What is it that makes some blog posts so readable, while others are painfully boring?

If you’ve ever wrestled with how to make your writing soar, rest assured, it’s a learned skill. While traveling my own path of “bloggerhood” I can safely say that any success I may have had thus far comes largely from these 4 tips:

1. Kill The Keyboard

For as sophisticated and technological as our world has become, nothing beats the old pen and paper when it comes to getting your ideas down. For a couple reasons:

1. Using a pen and paper to get your ideas down allows you the freedom of being able to quickly edit, cross out, circle, draw arrows, and underline for added emphasis
2. Synthesis is a little bit easier when you can see the entire page at one time.
3. The slower speed of writing with a pen and paper allows your mind to stay up to speed, whereas the speed of typing creates a lot of “stop-n-go” lag time while your mind tries to catch up, and figure out what to say next.

2. How To Write a Good Headline

The search for a good headline is a writer’s holy grail. It is true for newspaper columnists, magazine columnists and even MORE true in the online world. Why?

Because readers are never really committed.

While newspaper and magazine readers already have it in their hands, online content is never safe from an exit click. At any moment a reader can navigate away–forever lost to a far corner of the online universe.

Fortunately, there are some simple cheats for crafting a good headline. Here are a few of the most tried and true:

1. Incorporate a list of secrets, steps, tricks, or a process. Examples: “7 Must-have recipes for Your 4th of July”, “13 Teenagers that Are Shaping Your Online World”, etc. Lists are HUGE. The next time you’re in a 7-11, grocery store or newsstand, take a look at the magazine rack. 95% of the magazine covers will make use of a “list” headline (check out the headline of this post).
2. The “how to” headline. This guy works! The phrase “how to” is a siren song to generation looking for solutions. “How to” is actionable, it promises to teach a skill. It promises value (like the section header above).
3. The yes/no question. “Should Oprah leave Stedman Graham?” “Did Reagan lie in his biography?” “Is steroid use really the culprit?” Starting an article with a yes/no headline implies to readers that they will receive a definite answer. Not that anybody really cares about Oprah, Reagan, or steroids, but once the question is asked, something about the human mind wants that answer.
4. Money, money, money! Obviously anytime you throw money figures around, ears start to perk up. Why else do you still see ads that say things like “The $10 Million Dollar Stay at Home Secret”, or “$6,500 a Month of Passive Income!”? Pretty simple–they work. Use sparingly though. Money headlines are a close cousin of the FREE headline, which people have seen so much, that they are now starting to tune out.

The makings of some good stuff...how every post begins...

3. Pictures = 1,000 Words

Once upon a college class, I had a design professor that pounded one principle into my head–build an article around a good photo–not the other way around.

While I don’t know if my stance is quite that strong on the subject, I definitely see his point. At the very core, adults are just big kids. We still like picture books. We want to be entertained.

Along with your well crafted headline, having a great photo at the very top of your blog post seduces visitors into taking that first step of “reader faith” into your blog post. Spend some time to get it right if you need to.

Usually finding a great photo for your post can be as simple as doing a google image search. In the advanced section, you can enter specific search criteria, such as size, aspect ratio, and more.

If necessary, you can use additional photo resources such as flickr or getty images, to find that truly great photo that will be the springboard that launches readers into your content.

4. Keep It Chunky

Like La Victoria Salsa.

A good copywriter knows that too many lines of boring old text will drown a reader, so he keeps his paragraphs short. Think of your content like short little chunks, that can be easily digested. Lots of white space helps readers quickly scan, and feel like they are making progress.

Strange, but true.

Additionally, when possible,  mix in other elements to break up the solid wall of words:

• bullet points
• text boxes
• additional photos
• side boxes and other graphics
• colored text where appropriate

Want a Bonus Step?

Since you’re reading on, here it is.

If you have difficulty feeling like your posts are organized what you want to accomplish in your posts, try thinking about them in terms of a 3 part act:

1. Principles
2. Actionable Steps
3. Additional Resources

For this post, the principle is that there are easy steps you can take to make your writing effortless and catchy. The actionable steps are the numbered suggestions 1-4 that I give. The additional resources are what you will be reading in about 2 seconds.

