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How I used a blog to attract thousands of subscribers my first week.

Why I make six figures and you don’t.

How I quit my day job and now I work all day in my robe and slippers while my wife brings me lattes.

Ever seen headlines like these before? Find them at least a little compelling?

Like every good headline, they exist to attract attention and convince you to keep reading. They’re trying to get you thinking about how to use a tool like blogging to make lots of cash.

But there’s something in those big promises that misses the mark.

Now that I have some experience under my belt as a blogger making an online income, I’d like to talk about the missing ingredient of those pitches.

It’s not about your blog

Lance Armstrong has a great book out called It’s Not about the Bike.

In his case it’s about one of his testicles. To be more specific, the one he no longer has.

The book is about how his bike became a vehicle in a bigger race than the Tour de France or his Nike deal, how his bike is a metaphor for life.

Lance and his tragic disease wouldn’t be famous without his bike. And as an online entrepreneur, you won’t be famous, either, without your blog.

That said, it’s still not about the blog. Not at all. The day you realize that fact is the day you’ll turn an essential corner toward reaching your goal of making a living online.

So what is it about, if not the blog?

It’s about your business.

Your blog and your business are different, yet related, things. The former is a sub-set of the latter. The difference is sometimes subtle, but it’s a critical one.

Your blog is a strategy, a branding and marketing vehicle, a means toward an end.

Your business is the money-making model. A product or service for sale.

Your blog isn’t for sale. It may be of service, but it’s a service you’re giving away for free.

Which means, if giving out free content is all you’re doing, or if your blogging has become the core deliverable of what you believe to be a business, your strategy is upside-down.

There’s nothing magic about a blog

When I started out, blogging not only seemed like a good idea — especially with all the voices that suggested you could get rich doing it — it was also incredibly rewarding right out of the gate.

Not monetarily. It was rewarding because of how it felt.

Connecting with people. Helping them. Sucking up all that nice feedback. Participating in a community, being part of a meaningful dialogue.

Those are, and should remain, part of the reasons you blog.

But if they aren’t your real objective, your end game — if making a living is an element you want to add to that mix — it’s time to take stock. Because it’s so easy to get lost in all that community stuff, the warm and fuzzy elbow rubbing, the sense of doing something helpful and worthwhile.

Which doesn’t pay you a dime until you actually sell something.

There will come a day when it hits you

You’ve been getting up in the middle of the night to perfect a post that will go out via Feedburner at dawn. You’ve sweated the syntax of your opening line and polished those nouns and verbs until you found yourself dreaming of your old high school English teacher.

You really care. You’ve become your blog. Just possibly, at the expense of your business plan.

It hit me recently in a post from David Risley, who is one of those “pro bloggers” who, if you don’t read him closely enough, or if you only hear what you want to hear, could lead you to believe that blogging will be the source of your new income, and sometime soon.

But on this day I did read closely, and what I saw there rocked my blogging world.

David, in essence, said this: blogs don’t make money. Businesses make money.

(You’ve seen that message here on Copyblogger as well.)

Your blog is the face of your business, the voice of your brand, the bait that attracts a following.

And yes, you give away as much as you can with it, selflessly and abundantly.

But until you have a product or service to sell, and until the blog connects to that enterprise in a way that actually begins to generate actual revenue in addition to pumping up your online reputation and ego, your blog is nothing other than you expelling positive energy into the universe.

Or, to put it another way, just so much hot air.

Looking for a free online resource that will teach you to think like a businessperson, not just another struggling blogger? Check out Internet Marketing for Smart People, the Copyblogger email newsletter.

About the Author: Larry Brooks is the creator of Storyfix.com, an instructional resource for novelists and screenwriters. His book, The Six Core Competencies of Successful Storytelling, will be published by Writers Digest Books in early 2011.

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The Critical Mistake that Keeps Bloggers Broke

A guest post by Larry Brooks of Storyfix.com. Image by [phil h]

We are all storytellers. Whether we’re writing a blog, an ebook, a cheesy novel or a killer screenplay, even an essay, article or report.

Without some semblance of a story at the heart of it all, what’s left is a masturbatory exercise in rhetoric. And if there’s one thing we know about masturbation, it’s that we’re alone.

