The Copywriter Underground

In an era when 141 characters is considered simply too damn long, a “shorter” thesaurus makes sense – especially one that’s no further away than your Firefox Search Bar:

The Shorter Thesaurus site simply accepts the word you type, then returns shorter synonym – the perfect way to squeeze your latest Mastertweet under the limit.

Sure, it’s odd and weird and maybe even a little wrong, but if we can’t harness the power of the Internet to help us find better ways to communicate less, then why build the thing in the first place?

Best of all, a plug-in is now available for Firefox and Internet Explorer, and you can even add the Shorter Thesaurus to your Firefox search bar (while you’re on the Shorter Thesaurus page, simply click the drop-down list of search engines in your search bar and select “add THSRS”).

Bingo. You’re ready to create shorter, sweeter sentences.

The tool is found on the Ironic Sans blog site – a photographer’s blog that’s interesting enough that even a copywriter might want to add it to his RSS reader.

Keep writing (using shorter words if necessary), Tom Chandler.

With more copywriters business blogging for bucks (say that three times fast), and people now accessing streams of information more or less instantaneously, the dangers of the WordPress “Publish” button loom large.

Mis-type a word in a headline – or entirely blow your first paragraph out of the water with a half-assed edit – clicking Publish immediately places that post in your RSS feed , saving it for all to see and marvel at (for eternity).

It’s embarrassing when you do it on your own blog. But potentially expensive when you do it for a client.

The Feed Pauser plugin (WordPress only) helps solve this problem by delaying the Publish –> RSS cycle a user-specified amount of time.

In other words, set it for ten minutes, and you’ve got a whole ten minutes after publishing the post to correct any mistakes.

The post shows on the site, but isn’t placed into the RSS feed until your grace period is up.

Those headless posts you mistakenly send? Those half-finished drafts the world is never meant to see? Those headline typos?

Feed Pauser offers you a second chance to fix them, and like all great solutions, it does so simply and elegantly (no affiliation or financial interest on my end).

Regret is a powerful thing, especially when your own work is the source of it…

feed pauser, wordpress, wordpress plugin, blogging, paid blogger, business blogging, blogging for money

Amusingly, it’s now apparently OK to turn off the swirling tornado of notifications, alerts, bings and (bleeping) beeps that seem to define the working day for so many of us.

We can now move on to actually doing things until complete – one thing at a time – clear in the knowledge that its OK because it’s a trend:

via Singletasking: The Next Trend in Web Working?.

We freelance web workers multitask like it was going out of style. Question is, is it actually going out of style? Some people think so, and they look to singletasking as the next trend in how we work.

Singletasking is just what it sounds like: approaching and tackling one task at a time, sequentially, instead of trying to do a whole bunch of things at once, as has become de rigeur in our modern multitasking age. If you’re like me, the thought is probably at least a little refreshing, and maybe more than a little appealing right off the bat.

The principle is sound. Take on one task at a time, and don’t begin another until the one you’ve already started is complete. It sounds simple, but you know as well as I do that actually implementing that kind of thing in real life will take a lot more effort than you might first think. For one, it means ignoring any urge to procrastinate, and making sure that you prioritize very carefully in advance, lest you realize too late that what you thought was most urgent actually could’ve taken a back seat to something else.

I’ve got nothing against multitasking, except, of course, that it tends to get in the way of doing good work.

That’s why I tend to post here in spurts (when I’m busy, I’m busy), and why I find myself writing more and more using “clean screen” writing tools.

It’s also why the racy new notification system in Unbuntu Linux is mostly turned off.

I’ve got words to write and thinking to do, and if it’s one thing I’ve learned about twitter, Facebook, chat and email, it’s that the person on the other end isn’t doing to do that thinking for me.

Keep writing (with as few distractions as possible), Tom Chandler.

I admit it. I’m terminally unhip – at least when it comes to the latest, hottest, hippest, social media-esque uses of the language. In fact, I still think “sick” and “phat” are sorta bad things, which suggests somebody should take my blogging keys away from me.

Fortunately, Web 2.0 offers help even to the sad wordsmiths like myself: introducing Wordnik (found via Lifehacker, which had this to say about it):

Its value service, however, is the extra context provided by highlighted Twitter posts, Flickr photos, related tags, and other multimedia on the results page. It’s all spread out on a single multi-column page, but you can hit the sub-menus near the top to get a full page of any of them. Statistic geeks can also see how often words are being used online and the number of look-ups on Wordnik for a word. The site could be helpful for when you’ve got to get up to speed on something quickly and get a bit deeper than just a brief explainer.

There you have it Undergrounders: Words, served up Twitter/Flickr/Social Media style.

