Content creation is central to your inbound marketing success, but as your volume of written content increases, inconsistencies are also bound to arise. Whether due to lack of clarity in your own head about the style with which you want to write, or disjointed communication across the content creators in your organization, failure to decide upon and document accepted editorial guidelines is a recipe for inconsistent messaging and an incoherent brand experience.

That’s why most companies that rely on content as a central part of their marketing strategy develop an editorial style guide. When creating an editorial style guide, you’re not discussing the operations of content creation — like editorial calendaring or search engine optimization of content — nor are you going into the detail of a brand style guide like the nitty gritty on visual style and use of your logo. Rather, your editorial style guide will guide writers by providing a set of standards to which they must adhere when creating content for your website, eliminating confusion, guess work, and debates over what boils down to a matter of editorial opinion among grammar and content geeks.

By putting in time up front to writing this editorial style guide, you’ll save time spent answering the same questions over and over; get new hires and guest contributors on the same page more quickly; and publish content that is consistent in tone, quality, and presentation, reflecting a more professional brand experience. Now let’s break down, page by page, exactly what information to include in a comprehensive editorial style guide so you can go create one for your company.

Section 1: Grammar

Decide which established style manual you will follow. Most businesses adopt either the AP Stylebook, or the Chicago Manual of Style. You can purchase online subscriptions to these manuals for your employees to reference, the login for which you should also include in this section of the editorial style guide to make access simple. You might find employees are more likely to reference these tools when provided with an online subscription that contains a search function, instead of a paper book through which they have to flip to find their answers.

These style guides provide a good basis for basic grammar rules, but you’ll also probably want to make some exceptions to the rules therein for the sake of branding and style. This is the section of your editorial style guide to outline those exceptions and also highlight some of the most rules that commonly arise when writing for your company that people should commit to memory (regardless of whether it is aligned with or against AP or Chicago style). For example:

• What do you capitalize? Do you capitalize the name of your product, for example? Are there certain prepositions you want capitalized in your title despite your style book’s recommendations?
• What do you abbreviate? Would you type “a.k.a.” or “aka”?
• Do you use an Oxford comma?
• How do you spell words in your industry that don’t have a definitive spelling? Is it “ebook”, “Ebook”, or “e-book”? What about “website” versus “web site”?

Listing answers to common questions like these in the first part of your editorial style guide will give people an easy resource to reference that saves you time and encourages consistency. Feel free to continue adding to this list as more confusions arise and get resolved during the content creation process. You’re creating your own style guide, so feel free to borrow different rules from different style guides. The important thing is that you use the same rules consistently throughout all the content you create.

Section 2: Style and Tone

This section of the editorial style guide should address something less concrete than grammar rules but arguably the most important content in your editorial style guide: how your content should sound to the reader. Can writers use the first person? How do you feel about the use of industry jargon? Think about the words you would use to describe your content in an ideal world. Which of these adjectives do you want your content to evoke?

• Conversational
• Educational
• Academic
• Funny
• Controversial
• Irreverent
• Artistic
• Objective
• Sophisticated

You might think you want your content to be all of the above, but force yourself to prioritize just a few, explain why it’s important to achieve this style and tone in your content, and provide examples of content (excerpts are fine) that are successful in doing so. If there are stylistic characteristics your content absolutely should not have, this is the section in which to include that information, too. When deciding on style and tone, be sure to consider your target audience and buyer personas in the process. Which style and tone would resonate best with them? Which brings us to our next page…

Section 3: Personas

This section occurs after the Style and Tone section of the editorial style guide, because understanding your target audience helps clarify for the writer the style and tone for which you’re striving. The two are so intertwined that it would also be acceptable to place this as the second section in your editorial style guide, and move Style and Tone to page 3.

Whichever way you choose, know that the personas in your editorial style guide don’t need to go as in depth as the personas you hand to your sales and marketing team. Those might include detailed information like objections that arise in the sales process and how to overcome them, and tips on identifying these personas “in the wild” or when you get them on the phone. These personas should be more brief, pulling out the highlights from your in-depth marketing personas that concisely explain who your target audience is, their pain points, the value your company provides, how they like to be communicated with, and a picture to give writers a visual to keep in mind when creating content.

If your writers understand your target audience, many questions that would normally arise during content creation are easily answered with common sense based on their knowledge of your readers.

Section 4: Content Structure

Content can come in many structures, not all of which may be right for your audience; your editorial style guide should outline which are appropriate and encouraged for your website. This will be particularly important if you outsource content creation or rely on many contributors to keep your business blog running. Consider these possible content structures when deciding the acceptable forms your content can take:

• How-To Guides
• Top Lists
• Debates Over Controversial Topics
• Serialized Content
• Data
• News
• Interviews
• Infographics
• Product, Service, or Content Reviews
• Pro/Con lists
• Video Content
• Audio Content
• Comics

As with the common grammatical errors and exceptions in the first section of your editorial style guide, you will probably encounter new content formats that you want to include on this list. Continue to edit this section as you understand which content formats perform well (or underperform) and are an important (or harmful) part of your content strategy.

Section 5: Graphics and Formatting

Like your personas, this section should be light in the editorial style guide; you can create a separate brand style guide that goes into more detail on the visual elements associated with your brand. You should, however, delineate visual details that are common to the content creation process.

