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7-Figure Small with Brian Clark
Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer
Copyblogger FM: Content Marketing, Copywriting, Freelance Writing, and Social Media Marketing
Get More Clients With Smarter Email Marketing
Hack the Entrepreneur
Members Only
Rainmaker.FM Elsewhere
Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites
StudioPress FM
Technology Translated
The Digital Entrepreneur
The Missing Link
The Showrunner
The Writer Files: Writing, Productivity, Creativity, and Neuroscience
Youpreneur with Chris Ducker
Zero to Book
Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer
hosted by Sonia Simone

The 7-Minute Content Makeover

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Previous Episode:7 Commandments of Professionalism for Content Marketers More Episodes Next Episode:Self-Help for Business Owners: Useful or Useless?

All Episodes:

July 25, 2016

The 2 Points of Clarity that Will Make You So Much More Productive

July 18, 2016

Launching Your First (or Next) Digital Product

July 11, 2016

A Quick, Enjoyable Way to Sharpen your Vision, Goals, and Values

July 4, 2016

Q&A from Twitter, Independence Day Version!

June 27, 2016

The Difference Between Mindset and Wishful Thinking

June 20, 2016

Things I Love / Things I Hate #4: Trade Secrets, Transparency, and Lemonade Stands

June 13, 2016

Should You Swear on Your Blog?

June 7, 2016

Up All Night to Get Lucky: Sonia’s in a New Documentary!

May 23, 2016

The Context of a Successful Content Strategy: The Harpoon and the Net

May 16, 2016

My #1 Time Management Tip: Don’t Multitask; Compartmentalize

May 9, 2016

The 7 ‘Escape Pod’ Principles (Help Me Write My Book!)

May 2, 2016

Things I Love / Things I Hate #3: Nerdy Nummies and Crummy Content

April 25, 2016

Leadership, Categories of One, and Purple Rain

April 18, 2016

Make Better Mondays! 6 Minutes to a Happier, More Productive Week

April 11, 2016

5 Idea-Generating Techniques We Use on the Copyblogger Team

April 4, 2016

Blog or Podcast? 5 Questions to Help You Decide

March 28, 2016

Two EQ Hacks: A Nifty Trick for Making Big Changes, and How to Handle Hurt Feelings

March 21, 2016

Things I Love/Things I Hate about Health & Fitness Marketing

March 14, 2016

A Simple, Powerful Creativity System to Capture and Generate More Ideas

March 7, 2016

Anniversary Edition! On Finding Your Stubbornness and Going the Distance

February 29, 2016

Q&A: Cornerstone Content, Creativity, and the Future of Our Businesses

February 22, 2016

Getting to Freedom and Business Clarity: A Conversation with Sonia Thompson

February 15, 2016

New Mini-Series: Things I Love / Things I Hate

February 8, 2016

Getting Clear on your Metrics and Benchmarks: The 3 Lenses to Look Through

February 1, 2016

The Untethered Society: Scary or Liberating? (Or Both?)

January 25, 2016

Deep Creative Focus, the Long Haul … and, Yes, David Bowie

January 11, 2016

Motivation and Creativity: A Conversation with Mark McGuinness

January 4, 2016

Vision and Goal-Setting for Your Digital Business

December 21, 2015

Encore: How to Avoid Getting Sucker-Punched by Internet ‘Facts’

December 14, 2015

To Craft Content Marketing that Works: Avoid Silly Fads … and Do this Instead

December 7, 2015

How to Work from Home: Getting Stuff Done when No One is Looking Over Your Shoulder

November 30, 2015

5 Work Habit Hacks from 12 Creative Geniuses

November 23, 2015

Encore: Productivity for Flakes, Head Cases, and Other Natural Disasters

November 16, 2015

What You Need to Know about Guest Posting

November 9, 2015

7 Straightforward Steps to Superior Blog Posts and Podcasts

November 2, 2015

Self-Help for Business Owners: Useful or Useless?

