Online success will almost always be more easily achieved if you master the art of the explanation. Whether you are selling information or selling toothpicks online, explanations are very often a necessary part of the informational flow. If you can help someone understand something, in simple, clear terms, without making that person feel demeaned, you will have gained a happy reader, user, or client. You will have established your authority of the subject and proven that you care enough about others to share your knowledge with them. In return, you will gain a loyal following, and very likely, increased income.

So, what is the art of the explanation? Explanations need to be easy to understand, clear and precise. Although I highly recommend using pictures when appropriate, I suggest you practice the art of explaining by only using words at first. This will force to you learn how to vividly describe a process so that the reader can “see” it, even without pictures.

My challenge to you is to practice the art of explaining by describing the process of something you’ve done recently in as clear and simple a manner as you can. If you are explaining the process of changing the oil in your car, list the tools needed and the steps required to go from start to finish. Try to imagine someone who knows nothing about the workings of a car is reading your explanation. Will they get it? Could they take your instructions and successfully change the oil?

Test it and see. Give your explanation to a few different people. Ask them if they understand it. Find out what is confusing to them. Use that information to make the explanation even simpler and more understandable. This process of taking just one activity, breaking it down into clear, simple steps, and then refining it from user input will go a long way in teaching you the art of the explanation.

Take the knowledge you gain from this exercise, and apply it to some process related to your site’s topic. Sell kitchen faucets? Explain how to replace an old faucet with one of your new hi-tech ones. Blog about horses? Explain how to muck a stall or groom a horse. (Hopefully, I used appropriate terminology there. I know nothing about horses. Care to explain it to me? )

Once you have content that clearly explains a concept or activity on your site, there is a very good chance that you can easily gain traffic to that content. Let interested people know about the explanations you provide via social networks, forums, etc., and you could quickly find your site gaining traffic, links, and search engine rankings. But it all starts with great content, and in the case of the “how-to”, the art of the explanation. Get that right, and everything else follows.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2008. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: explanation, how-to, oil, Online success, search engine, search engine rankings, social networks, tutorial
This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this in your news aggregator/reader or on DazzlinDonna, then the site you are looking at is probably infringing upon my copyright.

First things first, if you are starting a new blog, choose a theme that is widget-compatible. Whether or not you intend to use sidebar widgets, you’ll eventually discover that you want to. So be prepared in advance. Now, on to the list.

Sidebar Widgets

Adds Sidebar Widgets panel under Presentation menu

Category Cloud Widget

Adds a sidebar widget to display the categories as a tag cloud.

Widgetize Anything

Provides a widget interface for any php code.

Enforce www. Preference

Provides 301 redirects to queries with /index.php and enforces your use or non-use of www.

Link Indication
Adds CSS class attributes to external links and optionally to any other link types such as flickr, wikipedia, imdb, etc.

MyAvatars

This plugin allows you to add MyBlogLog.com avatars to WordPress comments.

Sociable

Automatically add links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites.

WPVideo

Allows you to insert online videos in your post by providing the video url between the

Link To Me Textbox

This plugin will set up a “link to me textbox” with HTML code in your blog posts and increase your search engine rankings.

Compact Monthly Archive

Displays a compact montlhly archive instead of the default long list. Either display it as a block suitable for the body of a page or in a form compact enough for a sidebar.

Head Meta Description

Insert HTML META description tag: excerpt/content brief for post/Page, description for category, and blog tagline for everything else.

Random Redirect

Allows you to create a link to yourblog.example.com/?random which will redirect someone to a random post on your blog, in a StumbleUpon-like fashion.

Simple Tags

Allows you to create a list of Technorati tags at the bottom of your post by providing a comma separated list of tags between the [tags] tags. You can use it with any blogging tool/method, not just when posting from WordPress itself (doesn’t use custom fields). Supports multiple words within tags. Also allows in-post tagging of words by enclosing them in [tag] tags.

Subscribe To Comments

Allows readers to recieve notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.

WordPress Mobile Edition

Show a mobile view of the post/page if the visitor is on a known mobile device.

What Would Seth Godin Do

Displays a custom welcome message to new visitors

wp-cache

Cache module for those times you experience the Digg effect

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2007. | Permalink | 7 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: favorites, HTML, non-blog site, online videos, php, plugins, search engine, search engine rankings, Seth Godin Do, widgets, WordPress
This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this in your news aggregator/reader or on DazzlinDonna, then the site you are looking at is probably infringing upon my copyright.