Writing Advice Never Changes. These 22 Tips Are From (Almost) 22 Years Ago - They Still Work
I used these 22 writing tips to grow an online professional community from zero to boom. The basics of writing don't change. They won't change either, despite the fire, fury and, agony around genAI.
Online writing tips don’t change. They just get repackaged for the different publishing platforms every few years.
How do I know this is true?
This morning I found a list of “AIIM Expert Blogger” recommendations for contributors I recruited in 2010. Everything I wrote then remains useful today.
This list itself is an update of one I had shared with my magazine’s online columnists starting around 2001.
In 2010, my role changed from magazine editor to online community manager and inbound marketing.
We went from no community in December of 2010 to full-fledged, working online community platform in April 2011. As a professional member association, we already had a built-in advantage with a community based on that membership, in-person events, and emerging social media channels.
My piece of the pie was creating and sharing content useful to our members.
Below is a lightly edited list, with a few extra thoughts, I shared with our expert contributors 15 years ago. Their contributions – along with an interested community of professionals – led to a robust online community. I facilitated the online engagement and then mostly stayed out of the way.
If you’ve done any reading or research about what and how to write online, the below will be familiar.
Have a Topic and Focus On It
While I do believe that niches are a dead end, you do need some broad container for what you're writing about.
For me, it’s “marketing” or “business marketing.” That leaves plenty of room for me to explore aspects of psychology, writing tips (obviously!) and AI/genAI (from both a writing and IT perspective).
For my contributors it was the enterprise content management industry (now morphed into Intelligent Document Processing). Here’s how I told them to focus.
“Content/information is a business asset. We help folks figure out how to use that asset.
I’ve often joked that “No one reads this stuff for fun.” Our primary goal at AIIM, and with these blogs, is to provide USEFUL information to our community. While provocative, flame-throwing, in-your-face pieces have their time and place, for the most part, keep that word, useful, in the back of your mind as your write posts for the AIIM community.
You’ve become an AIIM Expert Blogger because, er, you have expert knowledge on one or more aspects of the ECM puzzle (discovery, ERM, capture, SharePoint, etc.). We want you to write about what you know. While we may have recruited you as an “ERM blogger or SharePoint blogger,” you aren’t limited to only staying in your lane. Stretching out and talking about multiple topics is a good thing.
Let’s focus on information that helps readers get from point a (confusion) to point z (answer), and the multiple steps along the way around how someone can manage and use content.”
Our “niche” was managing unstructured content so it can be effectively used to achieve a business goal. Even as a relatively small subset of the IT industry, there was (still is) more to cover, write about, and do than time to master all of it. That’s even more true today as these tools serve as the foundation for the LLMs that drive genAI and autonomous AI agents and the ongoing need to remove paper from business processes.
Every niche or general topic you choose will be like this, so don’t worry about locking yourself in.
General Writing and Topic Suggestions
Other than commentary in brackets, this section is unedited from 2010.
Whether vendor, consultant, or end user, we've approached you because you are an expert. You live with these issues daily and know them better than we can. What follows are a few general tips/ideas/suggestions for how to write as well as what kinds of articles to write. If you have any suggestions, please share them. Writing can be hard and I'm always looking to learn a new trick to share.
Great resource: www.copyblogger.com is one of, if not the, best source of online writing tips I've ever found. I can't recommend subscribing to it highly enough. I get at least a great tip each week, if not more, from reading it. [Still true. I would add Marcus Sheridan and Anne Handley, Content Marketing Institute, Neil Patel, and MarketingProfs. Pick one or all them; they’re each great in their own ways. Don’t over-indulge in expert resources. Find a few you like and trust; ignore or dabble with reading the rest.]
[Be useful]: I often joked that no one reads inform (or e-doc or AIIM E-DOC Magazine or, lastly, infonomics) for fun. My job as an editor has been to deliver articles for my readers that help them do their job better. We should be USEFUL to our readers; not 100% of the time, humor and flights of fancy have their time, but for the most part we should provide ideas that get readers thinking about what they’re doing in a different way or help them address their business challenges better.