Thing is, alone doesn’t get us paid. Writing for money is a team sport that demands we pass the ball to a publisher and then a reader somewhere down the road.

The differences in various forms of writing reduce to executional semantics. Which means, the essence of what makes us better writers remains eternal and therefore something we can practice and eventually master, no matter what it is we write.

It Is Written

Behind the conventional wisdom, beneath the tips and techniques, before the fundamentals and the principles, and above everything else, there are certain foundational truths about what we do and how we do it.

This is a closer look at the latter.

These universal truths apply to pretty much any profession, by the way. But for some reason there are writers, especially newer writers, who tend to think such foundational truths either don’t exist or do not apply to them.

If that’s you, hear this clearly: that is the worst writing advice, ever.

The best writing advice – ever – comes from a core, fundamental perspective. Embrace these five gifts of truth and your writing will quickly and forever escalate to the next level.

1. Design your writing like an engineer.

The most pervasive and destructive illusion floating around the writing universe is that you can write something good without order and structure.

Even if you just wing it, if you like to make it up as you go, you’ll end up rewriting and revising until an ordered structure emerges and becomes the skeleton of a finished piece.

Some writers – often the most experienced and successful, so pay attention – give significant creative mindshare to the structure of a story before they write it. They build on a structure, rather than digging one out from the chaos of a convoluted draft.

The worst thing that can happen is that you don’t even realize that it’s convoluted. But you see, a story engineer would.

And it’s not just any ol’ skeleton, either. Structure isn’t something you make up in the moment, in mid-stride as you write. Story structure in any genre and in any deliverable format is based on accepted principles and models.

You violate them, or write in ignorance of them, at your own storytelling peril.

Without a narrative structure in place, even the most elegant and powerful prose plops to the ground in a heap of moist, quivering helplessness.

Order and structure is always – whether planned or retrofitted – a function of design. And design, by definition, is a practice based on certain physics, principles and those proven laws and models.

Learn them, then build your writing upon their proven strengths, and your story will be set free to elevate itself to art.

2. Polish your writing like an obsessive poet.

Writing is very much like singing, playing an instrument or excelling at athletics. The more you do it, the more evolved and polished your sensibilities become, until finally you can instinctively add subtlety and nuance to your performance.

Which, by the way, is what separates the published from the non-published.

Such deft touches usually look easier that they really are when observed from the cheap seats. Success in all of these pursuits is the product of craft, and craft is the product of evolved instincts colliding with proven principles.

The inherent risk in polishing your work is to overwrite, to imbue your narrative voice with a certain hue of purple. Polishing is as much the rendering of complex words into simpler terms as it is de-cluttering the space between your periods, while leaving just a little stylistic juice to spice things up.

Sooner or later your writing will settle into a voice that is uniquely yours. Once there, polishing your work becomes the literary equivalent of clearing your throat.

Sometimes the best writers are simply the best throat clearers.

3. Edit your writing like an anal retentive executioner with a hip edge.

Editing is easily confused with polishing. It can mean two things – copy editing (which is, in fact, the cleaning up and correction of your prose, whereas polishing is more a style and voice issue), and story editing, which is the trimming of expositional fat and the empowerment of narrative moments.

You need both. And you need some combination of two things to do it right: time, and the eyes of a stranger.

What you don’t need is someone trying to turn your work into the vanilla sensibilities of your old high school English teacher. Deliberate, effective voice trumps English 101 any day, provided your readers agree. (Example: earlier I used the word “executional.” Look it up, there is no such word. Each time I type it I see that pesky red underlining. But it’s the right word, the intended word, I’m confident you get it, and my old English teacher can bite me.)

One of the best strategies to bring out the best in your work is to set it aside for a while before turning a fierce editor’s eye back on it. And if you can’t be that set of eyes with objective clarity, consider outsourcing the task to someone who is as hip within your target niche as you are.

In my case, my wife. If it’s purple or if it’s bullshit, I’ll hear about it.

Turning in well-edited – in this case synonymous with appropriately edited – work is the great secret of published authors.

4. Advocate for your work like someone possessed.

Know that the manuscript next to yours on an editor’s desk, or the blog competing for the attention of your reader, is likely every bit as good as your stuff.

