May 14, 2012 - Written by
Judy Dunn - 24 Comments
Do people remember your blog posts? Does your content have staying power? If you evoke emotions in your readers, I can guarantee that your ideas will remain firmly planted in their brain.
How do you do that as a blogger? With the right photo, of course.
I’ll be writing a post soon to help you figure out exactly where to get good photos that won’t break the bank, but for now, just know that posts with engaging photos get read more and shared more—even on sites that you aren’t necessarily active on.
Why You Should Touch the Heart and the Head in Your Posts
One of the biggest factors in remembering something—an image, an experience— is how much emotion is attached to it. For all you science lovers, here is the reason: The amygdala, the center of emotion in the brain’s temporal lobe, lights up when emotional content is shown, which in turn boosts the activity in areas of the brain that form memory.
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April 30, 2012 - Written by
Judy Dunn - 32 Comments
Today’s guest post on the Cat’s Eye Writer blog comes from Ali Luke, who heads up aliventures.com. I met Ali on Twitter and both she and my other half, @bobwp, will be presenting at Blogworld in New York City in June, so I’ll get to meet her in real time. I’m also looking forward to reading her new book, Lycopolis. Take it away, Ali:
Do your readers stick around for the long-term, cheering you on, offering feedback, and buying your products? Or do they flit away after glancing at a single post?
If you want to be a successful blogger, you don’t necessarily need lots of readers. Sure, it’s nice to have your Feedburner widget showing 1,000 or 5,000 or 10,000.
But if your goal is to make money from your blog, then a few hundred truly loyal readers are far more valuable than a few thousand readers who rarely pay any attention to your posts.
You know your readers are loyal if they:
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April 23, 2012 - Written by
Judy Dunn - 39 Comments
I confess. I’m a bit of a recluse. A hopeless blogger geek who spends most of her day clicking away at the keyboard, oblivious to the world. I don’t mind being alone. So it makes perfect sense that I live on an island.
I’m pretty sure I’ll never be a world-class speaker. Speech class in high school was for me the equivalent of Chinese water torture.
The fear started building one day in 5th grade when I gave my lame, over-rehearsed “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” talk to a group of rowdy, pre-hormonal 10-year-olds, including Stewart Granger, who sat in the front row and pretended to pick his nose every time I looked his way.
I had no sooner opened my mouth that day when my fidgeting fingers managed to send the erasers on the chalkboard ledge flying amid great white poofs of dust. I choked on my words—literally—and the classroom exploded, kids falling off their chairs, all of them laughing at me.
I was washed up, my speaking career irretrievably broken. And all at the age of 10.
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April 16, 2012 - Written by
Judy Dunn - 42 Comments
The passing of Apple Co-founder Steve Jobs on October 5, 2011 was a watershed moment for me. No matter which side we are on—the PC lovers or the Mac addicts—I think we all recognized the genius of this man.
Do you remember Apple Computers’ 1997 Think Different ad campaign? Narrated by Richard Dreyfus, it had actual footage of people in history who chose to break the rules every now and then.
The copywriters who produced this commercial were brilliant marketers. By using video of other people who ‘thought differently,’ like John Lennon, Albert Einstein and Jim Henson, they made us somehow feel that as Apple users, we were a member of that exclusive club.
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April 9, 2012 - Written by
Judy Dunn - 48 Comments
As a wordster, my favorite TV game show in the world was The $100,000 Pyramid. It started out as The $10,000 Pyramid, but, you know, with inflation and all, they had to up the ante.
The best part was the final round, The Winner’s Circle. One player, with hands strapped to the chair’s arms, so they couldn’t give away the answer with a hand gesture, would give the clues and her partner would have to guess the category the words fit into.
And if they got through all six categories, they won the big bucks.
Here is an example:
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April 3, 2012 - Written by
Judy Dunn - 42 Comments
Don’t you love it when you have a perfect storm thing going? When the new post you are starting to write is on the exact same topic you’ve been getting questions about all week? Well, it happened. You asked me what I did to grow my blog.
Because I love answering your questions and because I have a heart for helping bloggers improve their game (once a teacher, always a teacher?), I pulled together some ideas together for you.
Some bloggers like to focus on things like floating sign-up boxes and keywords and such. My strategy has always been to build your stage, with content front and center, and then use every strategy you can think of to let people know that you have helpful stuff.
Some of you asked: Did it help winning a Top 10 Blogs for Writers award?
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March 27, 2012 - Written by
Judy Dunn - 37 Comments
Write for yourself. No, you should write for your readers.
Posts over 500 words will bore your readers to death. But nothing worthwhile can be tackled in a post in fewer than 1,000 words.
Your posts don’t need to be interesting; just instructive. Wait. Your posts had better be interesting or your visitors will click away.
No wonder we freeze up. Lose our confidence. Start doubting our ability to crank out quality content. Fear that we aren’t good enough. There is just too much conflicting advice out there.
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March 20, 2012 - Written by
Judy Dunn - 23 Comments
Just one month ago, I would not have written this post. Because I needed a fourth social networking time suck like I needed another stray cat to show up at my door. (We have already adopted two.)
But then Guy Kawasaki sent me a copy of his new digital book, What the Plus! Google+ for the Rest of Us (you can get it here, for just $2.99). Now Guy is the creator of the wildly popular content aggregation site alltop.com and just about the most knowledgeable guy I know in social media, so I was interested in what he had to say.
Mostly because, frankly, I was having a hard time wrapping my brain around this new platform.
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March 12, 2012 - Written by
Judy Dunn - 24 Comments
When I taught blogging workshops for writers and authors, one thing was predictable. Their eyes would always glaze over when I got to the part about building an author brand.
They thought of selling out, of compromising their art, of consumer brainwashing. They had seen too many taglines, too many TV commercials—Coke (“refreshing”) and Apple (“think different”).
“I don’t need a brand,” they would say. “I’m not a product.”
They were confusing a brand with an advertising slogan.
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February 27, 2012 - Written by
Judy Dunn - 4 Comments
A couple of weeks ago, I found a new blog. New to me—but not to lots of other folks. It is the brainchild of Andrea Hurst of Andrea Hurst & Associates and supported by the talented writer and blogger Katie Flanagan. What I love about Andrea’s blog is that it melds the literary 
agent’s view of things with practical publishing ideas in the digital age. Really, it’s the best of both worlds.
Andrea has a series going on right now called AUTHORNOMICS. I had the honor of being interviewed for it this week. The questions were smart and, as usual, I learned more about myself and my work as I thought about the answers. I encourage you to poke around the site and would absolutely love it if you popped over to the interview and shared a thought or two in the comments. Just go here.
I love sports analogies. Once I even 
Last weekend I hit the road—and the water—for the Whidbey Island Writer’s Conference. I have been to a bazillion conferences in my day: they were events for teachers, or direct mail copywriters, or bloggers or marketers, depending on what field I was in at the moment.
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