There are a variety of different types of posts you could write:
Straight-forward advice: Here's an issue, here's how I solved it.
Tips and tricks: similar to advice, list of 3 or 4 or 5 strategies for addressing a particular business or technical challenge.
War story: personal story of something that went really well (or even really poorly).
Opinion: what's going on in the industry that bugs you? Stir the pot. Don’t be afraid to take a stance on something, pro or con.
Call to action/asking for advice: Are you experiencing a problem that you're having a hard time figuring out? Use your blog as a platform to ask for advice/opinions from others.
What’s Keeping You Up at Night? What sorts of challenges have you scratching your head or pulling your hair out (or both at the same time)? Technology? Strategy? Staffing? If it’s a challenge for you, it’s most likely one for other folks too. Write about it. Best case, we’ll generate some discussion and maybe a few suggestions from the community will arise. If nothing else, you’ll at least be able to vent a tad.
Feature-type article: Just as you would for a magazine.
Title is critical. Simple, accurate, and descriptive seems to work best. [The title is a promise/advertisement for what’s to come. As a promise, you need to deliver on it. As an advertisement, the headline needs to stand out and make someone want to spend time with your words. Agonize over your titles – a great way to get better is to write 10 daily.]
Write in digestible chunks. [People read on their phones. Giant blocks of text send folks fleeing from your content.]
Lists and bullets are great. [Anything that breaks up text without breaking the flow and making it choppy is a good thing.]
If an entry exceeds 500 words, try to provide subheads (mini-headlines) throughout the piece to break up the text. Think of them as a bread trail to lead the reader through your points. [I told folks 500 words because that’s enough to convey a single idea, but also short enough not to freak out busy professionals.]
Don’t be afraid to write a long post. Our stats show that if a long post is good, people will read it through.[I REALLY wish I had saved Google stats from my time at AIIM. They were good. Research continues to show that longer content gets shared on social media more and is viewed as more authoritative by the search engines. The range seems to be from 1,600 to 3,000 words, depending on who’s writing the research.]
These are your columns. Be personal. Give first hand anecdotes. Share. [Being yourself has been a winning strategy since people been people.]
Write about things that you are seeing that are interesting or that you think others in your situations would need to understand. If it's interesting to you, there's a good chance it's going to be interesting to the community. [If you’re bored with]writing it, the reader is likely to feel that boredom.
Don’t be alarmed if something that you write, that’s really good, doesn’t seem to generate a response. Web readers are fickle. While one can develop a good sense of what’s going to attract eyeballs over time, one is never going to be 100% accurate. A Led Zeppelin now and then is to be expected. Don’t worry about it. (I wrote this one 3 years ago; it’s as applicable today as then – I’ve taken to blaming the tides for why various posts are read/not read.) [Throw in the various algorithms changing willy-nilly and this is even more true today. Consistency is the only way through to growing an audience that expects and wants to spend time with you.]
Write like you write. I’m not interested in having all bloggers sound the same. Write in whatever style is comfortable for you. [Authenticity again. Publications with a single style are boring to me. Plus it would have been literally impossible for me to edit everyone and get anything else done.]
If you are looking for a style manual, I prefer Chicago There is a bit of the manual’s advice online. http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/home.html. In general, don't worry about it. See point above.
Please spell check your entries before publishing them. [I expect at least one typo in everything I do, but I try for perfection every time.]
I encourage use of the Oxford Comma. I think it adds clarity. This is my favorite explanation as to why: http://weknowawesome.com/2011/09/30/the-oxford-comma-strippers-jfk-and-stalin/ [The Oxford Comma RULES!]
Link to other blogs, articles, etc. as often as possible/is relevant to what you’re writing. [Still an important tactic to keep people on your pages, though Google has begun to downgrade links in search.]
This is obvious, but don’t use this platform to sell your products/services. [We had more vendors and consultants contributing than end users. They all got my “NO ONE CARES ABOUT YOU” talk.]
This is a community. We encourage you to read your fellow bloggers and agree (or disagree) with them. Start a conversation. Challenge each other (politely). If you read something interesting (anywhere, not just within the AIIM network), reference it and link to it if it inspired you to think about something in a different way. [Yep; Sharing is caring!]