Maybe not – making sure that doesn’t happen is the goal here – but sooner or later that will certainly be the case.

Which means, you’ll win some and you’ll lose some.

Persistence is every bit as important to a writing career as talent and craft. This isn’t a business for the thin-skinned, and it isn’t a marketplace for the uninitiated.

Agents and editors and even readers are actually looking for a reason to reject our work as much as they are hoping they’ll fall in love. Nobody said this was fair, and it isn’t.

Your job is to be as passionate about how and to whom you are pitching your stories as you are about writing them. Which means you need to master skills such as manuscript preparation, niche market research, the competition, market trending, live pitching and written querying, not to mention picking yourself up after a good cry and doing it all over again.

The world is full of perfectly worthy manuscripts that didn’t get published because their writers didn’t have the chops to sell it. Don’t be that writer.

Whatever happens to you in this business is what you make happen.

5. Love your work as if you are its mother.

Your mother loves you unconditionally. And yet, she calls you to a higher level of performance, of being. She helps you get there, even if she doesn’t model it herself. She expects you to get there, and if she believes you really want it, she’ll accept nothing less.

And if you don’t, she’ll love you anyway, and just as much.

Her expectation of your excellence, your success, and ultimately your happiness, is the expression of her unconditional love for you. And chances are she takes no shit in the process.

She picks you up when you fall. She tends to your wounds when you fail. She hugs you when you need it, she kicks your ass when you need that.

Then she sends you back into the real world to try again. All in the name of simply loving you.

Your story needs more than a genius writer, a crack idea, a ruthless editor, a maniacal advocate and a few lucky breaks. It needs someone to love it.

Someone to will it into a state of excellence, who understands and accepts that good isn’t good enough in today’s market. Good is just the ticket to someone’s submissions inbox. The ultimate winners bring more.

What they bring is the love of their story, forged and coached and loved into existence at a motherly level of commitment.

And as the author you are, after all, its mother.

This is the best writing advice you will ever hear.

Because everything else in the vast universe of writing knowledge, anything possible to learn and apply to the craft and art of it, is empowered by these truths.

Without all this, all you have is an intention. And that alone won’t get you there.

These five core truths, combined with your talent and passion, not to mention your killer idea, just might.

Larry Brooks is the creator of Storyfix.com, an instructional writing resource for novelists, screenwriters and those who love them. His new novel, Whisper of the Seventh Thunder, releases March 2010.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

The Best Writing Advice. Ever.

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The Best Writing Advice. Ever.

For years, the conventional wisdom has been that searchers are typing longer queries into the search boxes on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. The evidence I’ve seen in the analytics for the four hyperlocal blogs that my wife and I write support that: On our Richland Real Estate blog, for example, seven of the top 10 referring keywords in 2009 were four words or longer.

But the folks at Experian Hitwise have shared some numbers with me today that suggest otherwise. According to their user tracking, one-word searches jumped by 17% in 2009, while longer searches were generally down.

To be clear – the chart above represents the query lengths that produce a click.

So, could this be due solely to the change Google made to show local results on broad, one-word queries like “attorneys” and “restaurants” and more?

Both Yahoo and Bing now do the same.

Other than that, I don’t know how to explain it. Comments are open if you have thoughts.

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This is a post from Matt McGee’s blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Explain This: One-Word Searches Up 17% in 2009

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Explain This: One-Word Searches Up 17% in 2009

If you have a spare 37 minutes today to grab a coffee with me (or at least are doing something that will allow you to listen to something for 37 minutes in the background) check out this interview I did with Robb Sutton late last week. Robb’s also transcribed it for those who prefer to read.

In the interview Rob asks me about a whole range of stuff including:

• my background in blogging
• my philosophy on lots of sites vs focusing upon a single (or just a few) sites
• the process of going full time (and my wife’s six month ultimatum)
• my shift in focus to e-books and membership sites
• a little about Third Tribe
• finding readers for a blog
• my best advice for new bloggers
• a number of more personal questions like, favourite, food, drink, about the car I drive, the brand of camera I use

Hope you find the interview interesting.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Have a 37 Minute Coffee Break with Me [Audio Interview]

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Have a 37 Minute Coffee Break with Me [Audio Interview]

In the eight Christmases since life changed my name to Dad, Santa’s list has never been more important.

