PureBlogging

An editorial calendar is a schedule made in advance of what you’re going to publish. Magazines and newspapers have been using editorial calendars for many years, and with good reason–they work. You too can benefit from creating and following one. Here’s what you’ll get from having one:

1. Your post quality will increase. Since you know what you’ll be writing in advance, you’ll have a longer period of time to edit your post drafts until all uneccessary words have been cut and your metaphors sparkle. For posts that involve research, you have more lead-up time to conduct that research.
2. Your blogging consistency will improve. Before I created an editorial calendar, my post topics jumped all over the place. I would find myself writing a post that was too big and which needed to be divided. Or I would create a post that required follow-through in a later post, but would never follow through. If your readers think a particular post is coming, but it never appears, they will be disappointed. With an editorial calendar, you may plan series posts in advance so that they build momentum and nobody is disappointed because your posts are publishing at regular intervals in order.
3. Your RSS subscribers will increase. When you know what’s coming up, you can build anticipation in your readers for what’s to come at the end of existing posts or in comments. You can use this as a way to entice subscriptions. A small amount of extra effort at the end of some posts is worth the payoff in extra readers.

Any calendaring program can be used to create an editorial calendar for you blog. It doesn’t matter which one you use, so long as you use something. Sitting down and brainstorming all those posts for an entire month or more in advance is quite an eye-opening exercise! The more in advance you can create topics, the less likely it is you will ever suffer from writer’s block.

Try creating and using an editorial calendar for a couple months and see if you don’t notice a marked improvement in your post quality and consistency.

I’m going to show you how you can write with authority and inspire trust by providing you with information and techniques you can apply to your writing. People want reliable information they can trust. A trusting readership is a platform from which you may launch anything you like, including ethical monetization efforts which will succeed.

In the recent past, I helped a friend of mine change direction for his blog as he shifted from one type of work to another, related field. His problem was that his announcement was very meek-sounding and wishy-washy. It had no boldness to it, nor did it speak with authority. Because of this, my friend’s decision appeared arbitrary and he made himself seem as though he lacked the skill to excel in his new field. Nothing could have been more untrue, but he hurt himself with his writing.

All it took for him to really improve his game was for me to tell him what I’m telling you in this article. Now his writing is much more mature, solid, and bold. He speaks with authority, which inspires trust in his skills. You can do this, too. I’m going to tell you some of what I told him and more (more because this is general and the context is different). Here we go:

Know what you’re talking about in the first place

Does this really need to be said? Considering all the blogs out there about how to make money online by people who aren’t earning a dime online, I’d say yes. You must know what you’re talking about, or game over. Are you an expert in your subject?

Prove you have experience

Prove you have experience in your field by relating it to your audience. I just did that in this article’s second paragraph when I told you the story of my friend. I do it on my own blog in order to sell blog consulting services when I relate the successes of my clients. This technique cannot be applied to every post you write or your writing will be formulaic and repetitious. How are you proving to your audience that you have trustworthy experience?

Begin with a strong lead

Go back to the beginning of this article and read the first sentence again.

It is matter-of-fact and it tells you what you’re going to get from this article. It is a statement without flourish or slight-of-hand with the wording. In journalism, this is known as a strong lead. When you write sentences before your main point in order to set up your main point, in nearly all cases you are weakening your writing, which weakens your authority. Telling readers exactly what they’re going to get from reading an article isn’t the only way to do this, as Brian Clark shows us here, but it is a simple and effective method anyone can use. Are you beginning your articles with strong leads?

Remove qualifiers from your language

Would you feel that I carried authority and was trustworthy if my first paragraph read like the one below?

I would like to show you how you too might be able to write with authority and inspire trust by providing you with information and techniques you can hopefully apply to your writing. I believe that people often want reliable information they feel they can trust. In my opinion, a mostly trusting readership can be a platform from which you may launch anything you like, including ethical monetization efforts which have a good chance to succeed.

Of course I exaggerated for effect–but not by much! Wishy-washy language communicates to others that you are unsure of yourself. This creates an unpleasant dissonance in the mind of your reader, who wants to see you an expert, but you undermine this with your language. Your writing must sound confident and sure of itself in order to be authoritative and inspire trust.

Ignore feelings of inadequacy that spring up inside you as you edit your writing! I know this is common, and I used to experience it myself, but I do not any longer. That is your inner saboteur whispering to you. Tell it to shut up and take a hike. Show a little courage. Remember that readers want to see you as an expert. You need to meet them halfway and sound like one.

Command your reader

Yes, that’s right, I said command. When I told you to go back and reread the first paragraph above, did you do it? Have you noticed that the headline to this article and each sub-head is a command? I’m not being a bombastic blowhard. But I am telling you what to do, and that is exactly what you want. After all, what did you read this article for? To learn how to write with authority in a way that inspires trust. How are you going to do that if I don’t tell you? How could you trust me if this article isn’t a good example of its own precepts?

