Times Online:

When Rowan Gormley was running Virgin Wine, he conducted a simple experiment. He took ten pairs of different bottles of wine and carefully wrapped them in paper so that the labels were unreadable.

He took four professional wine experts. Each was asked to write notes on each bottle, tasted blind. There should have been some correlation between the notes on the two identical bottles. From three out of four tasters, there was not.

“One was a winemaker, the only one who knew what he was doing. Three were completely random. What these people actually do is look at the label, make a mental calculation on price and extrapolate from that for their taste buds.”

Mr Gormley is not a fan of professional wine shippers, nor of the mail-order firms that dominate that part of the market that does not go into the supermarkets. As for the latter, most are deliberately misleading the public with the “half price” productions they depend on.

His new venture, Naked Wines, takes its first orders on its website on Monday. This is an odd hybrid of online wine retailer - Virgin did nearly all its business online at first - and a social networking site, on which those with a shared interest in wine can contact each other and the small-time growers identified by a network of locals on the ground in various wine-growing regions.

His aim is to source direct from very small but enthusiastic growers around the world. “There are hundreds who would rather be winemakers than international wine sellers. They would rather be with their vines than in a Travelodge waiting for an appointment with Tesco.” He has 32 of these “little people”. “They are often interesting, charismatic people who have made a lifestyle choice. They are often foodies.” Some are very little people, indeed. One, a Catalan so local that he does not even speak Spanish, has 120 vines, each known to him by name. These produce two bunches each year, enough for 120 bottles. “He potters around squeezing the pests personally.”

Photo by elusive.

Today Bamboo Forest from Pun Intended shares some thoughts on the topic of avoiding Clichés.

I’ve co-authored a blog for less than a year, and prior to beginning, my writing was natural - which is precisely why it wasn’t good.

Good writing stands on good principles. These principles aren’t natural; instead, they are forged by reading blogs like this one – and quality material in general.

Once you begin to internalize effective principles, the challenge then is to constantly have the necessary awareness while writing. Developing awareness as a writer is an ongoing process; one we must continually perfect.

If you were to make a feast, and lacked mindfulness during preparation, you may forget a few integral ingredients resulting in the meal tasting a bit bland. Your guests would be disappointed. The same concept is true with writing: forgetting important principles during the creation stage will lead to a lackluster outcome.

I could cover all the important aspects one should constantly be aware of – but I’m opting instead to cover the final frontier to exquisite writing: omitting clichés.

A cliché is a phrase, expression, or idea that has been overused to the point of losing its intended force or novelty, especially when at some time it was considered distinctively forceful or novel.

A superior way to raise your awareness of these vile concoctions is to read a good sampling; I found this list via an article by Robust Writing.

The reason we have an unconscious tendency to use them is because they have been repeated a trillion times; they have become deeply imbedded in our brains; not only ours, but our readers too. If an audience finds a page full of clichés, their judgment of the content will decline. In short: reading clichés is reading what has already been written. That’s boring.

In a recent article, my final sentence was “Long and strong my friend!” I then changed it to, “Keep your heart in it my friend!” A small alteration, yes. But how many times have you read “long and strong?” The edited version is much better.

How to Ensure Clichés are Minimized from This Point Forward

You must install a cliché radar in your mind. Any metaphors, similes, or idioms that look familiar and tired – must be eradicated from your prose. Of course it’s easier to speckle your writing with clichés but it’s also lazy thinking, and unimpressive.

Everyone can pluck the mundane growth of clichés out of their prose with a little awareness, and by doing so you will have significantly upgraded your writing.

Tags: Clichés, Copy Writing, writing, Writing Content

Share This

It’s all doom and gloom at the moment so I thought I’d share a few of my favourite sites which either inspire me to look at new things, to try harder, or even take it easier, the main theme is to find an idea, develop it and get it built, then work smarter instead of [...]

Getting closer!

