Not a television writer (they generally stay locked up in an airless room crafting their scripts), but a writer of books. You’ve probably only seen a writer on a television show – Late Night with David Letterman, or the Today show – if that writer also happens to be a celebrity of some sort. An actress plugging a health and fitness book, or a sports legend plugging a memoir.

But what about someone – a writer who isn’t yet a household name – who’s written a good book? A book that could be something that might interest legions of television viewers?

Anyone?

Didn’t think so.

In many countries besides the United States, writers occupy a strong place in the cultural dialogue, often appearing on television discussion shows to weigh in on this or that. They’re considered worthy of attention. Not that they’re considered right or wrong in what they express, simply worthy of being included because they’ve taken the time to organize their thoughts into a narrative they’ve managed to get published.

Not so in a country where more than a million books are published each year.

The United States has a lot of readers, but its many writers don’t get a lot of notice. That doesn’t mean that you can’t get noticed.

Don’t expect television to be your path to fame as a writer. But you don’t expect that now anyway – since you’re probably someone who’s developing an online platform for ideas, for building an audience.

Nor should give up on “television” as a medium for your message. The new television isn’t one run by the broadcast networks. (Remember them? All-powerful in the days before the niche-ing of today’s television spectrum, with thousands of cable channels catering to all different tastes? Kind of like what might be happening, what actually is happening, with traditional publishers…)

The new television is run by viewers. YouTube is only one outlet. Many more such video outlets exist and are springing up almost daily. Younger viewers continue to watch television, to absorb video content. But they choose to watch it through their smart phones or on their tablets or at their computers. And content – as well as marketing – can be created for this demanding viewing audience that is no longer tethered to the living-room television.

Just as you’re not tethered to traditional methods of marketing your message.

You can reach a vast audience by keeping your message strong, by interacting with your audience, by including video content in your own online discussions of your work and your ideas.

You may not yet be invited to weigh in on matters of cultural importance on a late-night broadcast. But you may just be building a much stronger audience of readers who care more about what you write than what TV personality you sat next to.

Not all experts know everything.

Case in point: My good friend Greg Habstritt just spent some personal time with legendary expert direct-marketer Dan Kennedy.

Dan Kennedy is a brilliant no-BS entrepreneur for whom I have immense respect.

But.

But: I have to say the advice he gave Greg is wrong.

Kennedy told Greg that online content is no longer king.

Hold on. What?

Are you kidding me?

How could any intelligent Internet marketer make such a bold, and patently wrong statement?

To be fair to Dan, he isn’t actually an Internet marketer. He has a website to which he provides input. He doesn’t have an email address let alone a blog, a Facebook account or a Twitter tag.

Nevertheless, despite his avoidance of today’s social-networking tools, Dan is a brilliant marketer and his observations on the Internet are worth discussing. So, let’s examine them here:

Dan supported his belief that content is no longer king by saying:

“It’s about the relationship that you build with your community and the people in it. When you have that relationship, it’s very difficult for anyone else to get their attention, or to attract them away from you.”

OK, I agree with this statement: It is about the relationship, but how do you build a relationship?

More on this later.

“The second key is developing a unique and compelling offering that generates significant ‘pain of disconnect.’”

Hold on: If you’re not “selling” something (which is how I interpret “develop a unique and compelling offering that generates significant “pain of disconnect”) you’re doing something wrong, and selling takes precedent over content?

Wow, so let me get this right:

1. Develop a relationship
2. With the intent on selling someone something.

I’m sorry, but that doesn’t hold water for me. Ask yourself something: If you knew that the only reason someone was developing a relationship with you was simply to sell you something, how would that make you feel?

Would you find it easy to develop a relationship with someone who just wants to sell you?

My answer is that I run as far away as possible from people like that. I don’t want to be sold, I want to be engaged.

Trust is established through the transference of confidence between one person and another. Trust is needed to develop a relationship. Can you really trust someone whose intention you know to be one that’s simply based on selling something to you? I can’t.

