Here's a partial [and growing] list of the best books I read in 2012…
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Need a good book for 2013? @e1evation
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The e1evation book of the year is 11 Rules for Creating Value in the #SocialEra by client/mentor/friend Nilofer Merchant. Biased? Do Packers fans wear funny hats at football games? OF COURSE I AM!!! But it’s still the best book I read this year…
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Michael Hyatt shares this:
Now is a good time to review your previous year’s blogging results and see what you can learn. I just went through this exercise today and thought I’d share what I learned. Hopefully, it will encourage you to do a similar assessment.
Full story at: How a Quick Analysis of Your Top Posts Can Improve Your Blogging Results Next Year | Michael Hyatt.
Here's 'quadrant 2' thinking for you to ponder if you have downtime during the holidays…
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How to simplify your content marketing and thought leadership workflow for 2013 @e1evation
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I know, I know — I’ve got a long way to go but here are some thoughts on the minimum toolkit you need to get found in 2013…
Got content marketing? Here’s a special year end offer to help you get ready…
Got content marketing? Here's a special year end offer to help you get ready for 2013…
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Grasshopper or ant: which one are you? @e1evation
The wikipedia tells us: “The Ant and the Grasshopper, also known as The Grasshopper and the Ant (or Ants), is one of Aesop’s Fables, providing an ambivalent moral lesson about the virtues of hard work…
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A 3-Step Process for Painless Keyword Research
Beth Hayden @ CopyBlogger has a great post I’d like to share with you…
Keyword research is one of the most important types of research you’ll do throughout your content marketing career. It’s also one of the most difficult.
In this series, we’ve already discussed the fact that research isn’t sexy, glamorous, or fun. We’ve also talked about how you need to do research consistently — just like you need to work out in a consistent manner in order to see the real physical fitness results you want.
But there’s something particularly arduous about conducting keyword research. Many of the tools available are confusing and counter-intuitive. We don’t know what we’re supposed to be looking for, and we often don’t have a system in place for how to do keyword research effectively.
But, in putting this series together, I took a very close look at the process of keyword research, and I realized that there’s a better way to find the keywords I needed for my work … without tears, gnashing of teeth, or the desire for hard alcohol.
I always seem to get lost in the data of keyword research. I feel like all of the information I find is incredibly important, and I can’t figure out what to focus on and what to ignore.
Sometimes I make a half-hearted effort to research the keywords I should use in my content, then get aggravated and toss my lists aside in favor of doing less frustrating work.
In the next two posts of this research series, I’m going to give you the solution to your keyword research woes. I’ll teach you …
- How to stay focused when doing your research
- How to avoid getting bogged down in the stuff that doesn’t matter
- How to take a shortcut that will save you tons and time and energy
Let’s get started…
Get focused on your goal
Your goal when conducting keyword research is to identify the topics that matter most to your target audiences, and then discover the exact language they use when they search for information and discuss their questions on social networking sites.
To reach that goal, you need a simple, effective system for keyword research. Follow these three steps to clear up the fog of procrastination and confusion that surrounds the process of finding target keywords for your content.
Full story at: A 3-Step Process for Painless Keyword Research | Copyblogger
Discovering the exact language people are using is the key to aligning your writing with the value demands of your target audience. You may want to elevate your status by calling yourself a ‘purveyor of fine previously owned automobiles’ but the target audience is just looking for a good used car. If you don’t discover what people are looking for and bring your message into alignment, you’re whistling in the dark! Get a grip by following the link and reading the rest of Beth’s perspective. I’m always here to help, too! Comment below or connect with me so we can talk about how this applies to you and your situation…
Love blogging? Hate writing? Don’t despair!
There are ways you can engage in content marketing without wearing your fingers to the bone! Here is a dynamic [translate: under construction] list of tools that you can use to create content for your website without ‘lifting a finger’. Here’s the list…
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Do you like TEDTalks?
My family and I are positively addicted! What could be better for homeschooled 8 and 13 year olds than to have a smorgasbord of some of the worlds greatest thinkers [no, not me and my wife] feeding them a steady diet of brilliant thinking?
