How to Write Good Web Content – A Rriter Chat with Marcos Dinnerstein and Nico Hodel

A Better Mousetrap Newsletter

Marcos’s Book Recommendation: Everybody Writes by Ann Handley

Full Transcript for this Rriter Chat

Nico Hodel  0:01  

Very excited to be speaking today to Marcos Dinnerstein. And Marcos, why don’t you just give the audience a little bit of background on yourself and what you’re currently working on as well as where you come from and what your expertise is. I think everyone listening would love to learn more about you.

Marcos Dinnerstein  0:22  

Okay, yeah, as you mentioned, my name is Marcos, Dinnerstein or Dinnerstein depends on who you ask. My family, we’ve got a debate on that. And right now I’m doing a number of things. I am working doing business development for sam.ai. a platform that principally is a way to facilitate warm introductions, between high value people for their mutual benefit. It’s non-intrusive, it’s very privacy focused. But it does two things, it lets you know who you know, in a structured way. So you’ve got this marshal of contacts, this marshal of history of emails, Sam takes it in and structures that data. So it’s searchable. So it’s actually way way more useful as well. It also enriches that data with affinity, affinity data, publicly available stuff on LinkedIn, Twitter, and makes that data more powerful. And then the other aspect is when people join your Sam network, and it doesn’t have to be a large number of people, three thought, if they’re well connected, you can now see who they know. Again, non intrusively just name, title company. And if it’s an appropriate match, you can ask for an introduction, a super valuable business intelligence tool. So I’m doing both content for them and business development. It’s an interest, it’s a startup. So it’s a it’s a fun ride, as all startups are. I’m enjoying that. Let’s see, what else am I doing? I am. I have my weekly newsletter called a better mousetrap, which is, events and opportunities for founders in the New York area, principally. And I’ve been doing that for a number of years. It’s an outgrowth of what I used to do as the editor of digital.NYC, which I did for two and a half years. Digital.NYC is New York City’s official tech and startup website. It’s a public private partnership between or, as a writer should say, among because it’s more than two entities among the mayor’s office, and the NYC Economic Development Corporation. And it had been owned by gust, which recently sold it and it has a new owner. So it’s a public private partnership. And hopefully, it will restart again, at some point, it’s kind of a dormant state. And I was running that. And I’m also doing in my spare time, working with a company called three links, which is a supply chain company. And I’m doing video interview views for them for people in the supply chain roles have already gotten too in the can, and hopefully getting another another one in the next week or so. And that’s been a lot of fun. The the focus on that one is not just a regular old let’s interview a founder, you know, and hear their hero’s journey. And other Joseph Campbell type sagas, what it is, is we’re trying to interview and thereby encourage more socially focused more community focused companies, companies who have a greater number of stakeholders than companies have in recent history. So it’s not just returning the greatest investment to your your investors. It’s also a being beholden and concerning the taking into consideration the needs of your customer, the needs of your wider community, the needs of your workers. It’s a broader set of stakeholders, and we’re trying to both be that three links and also highlight those people who are doing it and talking about those concerns and those those issues culture, building community. And that’s a fun that’s a fun journey. I mean, that’s I like that kind of stuff, those are my ethics. So exploring that and encouraging that is, is a joy.

Nico Hodel  5:07  

Great, yeah, it’s so interesting to hear all the irons you have in the fire. And I’ve looked into a lot of the companies that Marcus is working with currently a bunch of really interesting projects. And we’ll include links to all of them in the show notes for this conversation. But interestingly, my co founder and I, Adi actually met Marcos at a New York City startup-related event, originally, and we were really interested to hear that he had been working for digital.NYC in the past, which actually showed up a lot in our research, when we were actually beginning work on Start It Up NYC, and kind of brainstorming ways that we could help get innovative startups out into the forefront, and do a lot of that content work as well as the innovation consulting. So it was one of those very small world moments. But yeah, Marcus has been involved in this space for quite a long time. And his his newsletter, a better mousetrap is, is really widely read by people in industry. So definitely encourage people to go and check that out. But Marcus, you have a really extensive experience working on content, particularly web content. And so I’d love to just get your thoughts more generally on what it is that makes good web content and your point of view and a few things that people could focus on when publishing content for the web.

