Easy On Me » Branding Yourself on the Web

How To Write A How To

Easy On Me — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 00:54:01 +0000

This article tells you how to write a how to, a skill you can take with you in almost any field and convert into hard, cold cash while simultaneously advertising your skills for the next job you get, even if not’s not writing. I’ve made a lot of money teaching people how to do things for decades, and I never saw all the elements of writing a good how to in one place. Instead, I studied the most popular, effective, and successful examples and came up this with short set of principles. It’s been drawn from applied psychology, wildly popular products from companies like Apple and Microsoft, and low-key sales techniques.

Make A Promise. Deliver it. Explain What It Meant

There’s a reason your English teacher didn’t make money as a writer. She didn’t have to worry about wasting people’s precious lives. The saying goes that you should tell them what you’re going to say, say it, and tell them what you said. Bull. Here’s what you should really do.

Promise them you’ll improve their lives and how you’ll do it
Show them something step by step
Tell them what it meant

1. Promise them you’ll improve their lives,and how

A how to is a promise to solve a problem, often one that will be painful. So instead of telling people you’re going to explain how to install WordPress, you tell them you’re going to teach them how to fire their webmaster and instantly create a website they can maintain themselves.

Keep It As Short As You’d Want It To Be

Keep your how to as short as possible. Even if you’re paid to write by the word, don’t treat your job that way. People don’t have any time for anything anymore. Solve the problem as quickly as you can, without leaving anything out. Write short, punchy sentences without too many commas, colons, or semicolons. Avoid big words. Your English teacher liked them. Your readers just get agitated.

Use The Rule of 5. Or 7, Whatever

People can’t retain more than 3-5 items at a time. Write your sections in groups of 3 or 5-maybe 7 at most. Anything with sequences of more than 7 items to perform or to remember at once probably needs to be reorganized.

Start By Selling

Assume they don’t know how they got here. Somewhere in the first paragraph orient the user who was sent here by someone else by explaining what you’re going to teach them and why it’s a good thing. You may think that because they’re here, they have a good reason. You’re wrong.

They may have landed on a web page someone else recommended. They may have been handed a printed document by a boss and aren’t certain what to do. Make them feel good about reading what you’re going to write. That includes making them comfortable from the first paragraph, and they can’t be comfortable if they are constantly wondering why they’re here.

The best salespeople are famous not for shoving their product or service down their customers’ throats, but for explaining clearly what the problem is and how it can be solved with what they’re selling. And in today’s world, everyone is doing sales. You must be forever vigilant in branding yourself and your employer.

2. Show Them Something Step By Step

Before you start writing, jot down each step you must cover in a separate line or paragraph. Then go through the process yourself, and add anything you omitted. Start each section with a summary of what they’ll learn in that section and how it fits into the bigger picture. Break the how to part into separate steps.

Bullets In The Head. Ing.

Bullets are your friend. Headings are your friend. People don’t read these days. They scan. (By the way-the correct, original meaning of scan is the opposite of how it’s used. It used to mean an exhaustive, complete consumption of the material–just like a scanner. But that’s not how it’s used anymore, so I’m reluctantly going with the flow.)

Readers will unconsciously jump from headline to headline before they do any actual reading. Your writing teacher probably wanted you to write in a huge undifferentiated mass of text. That made Dickens rich–a hundred fifty years ago. Get with the program. Headings (a line of text set aside from the material using a different size, typeface, or type style) help the reader ignore what doesn’t matter and dive right in to what does.

Here’s how to use a heading. Anytime you have a sef-contained concept, it probably deserves a heading, plus anywhere form a sentence to a paragraph summing up that concept. Depending on the level of difficulty, you may also want to explain why knowing that concept will help the reader.

Most word processors or online document editors such as Google Docs have a control that lets you choose Heading 1, Heading 2, and so on. Use them whenever possible. They normally convert to special HTML instructions when published on the web. These instructions help search engines and your human readers decide what needs emphasis.

The rule for using bullets is simple and widely ignored. Use one per step or per important concept. So instead of saying this, which is actually three steps :

Put the grated carrots into a pot of boiling water

You’d break down the steps in the way people expect them to happen:

Start a pot of water boiling
Grate the carrots
Drop them into the boiling water

Like headings, bullets help cement concepts together in people’s minds. Even more important, when your reader refers back to what you wrote because they didn’t quite understand something, they can jump directly to the bullets and follow along. Not forcing them to read a lot just to find their place saves their psychic energy for completing their task.

3. Tell them what it meant

This is perhaps my only original contribution to the whole enterprise of writing. Your teacher was wrong about the summary. The summary shouldn’t tell your readers what you said. Duh, they just read it-they already know what you said! Instead, it should tell them what it meant and how their lives are better for knowing what you just taught them. It should therefore explain how you made good on your initial promise.