• Outline from where writers can source images and how to attribute that source within the content — should they link to it at the bottom of their content, include an image caption, or work in the artist credit within the copy?
• When should images align to the right, to the left, or in the center?
• Should text wrap around images?
• What are the RGB and hex codes for your text and headers?
• What typeface should be used?
• Can writers use italics, bolding, or underlining? If so, is usage limited to certain occasions, like bolding headings and hyperlinks?
• What kind of bullets should be used — square, round, or other — and how do they align with the rest of your text?
• How should numbered lists appear — “1″, “1.” or “1.)”?

Many of these graphical elements can be preset in your content management system (CMS), but they can also be easily overridden when writers copy and paste content from elsewhere with formatting attached or by an overzealous writer with a flair for design. Outline these core expectations in your editorial style guide, and refer those with more advanced needs to your brand style guide.

Section 6: Approved and Unapproved Content

Great content often cites research and data from third party sources. Make your writer’s job easier by providing approved industry resources from which they can draw, and even more importantly, resources from which they cannot draw. Break up this section of your editorial style guide into two sections: recommended and approved industry resources, and “do not mentions.”

The information in the “do not mention” section should include competitors and unreliable resources, but it should also mention controversial topics and opinions that should be avoided at all costs. For example, many companies strictly prohibit any mention of politics or religion in their content or have provisions that explain when it is acceptable and how to frame the discussion. This is the section of your editorial style guide to explain the intricacies of such controversies as they relate to your brand so you can prevent reputation management catastrophes.

Section 7: Sourcing

With great research comes great responsibility…and unfortunately a lot of choices, too. Clear up the confusion around how to properly cite research by deciding on one methodology and documenting it in your editorial style guide. Explain how to create footnotes, references, links to external cites, or even bibliographies if they are relevant to your company. This section of your editorial style guide doesn’t need to be long; just write down the rules, and provide some examples of proper citations so writers can easily attribute their sources properly.

Illustrating the Difference Between Right and Wrong

Every section of your editorial style guide can benefit from real life examples of the concepts you’re explaining, whether you include those examples on the same page or as an appendix at the end of the guide. For example, when talking about proper formatting, include a visual example of a well-formatted blog post with call-outs that detail why the elements therein are successful. Or if you’re discussing grammar usage, provide an incorrect example, then mark it up to show how a writer could fix it to align with your editorial style guide. Bridging your requirements with proper executions from your actual website will help illustrate these concepts more clearly and cut down on follow-up questions and instances of exceptions to the rules you’ve laid out.

Do you have an editorial style guide for your company? What else do you include in yours?

Image credit: RambergMediaImages

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If your memories of high school involve wedgies, broken hearts, and getting stuffed into your locker, you probably love Glee.

The musical comedy TV show — Ryan Murphy’s smash hit about the nerds, misfits, and social outcasts of McKinley High School’s glee club — is equal parts quirky, cheesy, heartbreaking, and surprisingly delightful.

Over its first two seasons, the show has also attracted millions of obsessive fans from all over the world.

Glee fans, or “Gleeks,” follow the moves of their favorite show with a passion once reserved for Cabbage Patch Kids or the Toyota Prius.

What is Glee’s secret formula for creating crazed fans who would rather die than miss an episode of the show?

And how can you use Glee’s techniques to market your business and turn your listless readers into raving groupies?

Here are a few ideas …

Harness the power of the underdog

The Glee kids are the underdogs at McKinley High.

They constantly have to battle not only the school’s evil cheerleading coach, Sue Sylvester, but vicious classmates who taunt them in the halls and throw Slushies in their faces.

We cheer for these underdogs.

We want them to succeed, to show the world how truly talented they are. We want those bullying football players to see the light and drop the 7-11 cups.

Having someone to cheer for is essential.

If your customers can’t get behind you and support you, you’ll never turn them into raving fans. Show them what you’re up against — whether it’s battling writers block, standing up for mom-and-pop stores in a hostile corporate culture, or even stretching yourself to do something that scares you.

Show your audience what you’re fighting for. Share your biggest obstacles, even if those roadblocks are intangible, like fear of success or struggles with technology.

Once your customers know what you’re fighting for (and fighting against) they can rally behind you and become your biggest fans.

Be undeniably awesome

The kids of McKinley High may be underdogs, but they can sing.

They sing, they dance, they twirl, they shine. And when they perform, they put their hearts and souls into it.

Want to be like Glee? Be really, really good at what you do.

Social media is full of quirky people who aren’t very good at their jobs. The underdog and quirk factors only work if you have something remarkable to offer.

Put your absolute best writing on your site. Craft those autoresponder messages so they’re impressively well written and amazingly useful to your prospects, every single time. Make sure your products and services are remarkable and fan-worthy. Create an atmosphere of excellence.

Put your absolute best effort into every detail of your business. Remember that when you’re online, people are watching, so show ‘em your best side every day. Your customer will learn to expect the best from you every time you put something out in the world.

When they expect greatness and you give it to them consistently, they’ll become loyal. And loyal fans are the best fans to have.

Take risks

One of the most popular characters on the show is Kurt Hummel, played by actor Chris Colfer.

Ryan Murphy took a huge risk by casting Colfer in the show. Chris had no previous professional acting experience and was a complete unknown.

Murphy was so impressed with Colfer during his audition that the Glee creator actually wrote the role of Kurt specifically for him. Murphy thought Colfer had something special, and figured out a way to include him in the show.

