Headlines is a tricky thing. The world of headlines writing is different from the normal world of writing and grammar rules for articles. Many new rules are invented and many established ones are trashed due to the punch needed and the paucity of space and characters. In fact, Headlinese is a special word coined for the language used in the headlines and the rules around it.
While many articles are out there for bloggers on how to write titles that work best with the searches and key words, it is also important to be grammatically consistent. Specially if you want your blog to carry weight in the minds of educated readers. After all, those who have learnt English properly will find your writing jarring even when it carries important information. Let us go through 8 important lessons in writing good headlines for maximum impact.
1. Keep ’em Short: Long Headlines hurt in many ways. Most importantly, they are truncated by several sites which may carry your articles. Also, it takes away the punch that may draw any reader to your article. As Ogilvy says, Headlines are 80% of the whole impact.
2. Don’t copy the lede: A lede is the introductory section of a news story that is intended to entice the reader to read the full story (or excerpt in the case of blogs). Don’t simply copy the words from the lede into the headline or it will be jarring and repetitive!
3. Should be here and now: The headlines should be direct, straightforward, in active voice, and in present tense. The idea is to make the headlines as powerful as they can be and not be “beating around the bush”.
4. Don’t be vague and inaccurate: Correct, consistent and factual headlines always help. Those which are inaccurate, inconsistent and vague having little or no relationship with the body of the article and the points therein or just plain inaccurate on their own show the writer in a very bad light!
5. Headlinese has its own rules: Headlinese is the word used for abbreviated writing style that is used in newspaper headlines. Some of the rules, contrary to normal grammar rules in similar sentences, have become the norm around the world. Editors have acknowledged the paucity of space and characters and the need to convey ideas in a short format. Some of the important and interesting rules of Headlinese are:
6. Capitalize or not to capitalize: The jury is out there and it has become a matter of individual choice. Whatever you do, follow it consistently. So, the choice is – The first word in the headline should be capitalized as should all proper nouns vs capitalize the first letter of every word. But surely follow the following – Capitalize the first word, capitalize the proper nouns, and do capitalize the first word after a colon. If you choose to capitalize every word as per your choice, then follow it consistently.
7. Bring on the numbers baby: In the headlines, it is always recommended to use the numbers and not spelling them out. Even if that number is below 10, you don’t need tto spell it out.
8. To be or not to be is the question: Verbs like to be, is, was etc are not necessary and should be omitted. Unless it is absolutely necessary for clarity, these verbs shouldn’t be part of the headlines.
Image source: Flickr
Blogging is a creative pursuit, as is writing and advertising. For those who pursue it seriously… and full time, it is not just a creative expression, but also their livelihood. It is then something that needs to monetized.
In those two pursuits – Creativity and Revenue – lies a conflict at times. How do we create something awesome and make sure it sells? This has been the challenge for every advertiser for ages as it is now for every blogger.
So, to get some help, I thought it would be useful to go to that icon of advertising, David Ogilvy. In his book “Ogilvy on Advertising”, Ogilvy gives his top advise on how to do saleable creative work. Sometimes ruthless, sometime simple, but always looking at the end in question.
Ignore this great advise at your own peril if you want to make your blog BIG!
Image source: Flickr
Here is a very good list of tech blogs, social news, offline and online publications from US and other countries, which can be very useful in promoting one’s products and blogs. If you have an RSS feed reader then these may actually be great places to source your news from.