Additional Resources:

How to Create Headlines that Ge Retweeted

Ten Tips For Writing a Blog Post

How to Find Free Photos and Images for Your Blog Posts

It’s 12:05 am on December 26th, the day after Christmas.

I’m sitting on my black vinyl sofa.  My wife is reading the latest issue of “Do It Yourself” magazine, and I’m browsing the blogs of a few of my favorite life hackers.

Tim Ferriss has hit The New York Times Bestseller list in the hardest category for the hardest week of the year. Nice job Tim. I click on his bio category and re-read for the 100th time that he is an angel investor for several companies, including among others, Digg.com and Stumble Upon. No big deal.

Chris Guillebeau has his 2010 reviews up and posted. His sparkling blog layout is even fuller than last time I checked it–stacked with great e-books about travel, micro business, living differently. And packaged incredibly. The guy is winning. Why didn’t I think of those?

My heart sinks a little bit as I realize how well these guys are killing it.

Though I vowed not to check my email a single time on Christmas, I rationalize that I can at least check the back end of my online store, and do so. No sales. No sales for the last 2 days now. Bummer. Earlier this month, the Christmas rush had brought a stream of steady 3-4 order days. But now, suspicions are confirmed. The success of earlier this month truly was, just Christmas.

My heart sinks even lower.

I glance up from my computer to my wife telling me about some lady in her magazine who MADE her own flooring for less than $100, using lumber, sawdust, and other ingredients from her local hardware store. She also made her own counters, out of concrete and broken wine bottles. Man there are some creative buggers out there.

A few minutes later she turns to me and says, “Let’s get a house, so we can do some cool stuff to it.” I’m reminded of people that do have houses, and that maybe we would have a house if we were making money or weren’t in debt up to our eyeballs.

How is it that the very people that inspire and encourage us, can also make us feel so small time? Am I alone here?

Isn’t there something painful about realizing (or re-realizing) that greatness is lurking just a couple inches outside our front door, or a couple mouseclicks away from our homepage? It’s like an old familiar stab, reminding us that just maybe our carefully constructed “kingdom of greatness” isn’t that great after all. That for as often as we’ve wanted to be celebrities, sports stars, recording pop artists, millionaires, or great bloggers, other people are becoming these things every day.

It hurts.

It shouldn’t hurt, I tell myself. But I’m human. And because I’m human, I have built in defense mechanisms, for better or for worse. When I’m cold, I shiver. When I get food poisoning, I throw everything up. And when my fragile little ego gets ruffled, I rationalize.

Allow me to introduce the root of the problem.

The root of the problem is that I always want to be the best and win at everything, period. There, I said it. It rears it’s ugly head in many forms and fashions, but the source is the same. Feeling threatened by somebody else’s greatness is one of these forms.

Upon closer inspection, I realize that I do it all the time. MTV’s “The Buried Life” chronicles the experiences of 4 Canadian twenty-somethings on their quest for a life less ordinary. Armed with their list of 100 things to do before they die, they head off across the continent, not to be stopped by security guards, insufficient finances, or the word “no.”

These guys are hilarious, amazing, and I hate them. I should’ve thought of that. My friends and I should’ve been like these guys.

A girl that my wife works with decides one day to run a marathon. Not having trained, she runs it in under 3 hours. I hate her. My brother in law has a successful online store that sells custom belt buckles and belts. He’s getting more and more traffic and sales all the time, while I am getting crap. I hate him.

It’s as if there were only so much success out there, and every little bit that somebody else gobbles up, is less that I can have.

If you are a driven person, the above phenomenon is probably not foreign to you. But it is harmful. Why? Because as the Desiderata so nicely puts it, “…there will always be greater and lesser persons than yourself.”

At the risk of dying a lonely and miserable wretch, I agree that this is something that needs to be managed. Here are a few of my own thoughts/prescriptions for “hero envy”:

Realize you do it. Admitting something is liberating yourself.

Air it out, Write about it. Tell people about it. This is the above times 5. If you can actually tell another living, breathing human being about your injured ego, then maybe your injured ego isn’t beyond help.