In our house, the tradition is that each child requests a single gift from the big guy. The problem is, this year both kids asked for something a little beyond Santa’s typical reach.

Fortunately, my wife and I have learned enough about persuasion and selling to turn our trip to the store into an opportunity to keep the magic alive a little longer.

It’s important to me that Santa deliver what they ask for. My kids are five and seven, and still believe. I’d like to preserve that bit of childhood magic as long as I am able.

What do you want? No, what do you really want?

My daughter originally wanted to ask Santa for “Biscuit,” a battery-operated dog that does tricks on command and is roughly the size of a Shetland pony. I’m not positive, but I think Biscuit may require a car battery to start barking.

My son planned to ask Santa for the Lego Star Wars Imperial Cruiser. This thing has roughly the same number of pieces as a glass garbage truck driven from a rooftop, and a sticker price equivalent to my winter electricity bill.

Our mission: steer our daughter toward a Fur-Real Panda Bear which is just a fraction of Biscuit‘s price tag, and get our son drooling for Darth Vader’s TIE Fighter, which is smaller and more within our budget.

Entering the toy department armed with our strategy, here are five basic selling principles which we used to get our children to not only alter their wish lists, but want their new gifts even more than they did the old ones:

1. Scarcity

This one was awesome because I didn’t even have to try. There it sat, all the way at the top of a shelf so high not even my 6 ‘ 3’’ frame could tickle the Fur-Real Panda Bear. The rest of the selection lay littered along the bottom shelves.

“Uh-oh,” I said. “We’re going to have to ask someone to help us get the panda bear down.”

My daughter asked why the panda was up so high away from all the others. I told her it must be because everybody wanted him and there were only a few left.

“Oh,” she whispered. My daughter rarely whispers. Other people’s desires amplified her own. My daughter’s not greedy, but she is human, and humans tend to want something all the more the second it seems out of reach.

2. Storytelling

My son and I struck out on our own, leaving my wife and daughter to think about the panda.

I slipped into a story about Darth Vader and his planet-blasting Death Star. My voice rose in pitch, my hands in the air. I quieted to a whisper. I was an actor reciting Shakespeare and my son’s mouth was an open O.

“Hey, have you ever thought about asking Santa for Darth Vader’s TIE fighter?” I asked. “I bet he would get it for you.”

I pulled the box from the shelf and placed it in my son’s hands. His eyes lit up and he turned it this way and that through the air, the sounds of laser blasts spraying from his lips.

Information is important, but people connect to stories. If you want someone to both relate to your information and remember it later, deliver it in a “once upon a time.”

3. Address objections

My son was fondling the box. I figured he was about a third of the way to wondering why in the Hoth he had ever wanted a starship when he could’ve been asking for Darth Vader’s TIE fighter all along.

But we weren’t quite there yet.

“The TIE fighter’s a lot smaller,” I explained, pointing to Darth Vader’s home away from home. “The starship is like five times bigger.”

He asked how many pieces are in the starship. I smiled. It was like he was doing half the work for me. “It’s five times the size because it has five times as many pieces.”

Now even though my son LOVES pieces, this was an easy objection to get past.

“Hmmm.” At this point, I was actually stroking my chin like some cartoon character. “If you ask Santa for Darth Vader’s TIE Fighter, then we’ll be able to put it together and take it apart a lot more times.” I smiled wide and dropped to my knees so my eyes met my son’s. “We’ll get to play with it more because it will be put together more often.”

My son’s smile is always bright, but this one was even brighter than usual. You can’t ignore objections, but you can identify and address what the other person really wants. And in this case, it was to spend more time with his daddy playing.

Once you know what your buyers are really looking for, you can rob objections of their power.

4. Clearly state the benefits

When we rejoined the girls, my daughter asked how I would decide between the two toys. She’s a practical girl and, like her father, loves to linger on several sides of an argument.

“Well, at first I thought it was close,” I said, nose wrinkled, “but then I started thinking about it. Now I’d have to say the panda is the clear winner.”

She wanted to know why.

“Well, his size for starters,” I said. “Biscuit is so big, you’d never want to take him up and down the stairs.”