Murphy listened to his heart, even though it was a risk.

The result of Murphy’s risk? Last year Chris Colfer won a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Emmy for his brilliant portrayal. Kurt has become one of the show’s most-beloved and most-talked-about characters.

The upshot? Follow your gut.

If you think something needs to be said on your blog, say it. If you want to link to something on Twitter that might be a wee bit controversial? Tweet it. If you feel like going out on a limb and creating a bold new product for your customers, and your heart is telling you it’s the right thing to do, listen to your heart.

Don’t create controversy for its own sake, but don’t be afraid to stand out for doing the right thing either.

Think of Kurt, and be brave.

Let your freak flag fly

The characters on Glee are quirky. They’re odd.

In some cases, they’re downright bizarre. And that’s part of the reason we adore them.

Cheerleader Brittney is one of the most unusual kids in the group. Her dry observations have been known to stop lunchroom conversations cold.

Despite some strange looks and the tendency of her McKinley classmates to assume she’s dim-witted, Brittney’s not afraid to be herself. And the more we hear from Brittney and glimpse the world through her oddball observations, the more we cheer for her.

It’s Brittney’s oddness and naïveté, or Rachel’s songs about her headband, or Finn seeing the face of God in his grilled cheese sandwich, that make us love these characters. If they were all perfect, they’d be boring. And we’d be bored watching them.

What characteristics can you share with your customer that might show them a surprising new side of you?

Can you tell them you love show tunes?

Religiously follow Manchester United?

Have visited all seven continents?

Don’t be afraid to show a little personality. Your customers need to know you in order to like and trust you. So make sure they know some of your oddness, too.

Your customer will see your quirkiness as a part of you and will feel connected to you and your business. And then they will adore you and want to put up your Tiger Beat posters on their walls.

Encourage your fans to connect with you

Glee’s marketing team are absolute geniuses about social media.

Glee has a vibrant website with regularly updated content, including video sneak peeks, interviews with actors, quizzes, and photos. The site features discussion boards and a weekly Gleek newsletter.

The website even features an iPhone app called “Tap Tap Glee” for fans who want to go mobile with their McKinley spirit.

In social media circles, Gleeks are invited to participate in the Glee conversation in a myriad of ways, including:

• Glee’s Facebook page has attracted over 16 million fans. Glee posts at least twice a day with news, award announcements, special previews and regular reminders about upcoming episodes. Fans can comment on all the status updates and videos with encouragement, suggestions, and feedback.
• The Glee Twitter account is also constantly updated, and consistently links to the actors’ individual Twitter accounts, assuring Glee fans have access to their favorite stars, too. Almost a million fans follow the main Glee page and the Glee conversation is constant.
• Glee’s YouTube Channel features more than 120 videos, most of them of musical numbers and interviews. Their videos have received over 300 millions views. Fans can share their thoughts on any video, and each video is embeddable, so fans can share Glee news on their own websites and blogs.

By creating an online presence that gives fans scores of ways to interact with the makers of Glee and their fellow fans, they provide an extraordinary supplement to the experience of watching Glee at home.

They offer Gleeks the opportunity to talk about their favorite things — reliving this week’s show, and speculating on possibilities for the next episode.

Have you given your customers places to connect with you via social media?

Do you give them news, interviews, and fun behind-the-scenes previews of what you’re up to next? If you’re not, you’re missing a fantastic opportunity to turn your regular customers into crazy screaming fans.

Give them a place to show the love.

Your turn in the spotlight …

During sixty minutes of show tunes and Journey covers, Glee somehow pulls off a magic act.

It shows the world a bizarre, ragtag group of high school performers and manages to give each of us someone with whom we can relate. And while we’re relating to these kids, they touch our hearts and make us smile.

So whether you identify with Kurt, Mercedes, Artie, Rachel, or Finn, there is something in the Glee formula that can help you transform your business into an organization that people follow with fanatical loyalty.

Best way to get started? Stand up and sing it, people.

The stage is yours.

About the Author: Beth Hayden helps business owners make more money by helping them create fabulous websites, blogs, and social media campaigns. Get her best tips for achieving blogging nirvana by downloading her free report, From Blah to Hurrah: 25 Ways to Make Your Blog Bigger, Better and More Profitable.

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We’ve been thinking a lot about new WordPress users lately.

As elegant and simple as it is, WordPress can be a little daunting if you’re just beginning to work with it. The beauty of it though, is that it doesn’t have to be.

So, we’ve been taking some time to think through the big questions people have when they’re just starting out.

What came of it was an indispensible, easy to understand guide for the Genesis Framework for WordPress, compiled and written by Brian Gardner and our relentless team over at StudioPress.

Whether you’re just getting out of the gate with your Genesis + WordPress website, or you’re already publishing regularly, this easy-to-read distillation of how the Genesis Framework works for you is an invaluable guide for every smart online publisher.

In fact, you should go ahead and grab it even if you don’t own Genesis — it’s a fantastic primer for WordPress too.

The guide is for bloggers, copywriters, consultants, and content marketers who rely on the efficiency, security and scalability of Genesis + WordPress to make their place on the web.

With the free guide, you’ll be well on your way to utilizing (and enhancing) the rock-solid security and remarkable SEO capabilities of the Genesis Framework.

With the vast array of out of the box, turn-key designs & options, unlimited support & updates, and as many website domains as you can build on, the new revolution in publishing is getting a lot easier for everyone.