That’s hard. It’s easy to say “We’ve learned how to install WordPress on your website, write blog posts, and create pages.” Instead, it should say something like “It’s no longer possible for one person to create an maintain a complex website from scratch. WordPress does all the hard parts for you, and makes adding anything from a blog post to a whole new section no harder than a word processor. There’s plenty more to learn but this set of articles showed you everything you need to get a credible website built in under a day. Remember to update it frequently for security purposes, and see our next set of articles if you want to learn how to create an event calendar or back up so that you won’t lose critical data at the worst possible time.”

In an increasingly complex world, everything needs to be explained: manuals, sales material, websites establishing you as an authority. Words are more important than ever, and these same concepts can be applied to video learning too. The organization, promise, and fulfillment of the promise remain constant no matter what the medium.

Speaking of which: Summarize everything up front, break things up into little pieces, use short declarative sentences, and embrace the bullet. You can’t go wrong writing a how to if you follow those principles. Even better: everything you write is proof that you’re an expert in your field, and will show your next boss that your knowledge is so deep you can how to write a how to better than anyone else: what better reason to hire you?

Doh! ScoutingNY.com’s Elegant and Canny Thank-You

Easy On Me — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 06:30:28 +0000

Scouting New York is a well-written look at one of the world’s favorite cities from the point of view of a movie location scout. At the risk of being reductive, I love it not only because it is intrinsically so enjoyable but because it is also a charming and understated masterpiece of self-promotion. If I were a producer looking for a scout, its proprietor, Nick, would obviously be on my short list.

Nick has also devised an ingenious way to bridge the yawning chasm of Web as a broadcast medium. When I used the Donate button to kick in a few bucks I was pleasantly surprised to get a Scouting New York sticker in the mail a few days later, with a “Thank you for your support – Nick” handwritten on the back:

ScoutingNY's textbook example of personal branding on the web

Impressive. I haven’t seen anything like it in the dozens of blogs I’ve donated to.

Be sure to check it out its sister blog, Scout-Friendly New York.

Who’s Making it In Hard Times?

Easy On Me — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 05:57:46 +0000

I have been a student of successful businesspeople for decades. I grew up in the Seventies, during times harder in some ways than these. My parents were severely damaged by the Depression. I knew hard times would come again, so I started getting ready.

Ex 14-Year-Old Tells You What to Do

I was 14. Kids at school were watching “Love Boat”. My neighbors were getting into drugs and worse. My parents, incredibly, buried their heads in their sand and simply hoped their jobs were safe, even as our neighbors lost good jobs forever. I was going to the library and reading the then-meager literature on how to succeed in business and personal life. (The two often march hand in hand.) My parents hated it, and did their level best to pretend it was a phase I’d grow out of. Sorry, Mom and Dad, wherever you are… I still haven’t. Money’s important. It helps protect your children, especially in bad times. It means you don’t have to spend winters putting pots under leaky holes in the roof the way we had to. It can also be fun to make.

I made my first million by 40. I’ve made more millions since then (lost plenty, too). The story has been different from what you might expect. One of my goals with this blog is to tell you what I did wrong, so you won’t have to, and what I did right, so you can do better.

Why Listen to a Guy Who Didn’t Buy Google at $90?

Many of my mistakes stem from what turns out to be my greatest strength at this inflection point in history. Because I was always gearing up for hard times, I didn’t take full advantage of many opportunities I encountered. When the economy soared in the late 80s, I figured it would crest by the early 90s. Fail! It meant that my developed tolerance for risk-taking was tempered by my expectations of a dip that didn’t really occur for well over another decade.

On the other hand, I’m in a pretty safe position. I have several houses all paid off, I have a couple of paid-off rental properties, and I don’t have any debt beyond the mortgage for our main house. (Why not pay it off? More on that in a later post.) Plus I have enough cash in the bank to live on for a year if my day job goes south.

This isn’t bragging, because believe me, the path has not been without rough patches. Nor is it an accident. I am here because I’ve been ready for it since 1975. Maybe you made a few bucks on Amazon or Yahoo! or AOL during their respective meteoric rises. Not me. I didn’t understand how their P/E’s could remain so high. I wasn’t the guy to listen to in 2005 when Google went public. But if you want ideas on how to prosper in these lean and dangerous times, I’m your guy.

Learn to Steal from the Best

One thing I did right was continue to study good business practices. I did it to steal ideas, and also to accumulate material for other people who wish to start a business but don’t know how. If you have any business ideas you’d like to discuss or need help on, post them in the comments. I love talking business!

