You don’t need ideas, open Google Reader or join #Blogchat. You’ll have enough ideas to write posts for the next year.
The problem is, when you actually WRITE the post, then it’s real. Then you are dangerously close to publishing it. Which means suddenly everyone will see it, and read it, and judge it.
And yet, you are often the harshest judge of your own work. Too often, you assume that your post isn’t worthy of the reader, before they have a chance to dismiss it. So it stays in your Draft folder, mocking you.
If you visit your favorite blogging tips and marketing tips blog today, you will come across a lot of tips, ranging from tips on writing well to tips on building an audience.
The reality is that a lot of new blogs spring up every day, and the majority of these blogs are bound to fail right from the beginning. It’s not because there is something wrong with their approach, but because they fail to neglect something really important: their wellbeing.
Do you know that blogging is not only a physical challenge? It is also a mental challenge.
There are a lot of things we bloggers go through every day that no amount of practice will help make easier, but by focusing on being okay in every aspect of our lives (mental, emotional, physical, etc.) we’ll find those challenges easier to deal with.
In this article I’ll be touching some subjects bloggers hardly discuss online, and I’ll be giving tips to help you deal with them.
Go to the source if you’d like the rest of author John Smith’s perspective. Comment or ‘connect’ to talk about how this applies to you and your organization…
One of my new, favorite bloggers Heidi Cohen has these thoughts on blog design for you to ponder…
Writers at heart, many bloggers rush through selecting their blog design elements without much thought when they first start. But the reality is that design is core to your blog’s brand and readership. Therefore, out-of-the box blog set-ups most likely won’t work for you.
Blog design doesn’t require artistic training. It requires strategic (read: high level) thought, determining your blog’s goals and target audience (aka: persona) before you jump in and start blogging.
Review the blogs you read frequently to become familiar with your options. Consider which blogs you like and which elements of those blogs attract your attention. Make a list of those elements you want and those that you don’t want.
Here are twenty-one blog design elements that you don’t have to be a graphic designer to select…
Go to the source if you are interested in her 21 elements. Me? Through a long and rigorous evaluation process, I have decided to become a Woo Themes developer. I won’t bore you with the details of my search, but it literally lasted years. Woo offers over 100 themes that look good ‘out of the box’ but are also very easy for me to customize to a client’s specifications…
Heidi’s right! Much more important than the design is the actual strategy. Adam Osborne said “Adequacy is sufficient. All else is superfluous” and I agree. When it comes to design, I believe a tweaked Woo theme may be all you need – as I tell my clients, ‘Google doesn’t search for pretty’. I focus instead on delivering to my clients a system or toolkit with a repeatable process that is easy to use based on the premise that if it’s easy and fun to do, they might actually do it. On the back end, I have been working hard this year to link my ‘e1evation workflow’ more deeply to the value demands of my target audience by linking keywords to the problems my target audience is trying to solve. If you use a repeatable process like mine for your blogging and use a Woo theme for your site, you will draw your target audience in and the design won’t scare them away!
Heidi’s thoughts on determining your blog’s goals and target audience are must read before getting started — comment or ‘connect’ so we can talk about how this applies to you and your organization…
Francine Hardaway of Stealthmode Partners has some good thoughts about brand building for beginners here…
So you’ve made the resolution that in 2012 you are finally going to “get into” social media and use it to build a brand for yourself or your business. You’re not a geek, and you’re not with a big corporation that already has a social media team or a fairly savvy marketing department. For you, time is of the essence. You don’t have all day to give to this endeavor which is why you haven’t done it already. So here’s what to do in ten easy steps:
1) If you don’t already own it, buy the domain name for yourself and/or your business. I gave my grandchildren their domain names when they were born.
2) If you have some area of expertise that you would like to showcase, start a blog. Use WordPress or Blogger because they are free, hosted, and have some built in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) juice. Point the DNS to your brand domain. Your domain registrar can help you do this. This will stop your blog’s address from being http://buppythepuppy.wordpress.com and make it http://buppythepuppy.com. (Yes, I branded my golden retriever). Shorter and easier for people who want to go there. And don’t expect traffic or comments. That’s not the objective. Authority is the goal.
No worries, you won’t have to blog every day. Just sit down once a week or so and write 500 words about your field of expertise or your major interest. Or take pictures, make video, or record sound. Just contribute to your blog, and keep the subject matter related to what you want your brand to be known for (fishing experts should not write about wine, even if they love it). Your blog is found by its keywords, so write about something in which the same keywords might occur in almost every post.
I agree with and have applied these 10 steps over the years – you can go to the source if you want the rest. To her observations about blogging I would add this; I’m an advocate of posting every day to drive traffic to my site. I agree that at least once a week, you should do the ‘thoughtful creation post’ about your field of expertise or your major interest. On the other days, however, I think it’s a good practice to showcase other thought leaders in your industry through curation like I did here…
WordPress. Where would I be without it? Most likely living a life of quiet obscurity in Algoma, WI. Thanks to WordPress, however, I have a global platform and people can find me in Google. Does it work? Well? You’re reading this, aren’t you?