But before you type a word in the box, ask yourself this: Will it really help to know how a 13 year-old girl mangles a word? Just asking.

Keep writing, Tom Chandler.

wordnik, word definitions

My working day hasn’t grown less complicated over the decades. I used to openly mock techniques invoked in the service of productivity, but because of the temptations and interruptions of our connected lives, I now embrace them.

That includes my writing tools – a subject that remains at the core of writer geekhood.

One of the losses I experienced in my switch from Windows to Linux was the Q10 “clean screen” text editor (Windows only). It offered not only the dark, “no distractions” screen, but also a target word count and yes, a typewriter noise on every key click.

After testing the Linux-ready jdarkroom editor (which I didn’t like), I found Pyroom, which lacks the panache of Q10, but not its basic usability.

The Pyroom Clean Screen editor: Not many choices, but zero distractions.

Once I customized the colors to reflect an orange-on-black “Halloween” color palette that I found very easy on my eyes, I was off and running.

Even Old Writers Can Learn New Tricks

In my less tolerant moments, I’d tell you real writers don’t need gimmicks to put words on paper.

Today – in my more realistic moments – you’ll find me writing with distraction-free writing tools. (Hypocrisy, it seems, isn’t wholly the province of politicians and Wall Street.)

It wasn’t that many years ago that I wrote everything in MS Word, switching to OpenOffice after yet another expensive MS Office upgrade disappointed.

Today, 80% of my copy is written in a programmer’s editor or something equally simple (like Pyroom, which sadly lacks a spell checker).

I could go on and on about the reasons for using distraction-free writing tools, but the best is the simplest; I get more words written in Pyroom than in a word processor.

Words are the writer’s equivalent of a home builder’s pine two-by-four, and the more you get nailed together in worthwhile fashion, the happier you’ll be.

Those who haven’t headed off into the unknown with Linux benefit from a lot of choices surrounding distraction-free editors, some of which you’ll find profiled at the Bad Language blog, here at the Linux & Friends blog, or this at the Loose Wires blog.

Keep writing (any way you can), Tom Chandler.

UPDATE: For the hardcore among my readers, there now exists a computerized typewriter analog – with no ability to backspace or edit what  you’ve written. Thanks, but no thanks.

Teaching – done right – is really just learning in disguise. And what you learn when you teach is often what you already knew, though perhaps not as deeply as you should have.

I recently finished teaching the last local session of my Online Marketing Boot Camp. Aimed directly at small businesses, it was a reminder there’s life outside the twitter/facebook/blog echo chamber occupied by most freelance marketers.

My students were little interested in spending an hour a day generating “content,” and the challenge was to chart a path through the online marketing thicket that was appropriate (and realistic) for my micro-entrepreneurs.

Because my students needed more than an overview of all the possibilities, we found ourselves constructing an Online Marketing Map – a document outlining each businesses’ online marketing activities and the channels they’d use.

It’s hardly revolutionary. But it is grounding, especially in an era where a marketer has literally hundreds of options.

More importantly, I’ve discovered small businesspeople market best when marketing becomes a process – same as accounting or ordering supplies.

Too often – especially when overworked entrepreneurs are involved – marketing is the last job to get done, and yes, that realization also comes from grim personal experience.

Outlines? Or Graphics?

People learn differently, and in fact, that’s the source of my biggest struggle as a teacher. I’m an experiential learner, which is to say I dive into things and learn them by doing.

It’s not always the most effective technique (sometimes reading the directions actually works), and worse, my first response to students who want simple, basic, step-by-step directions is to just tell them to dive in and do it. What could be easier?

Turns out, a lot of things.

A sample graphic marketing map.

These differences played out even across the Online Marketing Map. I’m all about outlines, largely because I’m a writer (so I’m used to the format), and perhaps indecisive (I can change them easily). You can also easily add detail to an outline (just indent), and I like detail.

Some students did a lot better with graphic representations, so I pondered that for a while before constructing one in OpenOffice’s Drawing module (which was damned easy).

It lacked a certain level of detail, but the students were happier (especially the artists), and who am I to argue with success?

I liked the Online Marketing Map idea because I’m involved in one of my periodic reviews of my own marketing, both professionally and on my fly fishing blog, which I’ve decided needs to pay its own way.

And it’s never a bad idea to break out of your rut, asking yourself questions like:

• Am I working smart?
• Am I wasting time in unproductive channels just because they’re hot?
• Am I capturing the full value of prospects I do draw to my site(s)?
• Am I converting all this effort into sales and revenue?
• What am I missing?
• Can I back up any of the above with data, or am I rationalizing?

