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Book Review

Cranking Out Content

chrisbrogan · October 28, 2010 ·

Antique Printing Press
Blogging is tricky. Thinking up blog topics can take a lot of effort. Depending on what you’re covering, it can start to feel in short supply like you’ve covered every possible angle on your topic of interest. Further, as you get busy, your dedication to blogging often falls away. Here are some thoughts on how to crank out good content consistently.

It Takes Dedication

First off, if you’re not going to dedicate yourself to creating consistently good content, you’re not going to get there. This isn’t something you can phone in. What constitutes “good?” It must be useful to other people. It must provoke thoughts in your audience. It must be something that encourages more than one visit to your site (otherwise, you’ll miss opportunities down the road). So, agree that you want to use this blog as something of value to your audience, and dedicate yourself to creating consistent, thoughtful material that’s useful to an audience.

Topic Ideas

I get my blog topics from a lot of sources. As I’ve shifted a bit from writing about marketing and social media into writing about human business and social media, anything that I think is useful to helping humans do business better (in a relationship-minded, sustainable way) is fair game. The trick, always, is to keep my eyes open all day long, and to keep asking how I can be helpful to the people who come to my site.
Topic ideas usually come up from thinking of what will be most useful to your readers and audience. For instance, my audience is heavily comprised of marketers and small business entrepreneurs, as well as a spattering of large business functionaries who long for the days when they are master of their domain. With that in mind, I try to write about things that will help you improve your day. This post, for instance, should be helpful to your blogging effort.
Other times, topics come from a picture you’ve taken, or a sign you see, or something you’ve read in a book or another person’s blog. If you’re not reading books and blogs, then there’s no wonder you’re having trouble finding topics. Most ideas don’t come from a vacuum.
(The idea for this post came from writing 8 posts in a row for American Express OPEN Forum, and realizing that I think it’s really hard for me to run out of topics to cover.)

Brief and Useful

If you had two measures of your content, make them ‘brief’ and ‘useful.’ The other day, I wrote about making sure I get enough sleep. Honestly, it was a kind of “not sure what else to write about post.” It was also one of my most successful posts in the last several months. Why? Because it was a useful way for people to rethink how they’re spending their time. It wasn’t useful in the “how to get more followers on Twitter” way, but instead, it spoke to a broad audience of people.
The more often you can make a post useful, the better it will be received. If you find this post useful, it will get recurring traffic for a long time to come. My posts about blog topics get as much as 10% of my monthly traffic every month since I wrote them. No matter what else I cover, blog topics is “evergreen” content for me. That’s your goal, too. Write something that people can use for quite a long time.

Pictures, Audio, and Video

If you’re a text blogger, see what you can do about recording the occasional audio file. You can use something as easy as Cinch, or record a video chat in Skype, or you can use podcasting or videoblogging tools to create something even more compelling. You might just post photos as part of your posts. Christopher S. Penn does the occasional photo post, showing off his incredible skill for photography, and sometimes, when he’s feeling extra clever, he even formats the photos to become free iPad wallpaper. Talk about a commitment to good content.

Writing Schedule

Write when you find time. I wrote 12 posts (several for other blogs besides my own) while flying out to Las Vegas from Boston. I did it because I had hours and hours of time on a plane, and I knew that I wouldn’t have a lot of free time in the coming days. The more chances I have to write something when I’ve got some down time, the more opportunities I have to keep a one-or-two a day schedule with my blogging.
The world doesn’t make it easy for you to write. You’ve got family and work and lifestyle interruptions abound. The only way I can help you move past that is to recommend that you write when you’ve got a free moment, and that you write more than one piece at a time. The more times you can bucket up a blog post or two for a rainy day, the more times you will keep you schedule steady.
Another way to do this is to get the Editorial Calendar plugin, if you’re using WordPress. Zack Grossbart and Stresslimit Design have a great tool in this. I was talking to Brian Clark at Copyblogger, and he was saying that it changed how he’s managing his site. The same is true for me on some of my projects. Another great thing an editorial calendar does is ensure that you’re not accidentally covering the same topic more than once unintentionally.

Commit to a Series

One way to force yourself into writing compelling and useful content over a period of time is to commit yourself to writing or creating a series. If, for instance, you commit to a new book review a month, then you’ve got 12 of your blog posts spoken for in the coming months. A series is a great way to get your head into writing a lot in a row. For the record, Social Media 101 started out as a series of 100 posts on chrisbrogan.com

Your Mileage May Vary

Whatever you do, keep experimenting. See what you can do and you’ll be surprised with your results. Keep trying, just the same. The more you can commit to cranking out good content, the better your results will be on making the effort.
And if you find yourself with more than enough posts to serve your site, don’t forget the opportunity to write guest posts (affiliate link). It’s been one really great way that I’ve grown my own audience over time.
Thoughts? Questions? Details I need to fill in?

