutely cost jobs, and search engines, social media sites and bloggers will be greatly affected. Plus, the people who want to pirate content online will still find ways to do so. Piracy is a problem, yes. SOPA and PIPA are simply not the solution.”
–Bill Balderaz, President, Webbed Marketing, Columbus
http://www.webbedmarketing.com/blog
“This is a bill which will do almost nothing to actually stop piracy (which is, of course, already illegal), but will further rig the system in favor of those already entrenched at the top. It would give authority to copyright holders to sue internet start-ups and any site found to be hosting links (or links to links) featuring copyrighted material.”
–Eric Chase, Edgewood
http://cincinnati.com/blogs/letters/2012/01/18/voicing-opposition-to-sopa-bill/
“My opinion is that this bill is entirely the wrong approach to solving copyright issues. It makes community sites liable for content posted by users, and the risk runs as high as having their domain eliminated from the internet. In essence, it is remarkably similar to the Chinese approach to controlling internet content: if it is disagreeable to those in power, block it.”
– Brian Guilfoos, Editor, Plunderblund
http://www.plunderbund.com/2012/01/18/sopapipa-what-you-need-to-know/
“The problem with the legislation is that it is written too broadly. For instance, the bill states that to prevent liability sites and their hosts must take “technically feasible and reasonable measures” to prevent unlawful content from appearing on their site. Unfortunately, the broadly interpreted definition of “technically feasible and reasonable measures” means that a judge could determine just how stringent a university’s network security measures should be.”
– Rick Cartwright, New Media Dayton
http://www.rickcartwright.com/blog/
“We are threatening our abilities to learn, grow, entertain and conduct business. There has been roughly 43 years of invested knowledge from amazing thinkers, business people, programmers, who had the ingenuity to change the landscape of how we live our lives. In just one signing and passing of a bill, we erase years of dedication. Not to mention, jeopardizing the very ability to blog freely. Take a stand!”
– Travis Childs, Social Media Strategist, Cincinnati
http://cincinnati.com/blogs/queencitywelcome/2012/01/18/take-a-stand-against-internet-censorship/
“President Barack Obama, though stopping short of a veto promise, doused the bills with cold water over the weekend, too. The protesters will make their point in a different way today, and they’ll make it with the public rather than the politicians. It could prove a real attention-getter.”
– Cleveland Plain Dealer, Editorial
http://www.cleveland.com/opinion/index.ssf/2012/01/in_protest_of_pipa_and_sopa_a.html
SOPA/PIPA will have “a chilling effect on web entrepreneurship in general.”
–David Howcroft, Ohio for Internet Freedom, Columbus
http://www.thelantern.com/campus/sites-black-out-in-protest-of-sopa-pipa-1.2744651#.Txhpv_kVf-I
“We would have to hire more people to monitor and police that, which would create a lot of overhead…their sole purpose would be to monitor.”
– Stephe Kamykowski, AST2, Youngstown
Is Your Content Crap?
It’s happened to everyone at least once. You arrive at a website and can’t find the information you need because the content is just awful. It’s hard to read, it doesn’t say anything or it’s so overloaded with SEO tactics that the meaning is completely lost. Before you get complaints about the content on your website, here are some questions you should ask yourself to find out if your content is crap.
- Have you read it out loud? If the content sounds awful when you read it out loud, it’s not going to sound any better if someone reads it silently. What’s one of the main causes of this? Besides simply poor writing, over-optimized content can muddy the waters. No one will understand your content if it’s stuffed with keywords.
- Do you find yourself wanting to reach for your red pen? The best web content is concise and gets to the point right away. If your content seems full of fluff, edit it immediately.
- Does your content only focus on features? It’s a common problem. You want your website to tout all of the amazing features your product or service offers, but what really gets people interested are the benefits. Go back to the drawing board and make sure you include benefits that will entice website visitors.
- Do you have spelling and grammatical errors? As a writer, I find poor grammar on a website to be extremely annoying, but writers aren’t the only ones who are bothered by spelling and grammatical errors. Proofread everything you write before your publish it to your website.
- Is your page easy on the eyes? While a beautiful website design can help, I’m really just talking about the way the content looks on the page. Long, bulky paragraphs are overwhelming to look at, whereas bulleted lists and subheads can break up the content into easy-to-digest, scannable copy. Content development goes beyond simply writing meaningful copy. It also includes organizing the content in a way that’s easy to read.
Before publishing any content on your website, make sure it can pass these five questions.
Category: Content Creation
The Internet Blacks Out to Oppose SOPA and PIPA
Today many websites, including Wikipedia, Reddit and Google are going dark to raise public awareness for SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP).
These two bills before Congress (PIPA in the Senate and SOPA in the House) would censor the Internet and impose harmful regulations on American businesses. The Senate starts voting on Tuesday, January 24.
This is the Internet we are talking about!
SOPA and PIPA would give the government and major corporations the power to shut down entire websites just for one infringing link without a trial or even a traditional hearing. The legislation is aggressively backed by Hollywood movie studios, major record labels, trial lawyers, pharmaceutical giants and several major news providers, including Fox News and NBC-Universal.
SOPA and PIPA could greatly affect the way we use the Internet and social media today. Sites like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook would have to censor their users and would be required to remove all links to “infringing” content or face DNS shutdown. Internet users, like you and me, could go to jail for up to five years for sharing copyrighted work.
Check out this video from Fight for the Future:
http://vimeo.com/31100268
Michael MacLeod-Ball, First Amendment counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, says:
“Our primary concerns are with the fact that non-infringing content is going to be taken down in the process of taking down infringing content. The way the bill is set up, if a site has infringing content on it…their default reaction is going to be to take down the whole site.”
David Segal, Executive Director of Demand Progress, says:
“Congress is on the verge of wrecking the greatest engine of innovation and greatest platform for democracy ever known to human kind. And for what? For the sake of propping up an ossified industry that refuses to change with the times, but happens to make a lot of campaign contributions.”
Mark Zuckerberg, Founder of Facebook, says:
The internet is the most powerful tool we have for creating a more open and connected world. We can’t let poorly thought out laws get in the way of the internet’s development. Facebook opposes SOPA and PIPA, and we will continue to oppose any laws that will hurt the internet.
The world today needs political leaders who are pro-internet. We have been working with many of these folks for months on better alternatives to these current proposals. I encourage you to learn more about these issues and tell your congressmen that you want them to be pro-internet.
How will this affect the millions of people who use social media sites to get their news and connect with friends and family? Social media is based on the idea that people are free to share content, news, ideas, photos and videos with the world!
As someone who uses the Internet and social media every day in a professional and personal capacity, this scares me! Make your voice heard now, or this bill passes:
- Call your representatives - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:CongressLookup
- Sign the petition – http://www.fightforthefuture.org/pipa
- Join the online Protest – http://americancensorship.org/
- Get the word out on your social networks!
- NYC Meetup - http://nytm.org/sos/
This was the scene around the Internet today:
Wikipedia
WordPress
Tumblr
Mozilla
ICHC
Twitpic (remember the Hudson River landing picture?)
