Ever want to know what is behind those AOL/Google/Yahoo
headlines, like, “7 Ways to Better Sex tonight!” or “101 Techniques to Raising a
Healthy Teen,” or “Crazy New Weight-Loss Bean?” There is a science to this, and
Nick Thacker wants you to know how to use it. If you are blogging for a job,
Thacker can help you get more sales. If you want to penetrate the blogosphere
without selling a product, even better. Finally, and I will revisit this later,
you can follow Thacker’s suggestion to build up a community that will help you
sell books and help other writers. Let me put this in my opening paragraph: http://www.nickthacker.com or http://www.livehacked.com. The books are
also available on Amazon.
Thacker chose for the first book in the Dead Simple Guide to address the topic of headlines. I don’t care
if your goal is to sell toothpaste, you will fare poorly if you use a headline
that folks will blow past when they search to find you – or your competitor.
When I’m searching, if I think an article will not help, I’ll leave it unread –
and move on, seeking a more likely-looking answer. Don’t you? Shouldn’t you
invest some time making sure that you would click on your article,
advertisement, or blog post if you were doing the searching? In The Dead Simple Guide to Amazing Headlines, Thacker
helps you think through this, and provides shortcuts if you choose to use them.
Now you have your headline, or at least, you can conceive of
a headline that would sell your next blog post. Now what? You can make your
site awesome, make your content brilliant, and still attract nobody. I know. That’s
me. In the second book, The Dead Simple
Guide to Guest Posts, Thacker walks you through the process of creating
community, which causes people to link
to you, host your guest posts, and cross-promote your blog. What is missing
here is how to create the code on your site to do what you want. For example, I
don’t know how to sell my own book (on Smashwords.com) on my own Blogger page.
Hmmm.
The third book in the trilogy, The Dead Simple Guide to Pillar Content, shows that Thacker is
really a novelist at heart. “Creating Pillar Content.” Ever heard of it? I hadn’t,
either. Pillar content is why your blog exists. You need to make something
stand out to let people know who you are and why they should care. Thacker explains why you, a novelist, should
write about your philosophy of writing, how you develop your characters, where
your plot ideas come from, essentially who you are as a writer. Thacker
explains that, whether you are writing a blog on fishing or on writing, that
you make the “pillars” of your blog out of content that will draw readers.
Is this collection a real hack, meaning an elegant and quick
solution to an intractable problem, to your marketing and blogging issues? If,
like me, you don’t know much about the bits and bytes of what to do to achieve
your blog goals, maybe not. But for anyone with web design assets, or even a
few hundred bucks to handle the tech stuff, Thacker’s trilogy will set you on
the right path.
Don’t forget to buy my book 3 Through History: Love in the Time of Republicans, at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/239509.
Thanks for reading!