As Darren Rowse puts it “Genesis lets me sleep easy.”

This free guide helps you navigate all the basics:

• An introduction to Frameworks and Child Themes: page 4
• Turn on Auto-Updates for one-click streamlined stability and peace of mind: page 38
• SEO Settings to ensure your content is reaching your audience: page 19
• Install procedures for both beginners and advanced users: page 6
• Understanding how to enable Widgets for extended functionality and efficiency: page 24
• Theme and Navigation settings to style the look and feel of your site: page 11

It’s all in there. Download it, print it, or drop it on your mobile device to keep it handy whenever you need it.

Note: This is a “living” document, so as Genesis grows and evolves, so will the guide. Check back from time to time for an updated version.

About the Author: Kelton Reid is an independent screenwriter and novelist, as well as a copywriter for Copyblogger Media. Get more from him on Google+.

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Copywriters love to tell clients they can create compelling copy.

Few of them ever mention whom they think they’re compelling.

That’s because too few of them have ever given it the thought it deserves.

One of the first rules of copywriting is to know your audience, and many copywriters are fairly skilled at creating copy designed to appeal to, say, a 60-year-old female retiree who’s confused about her insurance options.

The problem is that that’s not how Dorothea in Florida thinks of herself.

If Dorothea doesn’t identify with that picture, what makes you think you’re actually writing to her?

Who does Dorothea say she is?

Dorothea in Florida thinks of herself as a mother to two children, and widow to a husband who recently passed away from a heart attack.

Dorothea used to be a saleswoman and retired when she was fifty, because every company she applied for wanted someone younger.

Dorothea is a poker player and a mystery-novel lover. Dorothea is a damn good cook. Dorothea is a busybody and a know-it-all.

Dorothea has never once in her life thought of herself as a 60-year-old female retiree who is confused about her insurance options.

So copy that was written for that theoretical person doesn’t appeal to Dorothea. It doesn’t appeal to her three closest friends either –- you know, the ones she plays poker with on Thursdays.

And when her eldest son reads the copy, it doesn’t sound like his mother. In fact, even though he thinks she could use the service, he doesn’t send it to her because he doesn’t want her to think that’s his image of her.

She’d be hurt. Or insulted.

Same goes for her doctor, her neighbors, and her book club. No one thinks that copy sounds like Dorothea — because it doesn’t.

It sounds like it would appeal to someone who doesn’t exist.

You need to write for Dorothea

The next time you’re writing, don’t write for a demographic.

Those people don’t exist. The real readers — the ones you want to persuade — won’t recognize themselves in a collection of demographic traits.

Instead, write for Dorothea.

Or write for a teenager named Harper who thinks her parents are ridiculous because they need her help with the computer and they don’t understand anything about Twilight.

Write for Mike, who’s just out of college and has about $ 10,000 in credit card debt that he hasn’t told his parents about (and hopes he’ll never have to tell them).

Write for Arnold, who’s just getting used to an empty nest after his kids left for college and is wondering what he should do with his hobby business, now that he has all this extra time on his hands.

Give yourself a real person to write for.

Appeal directly to that person. Know all their foibles, their worries, their problems – and explain how this product or service fixes one of them.

The person you’ve imagined in your head doesn’t exist either, of course. But writing for a human being instead of a demographic lets you think and write in new ways.

What this way of writing gets you

With that person’s image in your mind, you’ll be warmer and less robotic.

You’ll be less generic, more personal.

You’ll draw the reader in on a personal level.

You’ll be compelling because you know who your reader really is, what that person is worried about, and why this matters to them. You’ll be compelling because you’ll be focused on how you can help a person, not focused on how you can sell a product. And your reader will sense it.

You’ll be compelling because getting this right will genuinely benefit this human being in front of you.

If you think your readers can’t tell the difference, you’re dead wrong.

Just ask Dorothea.

About the Author: For more compelling writing tips, get on the Damn Fine Words mailing list at http://www.damnfinewords.com. Owned and operated by James Chartrand of Men with Pens, you’ll get weekly tips on writing, content creation and getting results from your words.

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If you are planning on visiting New York City this holiday season, or have any plans to visit New York City in the foreseeable future, you might want to jump on this deal and save yourself about $ 6 and probably …

WebProNews

Yes, as an inbound marketer, your blog content has to be amazing. However, even the best content can be hampered by bad design. As a business becoming a blogging machine, it is easy to focus 100% on content and ignore valuable design elements of your blog that can act as powerful boosters of traffic and leads of your business.

Think about it this way: Would you buy an expensive sports car and drive around with four flat tires? You’d still be able to go fast, but not nearly as fast as you could be. A clear, lead-focused blog design will help turbo-charge the results of your inbound marketing content.

So what does a great business blog look like? The design itself could be one of an infinite number of choices. However great business blog designs share common traits of success.

10 Traits of Perfectly Designed Business Blogs

1. A Call-to-Action in Every Blog Post – In a post about blog design, it would be simple for us to start out with some “fluffy” design advice. But that wouldn’t help your company’s bottom line, would it? Even if you stopped reading this post after this tip, you’d still leave with its most important takeaway. You MUST put a call-to-action in each of your blog posts. Yes, you should test the design and placement of your calls-to-action, but first and foremost, you need use them in your posts. This is one of the most powerful levers for transforming your blog into a well-designed lead generation machine.