Realize that there’s always luck involved. Everybody gets breaks. One of Mark Twain’s famous quotes says: “Fortune knocks at every man’s door once in a life, but in a good many cases the man is in a neighboring saloon and does not hear her.”

Who am I to hate somebody because they were home working when Fortune came a knocking, and I was taking it easy at a nearby saloon?

Realize that winners will eventually win and losers will eventually lose. Um reality TV celebrities Spencer and Heidi Pratt blew through 10 million dollars in a matter of like 2 years. Over the long haul, you reap what you sow. So rest assured, nature has a way of fairly distributing the dividends.

Befriend the winners. Instead of hating, don’t be afraid to congratulate someone on their success. You want people to be happy for you when you succeed, so be happy for them when they do.

While the above suggestions don’t constitute a bulletproof solution to all of my small man’s woes, I think it’s at least a start. Love to hear some of your own painful realizations, and your go-to anecdotes. We can be each others “support group” in Hero Envy 12 step.

Last Thursday, I’d had enough.

I’d been online trying to figure out my credit card balances for the last hour, only to be roadblocked every 5 minutes by a password I couldn’t remember. The cycle just continued to repeat itself:

1. Navigate to my credit card’s account’s login
2. Forget my username or password
3. Click the stupid little link that says “forgot password”
4. Go to my email, only to discover that the password  hasn’t arrived yet
5. Remember that the email I had on record with my credit card company was actually the one I never use, and now I can’t remember the login to that email either!
6. Threats and profanities.
7. Lather, rinse and repeat.

If the scenario above sounds familiar, give the air around you a loud “Amen” for me.

In our day and age of painless and secure transactions, passwords have become a nightmare. I sat down to list all the passwords I have. After 10 minutes I had a sheet of paper mostly filled and was still going strong. Here’s what it looked like:

Just in case your eyesight ain’t that great (or perhaps because my handwriting sucks and the camera resolution is terrible), there are 59. I had 61, but later realized that I no longer have memberships to Smugmug and Lonely Planet. Everything else on the list however is truly legit. Access to my cyber life really is scattered between 59 passwords. Uggghhh….nightmare.

Due to the fact that I conduct a majority of my business online, I may have a few more passwords than the average bear, but even if you have half as many as I do, remembering all of them can be an all out Goliath.

What doesn’t work.

Fuming, I reviewed some of my futile attempts to manage this chaos. Originally I had decided that I would make everything the same password. That worked great for about 4 passwords, until I ran into one that says your password is “too weak” or requires more numerals.

Then I had created a word document that contained all my login information. But who wants to update a word document every few days when you add a new password to your arsenal. Couple that with the inconvenience of my hard drive crashing twice and I was convinced that a word document was not a bulletproof solution either.

There are obviously some very serious security implications to consider too. With the click of a button, our passwords send money, authorize contracts, and in every way imaginable, sign our lives away. So it’s important that they be stored somewhere safer than a Chili’s napkin, or the back of a crumpled up business card in your wallet.

The Solution

So for the past few days, I’ve been looking for a headache free solution to keep my cyber world organized, and even more important, secure. Here’s what I found.

Last Pass, a web based company founded in 2008, provides users with a free “1 size fits all” password manager. By setting up an account with them, I could have remote access to a secure listing of every username and password I have–the cyber equivalent of a key cabinet.

Not only that, but after I had installed LP, it automatically searched my computer for any passwords being stored or cached locally on my computer. Once it found them, it gave me the option to store them and then delete any remnants entirely from any computer “log files.” This keeps them out of reach from malicious spyware. Bingo.

Two minutes and a few mouse clicks later, I was bounding towards the light at the end of the password tunnel. This was too good to be true. But too good or not, my passwords were being snugly tucked away in their bed of Last Pass’ double encryption, with their respective descriptions and website urls.

It gets even better.

Not only will Last Password store all your passwords for you, but it also gives you the option to automatically populate forms with your pre-stored data. What does that mean? It means that I never have to enter my stupid billing and shipping information again, when I’m buying books at Amazon or shoes from Zappos. Anytime you navigate to a website that has a form to fill in, Last Pass automatically sniffs it out and give you the option to fill it in with the single click of a mouse, using your pre-stored data.