I’m blessed to have the opportunity to work with two ‘TEDTalkers’ — Nilofer Merchant and Nina Tandon. Nina’s talk is the featured talk of the day at TED.com today…
Nina was referred to me by Nilofer. She needed a new, dynamic website in preparation for last Friday’s appearance on The Katie Couric Show as a Dove “Woman Who Should be Famous”. She did an excellent job as you can see from the show segment here:
http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1&isUI=1
Before Nina and I began working together, her site looked like this:
Here’s what it looks like now [with a little help from Manca Ahlin of Mantzalin on the logo side]:
Most people seem to agree that the second site is one a little more appropriate for a woman of Nina’s stature. If you’re one of them, I could help you, too! Comment or contact me to talk about how this applies to your situation…
Test post via Jetpack
Testing the new post via email feature…
David Allen on How to Fix Your Life
One of my favorite clients sent me an article from one of my favorite writers [James Fallows, Free Flight, et al] about my favorite productivity thinker David Allen and I share it with you here. Fallows writes:
As I mentioned… I’ve been writing about and learning from the productivity expert David Allen for nearly a decade. Eight years ago, I wrote a profile of him for the magazine. In our newest issue I have highlights from a conversation I had with him, about coping with the modern nightmare of email and all-hours connectedness.
Source: David Allen on How to Fix Your Life – James Fallows – The Atlantic
Here are some highlights from the article online…
Everybody’s going to top out at some point, where your psyche just can’t manage any more. I was just reading that J. S. Bach had 20 kids. People complain now, “I’m so busy with the kids.” Okay, have 20 kids and see what happens. If you’re a musician or a writer, you could always be doing more work. So I don’t know that it’s ever been different for someone with an open-ended profession or interest.
So again, back to my general philosophy, [which] is: look, make as few plans as you can, capture every single thing that is potentially meaningful, and make sure you’ve got the appropriate maps to be able to know where to focus. It’s always been true about GTD, but I think [you need] a way to be able to see: How do you set priorities about all this stuff? Well, you need maps. You need maps to orient yourself. You need a map that says “Hey, in the next three years, what’s coming toward me that I need to be aware of?” “In the next three minutes, what’s coming toward me?” Those are different maps. By the way, you know, a “map” would be any list that you have that orients you: “Here’s my whatever-it-is project.” That’s a map. Obviously your calendar is a map. So having all the potentially relevant data determined so you can populate your appropriate maps and then spread out [in] your map room and say “Okay, what do I need to look at right now?” So the ability to be able to decide what needs to go on what map and then building the behaviors to make sure that you’re then negotiating with those maps appropriately.
What’s different these days? Nothing is different really, except how frequently this occurs. You and I have gotten more change-producing and priority-shifting inputs in the past 72 hours than your parents got in a month, some of them in a year. I was reading that in 1912, someone was complaining about the telephone, exactly the same things you hear people say about e-mail: “Oh my God, it’s going to ruin our quality of life”; “conversations are going to become surface-only and not meaningful”; “all the interruptions and distractions!” It reads like right now. I am hearing the same things I did when I first got into these issues, at Lockheed in 1983. In those days, if you even had a pocket Day-Timer, you were considered something of a productivity geek. The difference is that rather than a small minority of people experiencing this stress, it’s a much larger group of people, at every level.
Allen is brilliant and Fallows captures him at his best! Read the full story and then go back and consider how to apply Getting Things Done [GTD] to your internet tasks as I have outlined in this ongoing series! You might also enjoy this audio interview I did with David Allen several years ago…
Full story at: David Allen on How to Fix Your Life – James Fallows – The Atlantic
The Tools David Allen Uses to Get Things Done
Lifehacker curated this story from The Atlantic:
GTD guru David Allen recently spoke in an interview with The Atlantic about all the things that keep him organized and productive. He uses a combination of low-tech tools and digital applications to accomplish what he says is the number one thing people need to do to gain control over their lives: “externalize” all the stuff thats coming in.” Full story at:The Tools David Allen Uses to Get Things Done.