If you want to embed video and/or illustrations to make a point (or just to add visual interest to your blog), within the boundaries of fair use/copyright, please do. [Video is even more important now and you should use at least one image for every piece you write.]
A final word on length. We tell everyone to shoot for 500ish words because that’s short enough to be written quickly, but long enough to quickly make a point, ask for help, tell a short story, etc. Remember, these don’t have to be perfect. They don’t have to be articles. Of course, research is great and you'll want to sink your teeth into something a bit meatier and write a bit longer post at times. A mix of short and long articles is a good thing.
Being a Person and Personable Has ALWAYS Been Important
Because this is your blog, and personality/writing is what will keep readers coming back, I thought it would be a good idea to have a “Getting to know you” type post. I’d like to give readers a sense of who you are beyond the bio. Here are a few suggestions to get you thinking:
Why are you interested in managing content? What gets you jazzed and excited about the technology?
What keeps you up at night?
How did you get to where you are?
I’ve included a few questions below that I worked up for the 15 Minutes section of Infonomics (any resemblance to the questionnaire from “Inside the Actor’s Studio” is purely intentional).
You don’t need to answer the Q & A (though you can), these are here to jog your brain and get you going. We just want people to get a look at the person behind the blog.
What do you do and how did you get there?
What was your best day at work? Worst?
What are you proudest of?
What is your No. 1. goal today—and what is your greatest ECM-related challenge?
What are your three favorite websites?
What are the three greatest books ever written—and what’s on your nightstand today?
What are the three greatest movies of all time—and what’s the last one you’ve seen?
What was your first concert—and what are the three greatest songs on your iPod?
This is not a mandatory post, but something we think would be great to have from the start if you are able to write something along these lines.
[“About” pages are often a top 10 page on websites. Use it to your advantage. Show some personality and why YOU are different from the company down the street that does the same thing you do. The writing that is succeeding best today involves personal stories and perspectives to break through the blandness. While I’m not sure the approach I suggested still works, putting yourself into your work IS a recipe for success.]
Setting Expectations
This isn’t the reason for this post, but I’ve included my short list of expectations – from BOTH sides – for completeness. And it might help you set expectations with others, or yourself, for your online writing.
What We Expect From YOU:
Two/posts a month (more often is fine too!)
Post content is educational and provides tips, thoughts, suggestions, etc. around the myriad issues surrounding managing content and using that content as a business asset. For vendor bloggers, this is not the platform to talk about your product or methodology.
A regular posting day, with a 3-day window to make your regular posting day (the day of and the day before and after).
You will post YOUR content to our blogging platform. Your content – no plagiarism.
Let us know if you’re going to miss a few posts for vacation or if your “day job” ramps up for an amount of time. Writing is hard and we appreciate the amount of time it takes. However, if you miss posting a “few” posts in a row, or just disappear (it’s happened), we will have to drop you as an expert blogger. This is not an irrevocable banishment – and the community manager will look with kindness on bribes for reinstatement. Seriously, it’s hard, let us know if you need a [limited!] break and we’ll talk it through.
What You Can Expect From US:
AIIM will remind you two days before your blog entry is due.
You can ask for editorial help/support at any time (bduhon@aiim.org). However, unless specifically requested, AIIM will not edit blog posts before posting.
We will promote your posts (and you) in as many ways as we can: social media, our in house newsletters, and anything we can think of. Additionally, non-vendor bloggers are often considered first-choice selections for speaking opportunities with AIIM.
We will provide input and topic suggestions on an ongoing basis and you’re always welcome to ask for feedback.
The More Things Change, The More They Stay the Same
Writing is frustrating.
It’s also how we think.
With marketing, it’s how we connect with new and existing customers.
The platforms will change. Tactics will change.
The basics of writing content that connects and helps?
That’s the little black dress of content marketing and never out of style.
Ready to turn content and your inbox into a growth engine for your business? Newsletter-in-a-Box gets you from blank page to first send in four weeks. Email me at bryant@simplyusefulmarketing.co or book a quick call and let’s start filling your customers’ inboxes with value and your pipeline with leads.