These are all good questions for freelance writers, especially when the economy is tough, and the number of media choices multiplies daily.

In the case of my trying-to-become-a-sustainable-media-property fly fishing blog, the Online Marketing Map exercise proved particularly useful, especially since advertisers are bound to ask them too.

I’m not done yet, but I’m already making decisions. Is it time you built an Online Marketing Map?

Ad agencies want to bill every minute of employee time to their clients, so they demand daily timesheets – which require each project have a unique tracking ID.

While I don’t track my time with such precision (any more), I have adapted my last ad agency’s job tracking system to my freelance practice, and while I’ve tried other methods over the years, I keep coming back to this simple, elegant system.

At the start of every year, I simply print a simple gridded spreadsheet with job numbers (each line increments by 1), and when I begin a new project, I pick up the clipboard/binder near my desk and assign that job the next number on the list (along with a start date).

The simple job tracking grid: fast, easy, and offline.

It couldn’t be simpler.

The Benefits?

Suddenly, each job comes equipped with its own unique job number, so I can simply note that number on everything associated with that job (copy files, invoices, passthrough costs, travel expenses, etc).

And because my numbering system begins with the year (“I started this year’s sheet with “2009100″ – the next job assigned will be “2009101″), I can tell at a glance which jobs have been invoiced (because yes, I do forget), which are finished, and even if a suspended job needs a tickler sent to a client.

More importantly, you’ll have a paper index of all your jobs – one that’s easy to scan, so you can tell at a glance which jobs are lagging, and which of your jobs haven’t been invoiced (yes, I have forgotten to invoice jobs in the past).

Every freelance writer develops an internal process for handling the business – and I’m sure there’s a technology-enhanced method for handling this one (if I wrote a lot of editorial, I’d probably integrate this into one of the PC or online submission tracking systems).

Still, simple offers a quality all its own (namely, it’s sustainable over the long run), and it’s hard to argue with what works, no matter how low-tech.

Click here to download the basic job-tracking spreadsheet in Excel format (.xls). Modify it to fit your process, and let us know how it works.

Keep writing, Tom Chandler.

Getting words on paper (excuse the archaic reference) is either our job, our passion, or our biggest roadblock.

Of course, writer’s block isn’t exactly new. What is new are some of the high-tech (and often high-comedy) techniques we use to deal with it.

One of the oddest is the “Write or Die” Web app (found via Lifehacker), which uses a highly questionable negative feedback loop to “encourage” you to write, and frankly, I thought it was a hoot.

Negative feedback loops typically fail over time (the lab rat [us] becomes acclimated, requiring ever larger doses of negative feedback to generate the same response), but it’s something you should probably try at least once in your writer’s life:

The idea is to instill in the would-be writer with a fear of not writing. We do this by employing principles taught in Introduction to Psychology. Anyone remember Operant Conditioning and Negative Reinforcement?

Negative Reinforcement “strengthens a behavior because a negative condition is stopped or avoided as a consequence of the behavior.”
Consequences:

• Gentle Mode: A certain amount of time after you stop writing, a box will pop up, gently reminding you to continue writing.
• Normal Mode: If you persistently avoid writing, you will be played a most unpleasant sound. The sound will stop if and only if you continue to write.
• Kamikaze Mode: Keep Writing or Your Work Will Unwrite Itself

These consequences will persist until your preset conditions have been met (that is, your time is up or you’ve written you wordcount goal or both).

Stuck on a project? Tell your client you would have finished it, but you simply didn’t find Rick Astley’s whining voice motivating enough (stop writing in normal mnode, and you’re punished with Mr. Astley’s singing, a violation of the Geneva Accords if ever there was one).

Keep writing (or else), Tom Chandler.

write or die

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Sometimes the world shifts imperceptibly underneath you, and though you notice something has changed, the difficult part is figuring out what to do about it.

For years, almost every commercial project I wrote was typed into in a heavy-duty word processor. But today finds me writing more blogs, landing pages, emails, and other “live” Web content.

And all the formatting applied in those word processors – and the sizable overhead needed for all the features I don’t need – get in the way of a good workflow.

And yes, after my switch from Vista to the more streamlined Linux OS (Ubuntu), I took a hard look at my workflow.

In the past, I typically wrote a few large projects simultaneously. Today, I’m more likely to juggle a lot of small projects.

Then there’s my list of blog article ideas for the multiple blogs I write. How do I keep track of those?

Simple. Steal From Programmers.

The simple text editor is a thing of wonder; little comes between you and your words, and the software pops up almost eagerly.

Still, after playing with several editors, I realized I needed more than a text editor – and turned a programmer’s editor into my online copy word processor.

