Happy New Year!
Hello…Carolyn Small back again. I hope everyone had a great holiday season!
Hopefully you’ve recovered from all of the fun, food, visiting and overall good cheer of the holidays.
Did you make New Year’s resolutions? Did you tweak your goals, plans and strategies for moving your business forward in 2011? Are you re-energized, re-motivated and raring to charge forward with your internet marketing business?
I hope so because I am excited for you and I’m ready to get down to business. How about you?
Let’s get started.
Today we’re going to take a look at
Content Marketing.
What Is Content Marketing?
In short, content marketing is the art of communicating with your customers and prospects without selling. It is non-interruption marketing. Instead of pitching your products or services like on TV ads, you are delivering information that makes your buyer more intelligent. The essence of this content strategy is the belief that if we, as businesses, deliver consistent, ongoing valuable information to buyers, they reward us with their business and loyalty.
But your content or articles must be relevant to the topic and well written.
This doesn’t mean that your writing has to be perfect.
Since blogging is in conversational style, it’s OK to break the occasional rule of proper grammar in order to communicate effectively. Bloggers routinely end sentences with prepositions, dangle a modifier in a purely technical sense, or make liberal use of the ellipsis when an EM dash is the correct choice—all in order to write in the way people actually speak.
Five Grammatical Errors to Avoid
There are however some mistakes that can detract from your credibility. You may have excellent content, but the truth is some people will not subscribe or link to your blog if you make dumb mistakes when you write, nor will they buy anything from you.
I recently started reading an article on generating traffic to a website. I quit reading the article half way through the second paragraph. There were simply so many grammatical errors that I could not focus on the actual content. With the wealth of information on the Web, why would anyone read a poorly written article?
The following are just five of many mistakes I see frequently in blogs.
Your vs. You’re
This one is very annoying to me, and it’s become extremely common among bloggers. All it takes to avoid this error is to stop and think about what you’re trying to say.
“Your” is a possessive pronoun, as in “your house” or “your blog.” “You’re” is a contraction for “you are,” as in “you’re messing up your writing by using
your when you really mean
you are.”
It’s vs. Its
This is another common mistake. It’s also easily avoided by thinking through what you’re trying to say.
“It’s” is a contraction of “it is” or “it has.” “Its” is a possessive pronoun, as in “this article missed
its point.”
Here’s an easy rule of thumb—repeat your sentence out loud using “it is". If that sounds a bit weird, “its” is likely the correct choice.
There vs. Their
This one seems to trip up most people occasionally. Make sure to watch for it when you proofread. It may simply be a typo.
“There” is used many ways, including as a reference to a place (“let’s go there”) or as a pronoun (“there is no hope”). “Their” is a plural possessive pronoun, as in “their bags” or “their opinions.” There’s a little test for this one too--“that’s ours”…are you talking about more than one person and something that they possess? If so, “their” is correct.
Affect vs Effect
This is one that always trips me up. I have to look up one of the words every time to make sure I get it right.
Here goes...
“Affect” is a verb, which means “to influence”, as in “Your ability to communicate clearly will affect your income immensely.” Affect can also mean, "to act in a way that you don't feel," as in, "She affected an air of superiority."
On the other hand, "effect" is a noun with several subtle meanings such as "result"." As in, "The effect of a parent's low income on a child's future is well documented.
"
The Dangling Participle
The dangling participle will damage the flow of your writing and it can also make it impossible for someone to understand what you’re trying to say.
Consider the following:
The robber ran from the policeman, still holding the money in his hands.
Hmm…who was holding the money…the policeman or the robber?
What do you think about the following sentence? Is it written correctly?
Walking along the beach, the sun rose majestically over the ocean.
The thing to keep in mind here is that the participle goes with the noun closest to it, either directly preceding or following it and the words which go with it in the sentence. In the first example above, "holding" is clearly intended to go with "robber"—but because the closest noun to "holding" is "the policeman," the sentence seems to suggest that the policeman is holding the money, not the robber. The sentence should read "Still holding the money in his hands, the robber ran from the policeman."
Can you see how to correct the problem with the dangling participle in the second example?
Final Comments
Remember, content drives the Internet, and consumers are looking for information that solves a problem, not immediate sales pitches. The trust, credibility, and authority that content marketing creates knocks down sales resistance, while at the same time providing a baseline introduction to the benefits of a particular product or service.
That’s it for now.
Until next time,
Carolyn
P.S.: The sentence in the second example should read, “Walking along the beach, we saw the sun rise majestically over the ocean.”
Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.
~Benjamin Franklin
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