(Note: I received a free, pre-release digital copy of this book from the author.)

I’ll say upfront that this review is probably biased. That’s because I read Marcia Riefer Johnson’s ’Word Up!’ on a smartphone while zipping around on the trains of Tokyo. Part of an ongoing experiment into my preferred digital and analogue reading habits.

It must have been good because I consumed almost every page using a device that’s much easier and safer to hold on busy trains than a tablet. And now, a few weeks later, I’m typing up this post on that very same smartphone while flicking through the ebook on a laptop. (By the way, Marcia also covers the perils and pitfalls of writing for readers with small screens.)

That said, Marcia has written a very entertaining and educational resource for any of us who wince when reading their own work… but then want to know how to improve it.

In other words, as its byline reminds her readers, this book’s all about “How to Write Powerful Sentences and Paragraphs (And Everything you build from Them).”

The thing is, ‘Word Up!” has value to me as both an author of science fiction and as a b2b commercial writer. My blogging schedule decided where this review would be posted but I want to point out that the book’s relevance to fiction and to non-fiction is a credit to Marcia’s own skill as a writer.

’Word Up!’ isn’t a ‘style guide’ although discussion abounds, sometimes humorous (‘sorry’, but my style on this blog slips between US and UK English…), on how “skilled writers make writing work.”
Marcia outlines this requirement for competency in a writer as a “command of the language”; noting that, “there’s no app for that.” Of course, such a creative tableaux includes the bundled vocabulary of grammar – something Marcia addresses in a pragmatic way throughout the book . (Read the ‘Up with (Thoughtful) Prescriptivism’ section to get an idea of how she rolls.)

The book’s three-part structure consists of a series of short discourses about words, moves on to sentences and paragraphs, and concludes with advice on the business of writing. Meaning that these delightful essays can be read in any order (although I went through them sequentially.)

My favorite section was titled ‘Decisions, Decisions’, in which Marcia applies many of the book’s lessons to one of her writings. Behind-the-scenes peeks into the working mind of an experienced writer are invaluable and I’ve read this section twice and will no doubt refer to it again.

Will ‘Word Up!’ make better business writers out of marketers, executives and engineers? Perhaps – especially if they continue to critique their own work after the initial draft’s been soaking in the subconscious for a day or two. At the very least, readers will have a better idea of what to avoid and what to do about it.

For professional wordsmiths I think this book is an invaluable reminder of the magic and power that words, sentences and paragraphs can be imbued with. Reading ‘Word Up!’ will help you choose more of them with care. Highly recommended.

You can find book excerpts, exercises, glossary, a blog and much more at Marcia’s ‘Word Up!’ website:
http://howtowriteeverything.com/ 

I was recently asked to write a proposal for a freelance b2b blogging project. The prospect is an I.T. networking corporation, and they already have a blog with some excellent marketing content.

So, Why the Need For a Freelancer?

Well, they’re growing very quickly and their marketing department is probably overworked (sounds familar?)

Add in the hassles of managing the content-creation efforts of employee-bloggers who are also executives, and I think this is what’s driving the requirement for a freelancer.

Many readers will be aware that regular, quality blogging takes both time and energy – attributes that senior staff often have little to spare for ‘secondary’ projects such as blogging.

True, it’s possible to have a ‘cheap’ freelancer cobble together several hundred words of corporate ‘gobbledegook’ and pass that off as a ‘blog post.’

Ghostwritten B2B Blogs – What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

The problem with this approach is that few online readers, even your most ardent fans, will come back for repetitive helpings of dullness. (Bland is the new boring in the blogosphere.)

Effective ‘ghost blogging’ in an executive’s voice requires research into how that person communicates in both professional and personal capacities. (Here’s where a recorded chat with the executive can be very helpful.)

Even so, it can still take a number of posts before the freelancer’s content is worthy of being called a ‘ghostwritten post’ – and this is why I usually turn down most requests to write individual posts. The ROI isn’t there to justify the background research required.

Think ‘Win-Win’ Freelance Content Marketing

The exceptions are where the project scope widens to include case studies, white papers and eventually a longer term arrangement (think, ‘retainer’). The payoffs for the client can be substantial in that they have a freelance resource already ‘trained’ in their products, services and marketing messages.

I welcome enquiries from IT networking companies worldwide who are interested in the benefits and payoffs to be gained from a regular freelance content marketing arrangement.

Well, here we are in 2013 – the ‘Year of the Snake’, in these parts – and I’d like to begin by drawing your attention to a new white paper resource on LinkedIn.

It’s a private group started by Gordon Graham, a very experienced white paper writer.

Gordon’s site is thatwhitepaperguy.com and he’s also just finished authoring a new book called, “White Papers for Dummies”.

His LinkedIn group, ‘Get More From Your White Papers’, only launched around Xmas 2012 time and has 35 members when I checked today.

Some of LinkedIn’s large b2b marketing groups have not been my cup of tea because the ratio of useful discussion to self-promotion was too low.

And I’m just too busy to wade through pseudo-spam these days.

However, this one looks like it will be a useful place to discuss how to get more from white papers. I’ll be dropping in only a handful of LinkedIn groups this year, and Gordon’s is on that list. If you become a member there, please feel free to say ‘hello’.

This post’s an update on the video interview I did recently with IT Pre-Sales Engineer, Matthew Norwood, via Skype.

The 18 interviews have now been transcribed and uploaded to my YouTube channel: samuraiwriter99.

You can also find a landing page on this site for the video series here.

