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Article Briefs
"Top Ten Internet Marketing Myths" From the Wizards of Web
Green folk often find humans amusing. Today I’m thinking about your
list-loving propensity. You love your “top-of-the-charts” tunes, your
best-selling books, your league-leading players, your seven habits of highly
defective people - even your lists of lists. What’s with this?
Perhaps it’s a deep longing for order in an otherwise chaotic world. Maybe
it’s a desire to simplify complex abstract concepts into digestible format.
What I do know is that lists are powerful marketing tools. They sell loads of
books, music, all sorts of merchandise and even intangibles. Think of all those
seminars that promise you’ll learn 7 ways to sell this, and 3 ways to identify
when, and 5 ways to simplify ABC, and 12 ways to improve that and 10 things that
will boost your whatchamacallits. Try it yourself; just add a well-prepared list
to a heavily trafficked Web page and watch sales climb.
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Practice Pacing the Rhythm
Rhythm is an powerful element in your writing. And you can think of the
rhythm of your writing in (at least) two ways. It can be the technique of
matching the pace of your copy to the feelings and visuals you intend to create.
But you can also think of rhythm as a way to impart a “musicality” and
unpredictability. Consciously using rhythm techniques helps you generate sight,
feeling and, yes, even sound images for your reader.
Rhythm as Visual Mood
People internalize what they read as visual images - that’s one of the great
beauties of sitting down with a good book: it gives you the opportunity to
create mental worlds. And the pace of your writing reinforces the mood of its
visuals, in an almost movie-like way.
To inspire an excited, fast-moving feeling in your reader, punctuate
intentionally, and impart motion through the use of
action verbs
and short, rolling words. If you want to convey a relaxed feeling, a sense of
rest or of moodiness, lengthen your sentences, use abundant punctuation and
appropriate descriptives, and pay very close attention to detail.
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