Blogging Advice

I’ve been listening to Made to Stick on audiobook and it’s inspiring me in the way I blog. This book is already being called one of the best business books ever written because it shows clearly how to make you ideas memorable, or sticky (as the authors call it).

One of the things the authors state is that simplicity is very important if you want to create memorable ideas. When they simplicity, they mean finding your core message and cutting out the extraneous elements. By doing this, it makes it much easier for people to remember your idea.

This principle is definitely a great idea when working online, because – let’s face it – most people going online are very busy and have tons of distractions. If you communicate more than one core message, your messages will probably get lost in the noise of online information.

Let’s apply this principle to blogging. If you want your posts to be memorable, to be remembered even months later, you need to be able to just say one thing. Have a central theme for each of your posts.

Remember from English college class when the professor gave you the first step for creating a good term paper: come up with a great thesis statement – not two or more. And then as you write your paper, make sure the rest of your paper supports that statement.

Sadly, too often my posts don’t have a clear thesis statement but go into many different tangents and are hard to follow. Also, I find myself covering too many topics in a single post.

The Inverted Pyramid Journalism Technique

One of the tools that’s helped me write more focused posts comes from the world of journalism. I found out about it in Made to Stick. It’s called the inverted pyramid and it helps journalists craft their stories.

It’s called the inverted pyramid because at the top of an inverted pyramid is the widest part, which represents the most important part of the story. This is like a thesis statement and should go at the beginning of the story. You want the most crucial information at the beginning of the post to “hook” your reader and get them to read more of your post. For the rest of the story, savvy journalists will share details supporting the core message. Each succeeding paragraph is less and less important than the opening paragraph that contains the core message.

Sometimes the most crucial information is not the apparent right away so don’t be afraid to take some time to think of the most important info and then craft a relevant title and opening paragraph based on that info.

Also, this technique also works for non-writers. If your preferred medium is something like audio or video, you can get a lot of value from the technique. In your audio podcast or video, start it off with the most important info to grab the attention of your audience. Then craft the rest of your audio or video content with material that supports that info.

From thefreedictionary.com:

simmer To be in a state of gentle ferment: thoughts simmering in the back of her mind.

Some of my most well received blog posts have been ones that I’ve let simmer for a couple days before publishing them. What I say simmer, what I basically mean is not creating your blog post in one sitting. Instead, you come up with the initial blog post topic and then mull over it for a couple of days. During this time period, I often do these three things to facilitate the simmering process:

1. Take notes
2. Do research
3. Create a rough draft

1. Take Notes

Taking notes is very important because it keeps you from losing or forgetting a good idea for your post. Fortunately, our minds will often give us great ideas without our effort. However, we often get these ideas when we least expect it (in the shower, while driving, right after waking up, etc.). Therefore, it’s good to have a way to capture your ideas easily – whether you have some index cards by your bed or you use your smartphone as a voice recorder while driving.

2. Do Research

Research can form a valuable section of your blog post. By pointing to other sources, you give credibility to your views as well as point your readers to other perspectives on the same topic.

A couple days before you sit down to create your post, consume online content about your topic. Of course, taking notes works hand in hand with doing research, so keep your PDA or a pen and paper handy to capture interesting ideas.

If you’re really ambitious, I recommended reading a book or two on your subject.

One last thing on this point: don’t make your post just like a mini-research paper. Make sure to also include your personal experience since blogging is a personal medium and more importantly, your experience is the best source for content.

3. Create a Rough Draft

I don’t usually create a rough draft, but for the posts I let simmer, I’ve found it very helpful to create a rough draft. Rough drafts help a lot because those posts tend to be much longer and more in-depth than the average 200-400 word post. A rough draft can make the process more manageable so you don’t get overwhelmed with all the information you’ve accumulated. Also, if I’ve collected a great deal of data, I’ll create an outline too to organize the data before I write the rough draft.

Advantages and Disadvantages

You’ll end up with higher quality posts by letting them simmer first. These type of posts will be more in-depth than the vast majority of posts already out there. Your posts will stand out, attract links and traffic, and build your online reputation.

However, as you probably can tell, it takes time to develop these posts. Your post frequency will suffer if your try to do the simmering process on every single post. So, if you want to post multiple times a week, you probably can’t let every post simmer because simmering takes time.

Still, I would try to use the process 1-2 times a month. This strategy provides a balance between post frequency and post quality. You can post multiple times a week and still creating that memorable, longer, more in-depth post once or twice a month.

Over to You

Have you ever tried to let your blog posts simmer? If you have, what was your experience?

In my last post, I wrote that sharing your experience is a great way to blog. Your experience from running a business can provide many interesting blog post topics.

With that in mind, here are some ideas and questions to consider to help you get started.

1. Are there common problems in your industry that you have solved? Write about your experience solving these problems.

2. If you sell many products, what are your favorite products and why? Product reviews are very useful for many people. Also, make sure to include the product name in your title. This will help you get more search engine traffic.

3. Blog about the most interesting people you’ve interacted with in your business.  These people could be customers, employees, business partners, competitors, or even other business bloggers.

4. Humor is usually a great angle to take in your blog posts.  Think of the funniest moments you’ve had while running your business and share it in a couple of blog posts.

5. How did you get involved in your industry? Tell the story of how you first got interested in your niche.

6. How did you start your business? Tell the story of how you first got your business going.

7. Write about a typical day at work.  Make sure to go in-depth and cover the whole work day.

8. Write about the most enjoyable part of running your business.

9. Write about the most difficult part.

10. In your interactions with people outside your industry, what are some common misconceptions they have about it?

The more I’ve been blogging, the more I see that tapping into your experience is the best source for blog post topics.