United States
Tech blogs
– Techcrunch.com
– Mashable.com
– Venturebeat.com
– Readwriteweb.com
– Arstechnica.com
– Businessinsider.com/sai
– Gigaom.com
– Webware.com
– Centernetworks.com
– TheVerge.com
– http://tech.yahoo.com/blo
– Allthingsd.com
– Techland.com
– Lifehacker.com
– Slashdot.org
– Boingboing.net
– Techdirt.com
– Technologizer.com
– Dailytech.com
– Paidcontent.org
– Inquisitr.com
– Makeuseof.com
– Techweb.com
– Sitepoint.com
– Techvibes.com
– Killerstartups.com
– Networkworld.com
– Infoq.com
– Building43.com
– Xconomy.com
– Techrepublic.com
– SiliconAngle.com
– Splatf.com
– BetaBeat.com
– TechCocktail.com
– Tech.li
– Pandodaily.com
– GeekWire.com
– Medacity.com
Social news sites
– http://news.ycombinator.c
– Digg.com
– Reddit.com
– Metafilter.com
– http://buzz.yahoo.com/
– Newsvine.com
– Fark.com
– Mixx.com
– Dzone.com
Online tech publications
– Wired.com
– http://news.zdnet.com
– http://news.cnet.com
– http://tech.yahoo.com
– Oreilly.com
– Eweek.com
– Huffingtonpost.com/news/t
– http://sciencedaily.com/n
– Discovermagazine.com/topi
– http://money.cnn.com/tech
– Osnews.com
– Infoworld.com
– Itworld.com
– Internet.com
Offline and online tech publications
– http://newscientist.com/b
– Technologyreview.com
– Informationweek.com
– Pcworld.com
– Pcmag.com
– Fastcompany.com/topics/te
– Scientificamerican.com/co
– Makezine.com
– Entrepreneur.com/technolo
– Popsci.com/technology
– Extremetech.com
– Computerworld.com
– Cio.com
General publications with tech sections
– http://online.wsj.com/pub
– http://bits.blogs.nytimes
– washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn
– ft.com/companies/technolo
– http://brainstormtech.blo
– usatoday.com/tech/
– newsweek.com/id/38590
– forbes.com/bow/b2c/catego
– businessweek.com/the_thre
– http://latimesblogs.latim
– sfgate.com/technology
– siliconvalley.com
– observer.com/tech
– idg.com/www/idgproducts.n
Twitter lists
Robert Scoble’s list:
– http://twitter.com/Scoble
Mario Sundar’s list:
– http://twitter.com/marios
TECH PUBLICATIONS AND BLOGS FROM OTHER COUNTRIES
United Kingdom
General publications with tech sections:
– guardian.co.uk/technology
– telegraph.co.uk/technolog
– theregister.co.uk/softwar
– theinquirer.net
– bbc.co.uk/news/technology (and bbc.co.uk/news/business-1
Blogs
– Silicon.com
– Thenextweb.com (UK/Netherlands)
– kernelmag.com
Spain
– wwwhatsnew.com
Germany
– T3n.de
– Gruenderszene.de
–
Deutsche-startups.de
– Basicthinking.de/blog
– Netzwertig.com
Ireland
– Siliconrepublic.com
India
– Pluggd.in
Israel
– Go2web20.net
Featured Image: photo credit: Jason A. Samfield via photopin cc
There are different styles of approaching a blog. Knowing how you propose to position your blog, you may want to treat it in different ways. Here is a very interesting presentation discussing the different styles of blogging.
Guest Blogging is a very useful way to popularize your own blog and create more and more visitors. Many people disregard this great way to market and promote one’s own blog. Bt what are the concrete benefits of Guest Blogging? Here is a great infographic that explains the usefulness of guest blogging.
Drupal is the most popular Open Source software for content management. On the other hand, Alresco is a top Open Source alternative for Document management. Although, both have features that can make them interchangeable in some scenarios, but their combination can be very powerful.
A little more on Alfresco for the uninitiated.
Alfresco is a free/libre enterprise content management system for Microsoft Windows and Unix-like operating systems. Alfresco comes in three flavors:
I found a video on how to integrated both these applications and create a strong Document-Content Management platform for your company.
Crowdfunding for social programs and for start-ups is growing. In fact now, common public will be able to invest in the IPOs for crowdfunding projects. Using the WordPress, one can create a very useful website. Here are a few good themes to help you create one of those sites, if you want to start one of those websites.
Crowdfunding theme
Here are some of the features:
Funder: Crowdfunding theme (UoU Apps)
This theme uses the Astoundify Plugin and Easy Digital Payments, uses the Bootstrap framework. The theme is very beautiful and user friendly.