2. Post Previews – Marketers must think like publishers. It’s easy to think of your blog as just a blog. Instead, you should think of it as a digital publication. Your blog is just like a trade magazine for your industry. One trait of magazines that people love is the table of contents that provide a preview for all of the articles in that issue. Instead of displaying your entire, most recent blog article on your blog’s homepage, display only an excerpt and an image from several of your most recent posts instead. This will allow visitors to scan some of your blog’s content and give them a choice of what to read first.

3. Clear Subscription Call-to-Action – Every visitor to your blog isn’t going to convert into a lead instantly. Some visitors will need to learn about your business over time. A way to help expedite this process is to get more visitors to subscribe to your blog via email or RSS. To do this, you need to have a clear call-to-action that encourages people to subscribe via either method. 

4. Clear Connection to the Core Business Website – Your blog isn’t an island. Instead, it is one part of a successful website. You blog design must make it clear and simple for a blog reader to get to key parts of your core website. It is great if you have awesome content, but it needs to be connected to your products or services to help move relevant visitors further along in the buying cycle. Have a clear blog navigation that connects to your website, and consider using some sidebar real estate to direct visitors to key website pages.

5. Limit Social Media Sharing Buttons – Too much of a good thing can be bad. Yes, you want people to share your blog posts, and having social sharing buttons on your blog is important. However, giving people too many sharing options is distracting. It actually causes users to become overwhelmed and subsequently take no action. Instead, limit the sharing buttons on your blog to only those networks that send traffic and leads to your business. If you don’t get any traffic from StumbleUpon, then why clutter your blog with its button?

6. Allow Simple Sorting of Content – Depending on how prolific of a writer you are and how long your business has been blogging, your blog design needs to make it easier for visitors to find older and relevant content. As a marketer, you have several design elements to help achieve this, including blog search, tagging, recommendation widgets, etc. As with social media sharing buttons, you don’t need to use all of these. Organize some user testing sessions to understand what people unfamiliar with your blog find to be the best methods for discovering past content.

7. Prominent Post Image Display – A great blog is visual. You shouldn’t knock readers over with block and blocks of text as soon as they arrive. Look at your blog design. How are you using images to draw in readers? There are many ways to showcase images from posts in the design of your blog. It can be as simple as an image next to an intro paragraph on your blog’s homepage or something far more customized. The important thing to remember is to not make assumptions on what your readers want. Again, conduct user tests to collect feedback and determine the best option for your audience instead.

8. Prominent Headline Formatting – In your blog design, make sure that your headline is formatted correctly. This means it needs to be the star of the show when it comes to the text on a page. Make sure it is significantly larger in font size than the body or subhead text on the page. This may seem like a small detail, but making your headers pop makes a huge difference!

9. Fast Page Load Times – Online readers are impatient. When they are looking for information, they want it NOW. If your blog post takes too long to load, then your visitor will bounce and go elsewhere. In order to prevent this issue, you need to test your blog’s load time. This free tool from Pindom will tell you how long it takes for your blog to load. Ideally, the load time for your blog would be under 2 seconds.

10. Clean Sidebar – A blog’s sidebar can easily become the junkyard of the page. It’s all too easy to keep cluttering a sidebar until it has a seemingly endless list of useless widgets. Look at the sidebar of your blog. Look at each widget or design aspect of that sidebar. Does it really serve a purpose? Is that individual element encouraging the behavior that you want your readers to take? If the answer to either of these questions is no, then delete it from your sidebar. It’s about time: De-clutter that blog sidebar and get users to take the actions you want.

What other blog design best practices would you add to this list?

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If you haven’t seen it yet, take a look at the new EJ step-by-step guide to set up a profitable website.

You will find it under the “How You Can Start” tab in the navigation bar above, or click this link –

How You Can Start: A Step-By-Step Guide To Set Up A Profitable Website

You… Read the rest of this entry »

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

Some are born famous, some achieve fame easily, and some work out how to make fame happen.

David Bowie’s career hit lightspeed when he became Ziggy Stardust, but it was anything but a fluke or an overnight success.

In the seventies, Ziggy was futuristic. We are now living in the future — where news guys tell us earth may well be dying, and our brains hurt like warehouses from information overload.

Back then, fame was for the chosen few. Now, it’s part of the job if you want to leverage the internet to find an audience for your art, subscribers for your blog or customers for your business.

Here are 7 tips to help you shine, based on the glittering example of Bowie’s space-age alter-ego.

1. Some rock stars are made, not born

Ziggy wasn’t Bowie’s first attempt at stardom. It wasn’t even his sixth.

Before he hit the big time, David Bowie had been knocking on fame’s door for a decade, as sax player and then singer with a succession of bands. At one stage he even gave up music in frustration and joined Lindsay Kemp’s mime troupe.

We know him as a legendary singer-songwriter-performer. But to begin with, neither his singing nor stage presence were particularly compelling. And he was anything but a natural songwriter:

I didn’t know how to write a song, I wasn’t particularly good at it. I forced myself to be a good songwriter, and I became a good songwriter. But I had no natural talents whatsoever. I made a job of work at getting good.

~ Bowie interviewed by Paul Du Noyer for MOJO

Takeaway: If you’re born with a fully-formed, effortless talent, good for you. But if not, don’t despair — apply yourself with passion, ingenuity and persistence and you may be surprised what you can achieve.

