by Chris Brogan
2. Find unexpected patterns. There are patterns everywhere. If you look carefully you can see, for example, correlations between how well the economy is doing and the size of shoulder pads in suit jackets. Putting together different concepts under the umbrella of a pattern is what we did with this book, for example. This relates to number 1 as well, because finding patterns means getting more data from more places.
3. Remove the irrelevant. Does your work need to have absolutely every example, or can many be removed if you find one perfect example? The problem with lots of the work out there is that it relates the same thing again and again without adding new information. This is subject to opinion, of course, but in many cases finding patterns (number 2) can allow you to remove many repetitive examples and replace them with a single one.
4. Add random data. The human brain is an amazing pattern-recognition machine. If you ever need an idea for anything whatsoever or need to see an old idea in a new light, attempt to add random data and see how your mind connects it to the old stuff. This is a known technique discussed by lots of creatives, such as Edward de Bono, as well as Brian Eno with his Oblique Strategies cards.
There are more methods, but they all focus on the same idea. Take disparate concepts and connect them. Take a look at what the new, combined concept is like. Give it a name and simplify it. Then do it again, somewhere else, until the concept is simple and perfect.
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If you’re like us, you probably started on the Web quite a few years ago. You may blog, but intermittently. You’re not “a writer” necessarily, or at least you don’t call yourself one. You may have a university degree in literature or something, which means you had to write long essays at some point, but that was a long time ago. You’re definitely no longer accustomed to writing on a regular basis, and this probably means you think you’re terrible at it—and hey, you may be right!
We’re not here to berate you about not writing, but we will tell you this: Writing is now one of the few skills you must have—and we really mean “must” here—for the twenty-first century.
Think about it: More and more of our content is consumed online. It gets sent to your mobile phone, your tablet, or your computer. We consume more written media than we ever have in history. Do you sincerely think this trend is going to suddenly reverse itself? It’s time for all of us to become master copywriters. Many Web aficionados are already doing it. They’re learning to master written sales techniques that get amazing results for any half-decent product they come across. As they get better at it, in some cases they are literally creating their own jobs by becoming better salespeople and persuaders.
Meanwhile most of us are sitting around, passively consuming content instead of creating it. Actually, it makes us kind of angry just thinking about the wasted potential. Maybe it has the same effect on you. We hope so, because it really is that important to learn.
Writing proper, excellent copy is going to be one of the most important tools in your attempt to conquer the world with the stuff you make. If you can write well and sell well, you can build an audience and make requests of them more often.
If you don’t know how to do these things, though, you’ll find yourself more dependent on others. Your channel won’t get much attention and you won’t know how to develop it. Or even if you have one with a significant audience, you won’t know how to sell them something. So you must learn to convince with your words.
To do this, you really have to become a master of language. This takes a lot of practice, and we can’t do the work for you. So for now, here are some 101-level tips.
1. Learn to freaking spell. Does this really need an explanation? Sincerely, this is important. Misspellings have a huge impact on credibility (a factor in Trust, discussed later). At the minimum, use a spell-checker. This is basic.
2. Expand your vocabulary. The magic of e-readers is that they typically include a dictionary. Click and highlight and you have a definition, instantly. How better to improve your understanding of your own language? Imagine how clunky it was to do this a hundred years ago and rejoice. Any time you don’t know a word, don’t think twice. Just do it.
3. Study the masters. Copywriters have sold hundreds of thousands of books to people like you and me because selling through writing is their art form. They have perfected it to such a degree that the writing seems natural and easy, all the while subtly convincing you. So study them!
4. Copy a masterwork. When Julien first remarked on his blog that he was doing this, it seemed nuts (and the comments said so). But some of the best-known writers of our time have done it. Haruki Murakami has translated a ton of English-language works into Japanese and is now considered one of the world’s greatest living writers. And Hunter S. Thompson, during his tenure at Time magazine, typed out Ernest Hemingway’s and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books on a typewriter. Copying a masterwork isn’t as crazy as it seems.
5. Write endlessly. Nothing works better to improve writing than making time for it every day. Free yourself from the constraints of perfectionism by writing something you’ve deliberately decided you’ll never read ever again or perhaps even decided to destroy afterward. Or, practice free-form writing and then editing afterward, but not together—they are usually incompatible.
Too Many Ideas
We often hear from people that they have “too many ideas.” They might start working on an idea to build a Web site that helps bands find better rehearsal spaces, but before they finish, they get a new idea to import different types of tea from Barbados and begin working on an import/export business. Midway through that, they have a great idea for how to really improve Netflix, if only they could meet the right person and talk about it.
