Nobody Wants to Write…

…but everybody wants TO HAVE WRITTEN.

There are blogs all over the Internet that had a great three-month run in 2012. And then they suddenly stopped. I’ve come to the conclusion that nobody really wants to write, but a lot of people want to have written.

Even the most renowned authors complain about sitting down and waiting for the muse to show up. Writing is pain in the neck. It takes time and effort.

But! There are many reasons to want to have written. People want a place to store their knowledge and wisdom, somewhere to leave a legacy. It…

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Is SEO driving the right traffic?

If you’re utilizing SEO, or search engine optimization, you need to take into account what kind of leads you’re generating.

I had an enlightening conversation with a landscape company the other day. The owner told me he’s been using an SEO firm to make his company the number one result for landscape Google searches in his area. The problem is, the leads he’s generating are driving him crazy.

They’ll call him up and ask him to give them a bid so they can compare it to other landscape companies in his market. But he isn’t the low-cost choice. His company…

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What Writing 'Voice' Should I Use?

We have some customers that want us to use an emotionless, corporate writing voice. And so we do, because the customer is the boss. But if it were up to us, we’d try to convince them that the best writing voice utilizes the personality of the storyteller.

Our default at  Shortcut Content is to transcribe audio (which eventually becomes a podcast), clean up the grammar, and move thoughts around to tighten up the story. But the voice of the storyteller stays intact. The resulting blog post maintains a conversational, human to human voice.

That’s our preferred method, but I still…

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Your Brain on Podcasts

We process information through listening much faster than reading, because of how our brains process information.

When you’re listening to audio, the visual association area of your brain is engaged, because you’re creating images with the sounds you’re hearing. So if you’re listening to a story about a giraffe, the visual association area conjures a stored image of a long necked, brown and white checked animal from Africa. There might even be some sounds or smells involved with that mental image.

When I say the word “giraffe,” the auditory cortex picks it up and then looks up what the sound…

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Video Sharing: Facebook vs. Youtube

When you’re producing video for social media, you need to think about the platform on which you plan to share it.

My approach to most things on the web is to think of it from the perspective of the user. Facebook makes it really easy for us to watch videos right on our news feeds. It will even auto roll, if the user has the option turned on.

You can produce your Facebook video with closed captioning and hard graphics, so that people can read it with the volume down. That’s especially helpful for users that are…

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