Skip links

Performancing

Main navigation

Featured

7 Time Management Tips for Bloggers

by

You want your writing to be inspired, but that in itself can be an obsession, and selecting a topic to blog about can take up a good chunk of your day, if you let it, and work still has to get done. Yet it doesn’t have to be that way. Here are some tips to manage your blogging workflow, choose blog post topics, and make efficient use of your time.

The Problem

One of the problems with having Web content aggregator tools at your disposal like Google Reader, AllTop, YourVersion, or TechMeme (for tech topics) is that you can easily get caught up in cataloging or bookmarking every new post — especially those with breaking news from a few minutes ago. If you do this, yes you’ll be aware of all kinds of breaking news and other trends in the blogosphere, but if your objective is to blog, you’re no closer to your goal if you’re spending hours looking at what’s going on online. Just like the saying “writers write,” be of the mindset that “bloggers blog.”

Nip Idea Acquisition Obsession and Pick a Topic

To make efficient use of your time, develop the skill of choosing suitable topics for your blog posts and get writing. Here are some suggestions to help you filter your choices.

1. Stop searching.

First and foremost, stop scanning your aggregators and adding new items to your list of references. Close your Web browser tabs – or at least the ones with your aggregators. Trust yourself that if you’re reasonably knowledgeable about your niche, you have enough references to trigger some ideas for a blog post.

2. Check your editorial calendar.

If you have one, use it as a filter for your current list of “hot topics”. Maybe something one blogger wrote coincides with an item on your editorial calendar and you can add to the “conversation” of that topic.

3. Check what’s trending on Twitter.

If you don’t have an editorial calendar, see what the trending topics are on Twitter. The new home page makes it easy; you don’t even have to have a Twitter account (though you should).

4. Look at Google Trends.

If you want a more long-term view of popular topics, use Google Trends to compare the search frequencies (on Google) of two or more keywords/ keyphrases.

5. Pick at random.

If tips #2-4, above, don’t help you, just pick at random. Assuming you have already been selective about what’s in your list of references,choosing a topic at random from the list is far better than wasting time trying to decide what to write about.

6. Set a timer.

If I have a large daily quota of articles and I have a client who needs news-y posts, setting a timer for each post helps me immensely. Sure, I might be able to write 800 words on some celebrity’s passing, but if 200 will do and the priority is to get the news out fast, then I can revisit a longer post later. Think of it as a link-building opportunity: write a shorter post now and link back with a longer post later.

Another area of obsession can be choosing the “right” image for your post. I use Flickr and filter for CC-licensed content. Sometimes certain keywords just don’t turn up the “right” image. If not, use a “first fit” approach: change search keywords and take the first image that works. It doesn’t have to be perfect, else you can easily get caught up in browsing for something “better”. Worst case: browse at most 3-4 pages of Flickr search results and pick the best one from each page. Compare the selections and pick one so you can get on with your day.

7. Write.

Just write.

  • Don’t cripple your creativity by mentally imposing minimum word limits for your blog posts. You might have those, but don’t write as if you do. If you learn efficient blogging, there’ll be some time to edit to length.
  • Don’t cripple creativity by worrying about SEO. As you become a better writer, you’ll learn to copywrite in a way that gives you good anchor text for both internal and external hyperlinks. But if you obsess your wording for the sake of one or two links, then you need to go back to Tip #6, above.
  • Don’t cripple your creativity by trying to write linearly. If something compelling comes to mind, just write it down. You can rearrange sections of your post later. That’s what editing time is for. (Of course, if you have 15-30 minute deadlines for posts, there’s not much time for that. But then that’s a whole different issue. Hopefully you don’t have a client who expects quality in 15 minutes, but if you do, here are some tips for writing effective news posts.)

How do you keep your blogging time in check? Or do you let it dominate your entire day?

Disclosure: I have share options in YourVersion, a real-time Web content discovery engine.

Image: Flickr.

Is It Too Easy to Blog?

by

There’s an interesting anti- blogging op-ed rant in the Baltimore Sun by Garrison Keillor, an amusing American writing icon who’s known for classics such as Lake Wobegon Days and A Prairie Home Companion. In the rant, entitled “When everyone’s a writer, no one is,” Keillor gives an entertaining slap in the face to blogging and microblogging, suggesting that the Internet has made us both literate in terms of increasing reading interest, though simultaneously reduced the value of writing. I mean, who wants to pay for something when you can probably find it for free or which is easy to steal? [Via Writers Write.]