Marcos Dinnerstein  6:37  

Okay, well, it’s, it’s a big question. There, there are lots of lots of facets to that answer. So let me just dive in, broadly, and then we can narrow it down, and then you can shut me down if I talk too long. Please, web content, has to be all content has to be interesting. And I’m all I’m actually starting to rebel against a little bit against the the term content, because it’s a commodification, commodification of writing of audio, or video, interviewing, or presentations. And by calling it content, you’re reducing it to its most abstract, a generic quality. And so one of the things that, again, to embody embody that it makes more sense to meet to talk about what good writing are on the web. And in what context?

Is it business writing is it blogging or journaling? And the the cardinal rule is be interesting. And to be interesting, you have to bring something either new and or a new take on that content. You have to know who your audience is. So that you you meet them in a place where they can take in what you’re saying. I’ll read stuff on on blockchain, say on coin desk, which is a it’s a major, very reputable blockchain publication. They’re speaking to a by and large, a very educated audience who understand the concepts of blockchain of cryptocurrencies of trading, so they don’t have to backtrack and give basic information that can be assumed they know their audience and they’re writing to that audience. So that they, by and large, partly they’re real journalists there. They know how to write about the blockchain and then the cryptocurrency space and the distributed ledger space. So that’s one thing is be interesting. Know your audience. Um, and very important, respect your audience’s time. And by that I mean, don’t just write something and go Okay, I’m gonna do 500 to 750 words. I’ve done that. No grammar Grammarly checked it over. Didn’t flag anything funky? publish. No, no, no. That’s that’s Your first draft. Now? How much can you remove and still have value? Is the is the content written in such a way? That it’s compelling? Why should they read the next sentence, you have to earn that. You know, and hold yourself, you know, not, you know, not everything is going to be a masterpiece.

Don’t get me wrong, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. You know, we got to crank out stuff often. But still, you don’t want to just put stuff, throw stuff out there and go, it’s good enough because your audience is not going to be fooled. They’re going to they’re going to read it and go, Oh, man, he’s just going on. Instead of putting a period here, they just went. And I did this, owing to the fact that that, and because of this, and I see that kind of writing all the time, and it just drives me nuts. Because it’s, it’s getting close to stream of consciousness. And I just want to say, finish your thought. Make a new sentence, see what you can condense. So editing is really, really crucial. Because it means you respect your audience’s time and your and the attention that they’re bestowing to you. You know, they don’t have to read your stuff. You know, that’s why people click off a website’s frequently, because people haven’t taken the care to really do their best to to to make tight writing. I’m going to do a plug for a couple of books that I really want this one called revising prose. And it’s by a guy named Richard Linham L i n h a m, it is a nuts and bolts about the craft of writing, I’ve got something pinned up on my wall called the paramedic method that he that I photocopied from his, his book, which is circle the prepositions. Circle, the is form, find the action and the actor. Put this action in a simple, not compound, active verb. Start fast, no slow wind ups, read the passage aloud with emphasis and feeling write out each sentence on a blank sheet or sheet of paper and mark off the basic rhythmic units. mark off the sentence like that’s it. I mean, it may have seemed a little long, but it’s eight things, eight items. And these just kind of keeping those things in mind, just those alone will really tighten writing. And that will that will make for better web content, because it’s better writing. And that’s really ultimately what we want.