And let’s get over this idea that we are all trying to sell something to someone else in everything we do (i.e., taking a shower, putting makeup on in the morning etc…). There’s a distinct difference between subtly selling who you are, and overtly selling something under the guise of selling who you are.

Honestly, what Dan is suggesting is transactional marketing disguised as relationship marketing.

What Dan and Greg seem to miss is this: that content is an expression of  both soul purpose and voice, your own soul purpose and voice.

Without expressing your voice, you have no ability to initiate or create a relationship with your audience.

Let’s use Greg Habstritt as case in point.

Greg created his excellent Engage Today event because he wanted to share an expression of his voice, after he’d noticed the moving shifts in business, communication and personal development. He had many opportunities to share his voice, but he chose to exercise it by putting on a fantastic live event, Engage Today.

This event was a reflection of both Greg’s soul purpose and his sharing his voice.

He got many of the world’s top thought leaders to appear and speak, including:

His Holiness the Dali Lama

Sir Richard Branson

F.W. Declerk

Steven Covey

Tony Hsieh

Eben Pagen

and many, many others.

Each of these speakers, as well as the subsequent DVD box set of the recording, Engage Today 2010 and 2011, and Greg’s blog Simplewealth.com were all a reflection of Greg’s soul and his voice. All of this was content.

Greg’s a close friend, and I know that his intention for hosting the initial Engage Today was not to make money. In fact, when he asked me to speak at Engage Today it was only after he had seen me present the Pendulum presentation in which I discussed how society was moving away from a “me” (or individualistic) mentality into a “we”- (or community) based one. He told me that Pendulum helped him articulate why he was doing the Engage Today, because it wasn’t a profit center for Greg, rather a labor of love.

Greg’s intentions are pure: He wants to help radically transform the world. Selling a product or service came second to making a difference.

So, the advice taken from Dan that Greg has latched onto is counter to his own personality and, I take it, his intentions. Greg, I want my readers to learn from your heart, not your pocketbook.

Living into soul purpose and sharing your voice doesn’t require selling something. It requires a genuine desire to want to help someone. If selling a product or service will help people, then that’s great. But it isn’t a must that you sell something, anything, in order to make a difference.

What’s interesting is, at the end of his post Greg says:

“The days of content ruling the world are over – so the secret is to focus on the relationship you build with your community so that they TRUST you (which is a key lacking element in the world today).”

Greg is both painfully wrong and painfully right.

Content for content’s sake, à la Emily Dickinson writing poetry and hiding it away, has never been king.

But Greg is right: The Internet is a relationship-building technology.

How, however, do you develop a relationship? How do you develop trust with people?

Through conversation. And what is a conversation made up of?

Content!

So, I guess Greg and I aren’t that far apart.

That being said, let’s start at the beginning. Here’s a few steps to writing a great blog post.

#1 — Pick Your Topic

Keep it small. Keep it simple. Keep to one point. We’re all busy, and a focused blog post will go a long way in building trust with your audience. Taking on a big topic from the outset is like carrying too many groceries at once — you’re likely to drop something. The same is true with a blog: too many topics, too big a subject and you make not make the point you set out to make.

#2 — Know Whom You’re Writing To

This might seem a no-brainer, but most people are confused at first about their target audience. The more clear you are about your target market is (right down to personality types) the easier it is to write to them.

#3 – Write From Your Heart

Over-thinking what you’re trying to say and finding fancy language in which to say it will likely leave you frustrated and ready to throw your computer against the wall. If you tap into your message from your heart and start writing as simply as possible – be yourself — I promise, it will flow much smoother.

#4 – Write, Then Edit

Go ahead and get your ideas out. Write and write, then edit what you’ve written. When you edit you’ll find you can string all the thoughts together in a much more organized manner. No writer writes perfectly the first time out. Editing is a vital part of the process. Write, walk away from it, then go back and edit. (It’ll take you a long way!)

#6 – Add Links

Now that you’ve written a post you’re proud of be sure to add active hyperlinks. Hyperlinks provide your reader with supporting evidence and answer the questions the reader is asking as they are asking them. It will build trust with your audience and they will know they can come to you for the information they need.