October 26, 2015

The 7-Minute Content Makeover

October 19, 2015

7 Commandments of Professionalism for Content Marketers

October 12, 2015

Staying Grounded on the Road to Success: A Conversation with JB Glossinger

October 5, 2015

Minimalism, Success, and How to Be a Big Shot

September 28, 2015

Finding the Balance Between Pragmatism and Your Ideals

September 21, 2015

What Happens at the Crossroads of Content and Social Media

September 14, 2015

But Facebook Doesn’t Work For … (waily waily)

September 7, 2015

Marketing for Writers and Other Creative Souls

September 1, 2015

How to Turn Bad News into Happy Customers

August 25, 2015

How to Avoid Getting Sucker-Punched by Internet ‘Facts’

August 18, 2015

Bringing More Emotion into Your Writing — From the Inside Out

August 11, 2015

A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Rainmaker.FM Digital Business Podcast Network

August 4, 2015

My Favorite Tools of the Trade for Writing, Content Planning, and Creative Collaboration

July 28, 2015

How Long Will It Take for My Business to Start Making Money? And Other Impossible Questions

July 21, 2015

5 Things I Learned from Minecraft about Community, Ecosystems, and Business

July 14, 2015

Call to Action: The Awesome Power of Asking for What You Want

July 7, 2015

A Question of (Writing) Voice: How to Strengthen It, How to Shape It

June 30, 2015

Deviance, Obsession, and Sharing Your Gifts with the World: A Conversation with Bill O’Hanlon

June 23, 2015

Is Hypersensitivity the New Fascism?

June 16, 2015

Q&A: Duplicate Content Worries, and Other Questions from the Audience

June 9, 2015

Business and Marketing for Artists and Creative Workers, Part Two

June 2, 2015

Business and Marketing for Artists and Creative Workers, Part One

May 27, 2015

The 3 Types of Trolls You Meet Online (and How to Deal with Them)

May 19, 2015

The 7 Circles of Belief that Drive Customers to Your Business

May 12, 2015

The Difference Between B2B and B2C Marketing (and Other Questions)

May 5, 2015

Annie Pratt on Resilient Leadership: How to Build a Smart, Agile Business by Crafting an Incredible Team

April 28, 2015

How Not to Be a Dirty, Rotten Spammer

April 21, 2015

4 Deep Marketing Questions (with Answers!)

April 14, 2015

How to Uncover What Your Audience Wants to Buy: An Interview with Ryan Levesque

April 7, 2015

Productivity for Flakes, Head Cases, and Other Natural Disasters

March 31, 2015

8 Harsh Truths about Social Media (and 1 Pretty Awesome One)

March 24, 2015

3 Juicy Marketing Questions Answered

March 17, 2015

How to Strengthen Your Talents

March 3, 2015

The Lies We Tell Ourselves About Business, Part 2

March 2, 2015

The Lies We Tell Ourselves About Business, Part 1

October 26, 2015

The 7-Minute Content Makeover

A few tweaks and checks can often boost a piece of written content about one “grade level.” In other words, if it starts out “good,” this will take it to “very good.” Here’s the process I use.

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No, this isn’t a “write a blog post in seven minutes” podcast.

It’s the process I go through once I’ve written a piece, to add that final layer of polish. Once you have the habits in place, you should be able to make these changes in about 5-7 minutes.

In this quick 11-minute episode, I talk about:

  • The two most important actions that take content from “pretty good” to “very good”
  • Quick fixes to make written content easier to read
  • How to get rid of Fluff and Waffle
  • When to use that ten-dollar word

Listen to Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer below ...

The 7-Minute Content MakeoverSonia Simone
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The Show Notes

  • Improve Your Writing Overnight with the Rule of 24: Guaranteed by Larry Brooks
  • 8 Incredibly Simple Ways to Get More People to Read Your Content by Pamela Wilson (about content formatting)
  • The Deceptively Simple Steps to Persuasive Writing that Works by Sonia Simone (about subheads)
  • Are You a Fancy Nancy Writer? by Sonia Simone (on choosing clearer language)
  • Editor in Chief, Stefanie Flaxman’s excellent podcast about self-editing for writers

The Transcript

Sonia: Greetings, superfriends! My name is Sonia Simone and these are the Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer. For those who don’t know me, I’m a co-founder and the chief content officer for Rainmaker Digital.

I’m also a champion of running your business and your life according to your own rules. As long as you don’t lie and you don’t hurt people, this podcast is your official pink permission slip to run your business or your career exactly the way you think you should.

Today I’m going to talk about the seven-minute check you do before you publish a piece of text content, which for most of us, is still most of what we produce. I use this process myself, and so does our editorial team. It’s highly streamlined, so when I say seven minutes, that’s being a little generous. You can probably get it down to five, once you’re familiar with the process and know what to look for.