Go to the source if you’re interested in David Allen’s approach…
Me? Here’s my list of GTD tools. Almost all electronic and besides the hardware, free or freemium and completely cross platform:
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How to Get the Biggest Boost from Sharing Content
A rich infographic with valuable tips about optimizing your curation:
Full story at: http://contently.com/blog/2012/10/09/how-to-get-the-biggest-boost-from-sharing-content-infographic/#
Stick to the 3-B Plan when Emailing Busy People
Gregory Ciotti writes this:
If you want to get in touch with influential people (aka: BUSY people), you need to know how to contact them. Despite the buzz around social media, far more people use email to communicate than any other online medium, and business today still gets done over email, not through tweets. Sparring Mind’s Gregory Ciotti explains how to make things happen over email with the 3-B Plan.
Why it’s Important to Know
Knowing how to write outreach emails might seem like a no-brainer or maybe even an unnecessary skill to have, but I can assure you the opposite, on both accounts. If you’re serious about networking and building your platform/personal brand, you MUST know how to email important people. Important people are busy people. You can’t rely on random encounters to get in touch with people who can help you flourish; while it may happen once in a while, the rest of the time it’s up to you.
Due to the fact that tweeting is so impersonal and a cold phone call is so annoying, email is the ideal platform for reaching out. For busy people, even their inbox is something that is viewed as a “task,” meaning they want to get in and out as quickly as possible. Understanding how to properly email people is a skill that sets you apart from others (trust me, I’ve received some truly awful emails) and is essential for making things happen with influencers.
The 3-B Plan
When deciding whether to read or delete an email, our brains go through this common evaluation process:
1. Who is emailing me (and is this spam)?
2. What do they want?
3. How long will this take?Getting a “pass” on all 3 of these can be tougher than it looks, especially for busy people. Here’s my 3-step technique to avoid the trash bin.
I call it the 3-B plan. I always double-check my emails to make sure they follow the guidelines below, and I’ve been able to get some fantastic response rates.
Brevity
If there is one thing that busy people value above all else, it’s brevity. If you were receiving upwards of 50-100 emails per day, or had so many obligations that you were only left with a short amount of time to check email, it’d be easy to see why. In order to get your messages read ASAP, it’s best to make sure your opening email follows the ASAP rule: as short as possible.
I wouldn’t put a set limit on email length, because it’s a case by case basis. The important thing to remember is to always edit your emails at least once to trim unnecessary information. People don’t need your enthralling life story over email, they just need “who, what, why” so they can get back to business.
Blunt
Being blunt doesn’t mean not being persuasive, it simply means getting to the point without trying to be clever. Stories and jokes are essential for other forms of writing, but NOT for emails. Get to the incentive on why the other person should respond right away.
If possible, list a number in the title to signal commitment time (Ex: “3 quick questions”) and state exactly what the email is about in the subject line.
Basic
I sometimes am in disbelief that this one needs to be said, but it’s so true. I’ve had emails where people send what looks like a newsletter, emails with tons of images in them (so I have to click “display images” to even read it), and emails with a DOZEN attachments. When it’s your first time emailing someone…
Keep it simple, stupid.
Read Greg’s complete 9-step email guide here.
Source: Stick to the 3-B Plan when Emailing Busy People
To this I would add one thought that is becoming obvious to me lately. I divide information into two categories; just in time and just in case. Just in time is information that affects relationship and revenue and should go in an inbox. A link, however, is most often just in case information. Now, think about the context of the person receiving the information and where they will receive it. If your communication is ‘just in time’ then follow the rules above to get a response – I even go so far as to try to limit my communication to the amount of space available in a single smartphone screen or limiting the message to a single thought so that the busy person on the other end [who is hopefully a Getting Things Done [GTD] practitioner] can do it in two minutes or less. If I’m sending a link, however, why not send it to them in their favorite social network? You will find them in a context where they are already looking at links anyway! I believe that if you think about the context in which a busy person will be reading your message and you communicate accordingly, you will eventually move to the top of the heap. What do you think?
The Master Of Media
Thanks to Mitch Joel for sharing this TED talk:
I believe that Clay Shirky is the Marshall McLuhan of our time. I realize that it is statements like this that will either make certain individuals roll their eyes and others to bail on this blog. I’m fine with that. But, before you debate, engage in discourse or dismiss me as a lunatic, I urge you to watch this TED Talk that was just posted online where Clay Shirky (author of Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus) talks about how transformative the Internet has been to our media landscape. Beyond the power of his thinking, pay close attention to his presentation skills. In particular, the language he uses, the stories he tells and how he breakdowns complex concepts by illustrating them through fascinating and digestible examples.” The Master Of Media | Six Pixels of Separation – Marketing and Communications Blog – By Mitch Joel at Twist Image.
