Posts tagged blog community building
The challenge of creating a blog that sings
Jan 28th
As I write these words, it is 5:36 a.m. on a Saturday morning.
Am I crazy?
No, I’m excited. After spending a week focused on consulting, teaching, and speaking projects, I finally have time to devote to this marvelous creative outlet, this opportunity to connect with you, through my blog. When I finally have that quiet time to write, I am ready to LEAP to that keyboard and create.
This is also the enigma, and perhaps greatest challenge of blogging … at least for me, and I suspect for most of you. How do you stay fresh and allow time for a creative process when you still have bills to pay? How do you hold down a job and create a blog that sings?
I attended a fascinating lecture this week that really pinpointed this problem for me. I spent about two hours listening to a person who is on the opposite end of the creative spectrum.
Creative immersion
Jena Serbu is creative for a living. She works on dark, surreal paintings. Jena sculpts. She writes plays and movie scripts. She directs, produces and edits films. She combines all of these talents in stunning music videos. Her latest art project is mailing 365 post cards to friends and strangers she plucks from the phone book.
Jena has the rich and rare opportunity of being completely immersed in her creative journey every minute, every day. She leaps from project to project and idea to idea in this seamless frenzy of activity. I’m not sure where the money comes from to support all this, but I know that in part, wealthy patrons provide grants and residency programs that allow her to live in the journey, instead of aiming at a financial destination.
I felt jealous. Wouldn’t it be amazing to have a chance to simply create without concern … even for a few weeks?
You and I do not have the luxury of submerging ourselves in a constant creative journey. To create my “art” on this blog, I have to work from point to point, grabbing time whenever I can (even before dawn on a Saturday!) if I am to unleash my ideas on the world.
To block out the extended time necessary to write a book, I have to take a serious short-term financial hit to my business.
Creating is a luxury
Creating art is a luxury. It’s way up at the top on that Maslow Hierarchy of Needs chart you studied in school. First you have to find a way to eat, take care of your family, and pay the bills before you can dabble in a creative process.
And while blogging is important to my business (and yours!) it is, in fact, a highly creative endeavor that is not unlike composing a little song or making a video. My son is in the music business and we often compare notes on the very similar creative processes we experience.
The problem is, it’s pretty darn challenging to be creative on demand, to be limited by a “point to point” creative process. We have to squeeze our art into the edges of the frenzied demands of life … after that last customer phone call, after mowing the yard, after putting the kids to bed,
So to all you weekend bloggers out there, I want to thank you, encourage you, and give you a virtual round of applause. This is hard work, isn’t it?
But I am also realizing that even if I cannot be a continuous creative buzzsaw like Jena, I still have to find time for random inspiration, playfulness, and new conversations that lead to creative insight. Short of finding a wealthy patron for my blog, I am going to have to actually “schedule” creative exploration as a business activity! This is the entry fee for a seat at the blogging table these days, I’m afraid.
Can I pull this off, or will I be drawn back into the daily hurricane every time I try? Time will tell. But I would be really interested in hearing about how you are handling this. My fellow bloggers and artists … how do you run a business, run a life, and still find time to create your beautiful song?
Top illustration: Still frame from the music video “Whether.” Song by Julia Othmer, video directed by Jena Serbu.
Side illustration: Artwork from Ippise Jones book series by Jena Serbu.
The best advice I ever received for my business, and my blog
Jan 22nd
I was recently asked by an interviewer, “Who has had the greatest influence on your personal growth?” Pretty good question! But the answer was easy. In fact, there was one lesson I learned from one man that has had a profound impact on my approach to life, my business, and my blog. I’ll share that important lesson with you today.
Sensei and sensibility
When I lived in Los Angeles, I desperately wanted to attend the MBA program at Claremont Graduate University for one reason – Peter Drucker taught there (in fact, the school was named for him). If you have never heard of Peter Drucker, discovering his books and articles might be the most important thing you can do for your career.
I applied for entry to the college, but was told I was too young to be accepted to this prestigious program. I would not quit that easily, however, and went through an appeal process, arguing that they needed my youth (27 at the time) to add to the diversity of the program! I made an unlikely stand on the grounds of EEO, which was quite a stretch, but incredibly, I was admitted! Perhaps my tenacity amused them.
