Posts tagged writing for a blog
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
This is why I am not reading or tweeting your blog post
Nov 20th
Do you want to increase the readership of your blog by 400% in just one easy step?
Lean in close now as I share this blogging secret: “Stop writing sucky headlines.”
In today’s world, you simply MUST craft a descriptive, accurate, catchy and “tweet-able” headline. I know this aspect of blogging has been written about before so I am mystified as to why it remains such an obstacle to so many bloggers.
If you don’t have a headline that grabs me by the throat in a nano-second you have lost me, and most other people too.
I swiped a couple headlines from my blog reader to illustrate both good and bad examples of blog headlines. Maybe one of them is yours? Here are real blog headlines that were so bad I could not bear to click:
“False Hope” — The headline is smug. The writer assumes the post is so epic that they don’t even have to indicate what it is about. Unless you’re Malcolm Gladwell, I’m probably not going to read this.
“Your Video Presence” — This has the potential to be an interesting topic but the headline is too generic. It doesn’t tell me enough about the angle of the article to force me to take the next action. I’m a busy guy. Sell me baby.
“What’s in a Word?” — I don’t know and I won’t find out either. It’s clever but not descriptive enough to capture my attention.
“A Walk in the Cloud, Part 2″ — Cloud computing is an interesting topic but a “series” generally does not work for a blog. When I see this headline, I think “Well I missed Part 1 so I should probably skip this.” It’s like walking in during the middle of a movie.
“Monday Inspiration” — This could be a great article but it’s a lazy headline. Unless I am a regular reader and already interested in you as a person, this is probably not enough information for me to click through.
“Want to grow your revenue? Check out B2B Marketing Sales Leads, a sales lead generation program” Ewwww. You’re trying to sell me something. Yuck. Do this a second time and you’ll get deleted from the blog reader. No check that. I’ve already deleted you.
“New Yelp feature turns photos into online menus and we also compare tablet VS smartphones usage stats” This is an interesting headline but it’s too long. At 100 characters, it’s too long to tweet once you get the sender’s name in there. And remember, if it gets RT’d, that adds more characters. So keep headlines short enough to encourage social sharing.
Now, here are some great headlines from the pros:
How some people are using Triberr to kill blogging By The JackB — This headline promises a fresh angle on a hot technology. It indicates that people are mis-using Triberr to hurt something near and dear to me. I want to read this.
5 Lessons From the Best Example of Content Marketing Ever By Jay Baer — For my money Jay is one of the best headline writers in the business. And he knows a number in a headline is gold. Probably increases “sharing potential” by 30%. Eight of my 10 most popular blog posts have a number in the headline and that goes for most other bloggers too.
What is sharing on Facebook worth in cold hard cash? By Jeff Bullas — Jeff is a master blogger who understands how to write a headline. He never fails to grab you and his content keeps you there. Combining “Facebook” with “cold hard cash” is a winner.
Five Tips to Navigate Sandy’s Stress and Sensory Overload By Judy Martin — We recently wrote about how capitalizing on the Hurricane Sandy tragedy was a bad idea. But here’s another take. Judy writes a post that is timely, appropriate, and HELPFUL in a time of need.
Did technology kill curiosity? By Christian Hollingsworth — Christian is a masterful headline writer. In this example, he takes a simple question that might be on his mind, and the mind of others, and riffs on an answer. It doesn’t have to be complicated.
Transmedia Writing By Geoff Livingston — Is it possible to get an idea across in just two words? Geoff did it. “Transmedia” writing promises to explore a fresh concept and it made me click. Bravo.
So here is the Schaefer Ever-So-Useful List of Best Blog Post Headline Practices:
- Make it “tweetable short.”
- It should be descriptive and accurate. Don’t EVER mislead readers.
- Make it creative enough to stand out in a crowded blog reader.
- Numbered lists work well.
- Grab me with something I have never seen before.
- Make sure the “value proposition” offers something helpful.
- Use descriptive and unusual verbs and adjectives.
- Don’t make your headline an after-thought. It’s the most critical part of the post.
Illustration: This is a very famous headline announcing the wrong presidential election result, held up by the true victor Harry Truman.
Welcome to {grow}
You’re in marketing for one reason: Grow.
Grow your company, reputation, customers, impact, profits. Grow yourself. This is a community that will help. It will stretch your mind, connect you to fascinating people, and provide some fun along the way. I am so glad you’re here.
-Mark SchaeferFollow Mark
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