My Trout Underground blog project – the tabs at the bottom represent four of the 14+ files in the project.

“A programmer’s tool,” you say? It’s perfect (almost).

Programmer’s editors are fast and streamlined. They’re simple text editors on steroids – my two candidates also offer word count, spell checkers, very advanced search, and HTML cheat sheets – though many of the programmer’s features simply don’t apply to your average copywriter.

The key feature? It’s the – the “project” or “session” function.

Save Time With Projects

Different editors call it different things, but a “project” function allows you to save multiple files in a single project, so opening that project opens all those files.

For the blog/article/engagement marketing part of my business, that’s a godsend.

I created separate projects in my editor for each of my blog/engagement marketing projects (one for the Trout Underground, one for the Copywriter Underground, one for… you get the picture).

I start each day by opening each project in its own tabbed window (each file is a tab). When a new article idea rears its head, I simply open a new tab, type the headline, add any thoughts or links, and then “save” the project.

Next time I open the project, all my article ideas for that project pop up.

Throughout the day, all my projects windows are open, so I can steal a few minutes and work on an article – with little time lost to overhead.

Of course, that’s a blessing and a curse; I’m also confronted by my half-finished articles, unstarted articles, and the articles-with-promise-but-require-too-much-research. The universe, it seems, is yin and yang.

I Name Names

In the Linux world, I’ve settled on the Bluefish editor (actually a Web development editor). Gedit is the Gnome editor that does largely the same thing once you add a couple plugins (it’s a little slower adding HTML code, but a little better actually writing).

In truth, a lot of programming editors will do the job.

On Windows, I believe Notepad++ is free, fast, and does everything needed. I’m less familiar with Mac editors, but BBedit and TextMate are likely characters.

I can’t say I’ve fully entered Valhalla – Bluefish would be better if it offered inline spell checking and a running word/character count instead of modal versions of the same thing – but fewer ideas are being lost to a busy workday, and I’m managing a lot of small projects far better.

What’s Next for Writers?

The trend towards online copy is obviously not going away, but few tools have developed in response to that change.

Blog editors help make blogging easier, and a programmer’s editor makes simply online writing easier, but we have yet to see a single “online writer’s editor” that offers everything today’s largely online copywriter needs.

That includes things like speed, toggled HTML markup, file and project management, running word/character counts, the ability to post to blogs (including all the category/keyword/SEO stuff) — and all with enough formatting to send prettified documents to clients (including sample landing/Web pages with graphics represented).

Some word processors do act as virtual databases for the files, notes and links related to a single project, though they seem better suited to longer works (like novels or white papers) than short online articles.

Of course, no writer thinks their word processor/editor/pen is ever exactly right, which is part of the fun of this whole odd career.

The “online word worker” is a relatively new category, and I expect we’ll see the tools we like tailored to the job.

Keep writing (in whatever software suits you), Tom Chandler.

writing, writer’s tools, online copywriter, copywriter, freelance copywriter

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Regular readers know I’m a fan of lumpy mailers. They’re powerful self-promotion tools – the kind of tactic that invariably finds your pitch on the desk of decision makers.

Of course, they’re not just a short-run tool used for self promotion. They’re also a damned effective direct mail tool.

And yes, as email and other ecommunications take the place of physical mail, I can make a cogent argument that the perceived value of dimensional mail is climbing, not diminishing.

Direct Mail magazine published a roundtable discussion of “dimensional mail” in a recent Technique article, and yes, I get all tingly when I see intelligent thought directed at one of marketing’s most-overlooked techniques.

Simply put, it’s worth a couple minutes of your time. To whet your appetite, here are a few excerpts:

What you’ve created is that moment where it’s just your target and your offer. And if your present is something they can play with for a moment, that’s good. If it’s something they show to their neighbor, even bet­ter. If it’s something they keep and use often, that’s great. And when they respond, you hit the jackpot.

“So the next time your creative depart­ment comes to you with the choice of another No. 10 letter for $1.25 per piece, or a box — that present — that rattles full of opportunity and costs $5 more, don’t dismiss it — not if your goal is to get your message into your custom­ers’ hands.”

-John Brogan, Executive creative director, Catalyst Direct Inc.

“Dimensional print offers an even more potent marketing alternative than just any piece of direct mail. Viewed from virtually any angle, dimensional mail is a best-of-breed hybrid.”

-Mary Bittel, Manager of marketing& communications, American Slide Chart

Intrigued? Read the whole article here.

At the very least, dimensional (or lumpy) mailers are another tool in your copywriter’s toolbox – a truly effective one that few new copywriters understand.

Keep writing, Tom Chandler.

dimensional mailer, lumpy mailer, direct mail, direct mail news

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