Never deceive, always keep your word

Trust is something that builds up in the minds of your readers over time, and it can be shattered with a single deception or broken promise. The perception of your authority is transformed into an ugly sense of betrayal in the minds of your readers. One of the great things about blogs is that they are like one giant sales brochure in the form of posts and comments. Over time, if you can prove that your word is good and that you can follow through, your readers will trust you. If your blog is for business marketing purposes, this is a most precious achievement. Are you doing anything on your blog that if your readers found out they would lose trust in you?

Authority challenge

Writing with authority is a conscious decision. So decide. You can begin to apply these techniques to that blog post you have in draft right now. If part of your problem is that you need more knowledge or skill, get it as fast as you can, because everything you write between now and then will be a waste of time.

Tell me about a post you wrote where you applied these techniques in the comments below. Let’s work together to provide more examples for everyone. I will freely make recommendations and point out good examples so that the whole group benefits.

A quick post for a busy week:

Right outside my apartment building, just around the corner on Hollywood Boulevard, is a huge advertisement for Grand Theft Auto IV. Not being a video game guy, I had no idea this game was coming out, so the billboard was my first exposure to it.

“Oh for the love of god,” I thought. “Here we go again.”

Every time one of these games comes out, there’s a bevy of opinions flying about: Concerned parents ask if someone won’t please Think Of The Children; feminists complain that the games are insensitive to women; gamers complain about everything, claiming that it’s Just A Game and we should all Get Over It. I’m not a gamer myself, and for the most part couldn’t care a whole lot less about the matter, but I know I’m going to see posts about it for at least the next week or so.

Well, I shouldn’t be so morose. It’s a pain, but it’s also a blessing.

The great thing about popular topics is that they’re popular. It’s potentially a direct line to a popular post; if you’ve already managed to garner a decent audience, your readers are naturally going to be interested in what you’ve got to say about the Next Big Thing. It doesn’t have to be as big as a video game that gets its own billboards on one of the most traveled surface roads on the West Coast; it could be some new app that’s popular in your niche, or a development that’s set to change the way people do business in your field.

Here are a few approaches you may want to take when there’s something everyone is talking about:

Resist the urge. If you run a political blog or a gaming blog, it might make sense to talk about GTA. But if you don’t, it doesn’t — it’s that simple. Offering your opinion on every possible issue doesn’t make you a pundit, it makes you a loudmouth.

Make the complexity work for you. Too often, we boil the issue of the day into something binary: Either video games are too violent and misogynistic, or they’re not. And even though just about everything is more complex than that, we still tend to reserve our creative thinking for the rationale we use as to why we picked the side we did. But if we just spent a few more minutes brainstorming (instead of rushing to get a post up), chances are, we’d find a unique take on the situaiton.

Use it as a segue into something more relevant to your niche. See what I did there? I wasn’t about to write a post about what I think of Grand Theft Auto — it doesn’t matter to this blog’s readers, and as I said, I don’t really care about the whole issue anyway. But it did give me a great lead-in to this week’s post. Which, you’ll notice, is about a wholly unrelated topic.

It’s like your mom used to say: If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump off too? Okay, actually I don’t think anyone’s mom says this anymore. Mine never did. But it’s true. And what would you rather do: Jump off the bridge, or try to figure out why everyone else is jumping off, and give a wry and humorously incisive analysis of it?

A few days ago my girlfriend and I were taking the Metrorail to Chinatown when she pointed out a poster advertising the train we were riding — the multitude of stops, the easy-to-understand schedules, the clean and safe cars.

(That sounds silly, I know. It’s like those companies that run ads during their hold music — Why are you hustling me? I’m already here.)

“Read that poster,” she said. “Doesn’t it look like it was written by a fourth grader?”

Indeed it did: Lots of simple sentences. No words longer than about seven or eight letters. No complicated wordsmithing. Just short, gentle, unchallenging copy.

I told her what many copywriters and journalists already know: While it may not have been written by a fourth grader, it was written with the understanding that people without much of an education would be reading it. The writers knew they had to target a very broad audience, so they cast a wide net when it came to reading comprehension skills.

I’ve always felt it’s one of the most insulting ways to address people.

Lately I’ve been working up a new Wordpress blog that lists the many ways our world is slowly turning into the world of Idiocracy. For those of you who haven’t seen this scarily prescient Mike Judge film, it’s the story of a regular-ish guy named Joe who’s cryogenically frozen for 500 years. He wakes up to find himself in a dystopia of famine, environmental disaster, and — most strikingly — extraordinarily low IQs. Mass marketing has dumbed down the population so much that farmers now water crops with Brawndo, a Gatorade-like sports drink advertised as having “what plants crave.”

The result is a worldwide famine. Nobody understands why Joe would want to give the plants water (”Like out of the toilet?” they ask). Brawndo has electrolytes, they say. It’s got what plants crave. It says so right there in the ad.

I think the Metro ad we saw is one of the many steps to a world exactly like the one Mike Judge imagined.

It’s not a good idea to alienate your readers with complex phrasing, eclectic references and an expensive lexicon of terms that make them reach for the dictionary. But the alternative isn’t to treat them like idiots.

So: How do you reach the widest possible audience while still maintaining an intelligent voice?