Everyone can suffer from this, if they choose to let their ideas run rampant. Chris did this a lot in late 2010 and into 2011, and it had quite a negative impact on his business. He would run with something, feeling very entrepreneurial about it, and never quite get the execution just right before he started in on something else. Julien’s had his share of ideas that have started and stopped too. When exposed to the Web, it’s natural. Lots of ideas seem exciting, but the ability to focus is really what matters.
Having too many great ideas is really part of the process. From there, you must pick an idea or a few ideas and work them from raw thought into something that might deliver value. And again, you can look at “idea” as meaning “project” or “thought you want to communicate” or “mission” or many other things. It all works out the same.
Having too many ideas is a starting point. Next you might decide upon a framework to determine which ideas are worth acting upon. That’s where most people miss a step.
There are many ways to tackle this, and which is best ultimately depends on what types of ideas you’re talking about and what your goals are. Let’s look at a few frameworks and talk about how they might work for you.
Business Ideas
If you want a way to evaluate business ideas, you might build a framework like this:
Does this idea fit our mission and goals for the year and beyond?
Is the new idea revenue generating (or cost cutting)?
What would it take (money/time/resources) to get the idea launched?
Who would champion this idea and do they have time?
Assuming we’re working at 100 percent capacity right now, what would have to go to make room for this idea?
How much money could we potentially make (a conservative estimate), and is it worth it?
Looking at that set of questions, you can see how to phase out “too many ideas.” You might have an idea that meets a few of the above criteria, but you’ll see rather quickly why it won’t be worth pursuing if it doesn’t do well on the others. If you do this often enough, you’ll end up with just the correct amount of ideas, and the right ones.
Creative Ideas
If you’re an artist or musician or some other creative role, maybe you need a way to determine whether to pursue a proje
ct idea. Your determining factors might be different. Let’s look at a sampling.
Does this idea connect with any of the themes of my work?
Does this idea stretch me as an artist, or is it a repetition?
Can I use my skills to execute this idea?
How much time and other materials are involved in this idea?
Do I care whether this idea is salable or not?
The best possible way to sift through the abundance of ideas in your head is to work through a framework of questions that will help you determine what works best for you and your pursuits. Again, the questions really will vary. A creative person might not care whether a project is revenue generating but might care a great deal about whether an idea stretches his or her skills or abilities.
Do Your Ideas Have Any Longevity?
Another problem with having too many ideas is that we have to be very conscious of the value of time. You might have a great idea, think it through, give it a pass through your framework, and launch it to your platform. But what if you don’t give it enough time to get off the ground? Or, in another time-related perspective, what if your idea is only really viable for a brief amount of time?
Thinking through the potential longevity of an idea is another good way to “gate” these opportunities and decide whether or not to give them a go. Chris once launched a project where he intended to shoot video reviews during all his business travels. The project presumed that Chris would be on the road quite often (which at the moment was true). Shortly afterward, Chris reduced his time on the road, and the project collapsed. If he’d thought about the idea’s long-term staying power, he might not have launched the project and left another orphaned site out there on the Web.
Thinking through the timing of ideas will help you reduce “too many ideas” to a workable number.
Story, Packaging, and Too Many Ideas
Imagine you’re tasked with creating a movie. You decide it should have giant robots. You then decide it should also have Greek gods and mythology. Then you add 1930s-style gangsters. Finally, you determine it should be a musical. Odds are, it won’t work.
The same is true of having too many ideas. It’s important to apply constraints to what you’re doing. Said another way: By sticking to one strong theme or story, you’ll have a better chance of limiting your ideas to those that are more promising.
The beauty of constraints is that they let you work within a certain set of parameters and cull extraneous “noise.” If you decide to improve your physical health over the next several months by taking up running and body-weight exercises, it might not be useful to also take up basketball. You might decide to rule out the idea of getting a new mountain bike, because that isn’t running, nor is it body-weight exercises.
Similarly, with a bigger idea, you can ask whether it fits the story you intend to tell. If you’ve decided to focus your efforts on selling video projects to big companies, starting a small business consultancy doesn’t match. This kind of story-based thinking allows you to rule out some of those “too many ideas” quite easily.
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At the time of this writing, tablet computers and smart phones have overtaken both laptops and desktops as the communication and consumption devices of choice. People are no longer comfortably reading your very long and rambling e-mail at their desk. They are reading it on the way to the bathroom in between meetings. They are reading it while on hold for a conference call. They are almost always reading it in a distracted and time-crunched moment of the day.
Think about yourself: That’s when you read e-mails now, right? You almost never sit down with a steaming mug of coffee, give a delighted sigh of contentment, stretch your neck muscles, and dig into your in-box. Instead, you quickly scan to make sure the boss or your clients or your significant other haven’t thrown something new on your plate.
