Category

Communications

Aug 16
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Six Ways to Keep your Blogging Commitment

By Communications

More than 95 percent of blogs are abandoned! By virtue of sticking it out, staying in the game and continuing to blog, you (and I) become leaders in the blogosphere. Here are six ways to keep up the blog:

1. Schedule your time to write. What time can you give to your blogging efforts? 20 minutes a day when you’ve turned everything else off and you’re in a chair tapping away at a keyboard will do the trick. Are you a better writer in the morning or evening? Put that time on your calendar and protect it like it’s your child.

2. Get a blogging partner – keep one another accountable by reading and commenting on each other’s posts.

3. Guest post for someone else – sometimes a deadline on someone else’s schedule will kick your butt into gear.

4. Institute a bribe (or get your partner to do it. ) I will share with you that I just offered my teammates for the collaborative corporate blog I manage an opportunity to win a Jar of Pie. Suddenly everyone is enthusiastic.

5. Join a group of other local bloggers and meet them for coffee, lunch, drinks — whatever — just get together in person periodically to talk about the blogging process, to learn from one another and be inspired.

6. Think about why you started your blog. Why was it important to you? What is the blog’s purpose? Write that down and stick it on the wall or the fridge or somewhere you’ll see it and it will remind you, often, of why you’re here, blogging like the rest of us nut jobs. It’s important, and you ARE making a difference to someone.

Need more help? I highly recommend Chris Brogan’s post How to Blog Almost Every Day.

Aug 11
Love0

Five Steps to Take After you Publish a Blog Post

By Communications

So you finally got down to it, wrote and published a blog post. Think you’re done? Hardly!

Here are five steps to take to make sure that people actually find and read your blog post:

1. Do a Google blog search on the topic of your post. Find other posts that are similar in nature, read them and, if appropriate, leave a comment.

2. Share the link to your post across your social networks — on Twitter, Facebook and if appropriate, LinkedIn.

3. If your business/company/organization has a Facebook page, post the link to the post (if it is relevant to the business) on the page.

4. Think about who you know who is not an active part of your social network, but who would really appreciate what you’ve just written. You can probably think of a couple of people. Send them the link in an individually addressed e-mail.

5. If you are lucky enough to have generated some comments, respond to them.

Jul 07
Love0

Collaborative Blogs, like Vampires, Suck

By Communications

For years, I  have been recommending that companies collaborate on a corporate blog. The thinking, of course, is that if there are more people shouldering the responsibility of the business’s online presence, then each contributing person will have to invest less time, individually.

Well, I was wrong about how collaborative blogs work in practice. Sure, in theory, I’m right — if there’s a team regularly and consistently contributing to a blog, then it can work and really rock. In reality, it rarely happens and if it does happen, there’s some arm-twisting involved, for sure.

Collaborative blogs, though, suck time from people who feel like they don’t have any to begin with; they suck energy out of people who were once enthusiastic contributors and writers, when they end up having blogging as an item on their “to do” list. They suck the fun out of a company that otherwise, and in other places (e.g. in person, on the phone), enjoys telling the stories of the organization. They suck for the people left holding the leash and feeding the beast because it exists and is important, but there’s no accountability (stick, carrot, or otherwise). In short, they suck.

I’ve contributed to collaborative, multiple author blogs of several types. They work best when there’s absolute buy-in from contributors. They work when contributors are contributing because they want to and get out of it what they want (money, accolades, satisfaction, engagement, the thrill of writing, etc.) They work when contributors are very passionate about their topic. They work when contributors always have a lot to say or share.

They DON’T work, or do particularly well when there’s no clear manager or leader. It’s difficult to maintain a collaborative blog unless, in reality, the blog is restructured to have one main voice or contributor and others who function as guest bloggers, with appearances so infrequent that name and voice recognition does not exist among the blog’s readership. Another model some have adopted is a rigorous schedule, e.g. Alex posts every Monday. Bob posts on Wednesdays. June posts on Thursdays. Fridays are a combined-effort post containing social bookmarking links of what the team read that week. It works, but only if Alex, Bob and June clearly understand that this blogging thing is PART OF THEIR JOB. And often, the only way they will understand this is if their blog participation is part of their review and impacts their compensation and/or job performance rating.

Have you seen a truly collaborative blog model that works? What is happening behind the scenes?