Many companies and organizations send out a regular electronic newsletter via e-mail. Whether it’s daily, weekly, monthly or as the mood strikes, it can be difficult to know what types of information to include. What interests your newsletter recipients? Are they customers, potential customers, or both? Here are four type of content that are usually
Five Tips for Writing a Letter of Resignation
Writing a letter of resignation isn’t always easy. Here are five tips to help you notify your employer the next time you plan to leave your job.
Tips from our writers
Recently we asked our freelance writers to share their favorite writing tip from the past year. Here are some of their responses we included in our quarterly newsletter: “I took a first step and ordered the book Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer. I know it’s going to improve my writing someday, if
Devon Edwards’ Mistake
It was the ultimate oops, going down in real time. Onward State, a student-run blog about Penn State University, had reported via Twitter on the evening of Saturday, Jan. 21, 2012 that legendary (and recently fired) Penn State football coach Joe Paterno had died. CBS sports and other news outlets soon picked up the story.
SOPA and Your Business
The internet is abuzz over SOPA, or the Stop Online Piracy Act, a bill that is currently under consideration in the US House of Representatives (H.R. 3261). (The corresponding Senate bill is PIPA, which is short for the Protect IP Act, which itself is short for Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft
Five reasons to add some color to your writing
Many of us are still producing printed documents in plain old black and white. Yet, the alternative, color printing is more affordable and available than ever, and at a high quality. There are several benefits to adding color to your documents: 1. Color can provide visual cues that direct the reader’s attention to certain parts
Five Forecasts Revisited
In January of 2011, I made five forecasts for last year. Let’s look back and see how accurate my predictions were. E-book sales will equal print book sales by the end of the year. While e-books have made steady inroads into the total sales of book, they aren’t at 50 percent just yet. However, it
Trade Press Services in 2011: A Look Back
At Trade Press Services, we ghost write a lot of articles for management consultants and other professionals who advise companies on how to survive and thrive in a bad economy. So the question is, have we learned anything from all of these pieces, or have we, like so many others, “stuck our heads in the
Corporate Lessons From Kim Jong Il’s Death
With the passing of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, the world has lost another evil human being in a year that was full of the deaths of evil individuals. (Osama bin Laden and Moammar Gadhafi being two of them). Not to make light of Kim Jong Il’s death or the potential for challenges that
10 Steps to Freelance Success
Andrea Brunais of Virginia Tech’s Faculty Development Institute recently spoke at a gathering of freelance writers and gave them some advice on making it as a freelancer. Bruanis has more than 25 years of news media and public relations experience and is the co-author of a book on media relations titled, I See Your Name
Journalism conventions
I’m not talking about a week in Las Vegas palling around with the news editor from the Cleveland Plain Dealer. I’m talking about conventions as in ways of doing things. Some journalists are funny about how they write. Mark Twain never followed AP style, or wouldn’t have had such thing been around in the 19th
When to cut and run
Robert Niles wrote on Nov. 18 in the Online Journalism Review that “It’s okay: you don’t have to use every social media service.” Thank goodness—because there are a lot of them. Wikipedia lists about 200 of the most popular sites, from Facbook to iWiW (it’s big in Hungary) to My Opera (the performance, not the
Push vs. Pull Media
A few years ago (eons in the digital world) the term “push and pull” media was a well-known marketing phrase. “Push” media were phenomena like television and radio that were delivered to the consumer without much interaction on their part. “Pull” media was content the consumer had to actively seek out and extract for themselves:
How to edit
Every business writer is also an editor, whether it is to edit their own work or someone else’s. And editing is not easy. First, there is given a set of constraints to consider, including word count, prescribed style, format and expected content, which are editorial lines that can’t be crossed. First edits are often straightforward.
Does your business need a “Scout Law”?
Nearly every business has a mission statement. “To make the best pizzas in the tri-city area.” You’ve heard the examples, good and bad. The Boy Scouts teach their members a mission statement of their own. It’s called the Scout Oath, and you may remember it if you were ever a Boy Scout: On my honor
Five excuses that keep you from becoming great
What’s holding your company back? You have a great product or a valuable service. A smart business plan. The right people in the right places. Why isn’t your business exploding into the stratosphere? Maybe it’s your attitude when it comes to marketing your business. At Trade Press Services, we’ve helped subject matter experts write books
What is your writing’s personality?
Much has been written about Steve Jobs in the days since his death, and nearly all of the praise heaped upon him has been true. Jobs was indeed a visionary, and he helped transform the ways in which the world consumes media. What hasn’t been written about as much is Jobs’ human side—his driven personality
Tablets, touch screens and e-readers, oh my!
The death of the e-reader—a small, handheld device dedicated to reading electronic books—has been predicted ever since it was introduced by Amazon.com five years ago. “Who will want to read books on a tiny computer that costs hundreds of dollars, when they can read them for free from the library?” the doubters asked. Then it
Did the Onion go too far?
On Thursday, the humor-parody site the Onion posted this status update on Facebook: BREAKING: Witnesses reporting screams and gunfire heard inside Capitol building And then it didn’t post anything for 10 minutes—an eternity in cyberspace after posting a headline like that. If you headed to the Onion’s website, you saw a story about a dozen
How to write a response
Often in the business world, a magazine, trade journal or newspaper will print an editorial with which your company will disagree for any number of reasons. Or, it could be a news story that management feels doesn’t accurately represent your company or its products. Your company may decide that it needs to respond with a
The arbiter of the news?
Robert Niles’ excellent blog posting “A journalist’s guide to the scientific method – and why it’s important” contains good information about the struggle to present factual, accurate information in a news world increasingly dominated by social networking and media bias. For example, people far from the epicenter of the recent Virginia earthquake learned about it
Affluent Americans Are Still Reading Print
Media commentators speak out of both sides of their mouths these days. They say print is dying (which is true), while remarking on how well the print industry is doing (which is also true). Both statements are partially true, anyway, and the real truth depends on which demographics and what kinds of media one is
Google’s circle is complete
Google, the search engine content aggregator online office application company cell-phone OS manufacturer Supreme Ruler of the Interwebs, has done the unthinkable—it’s relying on human beings to help edit its news. This is remarkable, considering that when Google began offering news as one of its many services about ten years ago, it made great hoopla
Book Publishing: Winners and Losers
Success is something that is usually best explained in hindsight, when one can see the trends that came together that made someone or something into a hit, while another seemingly surefire idea or icon went down in flames. Much like the stock market, it’s easier to make guesses at why something happened than to venture