Peter Drucker was one of the handful of people I have known who could distill vast complexity into simple wisdom. The scope of his knowledge was breathtaking. He would sit on the edge of his desk and lecture for three hours straight without a break, and without notes. He generally lectured about one of his books. My favorite was Innovation and Entrepreneurship
A new approach to leadership
Professor Drucker taught via the Harvard case study method. We would be assigned to read a long, detailed, real-life business case and then dissect it in class to discover the true nature of how business worked.
The students in this class were high-flyers — the brightest business executives in the Los Angeles region — and they were always trying to “solve” the business case. Nothing made Professor Drucker angrier than that! “What makes you think you are smarter than the people in the case?” he would ask, “Smarter than people who have worked in this industry for decades? How can you be that arrogant?
“Your job as a business leader is not to provide the right answers. It is to provide the right questions.”
Over and over he would pound this truth into our heads until it became part of our DNA. And he was so right … so profoundly right. There is not a week that goes by that I don;t think of some lesson from Professor Drucker, but this was the most important of all.
Think of the power of leading people to the most effective solution, not by pontificating and telling them what to do, but by distilling the issue down to the essential question and letting them discover the answer themselves.
Adopting a strategy of professional humility is anathema to our modern Western culture. We may associate humility with weakness, when in fact it is strength.
The essence of blogging?
Like most young people starting out in business, I felt a need to know all the answers, especially when I was promoted to a leadership position. But from Professor Drucker I learned that being vulnerable, involving others in the process, coming up with a better solution together, sharing the weight of decisions – those are all benefits of humility. Being deeply human, instead of trying to wear the Superman cape, is powerful and liberating.
This is also a key to effective blogging I think. Most bloggers adopt a mantle of invincibility and that is certainly the easy path to take: “I publish, therefor I’m correct.”
But being a humble blogger leads to meaningful social media engagement and ultimately, crowd-sourced wisdom. I almost never have the answers. But I think my blog posts do present the essential questions: Does every business need a social media strategy? What is the value of social media engagement? How do we measure success?
And then YOU provide the answers through your comments. A much better system, don’t you think? How could I possibly sustain this blog for the last four years by only giving you answers? Nobody is that smart.
I hope this resonates with you in some small way. How does this idea land on you? Could being a humble leader become a key to making you a better leader, a better parent, a better blogger?
Photograph courtesy Claremont Graduate University
Link to Innovation and Entrepreneurship is an affiliate link.
How to overcome the “I’m not an expert” fear
Jan 17th
By {grow} Community Member Sarah Santacroce
When I speak to my clients about the benefits of blogging, I often get a pair of big, frightened eyes looking at me. ‘Sarah, I’m not an expert, who would care to read my stuff?’
According to Wikipedia an expert is “A person who has a comprehensive and authoritative knowledge of or skill in a particular area.” OK, that’s pretty impressive. What probably scares my clients is the word “authoritative” which, means a) Able to be trusted as being accurate or true; reliable, clear, authoritative information’ and b)’Considered to be the best of its kind and unlikely to be improved upon.
Fair enough, that scares me too!
Reframing the discussion
What if we replaced the word “expert” with “specialist?”
My clients seem to prefer that! It’s not as exclusive, and if someone calls themselves a specialist, it tells me that they specialize in this topic, and has valuable knowledge and skills in this area. You don’t have to know absolutely everything, because of course there’s always room for improvement.
In fact, even pretending to be an expert can be a negative, right? Let’s face it, the person who pretends to know everything is just fooling themselves. I’ve always been more impressed by someone who admits that she doesn’t have all the answers, but promised to look them up, do her research, and then report back to me.
Let’s focus on your specialty
So how does that specialist title sound to you? Not that scary anymore, right?
You truly are a specialist at what you do, now you just need to let the world know about it. There’s no better marketing method than to position yourself as the expert/specialist and then writing about what you do.
Funny enough it’s often the same people who are scared of not being an expert, who are also not comfortable with selling their services. Well, that’s the nice thing about blogging — you don’t have to sell! You are just sharing your knowledge, educating your audience without bluntly selling your services.