This Post Is From ShoeMoney’s Internet Marketing Blog

New Lost Season 5 Trailer Out

Today Glen Allsopp a Personal Development blogger at PluginID shares a great technique for capturing lost subscribers to your blog. You can subscribe to his blog here.

A few months ago, I was messing around in feedburner and noticed something pretty drastic, I was rapidly losing subscribers on a regular basis. I bet that you are losing subscribers too, even ones that have signed up for your feed. Since this discovery I’ve been regularly ‘getting them back’ and I’m going to explain exactly what I mean today.

What brought me to remember this (and decide to do a guest post for ProBlogger) is a new tool I’ve been testing out called BLVD Status, it’s brought to you by a team of internet marketers and includes some awesome features. My favourite: live analytics.

So, on a normal day my blog was receiving quite a lot of traffic from StumbleUpon as shown in the screenshot below:

The panel for BLVD Status is very simple, giving you a brief overview of what is going on in your site at any one moment. I particularly like the outgoing links section to see where I’m sending traffic too, this also includes people subscribing to your RSS feed. I noticed quite a few of the StumbleUpon visitors were opting to sign-up for my email feed:

And then BAM! I instantly remembered the little area of Feedburner where I noticed that I’ve been losing subscribers, lots of them.

Lost Subscribers

Firstly, if you aren’t using Feedburner then I highly recommend that you do. It comes with a host of features such as:

• Seeing how many subscribers you have
• Seeing where your subscribers are coming from
• Simple email subscription set-up
• A chicklet that lets you show off your subscribers (great for sign-ups)
• and much more…

Now then, once you’ve logged into your Feedburner account, click the ‘Analyze‘ tab then click ‘Subscribers‘ on the left navigation menu.

Next, scroll down the page to see your email subscriptions through Feedburner. You should have this enabled if you don’t as not everyone will know how to use normal RSS feeds, especially if you don’t have a tech savvy audience. I’m not sure if you get the same options if you use a different email provider within Feedburner, but if you go directly to them I’m sure they’ll be able to give you similar information.

If you click on that link you should then see a list of all your email subscribers. My site is quite new (~ 3 months old) so there are only 41 right now but every subscriber counts.

Once there, you should see a list that looks a bit like this:

Of course, I’ve blurred out the actual email address’ for privacy reasons, but your account will show them clearly. Now then, on the column on the right hand side you can see subscribers which are ‘unverified’. What this means is that the person has entered their email address in the box, and gone through the captcha process.

However, they have never actually confirmed their subscription which should have been sent to their inbox and therefore aren’t being ‘counted’ as a subscriber. If you have a big site, you might find quite a lot of people who are unverified, these are people who want your feed, but for whatever reason didn’t finish the process. Some possible reasons:

• They didn’t receive the email
• The email went to their spam box
• They received it but forgot to confirm
• They changed their mind (possible)

Getting them back

Luckily, all is not lost. Just because somebody didn’t verify their address, it doesn’t mean they don’t want to. It would be great if there was an option within Feedburner to re-send the activation email but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

However, you do have their email address so all I recommend that you do is send all unverified subscribers a quick, friendly email to let them know that they can try again, or ask if they had any problems. If you want some pointers on this, here is the email I sent:

If you are sending this to multiple people at once, make sure you add them to the BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) field of your email client so they can’t see each others email address.

The result: about 40% of people got back to me and said they had either not received the email or received an error when they tried. I simply took 10 minutes to enter their emails for them and they activated their subscriptions. For some bigger sites this might be a job that takes you a day, but subscribers are an important factor in any blog, and not something that you want to lose.

I would not recommend doing this more than once as you will annoy people, but check regularly for new people that sign-up but are unverified. Hopefully, you’ll get a lot more subscribers back that you actually (kind of) had before.

Glen Allsopp writes on the subject of Personal Development at PluginID. You can help him help you by subscribing to his feed, here.

Tags: , Blog Promotion, Email, RSS, Subscribers, Verification

Share This