2. Be worldly and otherworldly

There’s a rich vein of fantasy running through Bowie’s early work, from the childhood whimsy of his first album, through the wide-eyed sci-fi of Space Oddity, the phantasmagoria of The Man Who Sold the World and the kookiness of Hunky Dory, to the alien persona of Ziggy himself.

Listen to his music, he sounds like a star-gazer.

But listen to those who knew and worked with the young Bowie, and recurring themes are his single-minded focus, ambition, work ethic, and an ability to turn on the charm for the right people at the right time.

Neither of these sides to his character would have been enough on its own. There are plenty of starry-eyed daydreamers who never get their work in front of an audience. And ambition is boring without the vision and talent to back it up.

It was Bowie’s ability to switch between the different facets of his character — characteristic of many outstanding creators — that made him more creative, productive, and successful than either the daydreamers or wannabe rock stars.

Takeaway: Don’t put yourself in a box. If you’re an ‘artistic’ type, don’t let it stop you learning professional skills — such as networking, marketing and presenting — that could help you realise your creative ambitions. And if you’re good at the business side of things but have never seen yourself as ‘creative’, give yourself permission to explore your weird side (I know you have one).

3. There’s more than one real you

Before he was Ziggy, he was Major Tom, David Bowie, Davie Jones, and originally David Jones.

Soon after Ziggy, he became Aladdin Sane, Halloween Jack, and The Thin White Duke in quick succession.

In hindsight, the transformations of the ‘chameleon of rock’ look brilliantly creative. But at the time he was taking a big risk. Authenticity was desperately important in late sixtes/early seventies rock (which was a bit of a challenge for white kids from Britain trying to follow in the footsteps of blues legends from the Mississippi Delta).

Bob Dylan spoke for many when he told Bowie bluntly at a party: “Glam rock isn’t real music.”

But authenticity isn’t about expressing a single “real you” — as if such a thing existed. You’re much more interesting than that. You have many different facets to your personality — each of which is a potential character with his or her own story to tell.

Bowie realised the artistic potential of authentic storytelling — focusing on one aspect of your personality (or company, or brand) that has particular appeal to your audience, and projecting it to them in vivid words, visuals and/or sounds.

Takeaway: Who can you be now? Is there a hidden facet of your character, company, or brand that you can usefully place center-stage? And is there another one that should be gracefully retired?

4. Talent borrows, genius steals

Ziggy was a magpie creation, assembled from rock’n’roll, science fiction, music hall, mime, kabuki, and multi-coloured pro-wrestling boots.

His next album, Aladdin Sane, incorporated Jazz piano, before he moved onto American funk and soul, and later the electronica of German ‘krautrock.’

Bob Dylan was missing the point when he said Bowie’s music wasn’t the “real” thing, as were those who looked down their noses at his “plastic soul.” Bowie himself seemed to deliberately court such criticism:

The only art I’ll ever study is stuff I can steal from. I do think my plagiarism is effective.

~ Bowie interviewed by Cameron Crowe, Playboy September 1976

What made Ziggy (and his other collage works) interesting wasn’t where the parts came from, but what he made of them — the original, flamboyant, creative twist he gave to his source materials, that made them unforgettably his.

Takeaway: Who are your heroes? What do you admire in them? What if you “stole” from them by taking some of their core principles (not their finished works!) and applied them to your own work. Don’t worry about being original — if you do it wholeheartedly, your originality will shine through, probably in ways you don’t realise.

5. Work with the best

Mick Ronson, Mick Jagger, Iggy Pop, Freddie Mercury, Peter Frampton, Nile Rodgers, Brian Eno, and Bing Crosby — these are just some of the big names Bowie has shared a stage or recording studio with over the years.

Even when working with lesser-known musicians, he often gave them extraordinary freedom to express themselves in the studio, so that many of the albums with the name “David Bowie” on the sleeve incorporate the creative input of disparate talents.

Apart from improving the finished product, this kind of creative collaboration is a sign of confidence. Either Bowie wasn’t afraid of being upstaged, or he surrounded himself with stellar talent to keep himself on his toes.

Takeaway: Look at roles that need filling in your next project. Who would be the best — the very best — people you could think of to fill them? How could you persuade them to get on board?

6. Leave them wanting more

Many people (including his backing band) were amazed when Bowie announced from the stage of the Hammersmith Odeon “this is the last show that we’ll ever do.” It looked like career suicide, not just the rock’n’roll variety.

But confident creators don’t worry where their next big idea will come from. They know there’s plenty more where the last one came from. And great showmen know when to leave the stage — with the audience clamoring for more.

Takeaway: Look at your biggest success to date. Does it still excite you, or is the magic starting to wane? Supposing you killed it off and started something new — where would you begin?

7. Always read the small print

Apart from his musical collaborators, Bowie’s drive for success was spearheaded by the man he believed was his business partner, Tony DeFries.

I say “believed” because the contract between the two men actually described Bowie as an “employee,” giving DeFries’ company, MainMan, ownership of his record masters and a percentage of royalties until 1982. Bowie was blissfully unaware of these conditions for several years, having either not read the contract or not grasped its implications.

When the situation was explained to him, he was horrified to discover that he did not in fact own 50% of MainMan, nor even the rights to his own music. Several years of legal wrangling ensued, and Bowie paid dearly for his naivety.