I love WordPress! Here’s another great blogger I found who is using it well. I was drawn in by this quote — “Many times on my journey I stopped short, convinced I would never find the place I was trying to find, only to discover that it was right in front of me all the time. (M. Beattie)” — and liked the rest of what I saw while I was there. I now subscribe to ‘Breathe.Smile.LetGo.’…
The other day I was driving along and realized suddenly that it takes more effort than it used to for me to brake. It got me to thinking about how that gradual change in my brakes’ effectiveness has finally caught up enough for it to be noticeable. It was nothing that happened over night. It was a combination of events that have occurred over the past 40 thousand miles. And then I started thinking about the larger picture… Did you know that if … Read More
This independence day, I declare independence from…
Trying to manage the unmanageable…
Anger and resentment related to the first item…
Substances that stimulate or depress…
Anything that’s keeping me from being a more authentic me…
I’ll give myself 30 days and I’ve entered these issues into Habitforge to help keep me on track. July is going to be a hell of a month — you may want to wait until August to talk to me…
From time to time, I post a list of WordPress plugins that I’m currently using. It must be that time…
Click to enlarge...
I think the best recent find is Google Docs Embedder which allows me to easily display documents without having to post them to Scribd first. How about you? Have any good ones to pass along?
Blogging? ProBlogger has an interesting perspective on monetizing your blog…
It has been a year now since an eventful day when I was browsing the Internet and clicked on an advertisement that seemed an obvious scam: Get 90% off a new iPad. “Yeah, right,” I thought. But I wanted to check it out anyway since I seemed to recall seeing the same ad previously, and I wondered if it was a new type of scam I should be aware of. As it turned out, it wasn’t a scam, just misleading advertising … and thus began my blog on penny auctions, which are a class of entertainment auctions.
I found the idea exciting enough to blog about. I was just getting interested in multi-player game theory and thought that auctions are a nice field to study. The problem was, I had no experience of problogging at all. Like so many others, all I previously had was a blog for my random musings but nothing serious. I had a very elementary knowledge of SEO which I gained working as a freelance writer. I knew nothing about how to rank well in Google or how to use backlinks effectively. As a writer, the only promotional tool I did know about was article marketing.
I started this blog in May 2010, and it’s been growing for one year now. Looking back, I have learned so much and there is still so much to learn. Here is my journey in a nutshell.
You can follow the ‘via’ link above if you’re interested in the ‘journey’, but personally, I wouldn’t start something like this on a Blogger blog. Despite what you might think, they are not at good at driving Search Engine Optimization [SEO] as WordPress. I mean a Google product should produce great Google search results, right? Wrong! Comment, call or ‘connect’ so we can talk about how this applies to your organization…
The good Lord has put some amazing people in my path. For a guy ‘straight outta Wisconsin’, I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to collaborate with some pretty high octane people. One of them is Nilofer Merchant. Now Nilofer herself is not in need of a ‘total beauty makeover’ but her web presence was another issue altogether…
Nilofer and I met and worked together at Apple during the ‘Think Different‘ campaign — she at the ‘mothership’ in Cupertino and me at the field office in Chicago. We both left Apple and went on to other things; she to GoLive, Rubicon Consulting, writing a couple of books and me to eventually start e1evation, llc. Thanks to social networking, our paths crossed again recently. I commented to her that I was surprised to see a global thought leader like her using Posterous for her blog. She remembered that comment and a couple of weeks ago asked if I would guide her through the process of moving to WordPress…
The old Posterous site; click to enlarge...
For her theme, we chose the highly modifiable Canvas from Woo Themes and designing the site was ‘easy peasy lemon squeezy’ due to their flexible and powerful approach to WordPress theme design. We still have a few things to clean up, but Nilofer, being the hard charging kick ass girl she is, couldn’t wait to ‘go live’. You can view her site online at http://nilofermerchant.com but don’t follow her unless you want your world rocked!
The new site; click to enlarge
Are you a great thinker that wants to engage in ‘thought leadership’ marketing? Do what Nilofer did. Ask me to guide you through the process. Comment, call or ‘connect’ so we can get started…
Long before I was a website developer, I was in sales and sales management. The other day, I had a convo with a fellow sales puke and we were discussing the top 3 sales movies of all time. They were, in our opinions, Glengarry Glen Ross, Boiler Room and, of course, Tommy Boy! Here’s the best sales team meeting of all time imho [warning: NSFW!]…
Blake, Alec Baldwin’s sales manager character says ABC means ‘always be closing’, but if you’re a blogger I say ABC means ‘always be curating’!
In my weltanschauung [worldview for those of you behind on your German], blogging, on one level, is little more than the public e-mailing and bookmarking. After all, what is a blog post but a “to whom it may concern” memo to the world? Because most people save bookmarks and send e-mails and links to one another they already have the basic instincts they need for thought leadership marketing. They are however using tools that are sub optimal for the task at hand. Even the person who has 1 million people in their address book cannot match the reach of a tool that can reach out to 2 billion people on the Internet.