Back in my journalist days I knew a sports writer named John. John was very cool in a very geeky way — he reminded me of Toby Radloff. And he would always cluck his tongue at me when I complained that my editors were too hard on me when I tried to write “smart.”

“Write at no more than an eighth-grade reading comprehension level,” they’d say, and I’d get mad and stuff my articles with as many five-dollar vocabulary words and heady references as I could without derailing the topic. Penury! Sin Qua Non! Fifty Four Forty or Fight! Then it would all disappear by the time it reached the page.

“You’re doing it wrong,” John would say. “Your writing should be more than a reaction to the constraints placed on it by your audience.”

He was right: The fact was, my audience did have a pretty substantial portion of readers whose education had gone in a different direction than my own, and who might be turned off by my a lot of my choices. My job as journalist was to inform, and I couldn’t do that if my readers were turned off by my writing.

Another of John’s pearls of wisdom solved my problem.

“Write simply and directly. But don’t patronize. I always try to include just one good vocabulary word per article. If it’s a good article, your readers will want to pick up the dictionary to find out what it means, or ask someone else what it means. One word is always simple enough to look up, but they’ll only do it if what you’re writing is compelling and page-turning for every moment up until the point at which the word appears.”

The Metro poster did none of this. It used what seemed like a series of simple, five-letter words and simple, declarative, five-word sentences to convey an idea. Whoever wrote it clearly thinks that, if you are the kind of person who rides public transit in Los Angeles, you have the brain power of a four-year-old.

I wish I had taken a picture of it. But I’m sure you know the kind of copy I’m talking about.

Also, maybe point zero zero one percent of Angelenos ride the Metrorail. Not saying there’s a correlation there, but there you are.

Don’t do what this poster did. It’s a bad idea to marginalize your audience by talking over their heads, but it’s even worse to marginalize them by talking down to them. Because if enough of us talk down to our audiences, eventually that’s what they’ll come to expect. They won’t want the kind of fast-moving, compelling wordsmithing John encouraged me to write. They’ll want subway posters that tell them the Metro is a good thing.

They’ll want writing that has what plants crave.

A few weeks ago I blogged about an unpleasant experience my girlfriend had looking for a good online tutorial. In that post, I mentioned how disappointing it is when writers post content just for the sake of posting content.* The sheer volume of information on the Web makes it a lot easier for readers to switch channels if you don’t give up the goods.Yesterday, Sharon gave some great advice on what to do when a post falls flat; today I’d like to point out five surefire ways to avoid just such a situation, by outlining five ways you can disrespect your readers, insult them, or just plain waste their time:

Don’t deliver on your title’s promise. The brilliant Copyblogger reminds us that every title we write is a promise to our readers — a promise that we will deliver to them as much value as we’re able. Don’t write a tutorial that doesn’t give detailed instructions, or a list post that reads just like every other list post on the same topic. As a writer, you’re asking me to spend valuable minutes of my life on your blog. Don’t waste my time with something I could have figured out on my own.

Write posts solely to generate hits and/or comments. You could get thousands of hits and hundreds of comments a day by writing a blog about how Ron Paul is the worst presidential candidate ever, or how Firefly wasn’t really a very good show, or how you finally played Halo and you don’t see what all the fuss is about. That’s because these three opinions have one thing in common: While most people in meatspace don’t really care about them, they’d be hotly contested on the Internet. Don’t broach overexerted topics unless you’ve got something truly original and inspiring to say.

Use grammar and spelling that defy human comprehension. Personally, I’m kind of hoping that when the Internet finally becomes self-aware and declares war on the human race, the first ones to be herded into the Robot Appreciation Camps will be those who perpetually misuse apostrophes. A typo here and there isn’t a dealbreaker, but if you’re going to try to make your living by writing, it’s pretty important that you master the basics of the language you’re writing in.

Pirate ideas, or just plagiarize wholesale. Yeah, this happens. And the worst part is, most of us don’t know if we’re reading a pirated post. The writer of the pirated material might not even know. But if you do it, you’ll know. And Santa will know. You don’t want to make that guy mad.

Let everyone know, without prevarication or hesitation, how unrelentingly awesome you are. There’s a big difference between personal, observational writing and self-aggrandizement. Don’t be shy about voicing your opinion, but don’t write down to your readers or assume you’re smarter than they are. And don’t get into flame wars with other bloggers (unless, of course, it’s very entertaining).

Looking at this list, I’m finding that much of what I’m saying boils down to one thing: Say something original and coherent. Look at the best content on the web — just about all of it stems from fresh, creative thought. It’s harder to generate, for sure. But your readers will thank you.

*A few commenters argued that the tutorial in question was actually perfect, because it drew visitors who would then search the site’s advertisers for an answer, bringing in revenue for the bloggers. I remind these persons that providing a substandard product in the naked pursuit of profit renders irreparable damage to one’s soul and integrity, and invite them to swim, Scrooge-McDuck-like, in their undoubtedly huge vats of gold Krugerrands, their self-worth untrammelled by the fact that they spoke out in support of offering a shoddy product in exchange for a few extra bucks.