Later he would learn enough about the business side of things to effectively manage himself, negotiating his own signing to EMI in 1983 for a groundbreaking $ 17 million advance. Later still, he issued innovative “Bowie Bonds,” earning him $ 55 million in securities against his future royalties — a hefty chunk of which was used to buy back his music rights from DeFries.

Takeaway: Contracts and spreadsheets aren’t the most inspiring things in the world. But ignore them and you could end up living with terms that crush your creativity. Make it your business to understand your business — so you can make smart decisions that bring you the rewards you deserve.

About the Author: Mark McGuinness is a coach for creative entrepreneurs. If you’d like to learn more about finding fame and fortune in the futuristic online world — from Brian Clark, Sonia Simone, Tony Clark, Jon Morrow and Mark McGuinness — click here for a preview of The Creative Entrepreneur Roadmap, the course they created together to help you do just that. Copyblogger Media is pleased to be a marketing partner for The Creative Entrepreneur Road Map

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What the heck is a flash mob? A flash mob is getting people to come together in a public space, surprising unsuspecting viewers with a choreographed performance/dance routine, and then walking away as if nothing happened. 

Flash mobs, when executed well, can be a great way to generate buzz, express your business’ creativity, and even garner some media attention and coverage. Want to inject some personality and creativity into your company’s marketing strategy? Consider orchestrating a flash mob! Last week, HubSpot employees did just that, dressing up in orange HubSpot track suits, sporting zombie makeup, and taking over the food court at the local mall to dance to the spooky Michael Jackson hit, “Thriller” in our very own Halloween flash mob. Here’s a step-by-step guide to planning and executing your own flash mob, using our own experience as an example.

Step 1: Be Creative

There’s nothing more exciting than watching or partaking in a surprise flash mob that interrupts people’s mundane daily routines. Flash mobs are a great way to stir up attention and create some buzz. Be creative, and think of ways to make your performance unique from previous flash mobs. There needs to be more to your flash mob than just a dance routine to make it stand out. Some flash mobs involve the performers’ hidden talents, some singing, theatrics, or getting hundreds of people to stand still for a few minutes. Your flash mob can be flashy, thought provoking, artistic, or even be used as an advertisement.

Step 2: Pick a Fun Tune

Pick a song that will catch everyone’s attention. Purchase a loud, portable stereo and cue up your upbeat dance song, classic throwback, or even a holiday related Christmas carol.

Step 3: Learn the Moves

Gather a group of your friends and/or coworkers who are willing to participate in the flash mob. Find someone who is an experienced dancer or choreographer who can breakdown the moves for everyone. Practice regularly. The key is to really perfect the routine if you want to impress onlookers.

Step 4: Choose a Date, Time, and Location

The best places for flash mobs are large, high-traffic public spaces where people wouldn’t expect something out of the ordinary. Whether you choose to target a local beach, a food court at the mall, or a train station, pick a day and time of the week during the location’s busiest hours.

Step 5: Surprise Everyone

An important thing to consider is that your performance needs to have the element of surprise. A well-executed flash mob performance should be kept secret up until the moment it begins. Catching your audience off guard is crucial. Make sure you video tape not just your performance, but also everyone’s reaction.

Step 6: Be a Cinematographer

Pack your cell phones and some HD video cameras, and capture some high quality video footage. A multi-camera shoot will provide sufficient coverage with wide shots, close-ups, and plenty of reaction shots of unsuspecting viewers. Make sure you have a camera operator that is part of the action and on the same level as the dancers. Have another camera operator shooting a wide/establishing shot from a higher angle looking down on the dancers. Your wide shot will show the scale of your flash mob. THE BIGGER, THE BETTER.

Step 7: Upload & Promote Your Masterpiece

Your flash mob may be over, but that doesn’t mean you can’t milk more from the performance. Edit and share your video on your website, blog, YouTube account, and Facebook page. Tweet links to the video or your post about it on your blog. You can still generate a ton of buzz from people who weren’t lucky enough to be present for the live showing. As we said before, staging a flash mob is a great way to generate brand exposure and a ton of buzz. Have fun with it! And check out the final product of our own flash mob below!

Are you yet motivated to organize your own flash mob?

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I was reading Jonathan Fields’ new book Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance this weekend, and one of the insights that struck me the most was his breakdown of the two types of creativity.

Because analogies help us learn, and because Firefly is the best show that has ever been on television, I’m going to call the two types of creativity Mal Reynolds creativity (insight, vision, and brave new ideas) and Zoe Washburne creativity (actually getting something done).

If you’re not a Firefly fan, don’t worry, because these archetypes are present in just about any epic story you can imagine. They’re also present in your business right now.

You can call them Kirk and Spock creativity, Jobs and Wozniak creativity, or Phineas and Ferb creativity.

Essentially, part of the creative process involves having brilliant vision and breakthrough insights. And part involves refining, expanding, and producing that vision — in other words, actually buckling down and making something.

One of these probably comes easier to you than the other, but chances are that you’re going to need to be able to handle both, at least at first. So let’s talk about how to do that a little less painfully.

Mal Reynolds creativity

The Firefly character Captain Mal Reynolds is the archetype of creative leadership.

He’s brave. He’s smart. He can sum up a tricky situation in an instant, knowing when to fight off the bad guys and when to turn tail and run.

Mal is a classic entrepreneurial leader. (And a classic action hero.) He comes up with the plan that’s so crazy it just might work, and his crew works together to make it happen.

