HelenaB Communications » Kitchen Sink

How to Write Effectively About Complex Topics

Helena Bouchez — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 02:33:58 +0000

One of the payoffs of mastering a discipline is that you gain command of a new language composed of precise, extensive vocabulary that enables you to understand and transmit new ideas to others at your level of mastery at the speed of light and with pinpoint accuracy.

While those words shorten the time you need to communicate with your peers, when communicating complex ideas to non-experts or experts-in-training, you can’t take any of those shortcuts. And your writing must be as clean as the board of health.

That means no extra words, lots of transitions, and the frequent dropping of anchors back to foundation knowledge. It also means defining — as you go along and in simple terms — every single word you use that is not a part of common language.

If you’ve done your job, the novice who reads the piece should assimilate a good portion of the new information without struggle, because the new information links back to things they already know.

If people choose to read your piece again, it’ll be because they want to commit the information to rote memory or think about it again using a different lens – not because they didn’t understand what they read the first time.

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5 Tips for Creating Content — Consistently | FunctionFox Newsletter

Helena Bouchez — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 16:29:57 +0000

In the February 2012 Functionfox.com newsletter, I provide clients of web-based timesheet and project tracking system Function Fox with some tips on how to keep the content monster fed and happy. Read the article: 5 Tips for Creating Content — Consistently.

(P.S. I use the FunctionFox Timesheet program to track and report on client time. Awesome tool.)

More on Weaving Findable Content with AdWords

Helena Bouchez — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 14:58:02 +0000

The purpose of last week’s post ” Weave a findable content tapestry with Google Adwords,” was to convince you that, in addition to producing content consistently, you must also begin to be conscious of the key word content in your posts, to ensure that your missives actually will be found. (Ensuring they are read and shared, well, that is another post .)

To reprise: Using the Google Adwords search tool is great for finding relevant (if basic) key words and phrases that you can incorporate into your posts. It’s a great way to get your feet wet. If you’re new to SEO, go back and hit that post first and play around, then come back here, because this post assumes you’ve played with the Adwords tool and are starting to grasp the concept.

Adwords is a great place to start, but as @randfish from SEOMoz points out in this post cautioning us to be careful when using Google AdWords, to get the real gold, you have to dig. Once you have culled the basic words, you should go back and type in other key phrases that you think or know people are searching on to find you and that will kick out a whole different list of suggestions.

To keep track of these, create a spreadsheet. Then, when you are scheduling your posts in your editorial calendar, schedule in the keywords you’re going to roll in, too.

The key to success here is to work at it a little bit at a time, consistently. Push the snowball, as Chris Penn posted recently. Maybe you create an event around it such as “Keyword Wednesday” where you spend the last 15 minutes of your day searching for new phrase options. The important thing is that you begin to address the need.

I’m not claiming to be an expert in SEO. My job is to call your attention to things that are critical to your business’ success, help you understand their importance and get you moving. Convinced? Want to find out and do more? Here are two good resources: SEOCopywriting and SEOMoz.