How Do You Stack Up

chrisbrogan · January 29, 2010 ·

titles Swing by any page at Alltop and browse the titles other bloggers are using. Now, compare their titles to yours. Which would you click? Go back and look at the last 30 days of your blog. How many posts does that encompass? If someone only had the last 30 days of your blog to go on, what would they say about it?
If you look at this graphic I copied, you’ll see a few titles that get your eyebrow raised. I found the experiment to be interesting, and even more interesting when I picked a topic material that wasn’t really my thing. It’s amazing how just the titles got me thinking about my own blog and what I could do better.
Just for fun, I grabbed the most recent titles from my blog. Here they are:

  • The Location Game – Over on OPENForum
  • Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3 Review
  • How Social Media Can Power Your Business – Kitchen Table Talks
  • Points of Contact
  • The Social Media Pie – over on OPEN Forum
  • How I Use Mindmapping to Write
  • Cubicle Farming
  • New Job New You – a Book Review
  • The Writing Practice
  • Switch- A Book Review
  • The Beginning – Kitchen Table Talks
  • How NOT to Help Haiti
  • How Systems Thwart Service
  • Your Farmer List
  • Living In Google Wave
  • What is Your Pop-Up Store
  • Get Seen- Do It Now
  • Represented by the APB Speaker’s Bureau
  • More Fun Than Competition
  • Business Stripped Bare – Book Review
  • Do One Thing Very Well
  • How Heartfelt Marketing Delivers
  • The Future Is Evidently Blurry
  • A Customer Aware World
  • Experiment- 30 Days of Bing
  • Deepen Your Networks
  • New Sponsor – Search Engine Strategies NYC
  • Are You Ready for Fun

There are four book reviews. There are four “announcement/promotion” type posts. There are seven video posts.
Of the titles, I think I did okay. I think they could be better. I’m sure Brian would tell me I could do better.
So, what do you think? How do YOU stack up? Does looking at other people’s titles and ideas help you think about your blog?
Can you see the value in comparisons, or, as I talk about in More Fun Than Competition, are you just competing with yourself?
If your blog was the next Wired / BusinessWeek / FastCompany / whatever-for-your-industry, how would you rate it?

Book Review: A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink

chrisbrogan · March 24, 2006 ·

Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age was a good read for me. It spoke of a shift from the days of the knowledge worker, into the conceptual age. What does this mean?
Moving further along on Thomas Friedman’s points in the seminal The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, Pink says that all the jobs knowledge workers are doing today are further at risk for global outsourcing. This week’s EWeek magazine agrees, mentioning that the next big wave of outsourcing will be business process outsourcing (HR departments will thin, finance teams, etc).
So what’s left for you and me to do?
Creative work.
Pink mentions that these are the six “senses” we must hone to be useful in the coming conceptual age:

  • Design– Everything requires creative design, and that can’t be simply outsourced. Not function, but the designer as a solution creator.
  • Story– Empirical facts are one thing. Being able to weave them into a convincing and useful narrative is where the value add will be. Numbers don’t tell stories. People wrap stories around numbers.
  • Symphony– I don’t like this term, because instead of symphony, Pink seems to be talking about synthesis. People can work with metaphors, disparate elements, etc.
  • Empathy– All those “soft” skills that have been rumored to be important ARE. Logic isn’t the only key.
  • Play– Play is growing as a way to educate as well as entertain. Even the US Army relies on it.
  • Meaning– As things become ubiquitous, we will become more and more concerned with finding meaning in our lives. Pink follows Victor Frankl’s assertion that mankind’s most important search is for the meaning of our lives.
    The book starts with some physical and neurological explanations about the brain, focusing heavily on the composition of left and right brains in the concrete. I found this mildly off-putting, because I wanted to get right into the concepts. You might feel otherwise.
    Each section covering one of the six senses has a playbook, which includes some ideas and further resources for how to develop these traits within ourselves. Pink did a great job of equipping someone interested in improving their conceptual age skills, though I felt like the resources got a little thin around Empathy, Play, and Meaning. Mostly Play. It bothered me that he mostly showed us links to video game sites and not so much for the other methods of play (live action, board games, etc).
    I strongly recommend this book. I found it readily available at my local library, or you can pick it up easily at Amazon.
    [email]
    tags: review, danielpink, conceptual, design

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