What then are the right tools? I believe they are the 10+ tools in the elevation workflow…
Google Chrome
Gmail
Google Reader and Feedly
Shareaholic
Posterous
WordPress
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
MailChimp
YouTube
Dlvr.it
I firmly believe that anyone who wants to be a thought leader can use this combination of tools to establish their public point of view. Many people are using some or all of these tools but have not aligned them in an optimal fashion.
I want to take a moment to talk about Shareaholic. When teaching social media I tell my classes if you only add one extension to Google Chrome [or Firefox], make it Shareaholic. Why? Because Shareaholic is the one tool that allows you to always be curating. With the Shareaholic extension installed I am always ready to share content to the appropriate channel in my vast Internet publishing empire. Shareaholic, I have said earlier, is the Swiss Army knife of sharing. Allow me to demonstrate…
Curation not only adds authority to your public brand, but it will also rock your SEO. Shareaholic is the secret to my success, because with it, to paraphrase Night Ranger, I’m curating and blogging 25 hours a day…
I believe that the elevation workflow is a kick ass solution for thought leadership marketing. Comment, call or ‘connect’ so we can talk about how this applies to your organization — I’m always available for Personal Digital Coaching on the ‘e1evation workflow’…
Some thoughts on beginning blogging from a writer at FlowingData…
I answered a few questions for Amstat News not too long ago, and the questions were centered around why I, as a stat grad student, take the time to write for FlowingData and why others should give blogging a try. The questions were more from a career standpoint, but it really all comes down to this. It’s fun.I have fun picking apart designs and playing with data. It’s fun reading comments. It’s fun looking at others’ work. It’s fun learning how to make stuff. It’s fun getting emails from people who were totally scared of numbers, but are now taking stat courses.
People often ask me how much time I spend writing posts, but it’s like asking someone how much he watches TV or plays video games. How many hours have you spent roaming an art gallery?
I’ll let you in on a little secret though. Maintaining a blog doesn’t take as much time as you think. You just need to manage your time wisely. Don’t waste minutes checking stats, tweaking design, etc. Get rid of the extraneous, and you’re just writing in a journal. Doogie Howser wrote every day and he was a doctor and he had a social life. So it must be possible.
Hold on. I think I have a point here.
I guess—if you’re thinking about starting a blog, go for it. I highly encourage it. FlowingData has definitely been a good thing for me. There’s a book on the way, and I’ve been lucky to connect with people and groups I probably never would have been able to otherwise. But don’t just do it because you think it’ll advance your career. Do it because you actually like what you’re doing, and other stuff will follow. It’ll be much more fun that way.
Sorry for the longish curation excerpt, but this was a great post by ‘askflowingdata’ at the FlowingData blog that I just had to share! Comment, call or ‘connect’ so we can talk about how this applies to your organization. btw, here’s a bit of ‘Doogie Howser’ eye candy for those unfamiliar with the reference…
In many ways, blogging is no more difficult than sending an email and much more effective in the long run…
“If you’re a great baker or known for your mad IT skills, chances are you get asked the same things over and over again. You probably also end up fielding distress calls from frantic friends struggling with a pie gone awry or a blue screen of death. Instead of typing out the same email responses repeatedly or talking yet another person through a troubleshooting process, slap up a web page with your own personal Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ’s) and answers.
Next time you’re tapping out 2 single-spaced pages to Aunt Gertrude describing photosynthesis in all its glory and splendor, consider emailing it to something like Posterous instead; then, fire Aunt Gertrude a link to the page. Now, not only will Trudy have all the chlorophyll-related knowledge [she] can tolerate, but Google will probably stop by and maybe send some other interested parties your way. And the next time somebody hits you up about it, you need only send them a link to that thing you already wrote instead of rehashing the same crap all over again!
We think that’s a pretty ingenious approach to helping people out with a minimum of impact on your valuable time. Of course, there will always be times when you’ll want to help someone directly instead of pushing them off to a web site, but building a personal FAQ is still a smart idea. Your friends and family will probably appreciate it, too, since they might feel weird about bothering you during the dinner hour to help them solve a problem. This way, they don’t have to.” Source: Create a Personal FAQ for Friends Who Want Your Advice – Troubleshooting – Lifehacker
I originally started blogging when I became chairman of a local volunteer organization. I didn’t want to spam members with every great article I found so I posted the ‘just in case’ info on a blog so I could save ‘just in time’ info for emails — that way I didn’t offend members with too much information and they actually kinda paid attention when I sent an email because they knew it wasn’t just another good website I found. A year later, I was stunned to see that my posts had attracted 25,000 pageviews from 93 countries and I was hooked on blogging forever…
This blog has evolved from the simple strategy outlined in the source. In many ways, the blog is little more than a repository for all the cool stuff I find every morning in my ‘virtual newspaper’. Like the source author, if I have something brilliant to say in email or a resource to share, I post it first and then send it based on the principle that if it’s worth sharing with one person, it’s worth sharing with billions. The fact of the matter is you don’t have time NOT to blog! Comment, call or ‘connect’ so we can talk about how this applies to your organization…
Francine Hardaway of Stealthmode Partners has some good thoughts about brand building for beginners here…
Bright, shiny objects! 
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