Sure, the blogosphere gets bigger every year. The pool of experts continues to expand (you know you’re one if you read ProBlogger). But even more key, the pool of non-experts is really taking off.

Two things are widening the audience for blogs:

1. Better options for integrating blogs into web pages and social sites
2. “Subscribe by email”

Better Options

Back in the day (last year), you could re-publish your blog as html, allowing you to place it on a web page. Now, you can click a box and syndicate your stuff so it automatically appears on Facebook and Twitter.

Over at WidgetBox, you can build a shiny widget with a few clicks that others can easily use to re-publish your content. About a third of our traffic is coming from off-site syndication.

Bottom line: more people have more places to see your stuff and it doesn’t look like a “blog.”

Subscribe by Email

Feedburner and others give publishers an option to include a “subscribe by email” link. It’s easy to enable - just a few clicks and embed a piece of code.

Feedburner’s email service (free) provides a really clean, professional, business-grade product to the inbox of subscribers. People who “don’t read blogs” are signing up in droves.

Check it out for yourself: Subscribe to our blog by email :)

Call it Anything Else

Call it a Journal or a Notebook or News. Take inspiration from The Sartorialist, Make the Logo Bigger and Slashdot.

Why do we call ours a blog? Cause it’s for experts ;)

After all, mixed-use development is a marketing phrase. It’s used to sell big projects to government officials, private buyers and the public at large. But, like many of the phrases coined by developers, this one rests a little uneasy on the ear.

Mixed-use community is better, more about people and less about cement, but it’s too academic. It tries too hard.

How about urban village? The best mixed-use developments turn into real civic places on their own merit. They exhibit the density we normally associate with urban environments but embody it on a smaller scale. Hence, urban village.

Builders and planners everywhere are invited to use urban village. But, please, don’t add the word development after it.

EMarketer has forecast that U.S. advertisers will spend $25.8 billion on web ads in 2008. Search advertising accounts for 40% of the total. That’s a 23% increase over 2007 when online ad spending was $21.1 billion.

Might want to hold on to that Google stock for a while.

Here are the Top 4 Rules for writing blog headlines:

1. Be clear (not cute or obscure)

Generally, we’re talking about a noun, in this case “headlines.” An example of a far weaker headline would be “Top 4 Ingredients in My Secret Sauce.”

2. Use a question

Every headline can’t employ every rhetorical device, but a viable option in this case might have been “Want to Write Better Headlines?”

3. Numbers create interest

Tried and true attention-getter. Works in email subject lines, direct mail and good old television advertising, as in “99 44/100% Pure” for Ivory Soap.

4. Keep it brief - 50 characters or less including spaces

Work your headline down to it’s shortest possible length. For some great headline writing, check out the New York Daily News or this from todays New York Post:

Pray Ball

Yanks Honor VA Tech Victims

Let’s start here: which do you hate more:

• Junk Mail, or
• Spam Phone Calls?

Well, get this: Limited Too is now spam-calling people to tell them about the junk they’re about to receive in the mail:

“Hi! This is Jessica from Limited Too! Watch your mail for our exciting new fall catazine …

I kid you not. Catazine.

Catazine is not even close to a word. It is a faux-clever term dreamed up by a marketing wonk.

Here’s why catazine doesn’t work - as I’m listening to the spam phone call, I get distracted by a word I don’t know. I suspect that most people lose the message at this point. Why create a friction-point by being overly clever?

One more note to Limited Too (Much): I’m on the Do Not Call list.

There are two main rules:

1. Don’t use all caps (FREE)
2. Don’t use multiple exclamation points (FREE!!!)

Anecdotal evidence suggests that exclamation points in general trigger some filters. As well, using “Free” as the first word in the subject line may also be vulnerable.

Thanks to Nick Usborne and others for sharing their wisdom.

See also: Great email subject line!

There are 70-75 words in a :30 TV commercial

80 is too many and 6o words feels too loose.

Although a writer may be able to read 85 words in half a minute, that hectic pace doesn’t allow for nuance, meaning or emphasis. Tighten it up and give the copy room to breathe.

After all, it’s the meaning the audience takes away, not how many words you can cram in.

As usual, Gino offers sound advice, summarized here:

1. Start with a strong headline.
2. Write about what you know. If it’s a gig for a corporate blog, educate yourself.
3. Keep in mind the interests of your audience and how they might find you with a Google search.
4. Include calls to actions too – think “nothing asked, nothing done.”
5. Good copywriting style means writing for “lower-literacy users.” [Hilarious, but true. We always say “Write how regular people talk.”]
6. Write in an “inverted pyramid style” with your most important content in the first one or two paragraphs.
7. Split long posts into shorter chunks. Use bullets, numbering and breakouts whenever it’s apppropriate..
8. Use strong page titles.
9. Put your main points at the beginning of sentences. This helps with scanning and saves time. [We also advocate the use of subheads to aid scanning. Face it - that’s how people read stuff on the web]
10. Use Links

Read the complete article here.

Wow! Who wouldn’t want a free breakfast? (Of course, I stay at an economical Fairfield Inn that already has free breakfast.) But how about $1oo? What’s that about?

Yes, I opened.

This subject line is good in so many ways. It promises personal information (”Your account”) plus gives an incentive to open (”Free Breakfast + $100 Bonus”). It even includes a specific dollar amount which is proven to lift open rates.

Note that the word “Free” managed to pass through the spam filter. Note also that the writer resisted the urge to use an exclamation point.

The subject line is the most important component of an email. This line answers the call. Tip of the old chapeau to the anonymous scribe!

The consensus seems to be that verbs are okay in many instances as link text, even advisable in some circumstances. We officially volunteer to help update the W3C specs on the language of links.

However, our endorsement of verbs has some limitations. For example, we noticed this week that gerunds don’t seem advisable. What’s a gerund? Here’s what dictionary.com had to say:

The English -ing form of a verb when functioning as a noun, as writing in Writing is easy.

This presents some challenges for the online copywriter. We find ourselves often re-working sentences to avoid the gerund form. For example:

You can find out more by contacting us.

Not so good. This is better:

Contact us to find out more.

To sum it up about using verbs for link text:

• Verbs are fine as link text
• Avoid the gerund (-ing) form.

For example, in our last post (Capitalizing Internet), the MSW dictionary didn’t recognize the following as legit words in the English language:

• Google
• Permissivist

How about this one?

• Blogged

Sure, we can all customize our own dictionaries, but that’s really just an invitation to chaos.

To be fair, dictionaries embedded in word processing programs have always been weak. But just because it’s been a chronic problem for two decades doesn’t mean we have to endure it forever.

In our Web 2.0 world, why can’t MSW’s dictionary link to a reputable online source? User-generated dictionaries could still be an adjunct to the main, authoritative source.

As personal publishing explodes, online writers everywhere need the proper tools to create credible content. The alternative is an increasing babelization of the English language.

We suggest the good folks in Redmond do all writers everywhere a big favor and fix their dictionary once and for all by hooking up with the Oxford English Dictionary or another recognized authority.

This is an issue of some importance to all online copywriters. It’s bothered us for some time that Internet remains a proper noun – after all, we don’t capitalize Cable or Water or Electricity. But, like the Internet, they are all piped to the house by a utility.

Internet is not associated with the name of a person (like pasteurization or Darwinism) or a trademarked brand name (like Kodak and Kleenex). It’s not even a singular entity – I get mine from Earthlink. Maybe you get yours from Time Warner.

Furthermore, Internet has become the commonest of common words, reflecting its importance in contemporary society. Its rising usage parallels the decline of words including hi-fi, pager and fax.

All the major reference sources show Internet with a capital “I.” These include:

Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1)
American Heritage Dictionary
Merriam-Webster

Microsoft Word always underlines in green our attempts to use internet instead of Internet. Interestingly, many dictionaries allow Google in lower case, as in “I googled it.”

So what’s up with the Internet? Maybe it’s the word “the” that sometimes precedes it. Makes the Internet feel all special and important. But even that’s fading away. We could correctly say (or write):

Kids today have always had the Internet.

Or:

Kids today have always had internet.

Here at Online-Copywriter, we think the Internet should get off its high horse and admit its commonness. Call it the price of popularity. The sainted William Safire would probably call us permissivists.

Other online copywriters are invited to weigh-in with their own heavy thinking about Internet.

Heard this on TV this morning at the gym:

“Cingular is now the new AT&T”

I had my back to the TV and thought to myself “what does that mean? Which brand died?”

It reminds me of the evergreen pitch from the fashionistas:

“Brown is the new black.”

Every season, a new variation on the same tired admonition: “gray is the new black,” “green is the new black,” “blue is the new black.” Translation:

Brown has replaced black.

So if Cingular is now the new AT&T, has Cingular replaced AT&T?

Au contraire. AT&T has replaced Cingular.

How can such a big company full of smart people make such a silly mistake? Answer: navel gazing. We’re guessing the original line was “Cingular is now AT&T.” Simple, functional, communicative.

But then some genius said “add the word new, Bob. We want people to know we’re the new AT&T. Not that stodgy old company we used to be.”

So Cingular is now the new AT&T. Red is the new black. And we miss the old Ma Bell.