This isn’t “write a post in seven minutes.” It’s the quick little tweaks and checks you make to give your good piece of content that final gloss and polish. This will typically improve your content by about a “grade level.” So if it’s good, it will take it to very good, if it’s very good, it will take it to excellent, etc.

Run spellcheck first

You’d think this would be obvious, but I see a lot of content published without it. We all have words we commonly misspell, but spellcheck also catches typos, like the internet-famous T-E-H for the.

This takes under a minute.

Read it aloud

This is probably the #1 thing you can do to go out with a more polished final version. If you pair this with what Larry Brooks called the “Rule of 24,” which is leaving your content for 24 hours between final draft and publication, you’ll be producing content that is substantially better written, better thought-out, and just … better.

Improve Your Writing Overnight with the Rule of 24: Guaranteed by Larry Brooks

This step takes about two minutes if you have a long post. You’re going to be watching out for the following issues:

Look at your formatting

One of the simplest things you can do to make your content more readable and shareable is to format it so that it’s readily scannable.

As you’re doing your read-aloud, look for walls of gray text, and break them up into smaller, more visually appealing paragraphs. Segment your content with subheads, so the reader can capture at a glance what the post is about. Break long-winded lists into nice, scannable bulleted lists.

Also look for overly long sentences, and break them down.

It’s not about making your content dumber in any way. It’s about making it more readable, without watering down any of the ideas, word choice, etc.

I have a link in the show notes for you for a post from Pamela Wilson with details on how to do this.

Once you know what to look for, this takes maybe a minute. If you’re smart, you’ll create the subheads before you even start writing — this makes your writing go faster, and will consistently produce a better-structured piece.

8 Incredibly Simple Ways to Get More People to Read Your Content by Pamela Wilson (about content formatting)

The Deceptively Simple Steps to Persuasive Writing that Works by Sonia Simone (about subheads)

Look for repeated words

We all have these — words that we overuse. I tend to overuse the word half, oddly enough. Or you may use a word six times in a 500 word post. If it’s not “the” or “and,” that’s probably too much.

These will jump out at you when you read the post aloud, so just fix them as you find them.

Look for “throat clearing”

This is a writer’s term for all of the fluff and waffle you do when you start a piece of writing and you don’t 100% know what you think about your topic.

Normally this happens at the beginning of your post. Take a quick look at your introductory paragraphs as you’re doing your read-aloud step. Could you cut it? Could you condense it to one sentence?

You’ll also find words here and there that you can just plain cut. For example, you never need to write “in the summer months.” Write “in the summer,” and possibly “in summer.”

Whenever you can, jump right into the meaty stuff.

This takes less than a minute and happens during your read-aloud phase.

Look for overly complex language

Complex words are wonderful. Overly complex language is not.

Normally if you see the word utilize, get rid of it and write use instead. A good 95% of corporate jargon can be cleaned up this way. If there’s a simpler, clearer word, use that instead.

If it’s just the right word, and conveys a particular nuance that you can’t get from another choice, then keep it. But pruning out all of the unnecessarily complex words will allow the ones you keep to shine. This is a hallmark of good writing, and it takes maybe a minute during your read-aloud phase.

Are You a Fancy Nancy Writer? by Sonia Simone (on choosing clearer language)

If you add up all the steps, you’ve got about a six-minute process. Give yourself an extra minute, and you have a handy seven-minute process that will take all of your content up a grade level, as we said at the top.

Let me know if you use this! I’d love to hear your experiences — leave me a comment. ๐Ÿ™‚ And if you have your own little tweaks that you check for, I’d love to hear about those as well.

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Comments

  1. Marie-eve says

    November 3, 2015 at 11:48 AM

    Just used it on my last post. It was extremely helpful!

    Reply
    • Sonia Simone says

      November 3, 2015 at 12:05 PM

      High five! So glad to hear it. ๐Ÿ™‚

      Reply
  2. Pam Hillestad says

    November 5, 2015 at 9:12 AM

    Thanks so much! That was great ๐Ÿ™‚

    Reply
    • Sonia Simone says

      November 5, 2015 at 9:20 AM

      Thanks, Pam!

      Reply
  3. Tanya Lumere says

    November 10, 2015 at 2:10 PM

    Having designed numerous publications, here’s my fancy tip.

    We tend to zoom in on the guts of the content, proofing and proofing. Yet there may be a glaring boo-boo in the headline, on the image, maybe a page number, etc.

    Be a smarty pants, zoom out and look at the big overall picture. Check yourself before you wreck yourself.

    * \ T / *

    Reply

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