That sounds about right, but the irony that the Baltimore Sun’s web page has Google AdSense ads smack-dab in the middle of Keillor’s op-ed piece isn’t lost on me. If this is what traditional publishers think they have to do to survive, then so be it. Now, I just had an email conversation earlier today with someone who wants to buy a few old sites that I’d previously bartered from someone else. The potential buyer wanted me to also add more content, which I wasn’t interested in even before he tipped his hat by making a mention that you can buy 10 posts for $20. That was because I’d mentioned to him that when I had tried to find writers for my sites, that was what I was quoted, by people who knew the niche well.

The $2/post might be available for some niches, but you will get exactly what you pay for: writing that’s likely unreadable and would take you far too long to edit than just write yourself. Specialized niches, on the other hand, require you to stay on top of the market, do extra research. I won’t give away the niche, but let me put it this way: if I have to watch a 1.5 hour TV show just to do some research to write one single post for $2, there’s something seriously wrong with the industry. You can’t live off that kind of workflow and rate. Worse are those who think everyone should now write for that rate, regardless of where you live. (One guy from Buffalo, NY, a few years ago, offered me a $1.50/post even though I repeatedly said I lived in Toronto, Canada. I’m now in Silicon Valley, California, and even if I can still work from home, life is expensive here.)

The culprits, as Keillor suggests, are probably the otherwise fantastic blogging systems such as WordPress, MoveableType and Drupal, that have in one sense revolutionized publishing because they allow anyone to easily write and publish at minimal cost, and in another sense are destroying publishing because they allow anyone to easily write and publish at minimal cost. And claim to be a writer or blogger. Even when they’re not. Keillor says, “Call me a pessimist, call me Ishmael, but I think that book publishing is about to slide into the sea.” Again, that sounds just about right. In fact, to add to the potential demise, Barnes & Noble have a new e-book publishing platform, Pubit!, for independents and self-publishing writers, with the distribution vehicle being through B&N’s e-Book store.

Still, let me reassure you aspiring bloggers who actually have or can develop real writing skills, who have inspired writing (though not day in and day out), that you can make living. I doubt most of you will achieve blogging success if you blog for advertising dollars, but if you align yourself with clients who sell products and/or services — or sell your own — then it’s possible to make a living writing online, even excel at it. Just don’t let the ease of blogging subvert you from building your writing skills. Blogging platforms like WordPress are merely writing tools, just like the now-ancient IBM Selectric typewriter was that I first started cracking out my short stories and poems on.

On a side note, it’s the seventh birthday of the WordPress blogging system — one of the key propagators of the online publishing revolution. Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress and Automattic, shares some thoughts about this occasion and mentions that version 3.0 is near (it’s available in beta form). He also notes that that WP development community now numbers over 1,500 active members contributing to what the GPL software is today — that is, much more than a blogging system. Happy birthday, WordPress.

Image: Flickr.

5 Tips to Leverage Free Mobile Apps for Link-Building

by

WebTrafficROI has a very interesting link-building tip: create an iPhone Web app. They’re not talking a native iPhone app, which would take a lot more time and money, but rather a Web app that would run in the iPhone Safari browser. Why? Well free mobile apps (native or otherwise) are today’s hot freebie, assuming you’ve done a good job. So WebTrafficROI suggests that you create a mobile Web app for the iPhone and then submit some PR to various sites that review or feature such apps. Their logic suggests that when a site covers your app, you’ll get an inbound link. Do this with enough sites and your search engine ranking will build.

Now while they’re absolutely right about that, and this is definitely a legitimate link-building technique, don’t be so sure you’ll get a lot of sites following through. I know from researching for my own mobile apps startup that while there are a growing number of mobile app review sites, many are either backlogged, some are not interested in mobile web apps. They also mention Apple as a site that features mobile apps. Again, this is true, though it’s not that easy getting featured. (I’ve heard tell that wooing some Apple employees with dinner might get you a contact name for getting featured, but that’s not necessarily true, and you’d have to live in Silicon Valley.)