Mal is perceptive, decisive, romantic (despite every attempt to be cynical), impractical, impulsive, and brilliant.

You’ll find Captain Mal creatives at the top of virtually every really cool company. For real life Captain Mals, look to Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, and David Ogilvy.

The idea terrorist

But this type of creativity has a dark side. In Jonathan’s book, he talks about being an “idea terrorist” in his own companies.

Every two seconds, I’d have a new idea about what we were going to do, how we’d define the brand, whom we’d serve, what kind of lighting we’d have, the type of music we’d create, the people we’d hire, what they’d wear, the tiles in the bathrooms.

It’s impossible to execute when you’re facing a firehose of ideas. And whether you have staff or you’re on your own, you’ll burn your organization out if you try.

Part of the difficulty of the creative process is to sift through the thousand possible wonderful ideas, and find one to execute on.

It may not be “the” right idea. It probably won’t be. It just has to be a right idea.

Zoe Washburne creativity

Zoe Washburne is Mal’s second in command. She’s a well-trained soldier, intensely practical, and steeped in tactics and strategy. She’s also brave and smart, but her skill lies in following orders.

Zoe makes things happen.

Some people don’t recognize Zoe’s style as being creative, but it is. It’s the Zoes of the world who literally create something, by taking ideas and vision and applying “REP” (refining, expansion, process) to them.

Zoe is pragmatic, tactical, effective, skilled, energetic, and realistic. She neither makes nor accepts excuses. For real-life Zoes, see Paul Allen, Derek Halpern, and Warren Buffett.

If nothing is created, there is no creativity

Part of what makes a creative life (and every bootstrap business is a creative project) so hard is that Captain Mals are the ones who tend to be drawn to this kind of life, but then we have to turn ourselves into Zoes to actually build something.

We have to write the content. We have to get the site built. We have to figure out the shopping cart. We have to record the audio, build the slide show, write the sales page.

Vision is nothing without execution — which is why so many brilliant visionaries have a history of being shot down by “practical” thinkers before they finally make their mark.

What to do if you’re a Mal

If you’re a Mal and you don’t have a Zoe yet, you’ll need to be able to uncover your pragmatic side, at least until you can create enough success to build an organization.

The first thing you should do is pick up Jonathan’s book, because he has a lot of practical ideas about how Mals can adapt from pure thinkers to doers.

It’s very likely that you’ll take the lead on creating your content — at least until you can communicate your vision to a few Zoes who can create it for you. So construct rituals that let your brain know it’s time to be productive.

Work in focused bursts, giving yourself recovery time to recharge your creative batteries.

You’ll also want to draw clear boundaries between your “insight time” and “implementation time.” There’s a time to dream and a time to write, and you need to define which is which.

When you’re in productive mode, look for clear, step by step instruction for how to do the task you’ve assigned yourself. Keep yourself on track with roadmaps, checklists, or other linear tools that let you know you’ve done all the steps.

If you’re a Zoe

If you’re more a Zoe than a Mal, you may not think of yourself as creative at all.

Realize that your implementation of an idea is one of the most valuable forms of creativity. Ideas are cheap; implementation is priceless, so don’t sell yourself short.

Your insights may not immediately brand you as a “thought leader,” but if you focus relentlessly on what your audience wants and needs, you’ll find you can go surprisingly far.

Zoe isn’t showy like Mal is, but she has a strong, appealing personality. And you do too — so don’t be afraid to let that shine through in your content. Because you’re a Zoe, you’ll be less tempted to showboat or turn your content into an ego-fest — and your readers will be grateful for it.

You may decide you feel more comfortable joining forces with a visionary. If so, you won’t have much trouble finding brilliant minds who can’t seem to get anything done.

Again, don’t undermine yourself — your skill set is rare and valuable, so don’t think of yourself as the hired help. Instead, consider yourself the valued producer who can harness the creative “talent” and make things happen.

And don’t assume you’ll never have a breakthrough insight of your own. Look for proven ways to generate more insights — by approaching a crossroads topic, by applying an old insight to a new market, or simply by giving yourself some creative downtime for new ideas to bubble up. Again, Jonathan’s book has a lot of ideas for you.

If you’re in the teaching business

(And by “the teaching business,” I mean content marketing, online education, or any form of sales … as well as a host of other ways the digital age has made us both teachers and students.)

As we all remember from grade school, really great teachers are creative … and they respect the creativity and individuality of their students.

Your Mal students already have the vision and the drive, but when it’s time for them to put the details together, they need help. Give them lots of step-by-step tutorials. Even better, give them checklists and manuals they can hand off to someone else when they finally give up trying to do it all alone.

Your Zoe students know how to work and they know how to make things happen, but they may not have confidence that they can create something really new. Give them reassurance, frameworks for creativity, and tools to develop their ideas from blah to breakthrough.

Best of all is if you can create an environment in which your Zoes and Mals can interact, ask each other questions, brainstorm, and possibly team up to form amazing partnerships.

Make your students and customer Big Damn Heroes, and they’ll love you forever.

How about you?

All of us have a mix of creative strengths, but we usually lean toward one side of the spectrum or another. Are you a Mal or a Zoe, or a different type altogether?

Let us know about it in the comments.

About the Author: Sonia Simone is CMO of Copyblogger Media and co-creator of Teaching Sells.

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• The Art of Irresistible Copywriting

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