We live in a hundred-year-old Victorian, and there are times when going upstairs feels like it should come with the help of a Sherpa.

I also explained that because of its size, the panda could keep her company and sit next to her while she’s doing her homework or is at the computer.

I let that sink in, then added, “The panda could even sleep with you, I bet. Biscuit would probably just sit in one place most of the time.”

When you’re writing to persuade, don’t forget to articulate what’s great about the experience. Give them the wind in their hair and let them clearly feel the smile on their face.

5. Know your audience

I’m lucky enough to be around my children for most of the minutes they aren’t in school. Getting them to change Santa’s list was made simple by first knowing them inside out and then communicating as effectively as possible.

Working out a communication plan with my partner ahead of time, using the same principles that make a sales letter work, made it a paint-by-numbers process.

While it’s highly unlikely you’ll get prospects that you can know as well as your children, you can get to know them. Pay attention to the details, ask the right questions, and uncover not just what they want, but why they want it. Do that, and you’ll be able to meet their needs.

There is a laser-thin line between many of the principles of friendly, honest selling and highly effective parenting.

With both, you must allow the learner or buyer to stumble onto your solution as though it was their idea all along. Sure, you use the authority you’ve built, but you also let your audience come to their own conclusions.

Trust is the key

Of course none of these tactics would have worked if our children didn’t believe in us.

And trust is an integral part of these strategies. I’ve never lied to my kids (you and I both know Santa doesn’t count) and have never let them down. I have never done anything to damage our bond and so they trust me entirely.

I would never have sold them on the panda or the TIE Fighter if I didn’t believe they would love their choices. If your actions are based on integrity and you do what is right for your audience or clients, they will do what is right for you in return.

About the Author: Sean Platt is a direct response copywriter and independent publisher. Follow him on Twitter.

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5 Lessons Learned from a List to Santa (All of Them Can Make You Money)

In recent weeks Google has been launching a higher than usual amount of new products. Many will say they are moving in the wrong direction. Many of these products appear to have been launched without fully considering the weaknesses they will have to spam. Instead of rushing “shiny new cat toys” out the door that keep their developers happy and entertained, Google needs to focus on fixing some of the things they have already released that are broken…or, if they can’t be fixed, pulling them down. In this post I’ll be taking a look at Google suggest, showing some of the innappropriate things it suggests. Fair warning: you may find some of the screen shots in this post offensive.

Before we get to the first screen shot, a basic primer. Google suggest works through the history of Google searches. It suggests search terms with a high volume and a high number of results. Basic porn filters have been applied, but in most cases these are completely inadequate for the job. Are these the kind of  things you want Google suggesting to you, your family or your children?

First up: pictures and videos of kids in their underwear …

Girls in underwear, miniskirts, diapers, boy shorts, and bras.

Little boys in underwear, speedos, briefs, undies, dresses, and tights.

Sleep with your sister, son, sister in law, or second cousin.

Here’s one Google has known about for a week or two: “little kids dirty dancing.”

Kids wearing thongs.

Girls wearing underwear, short shorts, pasties, tampons, or nothing at all.

Lots of variation of women without clothes.

A lot of things “my wife” will/won’t do.

Google does have the ability to filter words from suggest. Look at the word [teen]. There are absolutely zero suggestions for that word. I’d put good money on the fact that there are so many porn related searches for the word teen that Google blocks the word completely.

It’s also somewhat amusing that Google will suggest [Eric Schmidt Girlfriend], especially since he recently said people should be careful what they do or else it might wind up online …

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Google Suggest – Broken and Filled with Porn and Children

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Google Suggest – Broken and Filled with Porn and Children

That’s one of my recent tweets, inspired by seeing early reports of local businesses getting their “Favorite Place” decals from Google. It’s also inspired, I suppose, by a bit of envy … because my wife, a real estate agent, is probably not going to be honored like these other local business owners are. In fact, I doubt very many real estate agents will be honored, nor plumbers, nor any local business that attracts phone calls more than in-person store visits.