Some Mobile-Related Link-Building Options

An iPhone and iPad are part of my blogging computing setup, and I think WebTrafficROI’s mobile approach to link-building is still a legitimate and good approach. They give you some mobile Web-specific tips for code to detect when an iPhone/ iPod Touch device is requesting a web page. However, I wanted to add to the conversation, and suggest a slightly broader approach. When it comes to what you can offer in the mobile space, here are some options, possibly overlapping with what WebTrafficROI wrote:

  1. A mobile version of your site with the same or similar functionality, but obviously geared towards a specific mobile device, possibly an iPhone. This is the simplest approach and often the least expensive.
  2. Offer a native mobile app with the same or similar functionality as your website.  There are some things your mobile Web app just cannot do, depending on what smartphone(s) you are targeting. (If you are promoting a blog, offer an app that provides a mobile view of your content. There are some development tools that make this very easy to do, provided your site has an RSS feed.)
  3. Offer both a mobile Web version and a native app. Presumably the latter would have additional features not available to the mobile Web version.
  4. Offer a mobile Web or mobile native app related to your niche.

For example, I’m working on two iPhone/ iPad apps that I’m hoping to give away in the future. One is for bloggers in any niche, a very broadly-scoped app. The other is Twitter-related but geared to the social media marketing side of things, so it should appeal to web-based entrepreneurs and small business owners. Each app’s release will have a different market but the same objective: build brand presence and back links for my mobile apps startup.

Considerations for Leveraging a Free Mobile App

If you do want to release a mobile app, Web or native, as part of a link-building strategy, here are some things you should consider, especially if you plan to offer a native mobile app instead of a mobile Web app.

  1. Partner up. You can partner with other bloggers to help cut the cost of development, or if the scope of your app is broad enough,  you might even partner up with a mobile app development studio (I’m partnered with two). In fact, you may need to partner if you don’t want to go through the effort of registering with Apple or Palm or Google, etc., as a developer — which in some cases costs money. The cost of using an app development studio can be defrayed by bartering your writing services, or offering advertising, or something else entirely.
  2. Target one platform. I might be biased but I’d say go with the Apple iPhone OS platform, which includes the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. (As a starting point in your research, you might want to check out SplashPressMedia’s AppleGazette blog and my CallStyle blog. I’ll share other links in the future, as appropriate) While the Google Android platform is gaining ground, the problem as I see it is fragmentation, with far too many handsets with different screen footprints.
  3. Go beyond free. If you’re giving away a free mobile Web or native app, great. But consider a paid premium native app with additional features. This might be one way to pay for development costs. You might not make a profit directly from the paid app, but if you achieve your objective of building back links, which in turn bring indirect revenue, then you’ve succeeded. Don’t forget that your blog can be your marketing vehicle.
  4. Brainstorm your app. Be sure of your objectives for the app. Who is the target user? What will it do? Will you support it by offering upgrades? Why are you creating it? For the latter, be completely honest with yourself. Just like web designers were giving away free WordPress themes in hopes of getting backlinks to their site, it’s okay if you’re doing this for the for the purpose of link-building.
  5. Have a marketing plan. Oh you didn’t that “they” would just come if you “built it”, did you? Create a list or spreadsheet of all the mobile sites that might feature your mobile app. They don’t have to all be about mobile apps or smartphones; they could be niche-specific. Have a press kit for your app, and include screen shots or links to video, a description of the app, your intent, your contact info, and whatever else is appropriate. Then systematically contact each site and offer them interview time, if they want it. While you are waiting to be covered (don’t necessarily expect a response to your email), move on to the next site in your list. Promote your app in Facebook and Twitter.

This is a very nutshell overview of how to leverage a mobile app for link-building. If there’s enough demand for covering more mobile topics as they relate to blogging and building an online presence, I’ll do so. I do have a couple of mobile-related posts up my sleeve for the near future, so keep an eye out.

Via: WebTrafficROI.

Writing Inspiration: Blogging the Intersection

by

You’ve heard the term “thinking outside the box,” but how do you actually do that? How do you go outside of a niche and produce inspired thinking? Answer: you combine two or more disciplines, like Frans Johansson suggests in his recent book, ‘The Medici Effect.’ Johansson puts forth the idea that the really interesting, innovative and inspired concepts come from the intersection of two or more disciplines. This is true for architecture, music, art, mechanics, and pretty much anything including writing and blogging — something you can learn to apply.

