How a marketing thesaurus can improve your website content

Transcript: Famously Nabokov said—or infamously, perhapsit’s now a synonym for that too – said, “There is only one school of writing, thatof talent.” And it’s axiomatic that you can’t teachtalent. Of course you can’t. But what you can do is instill certain principles,and the avoidance of ugly repetition is very important. Repetition has its uses and anything is betterthan trying to avoid repetition through what they call “elegant variation.” This is an example from a biography of Lincoln:“While in Chicago he appeared to back concessions to the South. In New York he seemed to support…” You know, there’s no point in using a differentword when there’s no change in meaning. And that’s just something that the writerwas taught when they were 12— never to use a word twice in a sentence. And they’ve become terrorized by that andthen addicted to a new “ingenuity” where you avoid it. But I’m talking more about sounds and rhythms. The Nabokov novel we know of as Invitationto a Beheading was originally called – not for very long – Invitation to an Execution. Now Nabokov said, “Of course I avoided therepetition of the suffix so chose to call it Invitation to a Beheading rather than Invitationto... See more →

Key quotes:

• "If you use the app consistently for weeks you’ll get badges in your weekly reports with fun facts."
• "You have to copy and paste the text you want analyzed into a box and you’re good to go."
• "You have three basic settings: This tool can help you in 2 cases: Coming up with an awesome headline for your amazing copy is not easy."
• "If your headline is close to 70 or it’s more but you’re shooting for the moon and you’d like to improve it further check out the full report to see the parts you can enhance."
• "The right balance of common, uncommon, emotional, and power words is another thing that makes a headline great."
• "As the name would suggest Read-able is a readability test tool that uses widely accepted readability formulas to see if your copy is up to par."

Key quotes:

• "Image Credit: KopywritingKourse.com What better way to make sure you’re writing about stuff your audience actually wants to read than by actually asking them? For example, you can use the research tool to do online research on the topic you’re writing about, find quotes or educational information, and so on (see #4 on this list)."
• "If you’re all set on a topic but need help with organizing your writing so it’s interesting to read, you may want to check out our free, downloadable blog post templates or ebook templates, depending what you’re writing."
• "For HubSpot customers, Composer is a new distraction-free writing tool that helps writers easily turn their brainstorm ideas and research notes into a blog post."
• "(Read this blog post for more tips on simplifying your writing.) Here’s another tool that’ll assess your writing — but this time, it’ll assess it depending on your specific target audience’s reading level and which content they relate to the most."

Key quotes:

• "Your content person is obsessed with words — that’s why they write! Giving your writers a bunch of different content written with varying degrees of skill and in different voices creates extra work and potentially hurt feelings for those who don’t understand the editing process."
• "So don’t ask your copywriter to write things you’ve heard a million times before."
• "This is the most important time to guide your copywriter versus giving them no direction and a list of changes and edits at the tail end of a project."
• "It’s not our jobs as writers to derive meaning from a creative brief where not a lot of thought was invested."
• "For example, I was once given a creative brief that said the tone needed to be “formal and fun.” Uh, come again? You need to know what these phrases mean to you and your company — they should be defined for anyone writing or creating any sort of marketing materials."
• "Your copywriter needs specifics to focus their tone and make sure they’re meeting your expectations."

Transcript: Hi there, my name is Emma and in today's video We are going to look at, five ways to improve academic essay writing Okay? Or TOEFL writing, IELTS writing. This doesn't have to do with when you write a letter to your friends. Okay? We're talking specifically about formal writing, maybe business writing, or academic writing. Okay, so let's get started. My first tip on how to improve writing is do not use contractions. Okay? And again this is for academic writing. Awesome "don't," "can't" "shouldn't," "couldn't," "wouldn't", "isn't," "haven't," "hasn't." Okay so it's the short form of, (Two Words Put Into One) for example, "don't" is the contraction of "do not." Okay? So, it's better to actually write out the word in full in academic and formal business writing. So, instead of "don't," use "do not." Instead of "can't," use "cannot." And notice how with "do not," it's actually two words. "Cannot" is just one word. "Shouldn't" becomes "should not." "Couldn't" becomes "could not." "Wouldn't" — "would not." "Isn't" — "is not." "Haven't" — "have not" "Hasn't" — "has not." Okay. So don't use these, use these. Okay. So now let's look at Tip #2. So Tip #2 is... See more →

Key quotes:

• "Having agreed your marketing strategy, you’re now ready to build your marketing plan, and launch campaigns."
• "Look at your business and find your strengths and weaknesses, your value proposition, your competitive advantage, your target market."
• "Okay, marketing strategy agreed, time to work on your marketing plan."
• "#2 — If you don’t review your marketing plan and all your campaigns, how will you know whether they’re working? E.g."
• "customer choice, new competitors entering your industry, new products launched, channel conflicts, economic downturn, competitors outranking you in search engines SWOT analysis finished, now it’s time for another acronym — TOWs."
• "TOWs analysis allows you how to exploit your strengths to maximize your opportunities and minimize threats."

Key quotes:

• "From keyword research and content ideas to organization and tech stuff — we’re covering it all."
• "These inputs should get you enough information to start trimming the big list — to get the “winning” keywords and phrases."
• "If you’re working in a large organization, you may want to talk to the people from customer service and sales departments — they know your customers best."
• "Related to the previous point, you may want to include other colleagues to the content creation process."
• "There are two pieces of software you’ll want to use: first, there’s the project management software, and second — note taking apps and services."
• "There are many great services that could help you prepare images to be used inside articles — we prefer Canva, but you can easily “get away” with Photoshop if you know what you’re doing."

Transcript: Whether you're writing content for a blog post or an email the readability of your content is an important factor content that's hard to read will simply not convert you want to keep your content short and sweet learn how to improve the readability of your marketing content first what is readability this refers to how easy your content is to read there are various scales and techniques for measuring readability but the most used is the flesh Kincaid readability scale generally scores 60 or higher are considered highly readable if you want to test the readability of the top pages that appear in search engine results they'll likely have a high readability score the flesh Kincaid readability scale and other methods look at three main factors in your content the examine the number of sentences per paragraph they look at the number of words per sentence and they factor in the average characters per word if you want a high readability score the first place to start is with sentences per paragraph try to limit your paragraphs to two or three sentences your visitors won't enjoy reading large blocks of content break your content into smaller paragraphs next you... See more →