When I was fifteen, I wrote a novel. I thought it was pretty good, and daydreamt about literary stardom.

Fast forward ten years. I recently found my old notebooks and read that novel over again. And … let’s just say it wasn’t as good as I remembered, and leave it at that.

It’s amazing what a difference perspective makes.

Usually, you’re not going to be revisiting work from a decade ago. You’re going to be busy trying to get that new website copy done, or that sales page written, or that ebook finished.

Problem is, when you’re writing, you’re working at a zoomed-in level. You’re so deeply into the words that you can’t get a grasp on the whole piece. You’re emotionally attached to your work, and even if it doesn’t seem perfect, you simply can’t see any way to change or improve it.

Here’s how to zoom back out and get the big picture.

1. Let it rest

Ever since I started writing as a teen, I’ve heard this piece of advice. Put your first draft aside for a few days (or at least 24 hours). Leave it alone.

Yes, it’s hard; you’re itching to get your piece finished. You’ll need to plan ahead: give yourself a few days in the middle of a project to take a break. Your unconscious mind will carry on mulling over that project while you’re away from it.

When you pick it up again, you’ll come to it afresh. You’ll have new insights. You’ll see different possibilities. Mistakes will jump off the page at you.

How long should you put your work aside for? I’d say, the longer the piece, the longer you let it rest. For a blog post, leaving it for a day is probably enough. For a novel, give it at least a couple of weeks — preferably a month.

2. Read as a reader

When you pick up your piece again after a break, try to get into the mindset of a reader. Imagine it’s the first time you’ve read this.

It helps to make a clear physical break between your writing mode and reading mode. Depending on your project and how you like to work, that might mean:

• Printing out the whole thing and reading it in a coffee shop
• Turning it from a word document into a PDF so that you can’t keep changing the text as you read
• Creating a “real book” version of your manuscript on Lulu
• Reading through the whole thing in one session

While you’re reading, watch out for:

• Anything vague. Have you assumed knowledge which your real readers might not have?
• Anything extraneous. It might be interesting to you, but if you can cut it out without losing any meaning from the piece, it should go. In fiction, I ask myself “Is this part of the story?”
• Anything redundant. When you’re working on a project over a long period of time, you’ll often end up with two similar sections, or very similar phrase or word choices close together. Next to impossible to spot when you’re writing, glaringly obvious to readers.

3. Ask for feedback

However great your imagination, you can never truly put yourself in the position of a first-time reader. You know your writing and your topic too well.

There’s an easy solution, however:

Find some actual readers

Ideally, pick people in your target audience. You could try:

• A writing circle — either a group that meets in real life, or an online one
• Regular commenters on your blog
• Participants in a forum or membership site which you belong to (I’m sending out my ebook draft to some fellow Third Tribers this coming weekend)

Unless she happens to be a writer too, or typical of your readership, your mom is not the best person to ask for feedback. Ditto for your spouse. They’re likely to be kind rather than constructively critical.

When you ask for feedback, be clear about what you want

If this is a first draft, you’re not primarily concerned with typos or the occasional clunky sentence. You want to know if whole sections should be cut, or whether your angle works, or if your call to action is clear.

I always give my guinea-pig readers a free copy of the finished piece, if appropriate. It’s also nice to offer to reciprocate if they ever want feedback on a writing project.

4. Proofread

Once you’re past the revisions stage and into the final version, you’ll need to proofread. Although you can get away with the occasional typo, spelling mistake or grammatical slip in most blog posts, you’ll want to avoid any embarrassing mistakes in your shiny new ebook or your slick sales page.

I find that I’m great at finding typos in other people’s work … and awful at spotting them in my own.

Usually, I find a long suffering friend to proof-read for me, but if I’m proofreading my own material, this is what helps:

Proofread on paper

For some reason, it’s easier to spot mistakes on paper than on the screen. Perhaps it’s because we’re more prone to skimming on the screen, or because our eyes glide over any mistakes which the spellchecker hasn’t picked up.