Ever since Johanson’s book came out a couple of years ago, I’ve been more conscious of finding the intersection of niches as a source of writing inspiration. It’s really nothing I haven’t been doing as a writer for years, and coaching other aspiring writers to do, but it took his book to make me really conscious of the possibilities.

His book is named after the Medici banking family, who were the driving force behind the Italian Renaissance. They funded various arts, architecture and finance in and around Florence, Italy, in the 15th century, and the net result was a mingling of disciplines as people in these disciplines made their way to the epicenter of the Renaissance movement. I won’t get into the book here all that much, except by way of providing some examples of how you can combine two or more niches into inspired blogging. But even if you don’t write, Johansson’s book is highly recommended. You can still get the ebook free (link at bottom), or buy a print copy from your favorite bookstore.

Self-Improvement

Some niches just lend themselves to crossovers, and many bloggers already blog at the intersection of disciplines. Seth Godin is one such blogger. Can you guess at the niches he covers? Business is one, marketing is another — but you could say that marketing itself is all about applied psychology and how to stir up the desire to improve our lot in life, ourselves. The desire for self-improvement is a constant target of marketers — though their approach is to tell us we’re “not worthy” if we don’t buy product A. This desire was probably always part of the human psyche, but with two powerful mediums, radio and TV, for leverage, it’s become an even stronger desire in us, whether we know it or not. That means there’s a market for self-improvement blogs which help us find awareness in the non-superficial aspects of life.

The problem is, self-improvement blogs are all over the place, and lot of them dish up the same suggestions self-help books have been saying for decades (having read many dozens of them since the early 1980s, it’s easy for me to say that). If you want to jump into this busy and competive niche (and feel you’re genuinely qualified), there are a number of ways you could go, to stand out. One way is to crossover with celebrity news. If any group of people have their personality flaws and quirks front and center, it’s probably celebrities. They’re popular and successful, or they’re “aspiring”, and they got there “above” us despite all their flaws. It’s easy to pick on them or feel jealousy towards them, but the fact is that they are human and they do have neuroses, image disorders and illnesses. With a little bit of work, you could intersect celebrity news with either self-improvement or health and fitness.

How you do this really depends on your objective. If you want to write pure celebrity news, fine. But if you want to write self-improvement blog posts with a difference, consider some sort of intersection. It does mean more research; however, it could be an approach that makes you stand out. Think it can’t be done? Michael Gray’s SEO blog Wolf-Howl talks about a different kind of improvement: that of websites through search engine optimization. He regularly injects celebrity references into his content, and he does it well. Figure out a way to do the same for personal improvement.

Another direction is the learning niche. Learning is of course a type of self-improvement. On one of my older blogs, I unwittingly combined learning and education with self-improvement topics. While I haven’t put much effort into the site, it is my most-commented blog. It struck a chord with a number of people. If I had more hours in the day, it’d be a site I’d put more effort into, but until I found the inspiration for it, I didn’t want it to be yet another self-improvement blog saying the same old thing.

Personal Finances

Depending on how you define self-improvement, there’s another direction you could go to find a blogging intersection. One of my earliest self-improvement blogs, Rich Man, Poor Man, cast a philosphical eye on personal and societal prosperity. It was an outgrowth of my old PunkMonk “tough love” blog of 2002 — a time when my life and career was in total upheaval and I was trying to “find myself.” While the posts required a lot of emotional energy to write, typos aside, they were amongst my most inspired writing ever. I occasionally re-read those posts simply to see if I can recapture the incredible feeling of inspiration I enjoyed while writing those posts.

Prosperity is tied with attitude (self-improvement) but it’s also tied with personal finances. Your finances dictate your entire life, even your style. Marketers would have us believe that we’re not worthy or stylish if we don’t wear certain clothes or drive a certain car. While we may have our car preferences and desires, and while some people may go into debt just to have the car they really want, the more financially practical citizen buys the car they can afford. There may already be a lot of car blogs out there, but one which offers practical tips on saving money on the purchase, care and general ownership of a vehicle potentially has an edge over general car blogs.