Although I’d never met Matthew before and know him only from his blog and twitter presence, I think we got on quite well.
Mainly because of shared interests in IT networking and the effective use of social media channels.

I’ve encountered pre-sales SEs in previous corporate IT roles as a technical instructor for a vendor, and as a networking engineer for various multinationals. The best of them were able to overcome a prospect’s natural skepticism of sales people (and occasional cynicism directed at vendor vaporware!),  by quickly understanding and empathizing with their technical, business and financial challenges.

If account managers could be (somewhat unfairly, in most cases) sterotyped as ‘always be closing’ then their long suffering SE sidekicks evened things up with ‘always be consulting’. I learned a lot from talking to pre-Sales SEs at the bar, as well as in more formal business settings. They had so much technical knowledge to share about comparative solution selling (within the bounds of NDAs signed and unsigned.)

In this freelance technical marcom writing role I get to communciate mostly with marketing types and account managers.

And that’s OK.

However, now and then I welcome the opportunity to hear more about what lies (no pun intended!) behind vendor bells and whistles, and the endless dog and pony shows.

I believe this helps sharpen my writing by cutting out waffle and vagueness.

Anyway, enough of my ramblings.

I encourage you to check out the videos and, if you’re so inclined, to like and share them via whatever social media channels you are comfortable with.

Although Twitter’s a goldmine for discovering information nuggets, it does take time to digitally pan for the real gems.

Fortunately, Sonja Jefferson and Sharon Tanton’s book, “Valuable Content Marketing“, landed in my in-box after a twitter request by Sonja for early reviewers (it’s scheduled to be published in early 2013).

Today’s post is my review of their book, and loosely follows this mind map I made (in FreeMind) while reading it.

 

1) Who is this Book for?

Let’s start with a quote from page two:

Don’t ever try to sell me on anything. Give me ALL the information and I’ll make my own decision.

Marketers, especially those in professional services and IT, who recognise that selling and marketing has tilted irrevocably in favour of buyers, will find this book of value. Why? Because the Kanye West quote (a ‘rapper’ btw) highlights what more and more people expect from businesses when they are looking for a possible solution to a problem.

UK-based readers will find it of particular interest because Sonja’s company is based in Bristol and many of the examples mentioned are from the British Isles.

Even so, marketers worldwide, looking to see where and how value is added to the “content marketing” buzz meme, will also benefit from at least checking out the case studies. I visited at least 10 of the sites discussed in the book and all were functioning well and ‘content rich’.

2) How is the Book Structured?

There are three parts to this book:

a) Why ‘valuable’ content?

b) Tools

c) The process of ‘valuable’ content marketing

Why valuable content? - The first 39 pages cover how buyer behaviour has changed with the rise of the Internet and the concurrent increase in customer choice and influence.

Once this case has been made, it’s natural to describe the tools and processes that marketers can use to differentiate themselves from the competition and become that “trusted advisor” and “authority site”.

By the way, the reference to UK comedian  (Bob Monkhouse) in my mindmap is very apt to the ‘adding value’ proposition. (Google for “Bob Monkhouse Joke Book Stolen”, and you should be able to work out why he’s mentioned in this section of the book.)

Tools – the content marketer’s portfolio, everything from blogs to video, is described here. Experienced marketers will probably have read most of this before but the book’s target market is mostly small/medium-sized businesses. Many of them may be very hazy on how these content elements fit together.

To their credit, the authors seem to have thought long and hard about positioning their book as a good introduction to the tools and processes of creating valuable content, all the while recognising that it is not possible to cover everything in sufficient detail in one piece of content (i.e. the book.)

This thinking has resulted in the book being a funnel (for those interested in more detail) to the valuable content website, the online hub of their own marketing business. It’s reassuring to see marketers ‘walking their talk’ – this is something they are ‘teaching’ by example in almost every online interaction I have had with them.

Two topics in this section caught my eye.

a) Reference to Google’s Panda 2.0 and beyond… things change quickly here (‘blame’ Google!), but I didn’t see any reference to the pros and cons of overdoing specific anchor text from inbound links: just a reference to the importance of anchor text for inbound linking and offsite SEO.

That advice stills seem to be correct but the balance between the equilibrium point for a mixture of random anchor text (e.g. ‘click here’, ‘link’ etc) and specific link text (e.g. ‘valuable content book’) is likely to be a topic of importance for some businesses. Probably a good topic for some future blog posts on their site!

b) Content Before Designers - this refers to the unfortunate situation of a website project being run by the designer, but with the writing tagged on almost as an afterthought. The message is: DON’T!

As a b2b freelance writer, I have felt the pain of this approach directly.
The preferred way is to involve designer and writer at the earliest stages. (From experience, it’s even better if writer and designer are working together as a partnership, usually with the designer as the main project manager. Such combinations are worth the extra premium because of the value, service and efficiency applied to a client’s requirements.)

Process – the final two chapters describe the authors’ recommendations on a seven-step process for designing and creating ‘valuable content’ and these tie together the main elements introduced throughout the book.

Chapter 13 details their 7-step process while chapter 14 gives advice and tips on how to write this valuable content. Together with the resources section at the end of the book, these pages are among the most useful for readers wanting to put their advice into action.

3) Conclusion

I particularly liked this book because of its UK-focussed approach. There are, of course, many great content marketing books from US-based authors and I’ve learned a lot from them too.

I’m a great believer in studying success, and then applying it to my own environment and aptitudes. If a reader did nothing else but model what the authors are doing with this book and their digital business ecosystem, I think it would be well worth the investment in time and effort.

Recommended.

You can find out more about the book at this link.