Regardless of why, it works. Print out your piece, and go through it slowly with a red pen in hand.

Proofread backwards

When we read, we rarely take in every word. Uur brain fills in what it expects to see — even if that’s not quite what’s there. (Ever mis-read a headline? Or a billboard?)

Reading your work backwards deals with this. You’re forced to look at every single word. It’s a slow and tortuous process, but if you have a piece of work which absolutely must be error-free, it’s the best way to do it.

How about you? Do you find it hard to get perspective on your writing? What methods work for you? And have you ever written something which you thought was perfect … until you looked at it again a few months later?

Let us know about it in the comments.

About the Author: Ali Hale writes about productivity with perspective alongside Thursday Bram on their newly-launched blog Constructively Productive: you can grab the RSS feed here.

Remember those puzzles you used to do when you were six or seven?

That mass of dots and numbers on a page just looked like a mess.

But when you went through and connected dot 1 to dot 2, moving on through dots 100 and 101, you wound up with a picture of a pony.

You might think you’ve outgrown connect-the-dots. But actually, it’s one of the most important strategies for online entrepreneurs and small businesses looking to build profits with online marketing.

Learn to connect the dots in a smart and strategic way, and you could very well paint yourself a real pony. It’s not quite as easy as it was when you were six, but it’s still well within your grasp.

Connect the dots from the best free content

Content marketing is a massive trend that’s only getting stronger. And in the best content marketing, smart marketers will give you free material you can use right away to start creating great results.

If your goal is to market your business, don’t overlook the value you can get from free information. Some terrific businesses have been built by acting on the advice found in free content.

Benefiting from free content is all about connecting the dots. Take the great lead generation strategy from one source, connect it with the solid headline and conversion tactics from another, and wrap it up with some good social media sharing you learn on a third.

It’s a bit like playing connect-the-dots without numbers. Challenging, but if you put the work in, it works.

The real trick, though, isn’t finding great free stuff. It’s sifting out all the junk.

The most important dot

The most important dot to connect is this: Be sure you’re studying someone who’s worth your time. And there are very few marketing teachers out there who have changed more lives than Jeff Walker.

Jeff’s the creator of a program called Product Launch Formula, which helped Brian connect his own dots, way back in 2005.

Brian knew a lot about copywriting and marketing from his previous ventures, but it was PLF that showed him how to string everything together — to create not just great content, but also a great business powered by content.

You owe it to yourself to watch Jeff’s free instructional videos. Jeff’s a teacher at heart, and he loves to give out quality information you can use to start improving your own marketing, even if you never spend a penny with him. You’ll do particularly well if you combine Jeff’s approach with what you learn here on Copyblogger.

Click here to watch Jeff’s tutorial video, which he just posted today.

About the Author: Sonia Simone is Senior Editor of Copyblogger and co-founder of Inside the Third Tribe.

It’s only for people who want:

• A systematic, simple way to get a good grasp of the power of effective online marketing.
• Easy-to-navigate tutorials on the “Copyblogger method” of creating a profitable online business or marketing your offline business online.
• An organized reference guide to the “best of the best” that’s appeared on Copyblogger over the years.

Internet Marketing for Smart People is a free 20-part course and ongoing newsletter that’s delivered via email. Each week you’ll get a new lesson on one of the four essential pillars of effective Internet marketing.

You don’t have to be a genius to master Internet marketing. You just have to be smart enough to take us up on this free offer.

Sign up here.

There’s no delicate way to put this. If you’re a regular Copyblogger reader, you’re just . . . well . . . smarter than most people looking to market online.

You’re not interested in lame “get rich quick” schemes. You’re not trying to build a business with no work, no time, and no sense. You’re not chasing after that magical silver bullet that will solve all your problems.

Mainly, you’d just like some solid, smart advice on online business that actually works.

In other words, you don’t have to be an Einstein to “get” this stuff. But you’d have to be an idiot to believe some of the stuff peddled by traditional Internet marketing “gurus” (many of whom have never done what they’re “teaching” before).