And then the other book that just came out recently is by this woman who I really admire Anne Handlui Li h a n d l u i called Everybody Writes she is a professional writer and she’s worked on big accounts. And you read that book and it just flows it’s very simple writing it’s very direct some of her instructional stuff is a page long here’s a rule there’s nothing extraneous in it so she’s really she’s really walking the walk here you know it’s it’s like you know, she I admire her greatly as you can probably tell and those those two books alone will stand you in good stead they’re great. So for relating it back to SEO, which you you mentioned to me, I think before we started recording, um you’re you’re acquainted with the rules as well as I have, you know, having sufficient number of keywords or key phrases in having your h2 titles, so that the search engines understand the structure of what you’re writing, putting in a conclusion, and maybe even writing the word In conclusion, to sum things up. those are those are consistent with easy to read, copy or text. And they’re useful useful for for a reader and that matches up with being valued you in the SEO? It used to be you would keyword pack used to be called. And just like throw as many instances of your keyword or your key phrase into, and that would increase your your ranking in the results pages. Google and Bing and other search engines have gotten way, way, way more sophisticated than then that they give you ranking for. length. I believe you were telling me that long term content is now valued more. That seems consistent? It does, it does generally have to be the keyword I when we spoke about a month ago, I mentioned the concept of Latent Semantic Indexing. And like synonyms, essentially, that’s a fancy word. I did further research on it and I think I’m dead wrong. I was dead wrong about that. That that it does not actually let you rank well. So you have to you do have to stay pretty consistently with the key words key phrases. sentence structure, if you if you have a WordPress site, they often bundle it with I think it’s called Yoast

Nico Hodel  16:30  

Yeah, Yoast SEO see, Oh, fantastic plugin.

Marcos Dinnerstein  16:33  

Yoast SEO, and it gives you It gives you some nice simple rules that you and scores you on those for effective SEO content. And if you if you kind of adjust your your writing to those rules, you’ll see that the sentence structure matters, you know the complexity of your writing. So you can you can, you can actually learn from the free tools. Link linking is important in SEO writing, if we’re writing, you know, if we’re writing with the purposes of not only being of value to the reader, which I think you should never ever lose sight of. But you also want it to have SEO impact, then you want to if you’re writing, of course, nonfiction, business content that you want to link out to, to well ranking third party sources that support your argument because that tells the the search engine that you are linking to credible popular content that has value that that readers have voted with their eyes as as validating. And by linking out to it, you have no stake in pumping somebody else’s something.

So the assumption is that you’re you’re also trying to provide value. And they reward you for doing that, because that’s ultimately what the search engines are trying to optimize for a better user experience. And then, of course, you’ll see it every major professional site. But related content. Well, that’s just another way of saying Well, I’m going to link internally, because I want the value of pointing to my own content. And if it is related, well, then it’s a value, and you’re giving yourself links. So there’s those some of the principles if you can, if you can create original video, that’s very, that’s very valuable. And related and embedded in that content. I did for I don’t know, maybe maybe a year, year and a half, I was writing articles for a translation platform called moto word, which is a cute cute. It’s a great translation company founded by a couple of Turkish guys. They’re wonderful, great. Crazy. Love. And what was my point here? Yeah, I wrote I wrote, I don’t know 5060 articles for them and lose my train of

Nico Hodel  19:40  

You were talking about internal linking.

Marcos Dinnerstein  19:42  

I’ve Oh, yeah. We did lots of internal linking on the you know, in every single article, you know, that was that was just yeah. Yeah, a really important to given. And we came at talking about translation from zillion angles some, some of the fun ones were started by my predecessor in my role as a content writer. She started a series of famous translators sort of there were a lot of writers over history, who’ve been translators as well. So you’re doing biographies of Jorge Luis Borges, famous Argentinian writer. He, he was a raised bilingual English and Spanish. And so you know, you get to write a biography of him and point out his interesting work. So. So, there there are ways to be interesting.

Nico Hodel  20:44  

Yeah, thank you so much. Those are some amazing tips. I mean, I love your distinction between content as a term and good writing. I think that’s something that is super important that people need to keep in mind, love your focus on the importance of editing, I think that’s something that really gets lost, especially with a lot of these crowdsource platforms like Fiverr and Upwork. Editing is key and you need to process part of your creative process, you know, as a client, that is that is receiving content, you need to make sure that the quality of that content is there, and that, first and foremost, the writing is good. And it’s only at that point that you can focus on some of the more technical goals that you were talking about as well like, building a backlinking strategy, incorporating those external and internal links, making sure to do the technical SEO on the web page, to provide all the metadata that Google needs in order to rank that page effectively. And, yeah, I mean, your work for the translation company is particularly interesting as well, because it touches on some concepts of in international SEO, which is 