Worse still, if the mail you’ve sent to someone else was too long, they’ve clicked it as read without finishing it, and now it’s sitting in the gray, no-longer-bold, below-the-interesting-and-unread-stuff no-man’s-land part of the in-box (or worse, it’s filed away!). You can forget about a response if that’s where your mail landed.
But what happened? Why did the recipient forget about you? Don’t you deserve at least the courtesy of a response?
Let’s ask some questions:
Was your subject line obvious and actionable? Could the recipient answer based almost entirely on it?
Did you put the most important part of the e-mail in the first paragraph?
Did you end the e-mail with the one question that was most important?
Was there one “ask” in that e-mail or more than one?
Was the e-mail HTML formatted and sent via a “donotreply@” e-mail address? (That is, was it a newsletter?)
Had you messaged the recipient recently (within a few months) without making an ask?
Was the e-mail fewer than three hundred words?
Could the recipient read it in under thirty seconds?
There are several reasons why people have stopped responding to e-mail in a timely fashion, and most of them revolve around too much e-mail in their box and e-mail becoming less and less easy to answer. Hint: If SMS text messaging is on the rise, why would you still send 1,400-word e-mails?
Brevity and Articulation
Making a point is easier if you’re brief. Sometimes doing this makes people nervous. Teachers told them to write long, flowing sentences that show off their ability to produce great prose that stacks up against the likes of Herman Melville and prove, once and for all, that they understand grammar.
Phooey. Write brief sentences. Need help getting into it? Read The Shipping News by Annie Proulx. No, it has nothing to do with business. It’s fiction. It’s a few years old at this point. Whatever. It will cure you of the need to write superlong sentences.
The rule of grammar and paragraphs is to write three sentences per paragraph at minimum.
Phooey part two.
Welcome to the land of skimmers. If your idea is packed into a dense thicket of words, it’s lost. The faster you can shave off the fat and get to the point, the faster you’ll see your e-mail response rate go back up.
Articulation and brevity go hand in hand. If someone is to understand your idea, it has to be in a very tight package.
Could you say it in three words?
It’s much harder than you think to do this, by the way. For example, Chris’s company, Human Business Works, is a strategic advisory company that helps midsize to large businesses with customer acquisition via the digital channel. Blah blah blah. Say that in three words?
“Digital marketing strategy.” It’s a whole lot harder to sell with just those three words. That said, if we put that in the first line of an e-mail, it’s a lot more likely to get read than blabber about customer acquisition and the rest of it. See how this works?
If you can’t simplify words, lines, and syntax and make your writing clearer for people to respond to, you are doomed.
Do you see how we wrote this section mostly to demonstrate what we’re aiming for in your e-mail efforts? (If you’re listening to the audio program, that’s probably a “no,” but pretend we’ve written very brief, simple, punchy sentences with lots of tiny paragraphs instead of longer ones. Fair?)
Articulation will help you see responses.
CLARITY AS A FORM OF CONTRAST
If you’re good enough at it, it’s possible that high Articulation (or clarity) in your message may in fact be enough of a differentiator to put you over the top—from invisible to visible, from zero impact to high impact.
When Stephen Hawking came out with A Brief History of Time, there had never before been such a clear expression of how the universe and time work. Yet the ideas were not new. Only their expression and packaging were. In this case, it was enough.
Consider the originally submitted title, From Big Bang to Black Holes. It clearly conveys what the book is about yet leaves you with no impression of
the subject’s grandeur. Graphics inside help you truly understand how the four dimensions work. Opening it leaves you with the immediate impression that, yes, you can learn this stuff.
Combined with his important brand in the space (no pun intended), Hawking was able to create the first mass-market physics book, eventually selling over ten million copies and staying on best-seller lists for four years.
Here’s how to use high clarity to differentiate yourself.
Value clarification: “How to Gain a Thousand Twitter Followers in One Hour.” Putting the value proposition in the title often tells people exactly what they need to hear. If this is something your audience has been meaning to figure out, they’ll see it and care immediately. So you can gain an advantage just by clarifying.
Data visualization: If 2008 was perhaps the year of the top-ten list on the Web, 2011 could have been called the year of the infographic. Known to initiates as data visualization, infographics have caught on in a big way on the Web because of their ability to clarify data (and sometimes mislead with it, actually). Will they still work by the time you have your hands on this? Test them out and see.
Condensed or expanded content: Make what you do extremely concise and clear or extremely long and profoundly explained. Either method is a form of clarity if properly used. Viperchill.com, a blog run by the South African Glen Allsopp, produces material so long that his twenty thousand subscribers can’t help but feel that every article is a super-comprehensive, well-researched guide (and it is). On the other end of the spectrum, Seth Godin produces content so dense that practically every line is spreadable on its own without further explanation. Either of these options is better than middle of the road, where nothing much happens that’s exceptional at all.