#7 – Add Images to Prove Your Point

Visual hints make it easier for your reader to draw their own mental image and get excited about what they are learning. If you’re telling a personal story, add personal images. If you need stock images, those can be found all over the place both free and paid. Keeping your posts lively with images will keep your readers coming back.

#8 – Ask an Engaging Question at the End

Keep it simple for your audience to interact with you. Always end with a call to action question that puts the conversation back in the hands of the audience.

As you write and find community through blogging I’m sure you’ll find it very rewarding. Following a simple template will help you keep the content flowing and have you on the top of rankings before long. Hope this helps you understand the pieces of a blog post.

Do you have a formula that works for you? Please share.

We’re at that time of year when “best of” articles and lists begin to appear. People whose job it is to look at movies, listen to music, read books and weigh in on such matters give us their opinions of what they consider the most noteworthy in class since the last such list.

You may feel competitive by looking at such lists. Your own tastes might not match the taste of the critics. You may dismiss them since you haven’t heard of any of these works. You may have compiled your own list for your friends (you might be the kind of person people look to for recommendations). Or you might be the kind of person who regards such lists as ridiculous, since rankings based on personal opinion bear only the weight of that opinion and nothing else. (You’ve got a point.)

Then again, you might be afraid to read any “best of” lists, knowing you haven’t had time, and won’t have time, to read these books, see these movies or hear this music. Not to worry – this is what critics do. They get paid to watch, read, listen. Most people read a book or two a year, go to the movies a few times and catch up on music thanks to playlists their friends create for them. You’re not in the business of knowing everything. You know your subject. And you write about it.

But what about your own efforts at writing? And your audience? Surely if you can’t get around to cracking the covers or starting the first electronic line of a book that’s been touted as one of the best of the year, who’s going to read what you’ve written?

Plenty of people. As long as you’ve been building an audience, and introducing your thoughts and your writing to your readers, through your blog, your newsletter your Twitter feeds, your articles, your comments on other articles, you’re being read. You’re building a book online.

You may not be one of those whose works make it onto year-end lists. But so what? How many people actually go through those lists eager to check off every title so that they’re current with received opinion. Do you know anyone like that? Probably not.

Information is everywhere, and we take it in through various methods, often little by little, and often online. In this digital age, online may be the way to go, through the steady flow of a little information at a time to a dedicated (and growing) audience, rather than a flood of it once a year. Who can cope with that?

Better to build slowly. Start with a blog, and keep at it (nothing worse than seeing a current blog post that dates from a year earlier). Then know that while you might not have made it to the top-10 list, you’ve nevertheless had an impact on the people who read you.

Someday we’ll just refer to books as books. Not paperback books. Not audio books. Not e-books. Not self-publishedbooks.

The boundaries between the formats are coming down, though there remains a bit of hesitation. In today’s New York Times, there was an article about a new e-book whose authors assert that the advance of technology will continue to eat away at jobs by actual, live people. This is an old story, of course, and one that’s been argued since the dawn of the Industrial Age. What was new was that the Times gave the authors and their topic – and their book – the benefit of an article.

It wasn’t too long ago that the Times, and many other print newspapers, ignored certain books formats. Paperback originals never, or very rarely, received critical attention. They were considered too lower-class among the social hierarchies of old-thinking media. (This despite more people reading paperbacks than higher-priced hardcovers.)

The same holds true of electronic books, which are an increasing option for many authors – budding or established. It was only in the last year that the Times, for one, began listing e-book bestsellers, as part of its revamped (and quite confusing) bestseller lists.

E-books are a newish format, but with more people choosing them – for the ease with which they can be printed (almost immediately compared to months for a traditional book) and even updated – it makes sense to consider e-books the equal of “regular” ones.

The authors of the book, Race Against the Machine, are specialists in digital culture. Erik Brynjolfsson, is director and Andrew P. McAfee, associate director and principal research scientist of the M.I.T. Center for Digital Business.  By choosing to publish an e-book, of course, they are eschewing some of the human element in the book business: the sales staff at the store and the distribution system that gets the books to the store.