We live in the Seattle area. It has not been hit nearly as hard as Detroit or even California, but it’s been hit. That has made the continuing success of many of my acquaintances even more impressive. The unifying thread is that they are all providing high quality products and services. I know a psychologist who specializes in testing children. These tests aren’t cheap. They can hit the four-figure mark quickly. She literally is barely aware of the recession. I asked her business was down. She didn’t know. I asked her office manager. “Oh yes”, she said. “Our waiting list used to be four months long. Now it’s only a month.” I’m sure many of us would love to have a 30-day waiting list for our high-end business. Heck, I don’t even have an office manager, now that I think of it!

I go to the coolest little gym. It’s priced the same as the meat market gyms, but it’s a high-end studio with only 3 rooms, one per person being trained, one trainer (sometimes two) per customer. They’re so busy they can’t hire enough good people to manage demand. What’s their secret? Sensational service. They’re personable, knowledgeable, and know how to handle the kind of edge cases that simply won’t get dealt with properly in a gym with 500 customers and two personal trainers.

There’s an amazing restaurant called Poppy in Seattle. It has one of the most original (read: hard to sell) menus I’ve ever seen. Poppy isn’t cheap, yet they’re full every night. The food is incredible, and the wait staff are all top-notch.

Many small banks have weathered the housing disaster using a super secret ninja financial technique. They didn’t loan money to questionable characters who couldn’t prove sufficient income or provide a real down payment. Did you know that very, very few homeowners who put down 20% on their houses defaulted on their loans? Surprise!

If You Were Fired Would You Hire You?

What is it that all these parties doing right? They’re doing everything right, that’s what. Hang on, don’t click away in disgust. It has direct meaning in your life even if you don’t run a business. When I taught myself programming I chose a career in creating programming languages. Compiler theory is considered by most programmers to be one of the most technically formidable disciplines there is. Why did I do it? No degree, that’s why. I figured I’d better be pretty good at programming, or I’d lose jobs to people who’s resumes looked better because they had degrees. I learned something hard but I only had to do it once. It helped me for years.

You may not be an entrepreneur. Doesn’t matter. You should act like one anyway. Think hard. If you were fired tomorrow, would your employer do better or worse? If you can’t honestly answer “worse”, then it’s time to rethink your career plan. Now be even more honest with yourself. If you were your boss, would you hire you? Are you so good at what you do that you’re a no-brainer decision for your next hiring manager?

If the answer isn’t yes you know what to do. Either start working on your backup plan or improve your “customer service”, that is, make yourself indispensable. Or both.

Branding Yourself on the Web: Control the Message Before It Controls You

Easy On Me — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 18:11:11 +0000

Slightly embarrassed about an old Facebook entry showing you smashed out of your mind wearing an elaborate beer bong and a T shirt that says WORK SUX BUT I NEED THE BUX? You should be, and not just because it shows someone filling the bong with some lite beer that tastes more like a urine sample than actual malted hops. You should be embarrassed because your next employer will find it too. Or should I say the hiring manager at the next job you apply for.

Unfair? Of course not. Gimme a break! Suppose you had started a business with your own money. Given two equally desirable and qualified job applicants, is Mr. or Ms. Beer Brong the kind of person you’d put first on your list? Or would it be the who looked stone cold sober on that Facebook page? What if that page linked to a blog showing off that person’s expertise in web promotion, mentoring skills, or church involvement?

Maybe you’re not the business-minded type. Try this on for size. You learn you’re about to have new baby. You work your butt off at Olive Garden or Wal-Mart or a local insurance brokerage to get a managerial promotion with medical benefits. You hire someone with less than stellar work skills. Your boss turns up that same beer bong page in the three-minute-after-the-fact forensic investigation to determine why you hired the kind of flake who showed up on Wednesday for a job that started Monday. How do you plan to defend your hiring decision?

Let’s take the heat off you for a second. Suppose an apparel brand you like is demonstrably underpaying its employees and exploiting children in a third-world country. They respond to stories about factory conditions with weasel wording about local cultures taking a different view on child labor, about how they really aren’t associated with the company that runs the factory, and about how it was all set up by a consultant and not themselves. What message are they sending to you? Suppose another apparel brand you like has a factory here in your own country and has a great reputation for paying its workers fairly. You’ve seen a news story about how their workers stay on for 40% longer than the industry average and that job openings always result in lines that stretch around the block. You like both brands fine. Which are you likely to choose next time you need a T shirt?

Take it from a hiring manager. We know how to use that internet thingie almost as well as you do. Late-breaking update: it’s not even very hard. More and more, employers are acting on something you should know already. You are a brand. What you’ve published about yourself is often the only message most people will get from you. The web is the best way for a prospective employer (or children, or spouse, or ex-spouse’s attorney) to find out about Brand You.

And if you don’t control your message, it will control you.