Words

This guest post is by Uttoran Sen of traveltamed.com. You’ve got it! You’re officially a Have in a world of Have-nots! What do you have? It’s probably not money, fame, or tax-write-offs disguised as corporate jets. It’s something more powerful. You have a blog. And a darn fine one at that. If you’ve said before that you’ll never give up blogging—surprise! You’re probably right! Giving up a good thing is next-to-impossible. So it’s not a surprise to discover that blogging isn’t the sort of thing you just

This guest post is by Dan Zarrella of danzarrella.com. In my research into sharing, I realized I needed to develop a framework that would serve as a model for the decision-making process that takes place before someone spreads an idea. This framework describes the three criteria that must be met before someone will spread an idea in any format: Every piece of content, social network, and campaign has a vastly different conversion rate at each step of this process. For you to understand the scales involved,

This guest post is by Kelly Kingman of eBook Evolution. Last year, I took part in a writing challenge called National Novel Writing Month, which is also known as NaNoWriMo. The challenge? Write 50,000 words—all during the 30 days of November. Until then, my personal length record hovered around 10,000 words for a single project.

I’ll start with some basic facts which you may already know, but at the bottom of the article there’s a curious fact that you might have not heard before. First things first, what is a CAPTCHA? It’s an acronum for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” Now in simple words: it’s basically a test used to make sure that whoever is performing an action is a human.

The call to action (CTA) is the most important part of a website. It’s what turns visitors into cash. So, before you write the copy for your next so-so CTA, take a look at these 9 tips. Take advantage of them and you’ll be increasing conversions in no time at all. 1. Use active words. You see active words all the time. Think of all the action words you see in ads: buy, subscribe, download, register, call, etc. Why are they there? Because they inspire people to act, just as their name suggests.

This guest post is by Aman Basanti of ageofmarketing.com. Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s Hagakure is the most famous text on bushido, the warrior code of the samuari. Written in an era when Japan was obsessed with warfare and martial prowess, the book offers instruction on how a samurai should live and die. The most famous line in Hagakure is, “I have found that bushido means to die. It means that when one has to choose between life and death, one quickly chooses the side of death.”

So this week’s COJ was going to be about the famed Walt Whitman poem “Song of Myself“. But, after I finished writing, I re-read my post and thought, “this totally blows!”. I mean seriously, what was I thinking? BORING ALERT. So without even saving the post I just highlighted all 1000+ words and hit delete. Because honestly the post wasn’t up to my standards, it wasn’t good enough for you, and it certainly wasn’t good enough for myself.

The subject of "owning your own domain" has been covered to death in our industry, with excellent posts from Anil Dash and others (Fred) explaining the importance of having your own place on the web. I've also weighed in on the importance of "The Independent Web," where creators have control, as opposed to the Dependent Web, where platforms ultimately control how your words, data, and expression are leveraged.