Don’t get me wrong. I think the “Favorite Places” program is a pretty smart idea on Google’s part, and as I said in this post about Google PlaceRank, I think it’s a Good Thing for local businesses to show off those decals prominently. But the problem is with…

How to Become a Favorite Place

Google’s help pages describe how to become a favorite place:

“The list was determined based on the popularity of a business’ Local Business Center listing, as determined by how many times Google users looked for more information about a business, requested driving directions to get there, and more. Google users “decided” based on their actions, and we sent the decals.”

And there’s the problem: It’s all based on how Google users interact with the Local Business Center listing. But some local businesses are very limited in that. You don’t usually need directions to:

• real estate agents
• fence installers/repair companies
• plumbers
• roofers
• construction companies
• appliance repair shops
• carpet cleaners
• janitorial services
• landscapers
• snow removal companies
• many more

People won’t click for directions for those local businesses, and they may not click on anything. They’ll just pick up the phone and place a call, and Google has no record of that (for now, at least).

A Real Estate Agent Example

As I say, I happen to know a local real estate agent pretty well and have access to her Local Business Center stats. Here’s what they look like as of an hour ago:

(Sorry for blacking out some numbers; there are other local real estate agents who read this blog and I don’t think they need to know Cari’s exact LBC stats.)

That covers May 1, 2009 (when Google began storing this data) through December 7, 2009. Cari’s LBC listing has impressions that are in 5-figures (i.e., above 10,000). The number of actions is 3-figures. But in more than six months, only four times has someone clicked for directions. Four times.

Final Thoughts

As it stands now, Google’s program is biased toward local businesses that need foot traffic to survive. Maybe a rethink on the qualifications is in order, or perhaps a separate designation for local businesses that rely on phone calls more than clicks for driving directions.

No one ever said marketing is fair, and I know the playing field is never really level … but it sure would be nice for all small businesses to have a shot at getting Google’s blessing as a “Favorite Place.”

Advertisement: WordStream’s Free Keyword Tool delivers more keywords, faster than paid tools and always 100% free. Try it today!

This is a post from Matt McGee’s blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Google’s Favorite Places Discriminates Against Some Local Businesses

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Google’s Favorite Places Discriminates Against Some Local Businesses

Ten years back, my soon-to-be wife, Cindy, and I first noticed the bombarding beat for Marshall Mather’s “My Name Is.”

“What an ass,” I said as the two of us sat to watch the Grammies a year later. “It’s sad he can sell so many records just by being vile. Really, how much talent can that possibly take?”

“Have you heard the record?” Cindy asked.

“No,” I admitted. “But I’ve heard enough to know he’s an ass.”

She pursed her lips in silence as I stuttered through a series of half-articulated examples — the criticisms of others slipping through the filter of my voice. Unlike me, she was withholding judgment of the music until she’d heard more of it.

“You know if you listen to the album you’ll be a lot more entitled to an opinion, right?”

My wife has taught me, and continues to teach me, more than anyone else.

The next day I bought the Slim Shady LP along with the newly minted Marshall Mathers album. I then spent the next few months in a new sort of aural awe.

I’m not sure what my expectations were, but they certainly weren’t to meet a man who would murder my preconceptions of the alphabet.

Though I’ve always been drawn to great lyricists and songwriters, I’d never heard anyone able to effectively indulge satire, rage, sorrow, shame, guilt, regret, power, passion, loneliness, bravado, stupidity, genius, leadership, idiocy, misogyny, sympathy and, believe it or not, tender compassion. And Eminem was doing it in a stream of pentameter that would, I’m certain, cause William Shakespeare to shudder.

Plus, the dude is a brilliant storyteller.

Marshall Mathers is a lyrical sniper with a shotgun, and vents more in a few hundred words than many are able to effectively communicate in pages of copy. When I listen to an Eminem record, I’m hearing a man who cares about every single syllable and the exact tone of its delivery.

This isn’t to say all his songs are good. In fact, each album has a handful of songs I find both repugnant and unendurable. Yet they are always peppered against gems of absolute genius.

Eminem is a complicated artist, and could easily provoke pages of arguments on his positives, negatives and overall impact on our culture for better or worse. But as a writer and marketer, few can touch what he’s managed to accomplish.

Meaning that if we pay attention, there’s plenty to learn.

What Eminem can teach you about writing

1) Write and read all you can

Marshall started writing while just a child, constantly sanding the rough edges of his craft, knowing without doubt that the only thing that would get him out of the trailer park and into a better life was furious effort and endless practice.