Caveats

Now the concepts in ‘The Medici Effect’ is really nothing I haven’t been doing for years. I’ve always coached aspiring writers to learn as much as they can about everything and anything. Unfortunately, that way also lies a lack of focus. Reading books and magazines, watching TV, movies, theater shows is easy. The hard part is focusing on just a handful of niches, and what you pick is dictated by a few factors:

  1. Your current skills.
  2. Your interests.
  3. Niche profitability.

If you can combine all of these factors, fantastic. Writing about current skills gives your writing confidence. If your current skills are something you want to get away from, then your interests are key because writing about them generates passion. Confidence and passion are two key ingredients of the best writing, and what really attracts loyal readers. Profitability really should be secondary; if it’s your focus, you’re more likely to forget the other two ingredients and will thus lose readers.

Of course, writing an “intersected” blog might take more effort, since you have to stay on top of two or more niches. On the other hand, if you combine multiple interests, it will not feel like work. If the effort inspires new ideas or viewpoints on topics that everyone and their proverbial brother are writing about, then it means you’ll stand out, primarily because of the inherent passion it takes to pull off an intersected blog.

Does your blog intersect topics? Tell me about it in the comments.

Notes: The Medici Effect [PDF, 224 pages]
Image: Flickr.

Wear a Mask, Cut Loose Your Inner Blogger

by

Don’t or can’t use your real name when you blog? You can still build a personal brand, albeit around a fictitious character. Or maybe that character doesn’t have to be all that fictitious, and can be based on your interests, reveal a facet of you. Thus, it may be worthwhile choosing a Web moniker and building a persona around that.

Why a Web Moniker?

Blogger “Johnny B. Truant” is obviously a real person using a fictitious name. He discusses on Copyblogger today what prompted that choice, and how “Johnny” is just as real as the person behind the name. While in some blogging circles it’s believed that blogging is very personal, one on one, and real names should be used, others believe differently. I’m of the belief that if there’s no moral or legal hitch to using a moniker, then why not — except possibly when a business executive writes on a company blog? If blogging involves telling stories, as so many bloggers have written, then cutting loose a persona based on a moniker might free you up to say what you’d really like to say, without the concerns you might have about being judged by friends, family, or colleagues.

A moniker and Web persona, as Johnny B. suggests, lets you loose to write real copy, and gives you the freedom to stop censoring yourself. The moniker gives you the license to create a persona that you want to be known as, and thus gives you the confidence you need for blogging.

I’ve coached many aspiring writers over the years, and confidence is one of the fundamental roadblocks that stops people from just writing. Cutting loose with a few monikers also lets you explore different writing styles on an ongoing basis, letting you naturally choose one to build a persona around. This is the number one reason I’ve cultivated different monikers since I first started blogging in 2002, though I’ve essentially tried to build only one persona.

Picking a Moniker

Unlike Johnny B. and others — especially the Fake Steve Jobs types — my monikers were not intended to stay secret; nothing stays secret online for long. Rather, when I really started blogging seriously in 2005, with the intent of making it part of my career, I was not sure how widely blogs would be read, nor what topics would be popular. I have always had multiple interests — a fact that sometimes means I have a hard time deciding where to put my efforts. (There’s also a fear that I’ll pick the wrong niche.) As a result I’ve ended up with multiple monikers over time that revealed a different facet of the real me. But as far as a persona goes, I’ve usually tend towards favoring just one, Talespinner — though as of late, that has morphed into the UltraGeek.

In choosing your moniker to build a persona around, brainstorm off of your niche as well as your personal interests. Maybe you have a nickname you’re know by, or an interest you’re known for. Try word games that combine your interests, your nicknames, the names of celebrities, rhyming words and so on.

For example, I’ve had a long-standing interest in food from a cultural standpoint. It just so happened that in my Toronto days, I went through a long hybrid Rockabilly-Punk phase and thanks to my Elvis Presley hairstyle and the clothes I wore, I used to be known by some friends as the Punk Elvis or Elvis Parsley. The name is a double play on words. First, parsley is a common ingredient in East Indian cooking. Second, Parsley is a play on Elvis Presley’s name. Result: my “Curry Elvis” persona for my cooking blogs, when I was still pursuing the idea that I might launch a Web-based cooking show. (During my computer career hiatus, just before I started seriously blogging, I went to cooking school and worked in a dozen or so restaurants for a few years.) So this persona potentially suited me, but in reality it didn’t suit my ultimate online objectives.

Building a Persona

I never built up the Curry elvis persona, mainly because publishing cooking blogs didn’t seem capable of paying the bills, but also because it gets hard to maintain an Elvis-like persona as you get older — something that might be necessary were I to appear in video. My subsequent monikers were due to my personal interests morphing through different niches, including self-improvement, music, writing, etc. For example, Curry Elvis became Punk Monk.

