I hope you find my writing and business tips and observations useful. My business and blog are dedicated to helping businesses communicate clearly and reach their potential.
Read, and enjoy!Tash
Writing from home
Writing and children are my passions so running a writing business at home while also being a mum is an obvious solution for me.
Watching a friend look for a new job recently, especially as she may have to move interstate to get a great job, has reminded me how much I value working from home.
- I don’t waste time commuting to the city
- I don’t create any polution travelling to work!
- I control my hours and days
- I can say no to clients or projects if it suits me
- I can go on excursions and help at school – which I enjoy and consider important, but it also gives me a mental break from writing which actually helps me write better!
- It’s a good excuse to not do the dusting every week!
- I don’t have work colleagues distracting me as I write – I can sit for hours uninterupted (as long as the kids are at school!) and concentrate on writing
Word Constructions ~ for all your business writing needs
Photos – no apostophe
This is becoming one of my pet hates 🙂
There seems to be an increase in the number of people using an apostrophe when writing about photos – that it, people writing photo’s instead of photos.
“I will bring my photo’s to show you”
What do the photos own? NOTHING! So there is no need for an apostrophe to be there and it annoys pedants like me when it is there!
I’m struggling to think of situations where anyone would talk about photos owning anything so it’s probably fairly safe to say that photos should never have an apostrophe added!
And given that adding an apostrophe is actually more work, I don’t see the appeal myself!
Word Constructions ~ for all your business writing needs
What’s in a name?
My daughter recently discovered that people didn’t live at the same time as dinosaurs. She was shocked and didn’t really believe it.
“But if people weren’t alive when dinosaurs were, then how can people know what they were called?” she asked.
It lead to a discussion of why we use names for things – even things that we don’t see in our everyday life. Names save us time, words and energy, as well as individualising us as people.
When writing, the choice of a name can be really important as names also set the scene. Names can give information about the person, such as gender, nationality, personality and age, and about the theme of the writing.
And it’s not just naming characters in fiction stories either. When I am writing something that includes examples, I take care to use names that imply a mix of people – for instance, using male and female names.
Word Constructions ~ for all your business writing needs
Competition in business
Do you run a business? How do you deal with your competition?
I am about to write an article for the Business Mums Magazine on this topic, and the more opinions I have the better the article will be! So please share your thoughts here or answer the survey here – or both of course!
Word Constructions ~ for all your business writing needs
Fresh web content tips
Carrying on from my last post about Lucie of MultimediART’s talk, it was interesting to get her interpretation on fresh website content. It has often been said that fresh content is important for search engine rankings, but what does fresh content mean?
Three main points to consider are:
- change the content on your site at least once between each visit from a search engine spider (check your stats to find out how often that is for your site)
- keep the content change within 2 clicks of your homepage
- swapping around a few words or even a paragraph is probably not enough to count as fresh for a search engine
Search engines apparently search your site more or less often depending on how fresh they judge your content to be.
Content includes any articles and text on your site, as well as products, tools, news items, RSS feeds, and so on.
So how fresh is your website?
Word Constructions ~ for all your business writing needs
Website marketing
I went to a Business Mums Network morning tea this morning – in fact I hosted it!
The speaker, Lucie Battaini of MultiMediART, spoke to us about using simple and mostly free techniques to get more people to your website. Although I knew a lot of what Lucie spoke about, it was great to hear it all put together and I learnt some new things, too.
For instance, Lucie spoke about keywords – apparently, keyword metadata isn’t used by most search engines now but the use of keywords in your content is crucial. That means you should include a couple of important words as many times as possible in your web content for search engines to find and correctly categorise you.
However, it is really important to not overuse your keywords – imagine if I used ‘business writing’ at least once in every sentence – boring and confusing to read. I find it better to write the information normally so it flows properly, and then go back and see if there’s a way to add a few more keywords without loosing the flow.
And of course, Lucie pointed out that content is King, so I’d better get writing!
Word Constructions ~ for all your business writing needs
Dilemas…
Writing is easy enough for me, and honesty in my writing is important, but sometimes it isn’t easy to write the complete truth.
For example, when I write a review of something I will be honest – I’d never say it was great if I hated it. I’d always be polite and as constructive as possible rather than slamming it, but I will say if it isn’t up to scratch.
But what about when the less-than-pleasing item is owned/created by someone you want to impress? It gets tough because I want to be respected for honesty and feel the responsibility that if I review something it could influence other people’s use of money & time.
In the past, I have managed this by pointing out all the positives of the item and only mentioning the weaknesses – and obviously not saying anything like ‘great read’ or ‘value for money’. Once I reviewed a book which I found to be fairly boring, but it’s got a lot to do with the fact I don’t like that genre much either. My review commented on how it used simple language and was true to its genre with a few unexpected twists. That way, someone liking the genre would read the book but others wouldn’t bother – win win for everyone!
New articles…
I added 2 new articles to my site today, and just in case you’re interested in these topics, here are the links:
Getting your business ready for Christmas
Hope they’re useful to you.
Telling the tale…
I’ve heard of a fun way to write a story and find a lot of new blogs. It’s as simple as each person writing one sentence and building the story as we go – and there will be multiple versions of the story in the end, too.
Here’s what we have to do…
Here is the way it works:
1. Copy these instructions and the following story into a post on your blog.
2. Read the story so far and add your sentence to it. It must make sense because this will eventually be a real story.
3. Add your blog link to the links listed. Every time a new sentence and blog link is added yours will receive some link love too.
4. The only rule is that no smutty sentences are allowed!
“Telling the Tale
I really don’t remember how we came to be here. I am not sure that I really want to know!
However one thing that I do remember is that we followed a really bright light, that flashed every once in a while. We followed it blindly for some time and then when we came to a stop we were utterly amazed!
Looking down into a valley, we could see it wasn’t just one light, but hundreds of them converging.”
Contributing Authors:
The Tall Poppy
Just Delete That.
madmadmummy
Small Business Diva
Word Constructions
Have fun – I look forward to reading some great stories!
Word Constructions ~ for all your business writing needs
Keeping to the point…
I had a meeting with clients yesterday and they showed me a competitior’s materials as an example of materials they wanted. Well, the concept they wanted but not the materials themselves.
The document they showed me was 10 or 12 pages long, with a covering letter attached. I only skim read the document but it was clear who had written it – the owner of the business has written it about his precious business and service, and because of his passion and motivations, he tried to tell potential customers everything there is to know about his services.
It is important to know the purpose of any document and just stick to it. If your document (as was the one I saw yesterday) is more detailed than a flyer but is still meant to just give an overview of the service, then just give an overview. Your customers don’t need to know you use a PC or Mac to produce their pdf – and what’s more, they don’t care.
Telling too much will just bore your customers which could well mean they’ll go elsewhere. If they want to know the technical details they’ll ask for them, but you can bet most people won’t.
When writing for clients, I frequently cut back on the amount of information included in a document with the result being a cleaner, simpler document that works.
So as you’re writing ask yourself “Is this really necessary? Does this suit my purpose?”
PS I have a new article on knowing your purpose – you can read it here.
Word Constructions ~ for all your business writing needs
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