Copyblogger has been delivering solid, smart advice for nearly four years now, and starting this week, we’d like to take it up a notch.

Oh, and one more thing: we’ll be doing that for free.

Introducing Internet Marketing for Smart People

Brian and I have been kicking around the idea of a focused email newsletter for months, but we wanted to make sure we put something together that reflected the high standards we always try to set for the site.

We wanted to create a systematic, simple way that you could get a good grasp of the power of effective online marketing.

We wanted you to have an easy-to-navigate tutorial on the “Copyblogger method” of creating and marketing a profitable online business.

And we wanted a way to make sure that you got a chance to see all of the “best of the best” that’s appeared on Copyblogger over the years.

The four pillars of online marketing success

Thinking through what this would look like, we found four themes that kept coming up.

So we created an introduction to the newsletter that works through these four themes, systematically introducing you to the most important concepts we think every online marketer must know about. It’s like a course in Internet marketing that prepares you for the more in-depth stuff newsletter content that follows (still all free).

These are the cornerstones of how to build a business with the Copyblogger model, using everything we’ve learned over the years. Ready?

Pillar 1: Relationships

Creating strong relationships with an audience is critical to everything we do here. Rather than constantly hunting down new customers, we’d much rather create a valued environment that benefits our existing readers and customers and keeps pulling them back. We don’t advertise in the traditional sense; instead, our readers do a great job of “spreading the word” for us.

It’s about having consummate respect, always, for your audience and your market.

It’s about focusing almost obsessively on their needs, over and above your own (and getting what you want, almost magically, in the process).

It’s about making a commitment to creating a quality experience for your readers and subscribers.

Pillar 2: Direct response copywriting

We certainly stay abreast of the latest social media trends (and sometimes create them), but underlying everything we do here is solid copywriting techniques.

Starting with a killer headline and moving strategically through the copy to a stirring call to action, traditional copywriting technique works amazingly well in social media.

“Old-fashioned” copywriting advice can make all the difference between a business or blog that limps along and one that truly thrives.

We’ll show you precisely what we mean in the initial issues of the newsletter.

Pillar 3: Content marketing

What’s backbone of the Copyblogger formula?

Deliver great content. Deliver more great content. Deliver still more great content.

Keep doing that in a strategic and focused way.

Every once in awhile, make a great offer that benefits the reader and involves the exchange of cash money.

Of course, we’ll give you some more specifics on how to do that once you’re on board.

Pillar 4: Have something worth selling

Everyone is selling something. It might be a service, a product, a download, or simply an idea.

Whatever you’re selling, it’s got to be worth the price. (And never forget that reader attention is a valuable commodity that’s in strictly limited supply.)

Whether you’re asking for dollars, euros, yen, or valuable time and attention, you’ve got to deliver something that towers above your asking price.

Bringing it all together

Each of these four pillars enhances the others. Together, they’re much stronger than they would be if any of the pillars were missing.

Internet Marketing for Smart People is a free course and continual newsletter that’s delivered via email. Each week you’ll get a new lesson on one of the four pillars.

You’ll get lots of pointers to archived Copyblogger content, but with a new frame that will help you “connect the dots” and start putting this advice to work in your own business, web site, or blog. It’s much like the approach Brian took with Authority Rules, but ongoing and ever-evolving as the Internet marketing space does (which is fast).

To make it work even better, we’ll also be including “behind the scenes” lessons that show you how we put our own marketing systems and launches together, and the role each piece plays.

What you need to do next

Enter your email address here to sign up for the Internet Marketing for Smart People newsletter: 

It’s very important to us that everyone receiving Internet Marketing for Smart People truly wants the course, so we’ll need you to confirm that you want to receive it by clicking a confirmation link.

So check your inbox after you sign up (and put us on your white list… we’re not spammy at all, but thanks to scuzzball internet marketers, our topic is often viewed that way by the major email services).

And of course we’re never going to rent, sell, or otherwise share the information we collect. That would pretty much be a violation of everything we stand for.