I don’t want to or need to bore you further with my other monikers and personas. They’re not that hard to find, if you’re interested, but the gist is that you can use a similar approach to choosing a moniker and building your Web persona as I did. Though decide on your online objectives before you pick your moniker.

Once you’ve picked a moniker that you like, you can build a “personal” brand, a persona, around it through blogging, creating new jargon, and promoting the persona through social media — just like you would do for the “real” you. I wouldn’t recommend trying to build more than one persona; it just takes too much effort. Brainstorm a few monikers, even use them for blogging different niches, but ultimately focus on just one persona. Johnny B. suggests that you should actually become your persona, at least online — which is difficult to do if you fragment yourself into too many personas. Fragmentation, as far as I’ve experienced will hold back your blogging success.

Caveats

Now, some niches — such as entertainment, design, photography, writing, music, marketing and anything else creative — are well-suited to having a blogging moniker because they can and do often involve storytelling as well as “personalities.” The choice of a blogging moniker might not suit if you’re blogging for clients, though you never know. It really depends on the client and their niche; just ask your clients.

Image: Flickr.

7 Tips for Writing Effective News-y Posts

by

Even if your blog is for a business, there’s still a possibility that it covers the news in your industry. If so, it’s also likely that you don’t get exclusives and therefore are mostly rehashing topics. However, there’s still a purpose for doing that, and you should be armed with a few tips on the most effective ways to write news-y posts for your niche.

  1. Variety. There are tons of generic idea sources: aggregators, portals, microblogs, social media. E.g., Google News, Yahoo News, Technorati, Google Reader, Google Alerts, Alltop, YourVersion, Digg, Stumbleupon, Mixx, Propeller, Reddit, Neatorama, Twitter, Facebook and many more. For tech, there’s Techmeme and Megite. For celebrity, WeSmirch. There are many for business, sports and an increasing number of other niche portals. Choose a site relevant to your niche, and monitor the top news sources for breaking stories, but don’t ignore the smaller sites, which may offer a different perspective. (Hint: big sites often earn advertising revenue and are not always as edgy in their opinions.)
  2. Frequency. If you’re covering news in multiple short posts every day, you probably want to publish at least 3-5 posts. If you’re in a competitive niche, you might need even more. For example, celebrity and political blogs might require 10-15-20 posts per day to really make a dent in market share.
  3. Schedule. Spread out blog post publishing time frame during a given day. If your blogging platform or CMS allows it, you can write all posts at once and then schedule them to publish automatically at intervals (no less than 15-20 minutes). However, writing a day’s quota of posts at once, say every morning, means you miss out on any afternoon or evening news. In some niches, there’s news all day, and if you can work it into your schedule, writing 1-3 posts for each of 2-3 time slots (from morning, afternoon, evening, night) might serve your site and readers better. It really depends on the niche and your readership. The more global your readership, the more valuable it is for readers if you’re posting to multiple slots, provided it’s not all rehashed news from earlier in the day.
  4. Summary. Sometimes you want to cover several tidbits of news that don’t warrant their own post, searching for images, etc. The best way to do this is a roundup post, with a maximum of one per day, unless that your blog covers distinct sub-niches. Don’t forget to put the date in the title. I’ll do something like this on Performancing: “Performancing Blogosphere Roundup — May 20, 2010.” Sometimes I’ll precede such a title with some unique keywords relevant to the news tidbits: “Blogs, Hard Drives, and iPads — Blogosphere Roundup, May 20, 2010.” Brainstorm different titles before picking one; don’t be afraid to get creative, unlike me.
  5. Uniqueness. It’s not enough to rehash the news. If “everyone else” is doing it too, then why would you retain any regular readers? Add your own voice and value to the mix. Inject your relevant opinions, reference 2-3 other sites, say more than what the articles you’re summarizing say, and say it succinctly. Or add visual content such as images, video, web slideshows.
  6. Balance. If you are blogging for a business, one of your objectives is probably to establish expertise and be a thought leader. It’s hard to do this in newsy posts. So balance these by mixing them with regular posts and longer resource lists (e.g., 11 Ways to use the iPad to Run Your Business).
  7. Inspiration. Inspiration for blogging regular posts is a bit different than for newsy posts, but some of the rules still apply.

