All posts in Writing

Legal Guide for Bloggers

Black-and-white blog editor presenting a copyright symbol for a legal guide for bloggers

Can you afford to pay $8,000+ for using an image in one of your blog posts? If not, or if you would rather use images for free, you need to understand the laws surrounding blogging before you publish.

This legal guide for bloggers is general information, not legal advice. I am not a legal adviser, attorney, lawyer, or any kind of law professional, so use it as a practical starting point and talk to a qualified professional when the stakes are high.

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5 Quick Ways To Discover Hidden Content Ideas with Quora

Header image: Discover Hidden Content Ideas

Quora is still one of the fastest places to discover hidden content ideas because the questions are already written in the language your audience uses. The question and answer site remains a gold mine for finding out what your market cares about, how you can solve their problem, who the influencers are, and what other data appears at a glance before you invest effort writing.

The trick is to treat Quora as audience research, not as a place to copy topics. Look for repeated questions, strong answer threads, niche debates, and specific wording. Then turn those signals into useful blog post ideas, guides, checklists, videos, outreach angles, and keywords your readers would actually recognize.

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5 Tips to Maintain a Creative Mindset Under Pressure

A black-and-white creative lead standing beside a miniature press holding a brain model, representing a creative mindset under pressure.

Maintaining a creative mindset is hard because creative work asks for energy, taste, nerve, and patience at the same time. Under pressure, that combination can turn a normal slow patch into creative burnout or a full creative block.

The fear of burnout is enough to sap anyone’s energy. When it strikes, it is hard to imagine recovering from it, and projects that start with inspiration can derail at the slightest hurdle, leaving you drained and wondering whether you have lost your touch.

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4 Writing Mistakes to Avoid (Unless You Like Sounding Silly)

Business editor holding a proofreading marker for writing mistakes

If you want a quick explanation for why business writing gets distant, pretentious, and strangely hard to read, start with the famous 5 Monkeys and a Ladder story. It is better understood as a workplace parable than a clean laboratory study, but the point still lands: people repeat inherited rules long after the original reason disappears.

That is how many common writing mistakes survive inside companies. Someone writes in a stiff voice because that is how the last report sounded. Someone adds jargon because plain language feels too exposed. Someone calls weak copy “professional” because nobody wants to be the new monkey reaching for the bananas. Avoid those habits unless you like sounding silly.

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23-Point Peer Editing Checklist for Creating Exceptional Content

Black-and-white photo of a content editor inspecting a draft through a magnifying loupe, illustrating a peer editing checklist for creating exceptional content

An editor is a writer’s best friend.

For me, that’s literally the case. I’ve known Ben Mulholland since my school days, and he became the sharpest editor I know.

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17 Stellar Ideas to Perfect Your Business Newsletter and 30 Free Templates

Marketing operations manager calibrating a miniature newsletter printing press for business newsletter free templates

This is a guest post by Hannah Butler, a web developer, designer, and writer.

A strong business newsletter gives readers a reason to keep opening your emails. It can share useful ideas, explain your work, highlight customer stories, and point people toward the next best action without turning every send into a hard sell.

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12 Free Proposal Templates: The Only Way to Win Business

Black-and-white business development lead presenting a proposal binder for proposal templates.

Proposal templates work best when they help you move fast without skipping the details a buyer, funder, or reviewer needs to see.

This guide gives you 12 free proposal templates, plus practical advice for adapting each one to the client, project, grant, sponsorship, or bid you want to win.

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We Analyzed 180K Business Proposals (You’ll Never Guess What We Found!)

business proposal

This is a guest post by Adam Hempenstall, who is the CEO and Founder of Better Proposals – simple proposal software for creating beautiful, high-impact proposals in minutes. Having helped his customers win $500,000,000 in the last 12 months alone, he’s launched the first Proposal University where he shares best practices on writing and designing proposals.

A great business proposal means the difference between an unsigned contract and a successful deal. A poorly written business proposal will get turned down, even if the offer is good.

Business proposals are considered to be an art form that only the extremely skilled can write.

However, after analyzing over 189,000 successful business proposals, I can tell you that there’s no secret to writing a great proposal.

Allow me to elaborate as I take you through our analysis findings, and run through the following topics, in this Process Street post:

Let’s get started.

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9 Places to Find The Best Copywriting Examples for Your Swipe File

9 Places to Find The Best Copywriting Examples for Your Swipe File

Your boss has just asked you to write an email telling your customers their free trial has ended and encouraging them to upgrade to premium. But writing isn’t your thing and you could use some copywriting examples.

I mean, where do you start? What do these emails look like? If you had a swipe file, you’d have a reference point straight away.

Swipe files are collections of material kept by creatives for easy reference, consisting of great material you can learn from. If you’re just starting out, you’ll probably want to start making one and be prepared for your next assignment.

It’s best to amass your swipe file as you go, quickly adding quality copywriting examples when you see them and tagging for easy reference. Keep reading to find out how to do this using Evernote. But first, let’s look at where you can find awesome material to get started.

Swiped.co

While relatively new, Swiped is actively archiving a large selection of new and classic ads, emails, pop-ups, sales letters, direct mail examples and more.

If you’ve already got some material for your swipe file, go ahead and upload it to Swiped! It survives on user uploads and is an amazing labor of love by Mike Schauer.

Swiped Copywriting Examples Home Page

It was created because archives of ads are sparse, and if you’re a copywriter or advertisers without a hefty swipe file you’ll have to rely on the rare chance that someone has uploaded the advert you want to reference somewhere on the web.

As it turns out, most people don’t really like ads that much. More often than not, you won’t find what you’re looking for.

Swiped’s collection is small, but growing quickly and has an active community of marketers uploading their finds and even making annotations to highlight the effective elements.

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Communication Plan: How to Prepare for (and Prevent) Disaster

communication plan

Who is Kanye West?

A musical genius? A passionate campaigner? Jesus? Or a spontaneous, unintelligible twitter ranter?

I’m telling you, I am Warhol. I am the number one most impactful artist of our generation. I am Shakespeare, in the flesh. Walt Disney. Nike. Google…

A lot of people here felt like they lost. You know why? Because y’all been lied to. Google lied to you. Facebook lied to you. Radio lied to you

My greatest pain in life is that I will never be able to see myself perform live

Kanye West is a brilliant example of how impulsive, unplanned communication can ruin a reputation.

But it’s not only famous celebrities that suffer the cost of off-the-cuff comms.

Unplanned communication is costing companies over $37 billion every year. This is no surprise when you consider that over 60% of companies don’t create or follow a communication plan.

It’s time to stop winging it and start planning it.

Read this Process Street post, grab our free communication plan template, and learn how to communicate properly, as we go through the following:

If you’re keen to start planning your communication right now, grab this free Communication Plan Template Checklist:

Click here to access the Communication Plan Template Checklist!

(Sign up for a free trial here, if you’re not yet a Process Street user)

Let’s start talking…
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