This is a fascinating video from TED by Clay Shirky on the largest increase in expressive capability in human history – the social web. It’s about 17 minutes long and worth the view.
Favorite quotes by Clay Shirky from the video:
“What matters is not technical capital, it’s social capital.”
“Tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. It isn’t when the shiny new tools show up that their uses start permeating society. It’s when everybody is able to take them for granted.”
“The moment our historical generation is living through is the single largest increase in expressive capability in human history.”
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If the front door doesn’t catch people’s attention, they won’t come in. The headlines of anything you write – blog posts, email subject lines, ads, etc., are like doors. It doesn’t matter how great the content is inside if nobody opens the door. So your first job is to get people to want to come inside. Darren Rowse from Problogger wrote a blog post on 15 Ways To Rework Your Next Blog Post Title.
Obviously the article’s focus is blogs, but I think the 8 tips for writing compelling blog post titles are applicable to all headlines. It’s really a small and basic lesson in copywriting. For your convenience I’ve reprinted the first 8 tips, though I recommend you read Darren’s entire post here.
1. Communicate a Benefit – a title should tell readers something that they’ll ‘get’ by reading your post. 2. Create Controversy or Debate – not suitable for every post title but there’s nothing like Debate to get people checking out a post. 3. Ask a Question – in my experience posts with questions in the titles tend to get read more than others – they also are better at stimulating comments from readers. 4. Personalize Titles – for example: using ‘you’ in your post title (and post) can have a real impact and take a post from the realm of ‘theory’ into a more personal post. 5. Use Keywords – keywords that signal to readers and search engines what your post is about can help draw in significant traffic if you use them well. 6. Use Power Words – Not all words are created equal – some evoke a powerful response in readers – words like ‘free’, ’stunning’, ‘discover’, ‘warning’, ’secrets’, ‘easy’ etc all work well in my experience of blogging. 7. Make Claims and Promises – as long as you can back them up in your post – a big claim or promise can get someone’s attention. 8. Humor Titles – be careful with this one – funny can work great but it can also leave your readers very confused if it’s too cryptic…. or if it’s just not funny.
By the way, all these tips are also applicable to Twitter. Your Twitter tweets are really just headlines. Posting links to content with creative headlines you come up with is a great way to hone your headline writing skills.
Tracking however is essential to do this so that you can see which headlines get the most response. Sometimes headlines I think are great end up flopping and ones I think are duds get hundreds of clicks. So make sure you track! My favorite tools to do this are Budurl and Hootsuite.
A few weeks ago I got an envelope in the mail that really caught my attention. It was in a translucent envelope through which I could see the following card:
I pushed the other mailed aside and opened it at once. I had to see who it was from. It was from Enthusem, a company that makes sending personalized printed greeting cards as easy as sending an email.
I know of other options that let you send a single printed greeting card but what I think makes Enthusem really ingenious is that you can attach electronic files like videos, PDFs or web pages just like email. The recipient gets a unique “Pickup Code” which they type online to see.
They even provide reporting that tell you when the recipient sees your online attachment. Which means your direct mail campaigns are measurable.
The cost is based on credits. The more credits you buy at a time, the less the cost of sending a mailer. Although the cost is reasonable, I wouldn’t use it for mass random mailings. But if you strategically select customers, prospects, or colleagues, the return on investment could well be worth it.
This combination of the card AND the online attachment really make the difference.
Standing out is no longer enough, you also have to be memorable. I experienced it first hand and Enthusem is definitely both.
To give Enthusem a free try, click on the button below:
I haven’t tested all of them myself, but I thought I’d list them here and have you try them out yourselves. I have my eye on one in particular that looks promising.
Here are the five:
1. AdGridWork.com is a blog advertising network and link exchange.
2. iLikeToBlog.com is a wordpress plugin and also link exchange.
3. TweetBeep.com is the Google Alerts of Twitter. You can set keywords that you want to be alerted on, so you can jump in or follow conversations you’re interested in.
4. Twtqpon.com besides being the strangest and hardest to pronounce social media domain ever, it allows you to create coupons exclusive for your followers (or tweeps). The domain is supposed to be short for Twitter Coupon. Yeah, I know. Go figure.
5. Adcause.com This service allows you to place ads inserted between your Twitter feed. I tried a similar service several months back out of curiosity but decided I just didn’t want to turn my feed into a tweetboard (billboard). If you do decide to use it, don’t abuse it lest you annoy your tweeps and they hit the "Unfollow" button faster than you can say "Twtqpon".
So there you go, try them out and come back and let us know how they worked out.
Last week I wrote a popular blog post about 5 tools that can help you leverage your time when it comes to managing friends and tweets on twitter.
One of my twitter friends jokingly said Twitter and time-saving in the same sentence was a contraction. I agree. That’s why it’s important to use the tools properly. Here is my post:
![[Post to Twitter]](http://advancedincome.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-twitter-big4.png){kind=icon}
I agree. That’s why it’s important to use the tools properly. Here is my post:
