Susan B. Weiner's Blog, page 54

Naming your financial blog–Is it necessary?

“Does my blog need a name?” Typically my answer is “no,” but there are cases when naming your financial blog can pay off. Answer the questions below to understand whether your blog needs a name.

Question 1. Is your blog separate from your company’s website?

If  your blog is separate from your company’s website, then it needs a name. For example, if you work for XYZ Financial, but you blog on a separate website, then your blog needs a name so that you can create a website address (URL) for the blog. The name could play off your topic, your name, or the pain point that you help your readers address. For example, some of the blogs named in XY Planning Network’s “8 Blogs for Millennials” include “Blonde on a Budget,” “Afford Anything,” and “Broke Millennial.”

Choosing a good name can be challenging. In “” Chris Garrett says

A good name is

Readable

Pronounceable

Spellable

Memorable

Concise

Unique

If your blog is part of your company’s website, it’s okay to add a name. But it’s not necessary. For example, Jim Blankenship’s blog is Financial Ducks in a Row. It is linked to his corporate website for Blankenship Financial Planning, but has a different look and its own website address.

Which is better, you may ask, to publish your blog as part of—or separate from—your corporate website? Most financial professionals whom I know publish their blogs on their websites to help their corporate website’s search engine optimization (SEO). To boost your website’s ranking in online search engines, it’s good to update it frequently. If you keep your blog current, its updates will help your overall website by keeping it fresh. Google and other search engines give higher priority to sites that are updated more often. “Freshness Factor: 10 Illustrations on How Fresh Content Can Influence Rankings” illustrates some of the factors that come into play, even though it’s an older article. “5 Reasons Why Fresh Content is Critical for Your Website and SEO” is a more recent, but less comprehensive review.

Question 2. Does your company maintain multiple blogs?

If your company has more than one blog, then it makes sense to give them names. This situation is most common among larger firms.

For example, investment firm SEI has two blogs:

Practically Speaking , which focuses on “Common-sense ideas to grow your advisory practice”
Front and Centered , which discusses “Grounded perspectives to cultivate your inner leader”

In another large-firm example, Putnam Investments, has named its Advisor Tech Tips and Putnam Perspectives blogs. However, it also has a generically named Wealth Management blog.

As Putnam’s example shows, you can get away without naming your blog.

Question 3. Are you good at catchy names that also exploit SEO?

Even when a name isn’t required, a good one can help you to spread your message.

A catchy title will help you to attract readers, especially if takes advantage of SEO. If you can incorporate phrases that people commonly search when seeking the services that you provide, you may boost your ranking in online search engines. Of course, most of the good names are probably taken.

A short, memorable name may help on social media. John Anderson demonstrates in the tweet below how SEI uses the name of its Practically Speaking blog as a hashtag.

I think so. Makes it easier to leverage in other forms of social media. #PracticallySpeaking https://t.co/YvK1KnX3VA

— John Anderson (@SEIJohnA) January 28, 2016

The bottom line on naming your financial blog

Naming your financial blog isn’t necessary in most cases, if your blog isn’t separate from your corporate website.

Image courtesy of everydayplus/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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Style guidelines for financial services firms

Style guidelines for financial services firms can help you to make your written communications more consistent and thus easier to read.

Why create style guidelines for your financial services firm?

It can be distracting if writing styles are inconsistent within and across documents published by your firm. For example, is it “counterparty” in the first paragraph and “counter party” in paragraphs two and three? Do headings randomly mix sentence case and title case? Is your company name abbreviated in different ways?

It’s a good idea to pick a major style guide, such as the AP Stylebook, to use as your reference for common questions. However, style guides often don’t cover challenges specific to financial services firms. They certainly don’t tackle company-specific branding issues.

Creating style guidelines tailored to your company can help your writers and editors fill in the blanks left by the major style guides.

How I create style guidelines for my clients

For my editing clients, I create style guidelines for my own reference. They help me to be consistent. Also, I share the guidelines with my proofreader, when I use one.

As issues arise, I record the preferred style in an Excel spreadsheet. In the first column, I record the word, phrase, or other issue. In another column, I record the preferred practice.

Here’s an excerpt from the Capitalization section of one style sheet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Section headings that I’ve used include the following:

Abbreviations/acronyms—for example, BRL→Brazilian real, 50 bps→50 basis points (0.50%)
Capitalization
Headings—for example, use sentence case and bold
Numbers—for example, SPELL OUT numbers 1 to 9, even in five-year Treasury
Punctuation—for example, use serial comma; DO hyphenate first-quarter & worst-performing WHEN used as ADJECTIVE; use a consistent number of decimal places
Spelling—for example, health care, NOT healthcare
Word replacements—for example, cap rate→capitalization rate

How long should your style guidelines be?

My client style sheets would typically fit on one page, if printed out.

I like the philosophy of Intelligent Editing, which recommends that your style sheet run no longer than four pages. The firm says in “Writing a Style Guide: What You Need to Know“:

…bear in mind that the goal is just to focus on points of style where there is no right answer but where one usage is preferred by the organization. A style guide is not the place to teach your colleagues things that they should already know.

The longer your style sheet, the harder it will be for you and your colleagues to apply it consistently. It’s harder for users to keep all of the issues in their heads, even if they scan the style sheet repeatedly.

If you already have style guidelines

If you already have style guidelines,please share them with writers and editors whom you hire, in addition to your company’s employees.

You may struggle with getting your financial firm’s writers to follow them. I’ve addressed your challenge in “Reader question: How to get writers to follow style guidelines?”

Image courtesy of adamr/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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Fonts: By the numbers

The look of your financial reports makes a difference in the effectiveness of your communication. Fonts are part of your toolkit, as Professor Joyce Walsh explains in her guest post.

Fonts: By the numbers

By Professor Joyce Walsh, Boston University, College of Communication

For financial professionals, numbers are the heart and soul of client communications. But working with them in documents, presentations and online can be painful. Anyone who’s wasted an hour trying to get the decimal points to line up in a vertical column knows what I’m talking about.

Fortunately, there are ready solutions to numerical challenges. And they come from an unlikely source: your choice of font. You’ve probably spent some time considering the right font for your written material. (If you haven’t, you can read this paper I wrote about typography for financial professionals.) But the right font can also make your numerical life much easier—and your client reports and marketing material more effective.

If you’re having trouble with numbers in your documents and presentations, here are solutions to five common problems:

Problem #1: My numbers don’t align properly in columns

Arranging a column of numbers is a standard feature of most financial and investment reports. Whether you’re showing the market caps of your top 10 holdings or presenting a balance sheet, your figures need to stack up in an orderly way, with all decimal points in vertical alignment. If yours don’t, it’s because your font choice uses proportional figures, where each character varies in width. When 8s take up more space than 1s, your column will never line up properly.

The solution: Use a font that offers tabular figures, where each number is the same width on the page, and 1s take up the same horizontal space as 8s. If your default font doesn’t have a tabular option, consider investing in one that does or use a different, complementary font when presenting a numbers in a column. Many font families, like Gotham, offer both proportional and tabular options.

Pro tip: Not sure whether font figures are proportional or tabular? Here’s a quick way to find out: Type a line of 1s, then type a line of 0s underneath it. If the two lines end at the same place, the numbers are tabular.

Problem #2: When I bold a number in a column, it bulges out

Using bold is a great way to call attention to a significant number. But even if you’re using tabular figures, doing so can still throw a column out of alignment. If this happens to you, it’s because your font doesn’t have weight-duplexing figures.

The solution: Invest in a font that offers weight-duplexing, a feature that allows bold numbers to stack without bulging out of columns. Whitney, a font by Hoefler & Co., is a good example.

Pro tip: Speaking of bulging—10- and 12-digit numbers are common in today’s financial world, and they can wreak havoc in the best of layouts. Consider using a font that offers condensed numbers, which are designed to fit big numbers into narrow spaces without losing their readability or visual appeal.

Problem #3: When I use numbers in the body of a report, the spacing doesn’t look right

Financial professionals often use figures within the body of a report. And, yes, sometimes they just look off—the spacing seems out of whack or the numbers appear to be larger or smaller than the surrounding words. That’s probably because you’re using tabular figures instead of proportional ones. Within any font family, proportional figures are more like letters in their overall shape and appearance, and they tend to be more evenly spaced.

The solution: Always use proportional figures in running text or the body of a document. Their variable width makes them easier to read and lends a more harmonious feel to the content.

Pro tip: Beware of fonts with old-style figures, where the numbers approximate the size and shape of lowercase letter forms. While they work in a sentence, they look tiny and out of place in ALL CAP headlines. You’re safer with a font that offers lining figures, which are all-cap height and work well everywhere. Fortunately, most common system fonts default to lining figures.

Problem #4: I need more currency symbols for my reports

As the global economy expands to include emerging and frontier markets, forward-looking financial professionals need a font that goes beyond the dollar, pound, euro and yen to include symbols for currencies such as rupees, pesos and the new shekel. While it is possible to enter special numbers and codes to produce them, the process is slow and labor-intensive. If you use international currency symbols frequently, it’s just not practical.

The solution: Invest in a font family with extended currency symbols. Gotham, Mercury and Whitney are good examples of fonts with a wide range of monetary symbols.

Pro tip: If you want to make your articles, reports and presentations more useful and attractive for your audience, consider purchasing a font family that offers an extended character set. These typically include vertical and diagonal fractions, ordinals, and advanced mathematical and statistical symbols. Some even come with indices—circles with numbers in them—a very handy item if you want to compare plot points on a graph or add a distinctive touch to financial footnotes and disclosure references.

Problem #5: I need charts in my WordPress blog

The solution: You can apply the principles discussed above and post your charts as graphic files, such as JPGs or PNGs.

Pro tip: If you want to create charts and graphs while in WordPress, you will need a plugin. The WordPress Chart plugin is free and customizable, but is not user-friendly. Visualizer is also a free WordPress Plugin but is much easier to use. Just save your Excel XLS file as a CSV file. Then create a chart in the WordPress editor by selecting Add Media > Visualizations. To display the chart, simply add its shortcode to your post.

 

About Professor Joyce Walsh

Professor Walsh’s work has been featured in publications, exhibitions and corporate art collections around the world. Her book, Graphic Design Essentials: Skills, Software and Creative Strategies, was the first book to combine design fundamentals with creative software skills

Business data analyzing image courtesy of alexisdc/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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Top posts from the first quarter of 2016

Check out my top posts from the last quarter!

Everybody struggles with jargon. Perhaps that’s what put my financial jargon killer in the top spot.

They’re a mix of practical tips on writing (#1, 3), social media (#2),  blogging (#2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9), book marketing (#5), and webinars (#10).

Financial jargon killer: The Wall Street Journal
My experiment blogging on LinkedIn
Improve your financial writing with these rules—the strong performance by this post surprised me
What’s too long for a blog post?—one of the longest blog posts I’ve ever written is the #2 post on my first-quarter top posts list, supporting the idea that long posts do well, but my #1 post has only 741 words
Selling PDF e-books online: Tips from my E-junkie experience
Financial blogging tip: Opinion + summary
Blog post template: Write about a talk
Financial blogging lessons from my spinning class
Financial content: Ask questions of your readers
Mistakes to avoid in your first live webinar

Want to learn to write better? Check out my June 23 investment commentary webinar!

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Capitalize titles consistently in your publications

What’s the best way to capitalize a title when you write an article, blog post, book, or other publication? The rules vary. The best thing is to pick one approach and stick with it.

Option 1. Use sentence case when you capitalize titles

I’m a big fan of using sentence case for capitalizing titles. “Sentence case” means that you only capitalize the first letter of the first word of the title, just as you’d do in a sentence. This is easy to remember. Plus, it doesn’t require judgment calls about which words deserve an initial capital. That’s its big appeal in my eyes.

However, sentence case looks funny in book titles. I didn’t use sentence case in my book, Financial Blogging: How to Write Powerful Posts That Attract Clients. Perhaps that’s why the alternative to sentence case is called “title case.”

Other approaches to capitalizing titles

The alternative, title-case approaches amount to this: Capitalize the initial letter of every word in the title except for minor, helper words.

The complicated part is deciding which words are too unimportant to earn an initial capital. Typically “the” and “an” don’t make the cut. Prepositions are a bit trickier. Check your favorite style guide or use the online tool I mention in the next section.

For example, my old copy of The Chicago Manual of Style says to “Lowercase articles (the, a, an), and subordinate conjunctions (and, or, for, nor) and prepositions regardless of length, unless they are the first or last words of the title or subtitle.” I know of at least one investment management firm that uses the style guidelines of the American Psychological Association (APA). The APA’s guidelines for title case differ somewhat from the Chicago guidelines, as do the Associated Press guidelines.

A handy tool for capitalizing titles

CapitalizeMyTitle.com is a handy tool that will capitalize your title according to the rules of the style guide you choose. Just type in your title and click on the tab of your preferred style.

Image courtesy of blackzheep/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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Stop saying “Click here”!

Stop putting links on your web pages that say “Click here”! They’re not doing you or your readers any good.

That’s the message I took away from “Writing Hyperlinks: Salient, Descriptive, Start with Keyword” on the Nielsen Norman Group (NNG) website. NNG is an expert on website usability. I highly recommend that you subscribe to NNG’s weekly newsletter, if you care about online communications.

Why “click here” falls short

Your readers’ eyes are drawn to hyperlinks. That’s according to NNG’s eyetracking research that studies where eyes go when people look at websites.

To get the most out of their attention, the text in your hyperlink should give readers a good idea of what they’ll learn after clicking. As NNG puts it, “Links should have good information scent: that is, they must clearly explain where they will take users.” Also, it helps if the links are informative even out of context. Does “Click here” achieve that? NO!

Even worse is if your web page has more than one “click here” link, with those links leading to different pages. Your reader is unlikely to grasp at a quick glance that there are different destinations. You can see the problem in the image below.

This “click here” sentence is an example of what NOT to do when you hyperlink. It would be better to hyperlink “my article” and “our services” in a revised sentence.

 

 

Your next step: Scan your website

Have you been using “click here” on your website? I know I was guilty of this when I first started writing for the web. Today, instead of writing “click here to read about my services,” I’d write “learn about my writing and editing services.” Get the idea?

It’s time to upgrade your hyperlink text! You’ll get better results if you do.

 

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Financial white paper writers who say “yes”

Do you want a financial white paper writer who says “yes” to everything you write or suggest? I say “no.” Financial white paper writers who push back can be the best friends of companies that aren’t familiar with how to write great investment or wealth management white papers.

Don’t get me wrong. Your white paper writer should respect your goals and desires. However, the best financial white paper writers will push you to create the best white paper possible. They will say “no” when your white paper is weak in the areas I discuss below.

Weakness 1. Problem identification and WIIFM

If your white paper doesn’t identify a problem experienced by your target audience, then it’s not going to attract prospects or convince referral sources to pass along your name. You need to answer the question of “What’s in it for me?” (WIIFM) for your prospects. You should also understand the WIIFM for your business.

For example, imagine that you pose the topic of “401(k) plan types.” Who cares? That sounds like a dull reference work that could only interest an ERISA attorney or defined contribution recordkeeper. But how about “the 401(k) plan characteristics that boost participation and simplify plan administration”? That’s like a winner that will help both participants and the plan sponsor. If your firm helps plan sponsors achieve those characteristics—or if this topic enhances your credibility as a provider of related services or products—then this topic helps you to achieve your business goals.

A good writer will ask the following questions early in their discussions with you:

Who is your target audience and what do you want them to do after reading the white paper?
What is your topic and why will your target audience care about it?
What problem does this topic solve for your readers?

When you and your writer get the answers right, you can attract and retain readers’ attention. Your readers won’t ask “Why the heck are you telling me this?”

Good white papers focus on solving problems, not promoting the firm that publishes them, as I explained in “White paper marketing: Walk a fine line.” If you truly seek a white paper, your writer should say “no” when your draft becomes a brochure.

Weakness 2. Poorly explained concepts

Your experts know what they’re talking about. But sometimes it’s hard for them to explain their ideas in plain English. As a result, your readers won’t appreciate the value of what you write in your white papers.

Take for example, the concepts of “asset allocation” and “diversification.” These are easy for investment professionals to understand. However, they require explanation and perhaps even some examples to make sense to less sophisticated individual investors. A good white paper writer won’t hesitate to push you on this.

Weakness 3. Poor organization and wording

Poor organization and bad wording will confuse your readers. They may even drive them away.

When you give a weak outline to good writers, they’ll fight back. They’ll propose a new, stronger outline that will let your ideas shine. They’ll also polish your wording.

Look for financial white paper writers who say “no”

You need a white paper writer who’ll be responsive to your needs. Sometimes that means saying “no” to the way your ideas are presented. That’s part of the value that good white paper writers bring.

Image courtesy of digitalart/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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How to edit your financial firm’s bios

Your employees are one of your financial firm’s greatest assets. But poorly written biographies make it difficult for your audience to understand the breadth and depth of your firm’s expertise. When you streamline and standardize your financial firm’s bios, your bios’ readers will benefit. Happy readers mean happier clients and prospects.

I’m writing this article for financial marketers, whether you’re a member of a marketing department or a member of a small investment, wealth management, or financial planning firm who wears a marketing hat in addition to offering your financial expertise. These are my best suggestions for a process you can follow.

Step 1. Identify why you want to edit your financial firm’s bios

You can edit better when you know the purpose of your work. At one extreme, are you merely proofreading for big errors so you’re not embarrassed by someone’s title being spelled as “manger” instead of “manager” or are you looking to change the tone and content of your bios?

Here’s a list of some other goals you may pursue. You can pick from this list to give better guidance to your editor when you hire someone to work on bios.

Make your bios more focused on clients by describing how clients benefit from the employee’s work, instead of emphasizing the employee’s skills and credentials. This kind of bio draws in clients and prospects because it’s more than a dry recitation of credentials. However, credentials are an important part of establishing credibility.
Shift from last names to first names or vice versa. Today bios tend toward greater informality. If I were a corporate employee, my bio might call me “Susan” instead of “Ms. Weiner.” On a similar note, more bios are written in the first person. When I redid my website in 2015, I changed my biographical references to say “I” instead of “Weiner.”
Add more personality. Bios are changing as “authenticity,” or trying to show that there’s a real person behind the marketing, becomes more important. You’ll find more folksy or quirky language and more mention of the employees’ passions and interests. This is particularly helpful if the employees have good stories about why they chose a career in financial services. However, it can become labored and phony if the stories are weak.
Make your biographical format more consistent. If your bios have been written by different people over time, they may cover different information and use different writing styles. This inconsistency makes it harder for readers to find the information they need or to compare your employees’ roles and backgrounds. For example, some bios may start with how the employees help clients vs. others that emphasize the employees’ credentials vs. others that start with the employees’ prior experience. Others may be written in a flowery style, while some adopt a lean style. Some may consist of a few bullet points vs. others that use long paragraphs. Another form of consistency is to balance personal branding vs. the firm’s marketing goal, as writer and professional service marketer Meg Charendoff reminded me when I discussed this post with her. You want to support and promote your financial professionals, but you also need consistent messaging about people in specific roles and groups.
Fix bad writing. Mistakes sneak into bios. Eliminate typos, bad grammar, and other weaknesses with thorough editing.

Depending on your goals, you may take a more or less radical approach to editing your financial firm’s bios. For example, if you pick goal #1, you’ll need to create new templates for your bios. If goal #5 is your top priority, you’ll edit with a lighter hand.

Step 2. Review a few bios to get a sense of your challenges

The first step for you—or your writer, if you delegate the work of editing your financial firm’s bios—is to review several bios. What are their strengths and weaknesses? What are common components that repeat so you’ll want to standardize how you treat them?

If you outsource this step to a writer, ask the writer for his or her assessment of what needs to be changed.

Step 3. Create templates—or at least a style sheet

If you plan to make major changes to your financial firm’s bios, you’ll benefit from creating templates for each distinct type of position in your firm. Your template will be written like a model bio, specifying what’s included and in what detail.

Although there should be some consistency across all bios, there will be differences. For example, you may go into details about previous positions held by senior executives. Such experience is less relevant or available for entry-level employees.

No matter what approach you take to editing your firm’s bios, you need a style sheet. If your firm already has a style sheet for its communications, you’re ahead of the game. Share your style sheet with your writer, if you outsource.

In addition to matters of grammar, punctuation, and spelling, you should consider what content to include (and omit). Here are some of the issues (in alphabetical order) that you’ll need to decide:

Bullet points vs. narrative—when will you use bullet points instead of narrative to break up the flow of information in the bios? For example, when I edited bios that appeared as PowerPoint pages in a client’s pitch books, I converted their educational experience from narrative to bullet points that started with the name of the college or university. This trimmed the word count and made it easy for readers to see if they recognized the name of the employee’s alma mater.
Capitalization—when will you capitalize titles and other words? Technically speaking, you should only capitalize titles when they precede the holder’s name. You should write “President Weiner,” but “Weiner, the president.” This rule is broken more often than not in financial services. However, you must draw the line somewhere. Avoid using capitals simply to make a word look important. Don’t write that “We offer Investment Management and Financial Planning.”
Commas—will you use the serial comma or not? I’m personally a fan of the serial comma. However, the main thing is to pick a style and stick with it.
Details on employees—there’s a long list of questions you’ll need to answer to make your bios consistent in terms of details. You may not identify all of the issues until you’ve made one pass at editing all of the bios. Where do you draw the line between considering something relevant or not? Will you include any of the items listed below? Remember, there’s a limit to how much your clients, prospects, and referral sources are willing to read.

College majors and honors
Previous employment—how much detail will you go into? Will it vary according to seniority or relevance to the current job?
Outside affiliations, such as board memberships or volunteer work—must they be current to be included? Which organizations are worthy of mention, especially when the employee is not in a leadership role? On the other hand, employees’ outside affiliations give insights into who they are as people.
Awards—must they be relevant to the job or to your local community to be included?
Publications—what makes the cut for inclusion? Does it have to be a national publication or a publication in your field? Or can a personal blog qualify?
Social media profiles—will you link to your employees’ social media profiles? Connecting with clients and prospects, especially on LinkedIn, could pay off.
Speeches—speeches can help to establish an employee’s authority.


Job descriptions—is it possible to standardize descriptions by title? If so, it will be clear to your readers when two employees perform comparable jobs.
Names—will you include nicknames? What about middle initials, which are often important in distinguishing between people who share common names?
Non-degree education—certificate programs abound in financial services so you need policies on whether to include them and on how to write about them. I’ve found it particularly hard to figure out how to refer to non-degree programs that no longer exist. Also, employees may not be consistent in what they call the programs in their resumes or bios.
Professional designations—which professional designations will you highlight by having them appear after the employee’s name? Which designations will you omit as irrelevant? Will you include designations or licenses that are no longer current or that haven’t been formally awarded? In some cases, the professional organization that awards the designation may have rules against its use if the credential hasn’t been formally awarded.
Spelling—how will you spell words that have variants? For example, will you write “financial modeling” or “financial modelling”? Will you show bachelor’s degrees as “BA,” “B.A.,” or “bachelor’s degree”?
States—will you spell out the names of states, such as Massachusetts, in full? Or, will you use U.S. post office abbreviations (MA) or traditional abbreviations (Mass.)?
Word count limits—you can’t write a book about each employee. Plus, you may have word count limits imposed by the layout of your website, pitch book, or other place where you showcase your employees’ expertise.
Years of experience—listing years of experience, such as “five years with XYZ Financial” or “10 years of investment management experience,” means you’ll need to update bios annually. That can be a royal pain. At best, it’s annual busywork. Consider referring to “experience since 2010” or whatever the year might be so your bios will always be current. Another issue: Will you omit years of experience if the number is too low or will you abbreviate to “more than 20 years of experience” if you don’t want your employees to seem too old?

Step 4. Edit a few bios and get them reviewed

You or your writer should edit a few bios and run them by your decision makers. This will allow you to see if  you’re on the right track. It’s easier to adjust early in the process than to rewrite many bios later.

I hope that before you began editing your financial firm’s bios you figured out who needs to approve their approach and content. If you’re lucky, you won’t have a huge committee with conflicting opinions. The big picture questions about your approach to bios should be decided by a select few.

For tips on managing the review process, see “7 ways to manage writing by committee.”

Step 5. Refine your templates or style guidelines

Use the information you learned in Step 4 to refine your templates or style guidelines.

Step 6. Finish editing your financial firm’s bios

Use your updated templates or style guidelines to finish editing your financial firm’s bios. Then you can start the approval process.

At a minimum, you should run each employee’s bio by her or him to check for accuracy, before getting a compliance review of the bios. Give employees firm deadlines to avoid slackers.

Step 7. Keep bios consistent and up-to-date with a process

Bios should be reviewed annually for accuracy and to reflect changes to your templates.

To keep bios accurate and consistent, it’s best to have one official source where users retrieve them. You’ll also benefit from a well-defined process for making changes when the bio changes between annual reviews. Give employees the name of someone to contact with updates. Give the contact person a process to follow for the review, approval, and implementation of changes. Otherwise, you’ll end up with different versions in different places. For example, an individual’s bio in a pitch book may not be consistent with that person’s bio on the website. Later, in your annual review, you may unwittingly start with a bio that doesn’t reflect the latest information.

It may be necessary to tailor bios for specific purposes, such as a short bio accompanying an article. However, those specialized bios should be drawn from the official bio. If you have multiple “official” bios, you run the risk that someone will use a bio that doesn’t conform with your templates and style guidelines.

As Charendoff says, “The review and revision project is not the end, but the beginning of the process of maintaining effective bios.”

Good luck!

Image courtesy of digitalart at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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Rev up with my Daily Writing Challenge!

Do you struggle to write as much as you would like? I sometimes have that problem, too. When I was in a slump last year, I found a solution in a daily writing challenge on Facebook. To help me keep up my writing, I’m inviting you to join me in a daily writing challenge during the month of April.

Daily Writing Challenge rules

Here’s how it works:

You set a goal of averaging X words/day during the month. Note: it’s an average. You don’t have to write that amount every single day.
You check in daily on the Investment Writing Facebook page for accountability and encouragement.
People who reach their goal for April get the right to brag and a virtual badge that you can share via social media. I’ll trust you to report your success honestly.

What to share when you check in

What do you write in your daily check-in? You can

Share your word count for the day
Post your intention for the next day
Share a tip for writing despite leading a busy life
Ask for encouragement or helping in cracking a writing challenge
Encourage others

It’s up to you to choose what you share. I don’t want to ensnare you in complicated rules. I’d like this challenge to work for you.

If it works for me, it might work for you

I find that accountability to an individual or group is very motivating for me. As I mentioned in “How a blogging buddy can help your financial planning or investment blog,” I have a goal buddy with whom I check in weekly by phone. That has been invaluable.

I’ve been working with a goal of averaging 300 words daily on my blog and other non-routine, non-client writing. I hit my goal in December, January, and February. I’m not sure that I’m going to make it in March. That’s partly why I’m recruiting you to join me in my April challenge. I also figure it’s a good way to encourage the students who recently completed my financial blogging class to keep on writing.

I find that setting my intention—for example, a word count goal or planning to work on a specific blog post—the evening before my work day helps me to deliver. Also, it means that I don’t approach my computer with a blank mind. My first step is clear when it’s time for me to tackle my daily word count.

My partial date and word count record from Feb. 2016

When it’s time to pick a topic to write about, I can go to the Microsoft Outlook task list where I keep a list of potential blog post topics.

I also appreciate the support of others who struggle with keeping up the writing despite the demands of our work and personal lives.

To help me track my word count, I enter my word count daily in an Excel spreadsheet. I mostly write on a computer, so it’s easy for me to generate an accurate word count. If I were writing longhand, I’d use the old-fashioned trick of counting the number of words on three lines, calculating the average number of works per line, and the multiplying the number of lines times the average word count per line. It’s less time-consuming than counting word by handwritten word.

Declare your intention to participate in the Daily Writing Challenge!

If you’d like to participate, go to the Investment Writing Facebook page and declare your intention on this post.

Then, on April 1, post what you achieve for the day. Although April 1 is April Fool’s Day, this is no joke. I hope you’ll join me.

The post Rev up with my Daily Writing Challenge! appeared first on Susan Weiner's Blog on Investment Writing.

Force yourself to write or wait for inspiration?

Procrastination can be good. That is the startling point of “Why I Taught Myself to Procrastinate,” an opinion piece in The New York Times. Its author, Adam Grant, a professor of management and psychology at the Wharton School, argues that procrastination “is a virtue for creativity.” His article made me wonder about writing. Should you always force yourself to write, or is it sometimes better to procrastinate, to wait for inspiration?

Let me confess. I take writing deadlines seriously. I finish my projects early whenever possible. I’m not a fan of waiting for inspiration, which is my personal definition of procrastinating about writing. However, in this article I consider both sides of the story.

Why procrastinate?

Grant’s interest in procrastination was inspired by one of his graduate students. “She told me that her most original ideas came to her after she procrastinated,” says Grant. He and his student tested whether her experience applied more broadly. Their experiments suggested that “procrastination encouraged divergent thinking.” Why? Because it gives us a chance to move beyond “our first ideas, which are usually our most conventional.”

Of particular interest to writers, Grant reports on his experiment in procrastinating about writing his opinion piece about procrastination. Here’s what he found:

What I discovered was that in every creative project, there are moments that require thinking more laterally and, yes, more slowly. My natural need to finish early was a way of shutting down complicating thoughts that sent me whirling in new directions. I was avoiding the pain of divergent thinking — but I was also missing out on its rewards.

Clearly, procrastination sometimes pays. Still, what Grant described doesn’t fit my definition of procrastination. I think of procrastination as putting off beginning work on a piece. Instead, Grant focuses more on not finishing a piece at the earliest opportunity. In fact, he started thinking about the piece early, giving him time to come up with new ideas for it. To me, that’s a form of preparation for writing. It’s productive procrastination, unlike the unproductive procrastination of people who wait until the last minute to do any work at all on their projects.

Why you shouldn’t wait for inspiration, but can delay final draft

When my schedule permits, I like the idea of starting early but delaying the final draft. This is especially true for my creative work, such as blog posts. It is in line with what Grant suggests. I found evidence supporting this in Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind by Scott Berry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire. The authors describe Picasso’s creative process:

Exploration and seemingly blind experimentation were key to Picasso’s creative process. Rather than creating a painting to reflect his own pre-existing worldview, he seemed to actively build and reshape that worldview through the creative process. While he may have had a rough intuition, it’s likely Picasso did not know where he was going, creatively, until he arrived there.

I also like the idea of “creative incubation,” discussed in Wired to Create.

Many of us know from experience that our best ideas come seemingly out of the blue when our minds are off wandering elsewhere. Idle though it may seem, the act of mind wandering is often anything but mindless. Research suggests that an incubation period of mind wandering leads to improvement in creative thinking. The next time you’re working on a creative project or work assignment that requires intense focus and creative chops, try taking a five-minute daydreaming break every hour or so, and see how it affects your ideas and thinking. During this break, engage in a simple activity that will allow your mind to wander, like walking, doodling, or cleaning. Consider this your creative incubation period and see if you feel a renewed sense of creative energy when you get back to work.

Why force yourself to write?

One reason to force yourself to write is that waiting until your deadline nears is stressful. I regularly see my writer friends on Facebook lamenting their last-minute pressures as they hustle to finish articles that they put off until the last minute. Sometimes they lose face with their editors when they ask for extensions.

Another reason to force yourself to write is that “Research has shown that waiting for inspiration doesn’t work,” according to Paul J. Silvia in How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing. He reports on a research study that tested the effectiveness of three different writing strategies:

Abstinence, in which subjects “were forbidden from all non-emergency writing”
Spontaneous, in which subjects scheduled writing sessions “but wrote only when they felt inspired”
Contingency, in which scheduled writing sessions “and were forced to write during each session,” plus “they had to send a check to a disliked organization if they didn’t do their writing

People in the contingency group wrote far more than their peers in the other two groups. In addition, people in the contingency group reported fewer days between creative ideas than members of the other two groups, according to Silva.

Can you be creative without delay?

There’s a difference between procrastinating and taking time to prepare before you write. I believe in starting your writing early enough that you can spend time brainstorming, using techniques such as mind mapping or freewriting. When you start your draft early enough, you can let your ideas marinate.

Don’t wait for inspiration. Instead, start thinking early about your article. Follow a process to develop your ideas, write your draft, and edit. Most people will find they like the results and experience less stress.

Of course, we all have different personalities. I’m sure there are people who enjoy last-minute crunches that they’ve created for themselves. Just as there are things that I do that no one else would want to impose on themselves. Find the solution that works best for you.

Image courtesy of lekkyjustdoit / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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