Fundingpress: Crowdfunding
Fundingpress is a WordPress theme that allows you to create your own crowdfunding site.Users will be able to create projects that are brought to life through the direct support of others.
Fundify
This theme has many outstanding features and has multiple gateways to use.
Franklin Crowdfunding Theme
This theme is responsive, elegant, and light theme. The main features are: unlimited colours with 6 pre-set colour palettes, 8 background textures, 5 custom widgets (Campaign Updates, Campaign Video, Campaign Pledge Levels, Campaign Backers, Sofa Posts), widgetzied campaign page, blog section and more.
If you were thinking of starting a site like Yelp, then some of the WordPress templates provide some really excellent opportunities. Most of these themes are either called “Business Listing” or “Directory” themes.
Let us look at some of these.
Directory theme from Templatic
The Directory theme is by far the best alternative you have. Although, predictably, a bit expensive. Specially with all its add-ons, which make it extremely powerful! It is a true Yelp alternative in many ways.
The features are really excellent and include the following:
The Add-ons for this theme which make it really powerful are:
Event Manager: $49
Ad Manager: $39
Multi-Rating: $39
Admin Dashboard: $39
Prevent Duplicate Entry: $9
The theme is for $99. So the total of this entire package will be around $265.
Glocal Directory Theme
This is another excellent Directory theme. The Glocal Listing theme has the following features:
The site is available from Themeforests.
Atlas Directory and Listings Theme
One can use the theme to register, login, edit your profile, submit listings, change your membership and so much more from the front-end as well as has a built in membership system.
Business Finder Directory Theme
This is another beautiful theme with a lot of great features.
Geothemes
This theme has taken many avatars and now it is a real kick ass theme!
Portals are the future of interactive net option that individuals and the corporations have. This includes the ability to have social networking tools and blogging. Gartner recently came out with its analysis of the “Horizontal Portals” in the market and categorized the different options in different quadrants. First, let us understand what they mean by Horizontal and Vertical portals.
Gartner defines a portal as a Web software infrastructure that provides interaction with relevant information assets (for example, information/content, applications and business processes), knowledge assets, and human assets by select targeted audiences, delivered in a highly personalized manner. Enterprise portals face a range of audiences, including employees, customers and partners, and serve a range of business functions.
A portal product is a packaged software application used to create and maintain enterprise portals. These products can be used to design vertical or horizontal portals:
- Vertical portals focus on providing access and interaction with specific applications or business functions.
- Horizontal portals integrate and aggregate information from multiple cross-enterprise applications, as well as from various line-of-business tools and applications.
Here are the main guys:
Drupal is the only major blogging / portal application used in the broader blogging market by regular bloggers.
This is what Gartner says about Drupal and its strengths and weaknesses.
Drupal is the most widely adopted open-source package for publishing and managing websites, active in over 800,000 websites, including the U.S. White House official site. Although the package is often categorized as a WCM system, it supports portal scenarios through an architecture that includes a hierarchical framework of components (modules) and database-backed content objects (nodes in Drupal 6, entities in Drupal 7). There is an ecosystem of add-ons and modules, which now number more than 20,000. Together with a sophisticated configuration mechanism, Drupal can be configured for a variety of scenarios, although it’s used most often for external-facing sites.
The Drupal ecosystem includes a large number of small to midsize system integrators and professional services firms. Among them is Acquia, a provider of Drupal technology and services that was co-founded by the author of Drupal (Dries Buytaert), that also offers Drupal-in-the-cloud services (Drupal Gardens).
Strengths:
Which portal do you think is the better one?
Drupal themes are tough to find which are good, responsive and with plenty of options. I looked through the themes which are Responsive, Good Looking and great for a Blog or a Magazine. Best is that these are all FREE! Here is the list.
Mundus Magazine by valic is one of the best magazine style responsive theme for Drupal out there. And, it is totally free!
