Raisin Hell, Nice People, Free Stuff and More: Wordful Wednesday

Welcome to the real Wordful Wednesday, not the 29,000 other Wordful Wednesdays you’ll find on Google.

With that said, let’s start with this:

• SEOBook says in a recent post

…given the existence of Twitter, would you start a blog that pointed out interesting things on the internet? The time for a blog pointing out interesting things on the internet has clearly passed.”

A fair observation, but not entirely true. Twitter and other social media platforms may be the modern day nexus for interesting things, but there’s no efficient way to gather and publish this information to a focused audience. Blogs have the advantage here.

Hint: harvest good links from Twitter to republish on your blog. Just don’t turn into this.

• Tweet of the Week, not sure who started it, but found it here:

Best bloggers speak with their natural voice. If you can’t be yourself on your own blog, why even bother?

Being yourself on your blog is the only way to truly succeed. Just look at any big name blogger–are they pretending to be someone other than themselves? Read more about being genuine here and here.

• Here’s a great example of a truly niche blog: http://raisin-hell.com. Author David Gillespie dishes out all the right elements here: focus, passion, well-researched data, usefulness and a worthy cause. The subject (why sugar is poison that makes us fat) is controversial, which turns up the intrigue factor.

• I owe another thanks to Copyblogger once again, not for copywriting wisdom but this article that led me to Naomi Dunford of Ittybiz. She and Sonia Simone started a (so far) free course called Marketing For Nice People. You should sign up and listen to the call on copywriting for nice people. It healed me, really.

MFNP is for people who hate selling things but have to. Naomi and Sonia remove the anxiety of having to think and act like a marketer (artists and expressionists–listen up).  About Naomi: she has a foul mouth, but I like that. I have a foul mouth, too, but not in public.

• Good ‘ol David Risley once again makes the best of free speech with another rant on the state of blogging and what’s wrong with America. His rant: stop being a zombie and start thinking for yourself. Then start helping other people think for themselves. I quote:

Be a force for good in this world. Do what’s right. Encourage excellence.

David is proof in the pudding. His blog isn’t just his business tool, it’s also the platform for his deeper and evolving ideas about life. Such is the beauty of blogging.

• Seth Godin summarizes the concept of free on the web in this post. If free is so free, how much value does free really have? Is this antithesis of sticker shock?

• Last and certainly not least is Mary Ellen James’s “Quick Five Step Guide to Revising and Editing.” So far it’s the best guide to copy editing I’ve seen, aside from Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. Mary is a strong advocate for clarity through basic grammar and word conservation. I especially recommend “Step three: Clearing the Clutter.”

I’ll end this post with Mary’s quote:

Editing is where the real work of writing lives.