Is there a mobile application for cell phones?

Of course…you knew there would be. There are iPhone and Windows Mobile apps available to make it even more disgustingly convenient. This opens up a whole new world of capabilities to store not only your online passwords, but also things from the offline world too. Things like: car registration, insurance information, gate codes, lock combinations, or other important notes.

What About Security?

Even though a lot technical things go way over my head, I was curious to know just what it is that makes Last Pass so secure. Apparently there many, many  components, and after scanning through some reading on “host-proofing”, “salt-dashing” and various and sundry other terms, I realized that unfortunately these were pretty much over my head too.

For me, the big thing that I do understand however, is that due to the multiple types of encryption, my information is encoded BEFORE it even gets to the server to be stored. Everything happens on my computer before it’s sent (when you’re using Last Pass in web mode, that is). It’s like using a combination lock on your storage unit that the facility manger never knows.

Unfortunately, the negative side of this is that if you ever do forget your “all-in-one-ultimate-final-torch-to-burn-all-torches” password, you’re screwed, because they never knew what it was to remind you. But that’s a price I’m definitely willing to pay in return for security and a sane mind.

Bottom Line

I’m sure I still have several more corners to turn in the world of identity protection and security, but finding a safe and effective solution to manage my passwords has been a tremendous step.

I promise I don’t have an affiliate account with Last Pass. I’m sure there are other wonderful password managers out there–some probably even better. Last Pass just happened to enter my life on a dark and frustrated night, and offer me some much-needed reprieve. For me, it’s turned out to be just what the doctor ordered. But whether you sign up for an account with Last Pass, or opt for another password manager, do yourself a favor and simplify your life by letting technology be your memory bank and your identity watch dog.

What if there was a way to turn $1000 into $100,000?

What if there was a way to never sit in traffic? To earn more and work less. To keep in touch with all your old friends. To turn ideas into inventions, read faster, lose weight, travel, learn languages in weeks, save the world and get the girl? What if there were shortcuts for everything?

There are.

In fact, there always have been. Just because you didn’t know about them, doesn’t mean they weren’t there. You think the internet was invented in 1990? No way. Maybe that’s when you first started hearing about it, but people had been developing and using internet applications since the early ’60′s. When you were 4 years old you probably didn’t know how to jump on an international airline and fly to China either, but that didn’t mean other people hadn’t been doing it for decades.

There are literally billions of shortcuts, tools, and tricks to help you accomplish any goal you have. They are all around you. They are cheap, or a lot of times, FREE. And they are getting cheaper, more effective, and more accessible all the time.

Take a look around. Teenagers are running companies from MacBooks during their after school hours. Humble soccer moms in mini-vans are becoming celebrities with book deals and Oprah appearances because of leveraging social media platforms. There’s a whole new set of rules to change the rules…of 10 years ago.

Technology is in a tailspin, constantly reinventing itself around ease, effectiveness and ultimate accessibility. 10 years ago, who would’ve thought that we would be able to get free long distance calling to China (with video!)?

Who could’ve ever imagined that it would be possible to watch tv, listen to music, send email, tell time, make phone calls, take photos, take videos, buy groceries, draft documents, pay bills, fill out spreadsheets, set an alarm clock, balance a 2×4, run reports, tune your guitar, deposit checks, calendar your life, create logos, and find out where to eat lunch all from a device in your pocket?

It’s happening. Those devices are called cell phones.

If we truly are living in the era of shortcuts, which dreams lie within your grasp this very minute that you have no clue about? What is it that may only be millimeters away, but appears to be miles?

I am not the expert. I am the guide and the explorer. But there are experts out there. I’ve stumble across them enough to know they exist. People who can create, achieve, accomplish. People who do and earn more in their minutes than many do in days.

This is the quest to find these people. The quest to find the shortest distance between 2 points. The line. The ultimate “bang for your buck” in every life area. The revolution of streamlined processes. The search for life hacks.