Your readers will not show you where to go! Have you ever realized that?
Our users will tell us where the pain is. Our users will drive incremental improvements. But the user community can't do the revolutionary innovation for us. That's up to us.
Kathy Sierra posted that fundamental statement on her great blog "Creating passionate users" in the article We can't leave innovation up to our users.
Despite all my latest articles about tools like 103bees or HitTail which allow you to analyze your inbound search engine traffic to get article topic suggestions YOU as the master of your publishing universe always must be one step beyond regarding content, technology and monetization!
If you sit back and start focusing on your users needs - which is very easy to do - then you will fall behind in the long run! Act in advance and cut back your effort for analyzing the past.
Read more ramblings about producing Blog Innovation ...
Success factors for Blog Innovation
Let's talk about the success by offering new premium solutions before the user even knows that he would like to use them:
But that does not mean that your customers are in control of designing your next breakthrough innovation! It will never happen...and those companies that try to "outsource" their product innovation to their customers will inevitably condemn themselves to a slow dead by innovation monotony and product insipidness.
Taken from another nice article about that subject: You cannot outsource innovation to your users!
Success story: performancing.com
Performancing.com success story is based on these rules. First they published the site and created the community. Second they offered Performancing for Firefox (PFF). Third success factor was the counter package PMetrics. The next innovations like the ad network solution (PAds?) are already viewable on the horizon. For the very important success milestones the p.com team always followed their own schedule based on internal research, development and deployment when they felt ready for it. The community is important but the product innovations are driven by the inner circle.
Innovations: Consequences YOU have to draw
- Create a time budget for research and development. Big healthy enterprise plan that budget to be 15% to 25% of their turnaround.
- If you feel like trying a new technology or strategy - do it! After creating the momentary solution don't put too much effort in polishing it. Chris once said that he loves the (bad) habit to polish the design of his sites - here a pixel, there a pixel. Don't! Instead make a big step: You have a WordPress blog and you are satisfied and plan to use WP for future projects. Why not install another system like Drupal or Textpattern to be familiar with the additional possibilities before you bet on the same horse all the time.
- Schedule frequent sessions for self reflection. Methods used could be brainstorming, mind mapping or a simple talk to some friends. The sense is to collect arguments about what hast to be done to be successful in the future.
- Cut back the times you are looking paralyzed at your statistics. Do it once a day or once a week. A productivity boost would be to learn ten finger typing or get knowledge about the magic of CSS. You get the picture.
- Be radical! There are always golden rules to question. Example: Does your blog really need comments? Do you really want to answer or follow comment threads? What about an innovation shown by Darren on his Photography School; he decided to not have comments, instead he created a Flickr group which offers a discussion forum and the possibility for users to participate by showing their pictures as follow-ups to Darrens articles. By doing that I am sure that he gained a lot of time for producing new articles and handling comment or trackback spam is no time consuming issue for him anymore. Smart and I am sure that his readers love that solution!
My personal development in publishing on the web always had the goal to simplify solutions and to use cutting edge technology. I started long time ago by publishing websites with Frontpage. Then I built dynamic pages using PHPNuke. Now I am publishing using Textpattern and all the smart side kick solutions like del.icio.us, Flickr, Technorati and promote my articles through ping services. I could still be successful by using something like Dreamweaver or Frontpage but for what price?
Resume: Make your moves!
How do YOU handle the "big steps"?
Technorati Tags: marketing, innovation, product, blog, creativity
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don't forget the next step
don't forget the next step of p.com team: the performancing exchange :)
Great post as we are used to.
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