Features:
Nexus theme by saran.quardz. These theme is great for a blog or a news magazine. Here are some of its features:
Features:
Here is a screen Shot:
Gratis by highrockmedia is a great theme for blogs and blog magazine. It is clean, nicely done minimalistic theme which we like a lot and it has a lot of great features!
Features:
Mayumi by JohnNoc is a Responsive theme for Feminine or “Girlie” blogs with again, a great set of features which makes configuration a lot of fun.
Features:
Media Responsive Theme by shanidkv is a great theme for a Business related site. It is light weight with a clean layout.
Features:
Fontfolio by israelshmueli is a great responsive theme for portfolio types of sites for photographers, artists and designers.
Features:
Malinis by JohnNoc is a nice responsive theme with modular scale typography, powerful grid-based layout engine and clean design. It is a sub-theme of Groundwork 2.x.
Features:
Featured Image – photo credit: xamanu via photopin cc
If you are a startup, there is always a question of how to blog such that you can relate to your customers and break through the clutter of thousands of blogs out there? Came across this very interesting questions and answers regarding this.
Of course, the common ones are – to create stories around your customers and to include customer feedback into your content. But some of the suggestion merit some thought. The one that stood out for me was “Creating an Actual Editorial Program”.
Consider an actual editorial program.
Take two startups as an example: Bundle and Of a Kind.
Bundle (personal finance) devised an attention-getting editorial program that dealt with consumer finance. They did interviews with people about their financial lives; they published actual journalism that addressed people’s very real concerns and behaviors about spending and saving. That was their audience for their services, so why not use those tools to draw people in?
More recently, Of a Kind (small-batch direct-sale fashion) decided that they didn’t want to just put up a product for sale; they saw that they wanted to inform and engage a community of potential customers, so they treat their ‘sales’ site like a magazine. This is smart. It helps people identify with the seller, with the product and with the company.
Actual editorial programs in all manner of service-related businesses bring attention, bring customers and bring value.
Another one that seems to suggest not directly focusing on the product per se is – where the writer suggests to claim the “space” and not just talk about the product. I agree.
Talk about your space, not about your own product.
If you are creating a task manager, write about productivity, workflow, etc.
This can go broader too, in this case, your target market is.. companies, startups. -> write about startups, about life behind your startup, how you decorated your office, what rules you live by, startup tips, … see where I’m going?
When you’ve done that, after you’ve “informed” your target market, you can take it one step further and teach them. Going from the example case again, teach them about productivity, teach them about running a startup, …
Your own product doesn’t matter, if you center your blog around your product, no-one will care. Base it around a space, a target market, now that’s another thing. And once you got them where you want, stealthbombing your product here and there is as easy as pie.
Finally, here are 10 succinct ways of making your voice heard via a blog and do well for your starup.
photo credit: Pink Sherbet Photography via photopin cc
Google’s new search algorithm update, Hummingbird is out. It is generating quite a buzz out there. Blogs and content sites are wondering how will this new change impact them. It will change fortunes of many. But how? And what direction should the bloggers and content marketeers work towards?
One important change is that most of the users these days come via Smartphones. So, it is imperative to have sites that cater to this audience. Also, in the end, the sites which deliver useful content will win. Nothing is more important than helping people out.
Here is a very useful Infographic discussing that.
We have a new kid on the block of blogging platforms. Ghost. The site gives the following benefits of the new platform:
It already has close to 300,000 users within a month. Ghost is Node.js-based and a minimalistic blogging platform. It still has a long way to go and has some basic features that still need to be added.
There are two major features still lacking from the platform: the fancy graphical management console and the hosted service. The graphical console with all of its fancy charts and graphs has been set aside temporarily while the core team focuses on making Ghost stable and functional enough for launch, but it should be making an appearance in an upcoming release.
Ghost is definitely going the WordPress way. They will come out with a hosted solution as well and later will throw in the custom domains as well.
The hosted option is also coming soon. Instead of needing to set up your own Web server, you’ll be able to sign up and create a working Ghost blog with only a couple of clicks. Custom domains will also be supported. The end result should be a service similar in scope to hosted WordPress.
One feels that the blogs does look nice.
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