Through your content people will get to see that you know your stuff and when they are ready to buy, they will contact you !
A few examples
Still not sure what you should write about? Let me give you a few examples:
- If you are a coach, write about your coaching approach, about the most frequently asked questions you get from potential clients, a series of coaching tips, a list of inspirational quotes.
- If you are a stylist, write about the different colors and which color fits which body type, about the latest winter fashion, about Coco Chanel or your favorite fashionista.
- If you are a nutritionist, write about the different food groups, about your best recipes, about the good fat in avocado, about the holiday over-eating.
Do you see where I’m going with this? There’s an endless list of topics for every specialty. What are you curious about? Write about it. You just need to get over that fear and start thinking “Yes, I’m a specialist at what I do and I’m going to tell the world about it!”
I call myself a specialist in Social Media, Online Presence & Internet Marketing, NOT an expert. Far from that in fact! I learn new things every day and there’s people out there who are way more experienced than I am. And yet you are reading my blog post 
What do you think? How are you overcoming the fear factor in blogging?
Sarah Santacroce is a Social Media, Internet Marketing & Virtual Event specialist. She helps small business owners and individual entrepreneurs to find their place in today’s online world. Sarah is a Swiss national, but thinks with a global mind. Read Sarah’s latest blog posts.
Illustration courtesy BigStock.com
How I totally screwed up my blogging strategy
Jan 9th
A few weeks ago, I sat down to prepare for the upcoming week’s blog schedule and I became paralyzed. For the first time in four years, I seemingly had nothing to write about.
I knew if there ever came a time when I had to “force” content onto {grow} it was a sign that I needed to stop blogging so this was a bad sign. It is quite sickening to reach a point where the ideas stop.
But after I thought about the situation, I realized that in fact I had not run out of ideas. I simply had screwed up my tried-and-true system to generate ideas and was paying the price for it. Here’s what happened …
The system
Ideas come at us all the time, every day. It could be an article we read, a speech we attend, or something we hear on the news. Being a good blogger means always being alert to these ideas — and most important — capturing them. For me, that means writing them down wherever I am and then simply writing the headline for the idea in WordPress as soon as I can.
For example, recently I had a wonderful chat over breakfast at a cafe in Brooklyn with my friend Pavel Konoplenko. Pavel and I really had the ideas flying and many of them would have made a wonderful subject for a blog post. As our conversation progressed, I literally wrote the ideas down on the back of the receipt for breakfast and tucked it in my wallet. When I got to a computer, I recorded the ideas in WordPress for future development.
During my dry spell, I realized that I had swerved away from my system. For some reason, I was either too busy, too lazy, or both and ignored my discipline of recording ideas.
Luckily, I had planned for the day when something went wrong and was able to pull from a stable of extra blog posts I had prepared for an emergency. So the quality on {grow} never suffered even though I was temporarily “empty.” Another lesson — have a back-up plan!
Getting back on track
Once I realized what I had done, it was fairly easy to get back on track. Simply by paying attention to the world around me — and recording my ideas — I was able to quickly re-fill the pipeline.
For example, I read a post about Facebook that I completely disagreed with. I simply copied the link to the post, pasted it into a new blog post and wrote the headline “Comment on this?” Will it turn into a post? Who knows? But at least it is an option so I won’t be facing a blank slate when it’s time to blog.
Now when I settle into my usual quiet blogging time (you do have a quiet blogging time don’t you?) I don’t have to remember that story and try to find it on the web again. It’s sitting right there for me as a great option for a blog post for the upcoming week.
Another example — I was scanning my Google Analytics and saw an unusual keyword phrase that people had used to find my blog. It seemed like an excellent idea for post, so I immediately recorded in it the queue for future consideration.
Think about it. Even if you come across just one idea every day, by the time you sit down to blog, you have at least seven potential post concepts to choose from.
This system really works for me and I found out the hard way that when I’m not disciplined about it, I hit a wall!
What works for you? How do you keep the blog idea pipeline open?
Illustration courtesy BigStock.com
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-Mark SchaeferFollow Mark
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