Three Easy Proofreading Tips

In today’s world, consumers want to make educated purchases. But the way consumers obtain that education is very different than in the past. Gone are the days when humans questioned each other in person about goods and services. These days, it’s all about putting your information online where it can influence buys – a practice commonly known as content marketing.

There are countless ways of getting information about your products and services out to the masses but it all starts with text. It’s more important than ever to have copy that is informative, helpful and error-free. That last one is a biggie as many job postings now stress proofing skills. It can be tedious but here are three tips I use to simplify proofreading.

Simply Wait

Whatever you’re writing - - blog posts, brochure copy, press releases, etc. - - you’ll easily miss typos and other mistakes if you proof your work immediately after finishing. If time is not a crucial issue, wait up to an hour to read your work again and you’ll find that it’s much easier to spot errors.

sdrowkcaB deaR

It may be surprising to realize that reading your copy word-for-word backwards really helps with your proofreading efforts. But, this method is especially handy when trying to spot issues with grammatical tense and punctuation.

Avoid Distractions 

This goes against our natural urges but blocking out all distractions while composing your copy can have a significant impact on your proofreading steps. You’ll take serious strides to cutting down on proofing time by closing your email, putting your phone away and dedicating a measured block of time to working. A great tactic for bloggers is putting the Distraction Free Writing Mode to use when composing a WordPress entry.

I hope these three proofreading tips will be helpful in your work. What are some of the tricks of the trade that you use? Please let me know by leaving a comment below. Thanks for visiting!

What are the Rules of Photo Credits?

I'm not a great photographer and I certainly don't have top-of-the-line camera equipment. But I have a lot of need for quality photos at my job. That's why I love stock photography. I've been an iStockphoto customer for many years. My primary use for stock photography has been to spice up posts on my employer’s internal blog and newsletters with a crisp picture. The superior image quality and the sense of honesty I get when using a purchased photo (as opposed to the guilt felt when copying a photo from the web) are what I consider the best elements of stock photography.

It's always cool to see a photo that I've purchased used in ads for other companies. In these cases, I always catch myself saying, “I know where they got that photo!” Recently, I've had a few needs to use some of my purchased photography on external projects but my confusion about the issue of giving proper photos credits has made me hesitant. Do I credit the photographer? Or do I credit iStockphoto? Or, since I've paid for the photo, do I have to worry about photo credits at all?

I've been thinking a lot about this since I saw a recent post on MentalFloss.com that featured a stock photograph. As you can see below, the post author gave credit to ThinkStock, another online stock photography website.

It's easy to determine that ThinkStock was indeed the source of this photo. And there wasn't a watermark on this photo when it was used on MentalFloss's website - that's a good indication that it was purchased.

So I’m reaching out to you: why did MentalFloss give a photo credit in this situation? Your answer to this question will really help me. Feel free to leave your answer – brief or detailed – in the comments section below.

Seriously, any input will help. Thanks!

UPDATE || February 4, 2014: I noticed that this same image was featured in an article seen on Inc.com. The author gave credit to the stock photography provider after the article - but this time credit was given to ShutterStock!

How to Embed a Video in an Email

Learning how to perform a new marketing task by trial and error has resulted in satisfaction quite often for me over the years. But there have also been times when I've been left disappointed, frustrated and even a little hopeless.

Such was the case very recently when I tried to embed a YouTube video in the body of an email. I use a great email marketing vendor called Emma at my job. It’s very simple to use and is the complete package – from design to analytics. Composing your email message with Emma is a lot like writing a new post on your blog.

I recently learned the hard way that you can’t simply copy and paste YouTube HTML code into the body of an email like you can for a blog post. I double-checked with Emma’s competitors and yep, they can’t do it either. There may be a way to get around this problem but as I've stated many times, I’m no guru. It could be that this restriction is limited to email marketing vendors but my research helped me realize that for analytical reasons, embedding video code into an email doesn't come highly suggested. Plus, there’s something about the code that doesn't agree with the email software – a guru could probably be more specific here.

So what did I do? I really wanted the recipients of my emails to view this video in a convenient way. I thought back to all the emails I receive on a daily basis that feature video players right there in the body of the email. It dawned on me that those video players aren't video players at all. They’re images of videos that are linked to a video page. In the back of my mind, I knew how this process worked. But it’s like my mind’s eye “sees” the video within the email.

The solution to my problem required the purchase of a video player graphic template from a site like ShutterStock and inserting a photo along with a “Play” icon. Now that I have this image, I can place it into the body of my email and Emma’s software allows me to link it to any page I desire.

An example of a video player image. 

I hope this post has helped you. Isn't it uncanny how solutions to problems that seem unsolvable often turn out to be so simple? I’d love to read about your similar “problems” in the comment section!