Still, that they were given an article in a major newspaper shows the growing importance of, and respect given to, e-books. For anyone who’s considering making and marketing a book online, or creating an e-book, or self-publishing, then this is good news. However, one would hope that going forward, a book such as Race Against the Machine would simply be called a book, rather than an e-book, even if the term is there to alert readers to its availability online, and only online. Not that books will only be available online going forward (though who knows?), but that all books should be considered to be created equal, since it’s what’s in them, not what they’re made of, that really counts.

After viewing the videos, the subjects were given questions about the accidents and were asked to write down their answers.

The twist was that they were given different questions.

The critical questions were:

1. About how fast were the cars going when they hit each other?
2. About how fast were the cars going when they smashed each other?
3. About how fast were the cars going when they collided with each other?
4. About how fast were the cars going when they bumped into each other?
5. About how fast were the cars going when they contacted with each other?

The time taken to conduct the experiment was about one and a half hour.

The results? The highest speed estimates — 40.8 miles per hour on average — were provided by those asked how fast the cars were going when they smashed into each other.

The lowest speed estimates — 31.8 miles per hour on average — were provided by those asked how fast the cars were going when they contacted each other.

A slight change in verbs resulted in a 22.1% difference in recall.

Table: Speed Estimates From Various Verbs

Are you connecting the dots that this has profound and far-reaching implications for advertising and marketing?

Are you leveraging the power of verbs in your marketing messages?

Stephen Palmer is a marketing consultant and writer with KGaps Consulting. His firm uses their methodology Hub Mentality to help small businesses generate more leads, sales, and referrals while making their marketing budget more efficient.

Stephen is the co-author of as Hub Mentality: Shifting from Business Transactions to Community Interactions as well as the co-author of the New York Times bestseller Killing Sacred Cows: Overcoming the Financial Myths that are Destroying Your Prosperity.

When you start a business, you have a lot of things to worry about.  At the forefront of those worries is finding a way to make money as fast as you can. With cash flow being a huge concern, I find it odd that so many start ups treat their cash flow so casually.

The first thing that I want in my business is certainty. Is my business going to work?  Do people want what I am selling?  Am I different enough to stand out?  This is paramount.  In most cases, no logo, pamphlet or fancy website is going to change that.

Putting together a proper brand identity takes time.  Chances are the best way to understand your brand is going to be through market research, case studies and just plain old experience.  You can’t get these things overnight.

Besides concerns about cash flow,  business owners have to concern themselves with the finite resource of time.  Everyone has the same amount of time in their day. Rich people don’t have more.  Poor people don’t have less.  The difference between successful people and people who aren’t there yet is in how they manage their time.

The point is that people waste a lot of time and money branding a business that:

A.     They don’t even know will work.

B.     If it does work, it won’t look like they thought it would.  It just never does.

Branding is important but waiting may be the best thing that you can do. Get some traction in your business first and get some clarity around what your business really is and how it creates value in the marketplace.  Then go out and create the powerful visuals that help to reinforce what your company is all about.

There are many ways that people can experience your company.  They can experience your company.  In the book Experience Economy, they talk about how important visuals are as well as smell with the goal to be touch as many as a clients senses as possible when they experience your company.  These are all components that go into your brand’s five senses.

Visual: This one’s the easiest for us to handle.  We create logos and other graphic visuals as well as websites, store fronts etc.  The typestyles that you use as well as the color scheme.

Auditory: Everyone knows what sounds accompanies any presentation of the Intel logo.  You recognize the noise that occurs when you start up Windows.  If you drink coffee at Starbucks you are likely to hear an artist like Elvis Costello or Joni Mitchell playing in the background.  How people talk to you at a business is very important as well.

Smell: This is obvious when you walk into a restaurant but what about other types of businesses?  What do you want your customer to experience from a sense of smell standpoint. I read an article not too long ago from Brand Strategy Insider about this very topic.  Here’s what they had to say: “Smells invoke memories and appeal directly to feelings without first being filtered and analyzed by the brain, which is how the remaining four senses are processed.” Sense of smell can be powerful.