Image: Flickr.

5+7 Tips to Spark Blogging Inspiration

by

If you’ve written or blogged for at least a few months, you know that inspiration comes and goes. It’s not always lack of ideas that stop you from getting that next blog post out — often it’s having too many ideas and having doubts about what to write. Here are a few tips to spark some blogging inspiration, that have worked for me in the past.

Scanning For Ideas

The first step is scan for sources of ideas. Yeah, I know that I said you might have too many ideas, but we’ll take care of that in the next section.

  1. Scan the blogosphere. The first thing I usually do to start a blogging day is check my favorite aggregators and portals. I like to use Techmeme, Alltop, YourVersion, Google Reader. Depending on the niche that I’m blogging, I might check other similar tools or have my own custom aggregators that I’ve built in WordPress.
  2. Look at your archives. Ok, maybe it’s a slow news day. Don’t forget to look at your archives. Maybe you wrote about something before that needs correcting, updating, or some sort of followup. This is also an opportunity for you to deep link to your own content, to help build your site’s search engine profile.
  3. Write for yourself. If you’re trying to establish expertise, you need to cover topics relevant to your niche. Ultimately, you’re probably a rich source of ideas, and writing about what interests you is what gives you motivation and focus in blogging. Unless you’re doing it to pay the bills, why bother blogging about something in which you’re not interested? Look within yourself for ideas. It’s okay to get ideas from readers, but if you’re always wondering what your readers want, you’re asking for trouble. Blog readers are fickle as well as transient as a whole, and unless you’ve been posting a lot of cornerstone content and following a regular publishing schedule, your readership on any given day will change. That’s especially true for a new blog whose bulk of Web traffic comes from search engines. So it’s more important to decide what you want to write about, then promote your content to attract interested readers. They’re out there; you just have to attract them.
  4. Mine your web metrics. Now while you do still want to write for yourself, as your readership grows, the value of your site’s keyword searches grows. Your site metrics will show search terms used to visit your site from search engines. If you see any trends, they might be worth exploring, provided they’re related to your blog’s niche.
  5. Mine your comments. You don’t have to have a high-traffic site to enjoy regular commenters and loyal readers. If you’ve been promoting your blog content through your Twitter or Facebook networks, you might find you have regular readers sooner than if you didn’t use social media. Comments can be a rich source of ideas for future blog posts, either because of a direct query or some idea that gets triggered by a comment.

Filtering Suggestions

Now that you’ve bombarded yourself above with lots of ideas, what’s the next step? Filtering, to narrow your interest to one or two topics. Inspiration strikes when you’re focused. Believe me on that. I’ve been using inspirational writing and productivity techniques for a couple of decades, and whenever I’m distracted by too many ideas and thoughts, my writing isn’t my best. It’s also far tougher to write at the pace that most blogging requires, compared to non-blog writing. So filtering ideas for focus is a crucial step to getting inspired. The key is to use some sort of mechanism to, real or mental, to narrow down your topic choices.

  1. Topic themes. Some bloggers have a different weekly or monthly theme for posts, which helps to focus. Usually that’s something you can plan for in an editorial calendar.
  2. Editorial calendars. Create an editorial calendar ahead of time and use it. Of course, newsy topics aren’t always something you can plan for, but you can for evergreen content that’ll be relevant long-term on your blog. How-to tutorials, guides, and resource lists are often good candidates for editorial calendars.
  3. Random choices. If you’re fortunate enough to be blogging in a niche that allows you a lot of different sub-topics, then sometimes picking something at random suffices. This works for newsy sites where you’re publishing lots of short content daily. E.g., news, celebrity, politics. That doesn’t mean what you write will improve your site, only that you’ll have something to write about, to help get the creative juices flowing.
  4. Trending topics. If you’re uncomfortable with randomness and want maximizing your blogging efforts, check for trending topics. For example, the Twitter trending list that you’ll see on your profile page, right hand sidebar, might give you some ideas of what the Twittersphere is microblogging. There’s also Google Trends, which gives you a longer-term historical view and a plotted graph to boot.
  5. Visual input. While I’ve long ago realized that unless I’m live blogging a TV show, watching TV while while blogging is a major distraction. My productivity is sometimes zero DURING watching TV. However, a short break to watch something relevant to your niche, or to view some video, or even just browse some totally unrelated photos at Flickr might spark a post idea to help you focus.
  6. Change your environment. If working at your desk is not working for you at the moment, trying moving into another room. Some people like to take their blogging outdoors. A netbook works well for that, if you don’t want to lug around a laptop. If that’s not viable, sometimes moving to another room works. I like to lounge for a while on the couch and use my iPad for some planning and notetaking. I find it’s easier to focus on an iPad.
  7. Sleep on it. If the blogging inspiration you’re seeking is for publication the next day and you can’t come up with anything, there’s no harm done in literally sleeping on some ideas for the next day. Your brain needs some “alone time” to sort through and parse other ideas that you may have accumulated. I often find that if I’ve prepped suitably, I wake with a couple of clear ideas or possibly even a full post in my head. Alternately, a nap or just a short break away from your computer can make all the difference. (Take a notebook, netbook or iPad with you, but don’t use it unless an idea sparks while you’re on break.) A long break can paradoxically increase your productivity. For example, in the past, I’ve gone off to watch an afternoon movie then come back home and productively written material for novellas or a book. This works for blogging as well, but I usually try to finish any daily client blogging obligations before I take long breaks.