Marshall familiarized himself with the greats until storytelling was as natural as drawing breath. He may have started by imitating the pioneers who came before him, but Eminem soon blended their legacy into his own brew that was like nothing else.

2) Edit ruthlessly

Eminem’s best tracks harbor some of the tightest writing I’ve seen in any medium. One has to wonder just how long he spends on each song, considering how securely each syllable is cemented in place.

Not only can Em craft a compelling argument in prose, he can also structure it in a way that would dazzle Dr. Seuss, not only by rhyming words that shouldn’t rhyme, but by packing more poetry into a verse than should be technically possible. Only fastidious editing can pull the written word so taut.

3) Write what you know

One of the things that makes Eminem so polarizing is that his message flies from mind to mic with only the thinnest filter in between. Listening to his music is like tuning into a live therapy session that would make Tony Soprano seem stable by comparison. It’s easy to believe that Marshall is speaking directly from his heart and unique set of experiences.

4) Start strong and finish stronger

The best of Em’s songs achieve something rare in commercially produced music — they realize a powerful climax prior to their conclusion. Many of Marshall’s songs are written as arguments, and it’s usually in his third verse when he drives his point home, often with a lyrical sledgehammer.

5) Be concise and use powerful sentences

Marshall pares his arguments down to the marrow. His intuitive sense of flow allows him to seamlessly drift from the measured cadence of ordinary speech to an unrivaled intensity of verse, but it is always the power of his writing which enables him to drive his point home with such precision.

What Eminem can teach you about marketing

Eminem is a terrific writer, but if he wasn’t also a natural marketer, he might very well be still living on the wrong side of 8 Mile.

1) Put yourself out there

Be tireless and undaunted. Marshall paid his dues in underground clubs as the only white boy to step up and take the mic.

I was playing in the beginning, the mood all changed. I been chewed up and spit out and booed off stage. But I kept rhyming and stepwritin the next cypher, best believe somebody’s paying the pied piper . . .

Em knew that no one was about to hand him anything. If he wanted his voice heard, it was his job to spread it.

2) Be extreme

Try speaking to everyone and you end up speaking to no one.

As Sonia recently pointed out, Jenny Lawson and Naomi Dunford aren’t for everyone, but those who love them, really, really LOVE them.

See I’m a poet to some, a regular modern day Shakespeare, Jesus Christ the King of these Latter Day Saints here. To shatter the picture in which of that as they paint me, as a monger of hate and Satan — a scatter-brained atheist. But that ain’t the case, see it’s a matter of taste. We as a people decide if Shady’s as bad as they say he is. Or is he the latter — a gateway to escape? Media scapegoat, who they can be mad at today . . .

3) Tell a story

Build a backstory that is unique to you and you’ll develop a following that can belong to no one else.

Marshall’s storytelling was evident in his first LP, but he cemented his place as a teller of unforgettable tales in the second album, most notably with the song Stan, which tells the story of a crazed fan who does double duty in the song as a doppleganger for Marshall. Eminem used this narrative as both a means of self reflection and as a response to the many critics questioning the cultural impact of his music.

4) Experiment

Eminem’s music is crammed with experimentation. From the simple lo-fi beats of his earliest work to the wicked carnival rhythms which characterized his partnership with Dr. Dre, and all the loopy meters in between, it’s easy to imagine that Marshall isn’t happy unless he’s trying something new.

Not every experiment works, but at least he’s willing to play in the lab.

5) Address objections

A big rule of marketing is to address audience objections before the audience does.

Eminem has a history, going all the way back to his first major release, of addressing critics head on without flinching.

How many retards’ll listen to me and run up in the school shooting when they’re pissed at a teach-er, her, him, is it you is it them? ‘Wasn’t me, Slim Shady said to do it again!’ Damn! How much damage can you do with a pen? Man, I’m just as %#&@#! up as you woulda been if you woulda been, in my shoes, who woulda thought, Slim Shady would be something that you woulda bought?

Marshall Mathers is complicated and undeniably controversial, and though his critics would correctly point out that his music is filled with hate and vitriol, few of them seem to acknowledge that he is also manipulating his own material, taking his arguments to such ridiculous extremes that he turns them into farce.