Touch: How do your products feel when they are in your hands?  I love the iPod packaging for that very reason.  I love the way the paper on the box feels as you are holding it. It feels like something you want to own.  Again the Brand Strategy Insider articles cited online clothes shopping as one of the industries that never took off online.  People want to feel who the clothes fit before they buy them.  They obviously can’t get that experience online.

Taste: Obviously this one is easy for businesses in the food industry as this is an important component for them.  How can you also leverage this in your own business?  Do you offer clients drinks when they come in? Maybe a mint?  Just because your business is not in the food business doesn’t mean you can’t use taste in your experience.

Utilizing the five senses in your brand experience takes some work to implement and depending on your platform for business, you may not be able to incorporate all of the senses into your experience. My guess is that there are, however, senses you can incorporate into your business brand that you haven’t even thought about.  Our senses can trigger powerful thoughts and memories, this can be a great way to create positive, memorable experiences for your business.

What can you incorporate into your brand today using the five senses?

There are several areas to consider when going through this discovery process.  Below are my top areas to look at:

The first area to look at is who your business is and what you want it to be.  Are you fun?  Are you serious?  Are you online?  Are you offline?  Do you want to grow up to be a huge company or do you want to be a small boutique firm?  What problems do you solve in the marketplace?  What is your brand message? What does your company value?  These are all questions to be considering when looking at who your company is and what it stands for.

The second area to consider is the market in general.  Market research is important for looking at the current landscape of your area or niche.  What companies are doing well?  Is your area of expertise best served to a local market or national?  Is there an area of your market that has been overlooked and is begging to be served?  Doing your homework is where you can make your mark and gain traction up front in your business.

The last area to consider is what you are capable of.  Be honest with yourself.  A SWOT analysis is a great tool to use in this realm.  Here you are looking at what you are best at.  Where you are weak.  What areas are available for expansion and what areas are oversaturated and may need to be avoided altogether.  Take a look at the pieces you have in your business and look at how those can be best maximized to create a positive customer experience.

Most business owners skim the self understanding process.  They take a snapshot of their first impressions and run with them.  I would encourage a more methodical approach that involves testing your assumptions about your market and finding out what your customers truly want.  When you understand your business, you are putting your business in a position to understand what people really want in a way that is congruent with who your business is.

Cutting Edge, which recruits musicians and music for films, helps filmmakers save money on the nuts-and-bolts work of assembling a movie score.

There may be something to it – as publishers look to cut their advances for everyone except perhaps the most starry authors, more and more writers struggle to exist on their writing. I’m not only talking about creative writing, but all sorts of writing that might take more time than squeezing in an hour or two before or after work.

Already, some rock and pop singers now ask for donations via social media, and promise to include contributors’ names on the liner notes, and even pay them back when there’s a profit. It takes the pressure off the artist to search for a label (since so many more are self-releasing). And some artists are evening being inspired by sites like Facebook to create works of art.

Could the same thing happen with writers? As it’s becoming more likely that authors will be heading toward a world in which self-publishing is another option, rather than a last resort, getting backing for a project seems to make sense. It means, however, that an author has to structure his project as more than one where he waits for inspiration – he needs a plan.

Maybe a collective – perhaps funded by an angel fund that wants to offer some of its money to the arts at a time when a lot of funding, including government funding, is drying up (arts are the bane of politicians, despite the fact that arts contribute greatly to local economies – politicians loathe art as vampires fear the sunlight).

In order to attract funding, through donations or a collective, a writer needs to be able to utilize social media in a good way. We have seen the power of social media with the recent event sin Tunisia and Egypt, where Twitter has been the means of getting the word out about popular uprisings. Twitter is even the preferred method of getting in touch with airlines now for updates on cancellations.

Wouldn’t it work for proposals for donations for a project/ If you’re able to craft yor proposal in under 150 characters, it means you already have a good sense of where you’re going. Investors like that.

It means, though, that you have to be willing to be rejected. But writers are used to that. In any event, there are more and more options for getting funding – it takes a little creativity. And every writer worth his salt has that.