This video is well worth the watch…
The wishing/doing gap
Here’s something from Seth Godin to ponder this weekend:
It would be great to be picked, to win the random lottery, to have a dream come true.
But when we rely on a wish to get where we want to go, we often sacrifice the effort that might make it more likely that we get what we actually need. Waiting for the prince to show up is a waste of valuable time, and the waiting distracts us from and devalues the hard work we might be doing instead.
If you can influence the outcome, do the work.
If you can’t influence the outcome, ignore the possibility. It’s merely a distraction.
The anatomy of a perfect blog post
Mark Shaefer has a new resource I thought you might interest you. He says:
I wanted to let you know about a new resource for all you hard-working B2B bloggers out there. The amazing and progressive Eloqua company sponsored me to create The Grande Guide to B2B Blogging and it really turned out to be a sensational piece of work. It’s full of new tips and tricks to make your company blog sing and do a happy dance.” Full story at: The anatomy of a perfect blog post.
Here’s a well done infographic that accompanies his post:
This is what inbox zero looks like…
Having a system or process for any ‘easy to empty’ inbox makes me feel good and ready to take on other creative activities…
I work with my clients to help them reach inbox Nirvana as often as they’d like by applying David Allen’s Getting Things Done [GTD] principles to ‘personal news aggregation’ using Gmail and Google Reader…
If you’d like to experience more of the peace and productivity that comes from effectively handling email, please connect with me using the form below…
How to Mind Map in Three Small Steps
I have been mindmapping since 2007 and it’s one of the most important skills I possess for many reasons. Follow the link below for some practical steps to get started…
My tool of choice these days is Mindmeister; it’s freemium and completely cross platform right down to the tablet and smartphone levels. Full story at: How to Mind Map in Three Small Steps.
Getting Things Done [GTD] on the Internet…
Today I’m announcing an epic series called Getting Things Done [GTD] on the Internet. Every Friday for the foreseeable future I will post on some aspect of applying David Allen’s classic work “Getting Things Done” to the basics of Internet marketing…
I’d like to start by thanking those of you who have not read David Allen’s book — you have given me a competitive advantage for years! Seriously, though, I’m continually surprised at how many people have not read this classic work. For me, it ranks among the three best business books I’ve ever read. It’s right up there with the seven habits of highly effective people and that is saying a lot for me. In fact, I think these two books go together like peanut butter and chocolate; Stephen Covey‘s book provides a strategic framework on David Allen’s book gives great insight on how to implement Covey’s framework…
Allen says:
THE CORE PROCESS I teach for mastering the art of relaxed and controlled knowledge work is a five-stage method for managing workflow. No matter what the setting, there are five discrete stages that we go through as we deal with our work. We (1) collect things that command our attention; (2) process what they mean and what to do about them; and (3) organize the results, which we (4) review as options for what we choose to (5) do. This constitutes the management of the “horizontal” aspect of our lives—incorporating everything that has our attention at any time.
Allen, David (2002-12-31). Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (p. 24). Penguin. Kindle Edition.
In my practice, my emphasis is on what I call “practical, tactical social media“. Chapter 2 of Allen’s book gave me a tool that I apply in multiple was to the social media process…
In the next couple of weeks, I’ll be talking about how to apply this diagram to everything from email to social media management, including…
- Getting Things Done with Gmail, Google Apps and Google Tasks…
- Getting Things Done with Google Reader for ‘Personal News Aggregation‘…
- Getting Things Done with WordPress for Business Blogging…
- Getting Things Done with Twitter for social media…
- Getting Things Done with social media management…
I’ll also entertain ‘how would I apply Getting Things Done [GTD] to ________’ kind of questions if you have one you’d like to ask. I’ll share theses posts each Friday so you can ponder them and implement the parts you like over the weekend so stop by next Friday for Getting Things Done with Gmail, Google Apps and Google Tasks…
Bright, shiny objects! 
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