The posts where I share my experience are usually better received than my other posts. They get more traffic and comments.

Business Owners Have an Advantage

If you’re not familiar with blogs, you may not realize that many non-business bloggers don’t have a lot of experience. As a business owner, you have an advantage because you’re involved in your industry on a day to day basis whereas your average blogger is an amateur or a hobbyist.

I don’t want to downplay amateurs. In fact, there are many amateurs that have as much or more expertise than business owners. But for the most part, business owners have more experience.

Experience Trumps Book Knowledge

For many new business bloggers, after blogging for a while, they feel like they are running out of things to say. They had a good number of topics to cover but they can’t thing of any more topics.

For these bloggers, the problem is not seeing their experience as a source of blog topics. They feel like they don’t have anything left to share because they don’t keep up with their industry as much as they would like by reading books and magazines. However, practical experience is usually a better teacher than sharing something from a book.

Once these bloggers start seeing their experience as a vast knowledge pool, they overcome writer’s block and generate more than enough topics to keep their blog going.

This article, Report vs Expert, helped me realize this point. Yaro Starak, the author, argues that expert status is gained by having relevant experience and then sharing it.  By sharing your experience, you give evidence that you are an expert in your field and your knowledge is worth listening to.  You’re not just a reporter, or someone who just relays someone else’s content.

Yaro writes that it’s all about leveraging what you’ve experienced and overcoming fear and insecurity by sharing it with others.  Here’s a relevant quote from his article:

Most people fail to become experts (or perceived as experts) because they don’t leverage what they already know. Every person who lives a life learns things as they go, takes action every day and knows something about something. The reason why they never become an expert is because they choose not to (which is fine for some, not everyone wants to be an expert), but if your goal is to blog your way to expertise and leave the world of reporting behind you have to start teaching and doing so by leveraging real experience.

Experience can come from what you do today and what you have done previously, you just need to take enough steps to demonstrate what you already know and what you are presently learning along your journey. I know so many people in my life who are experts simply by virtue of the life they have lived, yet they are so insecure about what they know, they never commit their knowledge to words for fear of…well fear.

Over to You

How often do you blog about your experience?

Eben Pagan has some of the best productivity/time management content for small business owners especially those that do their work on the internet. Here’s a recent video he did. It has a lot of great advice. I don’t usually take notes while consuming content, but Eben’s video had such great content that I found myself pausing the video at important points and taking notes.

Here are the concepts I found useful.

Don’t Multitask; Instead, Focus

The best work schedule is filled with short work bursts of concentrated focus of about one hour. Studies have shown that this time period is about how long we are capable of staying focused on a task without needing a break or experiencing degradation in our ability to focus.

Multitasking is very bad for productivity. Very bad. Multitasking lowers your IQ more than marijuana! Therefore, we need work environments that keep distractions and interruptions at a minimum.

Avoiding multitasking means doing one thing and one thing only.  Adhering to this rule is very important since it’s so easy to get distracted while working online.

We have to learn how control our “monkey mind”. This terms refers to the times when our brain stops focusing and gets distracted with thoughts unrelated to the task at hand. Having short work periods of about one hour helps, but we still have to be disciplined to continually refocus our mind when it wanders.

Breaks are Good

Our bodies have a natural rhythm. We will have energy for about 90-120 minutes and then we’ll hit a lull. Anticipate this lull and don’t fight it.  It’s your body telling you to take a break.  Taking a short 10 minute break away from work to let the body rejuvenate itself. If you avoid these breaks, you’ll overwork and damage your body.

Overwork leads to missing out on the big picture. We lose who we are and why we got into the business world in the first place.

Set Yourself Up With a Great First Hour

The first hour of your day is the most important hour of the day. You yourself are the biggest leverage point in your business, so use that hour to take care of yourself. Focus on making yourself strong physically, mentally, and emotionally.

Eben’s sample first hour goes something like this:

1. Drink one liter of water
2. Exercise for 20-30 minutes
3. Meditate for 5-10 minutes
4. Eat a healthy meal
5. Read for 5-10 minutes

Along with improving your productivity, this first hour will help you produce better work.  If you’re taking care of yourself, you’ll take care of your customers and business partners better.

Again, here’s the video. Check it out and let me know what you think.

About a week ago, a business blogger came to me wondering why she wasn’t getting more traffic. She had just started her blog three months ago. She said she checked out a successful blog in her industry and was publishing posts similar to the posts on that blog.

I checked out the successful blog she was talking about. It was a three year old blog with mostly short posts. The posts were usually less than 100 words and included one picture.

I told her this blog gets a lot of traffic not so much because of its content but because it got started earlier when there wasn’t a lot of competition in the “blogosphere”, or blogging world. Sure, the content wasn’t low quality but today you need to have higher quality content to generate a lot of traffic.

Today, the posts that attract links and traffic are usually longer posts. When I say “longer posts”, I mean content that is at least 400 words. And oftentimes the longer, the better.

Longer posts get more links because they have higher perceived value. The successful blogs less than two years old all seem to have long posts as the bulk of their content.

Still, many bloggers are trying to build an audience with short posts. This trend allows allows bloggers who write longer, more in-depth posts to stand out from the crowd and earn the attention of more readers. There is much more competition today in the blogosphere. Anything that allows you to differentiate your blog should be considered.

Also, long posts are usually more unique than short posts. Short posts tend to just be commentary of an interesting link. These type of posts are not very unique. They are easy to emulate and many people are already publishing these short, commentary link posts.

Even if your style is to write short posts, I would at least try mixing in a longer post 1-3 times a month.

How long is your average post?