Love him or hate him, the man known as Eminem has proven that he’s an important force in both modern music and culture. You don’t have to like his lyrics or his message to learn something from him. I’m grateful for the day my wife wondered out loud if I really knew what I was talking about.

About the Author: Sean Platt is a direct response copywriter and independent publisher. Follow him on Twitter.

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The Eminem Guide to Becoming a Writing and Marketing Machine

A Guest Post by David Risley

Except yours, of course. However, there are a lot of bloggers who feel this way.

You write. You write some more. You don’t feel as if you’re getting the traction that you want. What’s going on?

There is plenty to be said about issues like proper market selection, search engine optimization and other tactical things, but let’s go deeper. In fact, let’s go deeper than most bloggers really think about when it comes to their blogging.

Are You Talking At Or Talking To Your Readers?

If I walked into a crowded mall, went into the food court, stood there in the middle of it and just started talking, what do you think would happen?

Most people wouldn’t see me. Then, a few would and they would probably think I was crazy. At the end of the day, I’ll just be that crazy guy they saw at the mall.

Now, imagine if 90% of the people in the food court did that. They just got up and started talking into space. It would be one big din of noise. Now, all of those people want to feel as if they are famous, so they start competing and trying to out-talk the other people. The volume increases, but few are being listened to. The ones who are listened to are the ones at least saying something useful.

And that is the blogosphere.

Most new bloggers go out there and start talking, then hope somebody notices and listens. Chances are, it won’t happen that way.

What is True Communication?

I’m married and that leads to some minor adventure from time to time. One of them is being accused of not listening to her. She will tell me something I need to do and I have literally no memory of her saying it. Well, that was because I was doing something when she said it. When she told me what I needed to do, she spoke AT me and not TO me.

In other words, she just threw out the words with no intention of them really GETTING to me. It put the responsibility on me to be paying close attention first. She was right, I wasn’t listening. She was just talking at me.

Now, I love my wife to death, but she was doing what a lot of bloggers do.

What is TRUE communication?

Well, it isn’t communication unless the idea being said fully ARRIVES on the other end and is understood. To complete this process, an acknowledgement of some kind would need to take place to show that the information was indeed received and understood.

Underlying all of this is, of course, the importance of saying something that people want and doing it in a likable way. When you combine being likable, speaking within a reality that your audience will click with, along with actual communication where your thought actually gets to your reader, that’s when people will most definitely care about your blog.

Then you have readers, fans and more traffic that you’ll know what to do with. If you want to make money with your blog, that becomes really easy.

Applying This To Blogging

Blogging is a communications platform. Personal human relations still apply. If you just talk to yourself on your blog and hope people listen, it won’t work very well. That’s not communication.

In other words, talk TO your audience. Your job is to have something worth saying, then communicate that in a fashion which works for THEM. Do it in a reality which works for them. Make sure the idea arrives in their head by getting them to talk back to you. Without some acknowledgement from the audience, you don’t have true communication taking place. The cycle will be incomplete.

Your job with your blog is to create a relationship with your audience. You want them to know, like and trust you. That is done by forming true understanding between yourself and each of your readers. You want them to see you as an authority in your market, but also a trusted friend. The key to do that will be what I said above.

Blogging isn’t all about yourself. It isn’t about just blurting words into Wordpress and hoping people listen. It is about talking TO them and having them talk back.

If you are new to blogging and hardly have any audience yet, the same principles apply. You want to have these interactions with other people. So, you go out onto social media and you do exactly the same thing. In other words, go where the people are and strike up a conversation. Then, with some form of understanding formed, you direct them to your blog.

Build a tribe of people who know, like and trust you… who you routinely talk to (in both directions), then you’ve made it. The rest of your goals as a blogger become a piece of cake.

So, in a spirit of communication, let me know what you think. Post a comment. Let’s talk!

By David Risley, a 6-figure professional blogger who got his start as a tech blogger. His blog David Risley dot com is a pull-no-punches account of the business of pro blogging and what it takes to earn a living as a blogger.

Tags: blog tips, Communication, content, conversation, David Risley, finding readers

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Why Nobody Cares About Your Blog

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