Controlling the Flow of Ideas

If you use the above tips regularly, you might find days where you get over-inspired. Ideas start flitting through your head; blog posts start writing themselves for you, waiting for you to type them up. Because I’ve enjoyed this sort of idea flow for many years, I’ve long used mind mapping as my tool of choice for capturing ideas and breaking them down as far as I can go without writing posts right there and then within a mind mapping application. The problem is, you still end up with too many ideas, thus hampering inspiration for writing a post right here, right now. You still need to filter, as discussed above. (Note: mind mapping is more suited to developing longer content, not short newsy pieces.)

More on finding blogging inspiration, in the near future. Stay tuned.

Disclosure: I have share options in YourVersion and am an unpaid tech evangelist for this real-time discovery engine.

Image: Flickr.

3 Quick Tips for Improving Your Writing Skills

by

One of the best ways to improve your writing, at least in terms of succinctness, is to write reviews. While I’ve been doing technical writing for a couple of decades and writing fiction, poetry and song lyrics for even longer, I cut my teeth on non-fiction by writing articles, interviews and reviews for weekly local and college papers in the 90s. The latter efforts, especially review writing, proved most beneficial to my blogging skills. If you’re looking for ways to improve your writing, I’d highly recommend writing reviews.

Here are some review writing tips:

  1. 150-250 words is a perfect review length. Start by reviewing something without a word limit. Then edit down, to 1000 words, 500 words, 250 words, etc. Write enough reviews and you’ll eventually find your writing to be more succinct — often a necessary skill for effective blogging. The shorter your review, the more effort it actually takes to write well.
  2. Learn to be your own editor. Copyediting seems to be a foreign concept in blogging, partly because of the crazy pace we bloggers sometimes have to maintain, no matter how well-intentioned we are. My own frequency of typos increased drastically when I started blogging. However, you still need to edit for meaning. Here’s a simple rule of thumb, to learn how to be succinct: When you’re editing down, cut out every other word, and if you lose the meaning, put some words back. I’ve forgotten the source of this advice, though I think it was from William Zinsser‘s classic On Writing Well book, but was a paraphrasing of a tip from an American novelist.
  3. Keep publication off the objectives list. If one of your review “exercises” is of high quality, you could spin it off into a blog post for publication, but that is not the objective. You’re writing these reviews to hone your skills. Think of them as analogous to the pencil sketches that an artist might do before a detailed illustration or painting. Leonardo da Vinci was a master painter because of the many thousands of sketches he did in his lifetime, which helped him understand structures and give his painter’s hand confidence. You can give your writer’s hand confidence in a similar manner.

Don’t stick to one type of review. When I published my monthly print magazine back in the early to mid-90s, I was reviewing everything out of necessity: music, movies, books, comics, restaurants. Those were pre-Web and Mobile Web days. Nowadays you can also review mobile apps, web games such as those that you find on Facebook, and Web-based services, websites, smartphones and much more. Some types of reviews are going to be harder to keep short, such as books and movies, but that’s fine. The objective is really to learn to be as succinct as possible, not to always write in the 150-250 word range.

What tricks have you employed to refine your writing skills? Feel free to share in the comments.

Image: Flickr.