Marcos Dinnerstein  21:53  

Yeah, that’s really, orange feel, yeah,

Nico Hodel  21:55  

very, very technical. And something that’s really important, because people are consuming content and a bunch of different languages across the web. And Google is also ranking that content and ranking different content in certain languages. So that metadata also needs to be provided in those requisite languages, if appropriate, or specifically not provided if you only want people to be reading your content in one language. So

Marcos Dinnerstein  22:21  

which is leaving money on the table? Typically? Because if you if you I mean, really, any company that’s on the web is international. Hmm. So the point you know it, if they, if a customer, a potential customer can buy from you from another country, you should give serious thought to translating in my research for a lot of these articles. Time after time, I would see that countries in which there is a large English speaking population, like the Netherlands, just about everybody speaks English, they’re still they purchase in Dutch. So if you translate your site into Dutch, they, the conversion rate is way, way higher. Because it you know, you’re meeting them in their language. That’s just, uh, you know, you’re you’re creating a comfort level there.

Nico Hodel  23:25  

Definitely a sense of sharing it would be,

Marcos Dinnerstein  23:28  

yeah, I’m sure the same thing would be true in Finland, I went to Helsinki, about five years, four or five years ago for the slush conference. And I was blown away that every cab driver, everybody just said, Hey, dude, how are you? Is it vernacular English, like? The US is so behind

Nico Hodel  23:56  

Scandinavia is pretty amazing in terms of their their English speaking ability. But yeah, I mean, what you’re saying also goes right back to readability. You know, just because someone can read your content in a non native language doesn’t mean that it’s going to be as effective and all those things are very, very important.

Marcos Dinnerstein  24:15  

And then that also gets on the one of you. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That also gets touches on the point of localization, versus just pure translation. So if you’ve got an article with, you know, blond haired, blue eyed people in the illustration, well, if you translated for Mexico or Latin America, you better think long and hard before you put the blond haired and blue eyed people in there. You might want to change up the the graphics. Absolutely. And yeah, expressions expressions don’t translate. So

Nico Hodel  24:53  

yeah, um, this has been so helpful. Thank you so much for touching on all these different spheres. Sure, if you are someone that is it’s great to speak to a person with your depth of experience, you know, you’ve been in this game for a very long time. And you’ve also kept up with how the rules have changed, which is really important. Because as you were saying, there are a bunch of blackhat SEO strategies back in the day that actually did produce results. But as you mentioned,

Marcos Dinnerstein  25:22  

well, and they got banned.

Nico Hodel  25:24  

Yeah. And,

you know, you can also be penalized for using a lot of those strategies today. So it can can very often be counterproductive if, if Google or another search engine detects that you’re up to this sort of thing, which is, they’re getting better and better at doing. You could have some very negative effects as well.

Marcos Dinnerstein  25:44  

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. But no, no more. No, no more white font on a white background. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. That was a crazy one.

Yeah. That got shut down pretty

Nico Hodel  25:56  

early, actually. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Marcos, thank you so much for your time on really quick before we start to wrap up here. Where can people connect with you? And kind of learn more where you have to we’ll provide a few relevant links in the description for this video. But where can people get in touch?

Marcos Dinnerstein  26:16  

Well, you can always just hit me directly at Marcos.dinnerstein@gmail.com. Or Marcos at bettermousetrap.NYC if you don’t want to know how to spell my last name. Yeah. I have a Twitter @marcosd.

Nico Hodel 26:42  

Okay. Great. That’s Yeah. And like I said, Marcus is a newsletter provides a lot of value. So definitely recommend anyone that’s involved in the startup or innovation consulting space, check out a better mousetrap on there. There’s a lot of value there. So, Marcos, again. Absolutely. Thanks again for for your time and I’ll let you go for now. And hopefully this this will be the first of many conversations to follow.  Yes, have a great rest of your night over there.

Marcos Dinnerstein  

Thank you.

Take care. Take care.