Blogging Illiteracy – The Most Common Error

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It seems strange to come back from such a long break with a post which is really a rant but I can’t hold it in any longer.

I know that there are a load of very successful internet marketers out there who make money every day from their very impressive blogs and the number of visitors they get all the time. But I hold this against the blogging community in general (and I think IM blogs in particular) – the complete lack of any attempt to check the copy which is being written.

Surely copywriting is meant to be one of the mainstays of writing anything (including a blog post) and yet these posts go out, time and time again, with no clue as to what bad English they are using.

So, here’s my favourite error…it comes up all the time so see if you can spot it in the coming week! There are 3 words that all sound the same and those words are peaked, peeked and piqued!

Peaked – To get to the maximum of something

Peeked – To sneak a look at something

Piqued – Heaven only knows, but used when you pique someones interest. Actually I looked it up…to excite (in this context)

So there you have it. No more “Taking a peak” at some details, or “I hope I have peeked your interest” and I will be a much happier man in 2010. If you are a super-dooper affiliate and are making so much money, pay someone pennies to proofread your post!

Maybe I should start an IM spelling competition – if you’ve seen any other good ones, just let me know.

Does Christmas Get In The Way Of Your Marketing?

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This is more a musing than a truly valuable post, but I had a chance to think about the way we run our lives when working for ourselves.

I know that there are countless “gurus” out there that will talk about automating your business so that you can get away from that one-to-one connection between hours and money that we call “having a job”. Now, I think that is a great thing to aim for…there’s no doubt that this is the only way to get to the final prize in internet marketing.

The trouble is that we all have to start somewhere and I’m convinced that many people really are trading their time for cash, just so that they can meet those payment deadlines! Heaven knows, I’m there myself. I’m sure it all comes down to an element of bootstrapping.

You need a bit of cash so that you can start to outsource some of the work, so that you can start to multiply your efforts, so that you can expand into other areas etc etc. In the mean time though, we are stuck with building our own autoresponder sequences, setting up our own squeeze pages, making our own products or countless other small tasks that make up the world of the IM expert……and then along comes something like Christmas!

I don’t know about you, but Chateau Percival tends to be a bit busy over Christmas. The world of mulled wine and presents takes over the house and any attempt to get out the laptop is met with a stare which is even stonier than normal. So, what to do? The freshness of a blog seems to me to come from its timeliness and that works against setting up a load of posts in advence.

You might think that this is exactly one of those posts…until I rave about going to see Avatar yesterday…in Leicester Square in London….in the miserable snow. Yet one more thing coming between me and IM world domination, taking up my time, but one that I would gladly repeat – an astonishing film.

So, what do you think? Are these breaks in our plugged-in life something we should try to minimise? Or do we take back some of our humanity and use them to remember why we work so hard in the first place. I’d be interested to hear your views.