Productive Blogging Posts

The last seven weeks we have been doing a series of Productive Blogging. Here are links to each of the posts. How did this go? Was it useful? Should I only stick to non-blogging topics in the future?

1. The Distribution of Inspiration - Understanding how inspiration is distributed is crucial in maintain a regular posting schedule.  Pace yourself and  don’t get discouraged when your mind is  blank, but plan ahead when you have plenty of ideas.
2. Make a Top 100 Tips List - This is a simple method to make sure that you always have a ready supply of ideas for creating posts.
3. Create a Series - Creating a series can be a great way to spread out a larger post into smaller bite sized sections of content and give you a way to plan weeks or months ahead for your posting schedule.
4. Promotion vs. Production - A discussion about the proper balance between promoting your blog and producing content.
5. Starting Slow - Blogging is a long term commitment.  Don’t start out at a sprint.  Try to take steps today to plan for your readers in the future.
6. One Post Per Week - A simple method to make sure your readers always have fresh content even if you go for periods of time without making a post.
7. Getting Unstuck - What to do when your mind is blank and you can’t think of anything meaningful to say.

Productive Blogger: Getting Unstuck

Everyone gets stuck. Productive bloggers know how trigger ideas for great new posts. Here are some methods I use for generating new ideas:

Skim a Book on Your Topic - An hour in your public library with a pencil and notebook can easily produce enough ideas for several weeks of posts.

Use Someone Else’s List - Find another list on your topic. Link back to the original to give them credit and add your commentary to the list items you feel are important. This way you use their list as a springboard, but it is primarily your content. Make sure you give them proper credit and are actually adding value.

Link Out - Gather a bunch of links to great posts on a particular topic and use them as a basis for your post. Ideally you should read each one and provide some commentary for each link. More often than not, once you finish doing this, you’ll have a bunch of ideas for new original posts. Link out posts seem to be a popular thing to put up on Friday or the weekend. When you get stuck and can’t think of anything to write, use this as a way to break the gridlock. You can schedule it to go live on the weekend and use he ideas it helps you generate for your current post.

Interview Someone - This can be as simple as writing a fellow blogger and asking them two or three questions to use as a basis for post or as complicated as emailing 50 individuals and compiling their answers.

Draw Analogies - Think in terms of “how is X like Y?” For example, a recent speech at Harvard’s graduation discussed how John Harvard was similar to a Jedi in Starwars. (The entire speech was given in Latin.) Making comparisons is a great way to trigger new ideas and get a fresh perspective.

Create a List - Even when you hit a roadblock it is usually pretty easy to create a short “5 ways to” type post.

Reread Your Previous Posts - I find I can get a lot of ideas for new posts by rereading things I wrote a year ago. By writing a new post and linking back to the original, not only do you get a fresh perspective, but you help drive people (and search engines) back to your older content.

Links From the Past - Go through your content and select the top five posts from last year. Usually these are great finds for new readers and the process will often help you discover some great ideas on the way.

Use Related Links - If your blog is setup to show you related links, find a post that you liked and see what the computer thinks is related. You may be able to get some great ideas by comparing or contrasting the two posts.

Productive Blogger: One Post Per Week Autopilot

To keep your blog from looking dead, you really should have at least one post per week. Any less and it is difficult for someone to justify coming back again. Since you know you need at least one post per week, why not do these ahead of time. Sit down one weekend and write one post per week for the rest of the year. They need to be well written, but not necessarily long or earth shattering.

• Pick a Day - Always publish these posts on a particular day. For example at Productivity501, we do a quick tip every Tuesday. This helps people come to expect that at a very minimum they can find new content on that day of the week.
• Include the Day Name in the Post - Calling your post Tuesdays Tip or something similar will help reinforce the idea that this is a weekly occurrence.
• Don’t Write too Much - If you find that you are on a roll, consider breaking the post into sections or create a series out of it. Don’t use the weekly as the place for your flagship content. 150 to 200 words is plenty.
• Schedule the Posts - You want these to go live even if you aren’t thinking about it. If you get sent away on a two week business trip away from internet, you want to know that your site is still going to be active with the weekly post.
• Take Notes for Other Posts - In the process of creating these tips, you will find some ideas for other posts. Make sure you capture these ideas and don’t lose them.
• Fill in as You Have Time - Once you have weekly posts for the entire year, go back and fill in. Other posts. If your weekly posts go up on Monday, maybe add your other content to Wednesdays.

When you get to a point where you want to post every day, it is amazing how much easier it is to fill out a week if one post is already written. By having these posts in place ahead of time, it gives you more flexibility to bring your blog up to a daily posting schedule even if you are busy with other activities that will prevent you from writing as much as you’d like.

Productive Blogger: Starting Slow

One mistake I see new bloggers make is to start off by writing 20 posts all in the first week. Write as much as you can, but don’t post all at once. Here is why. When you start of you will not have any readers. If you spread your great posts out over time, you have a better chance of people actually seeing your content.

Obviously you can’t decide not to post anything until you have a bunch of readers, but unless your posts are time sensitive, don’t try to post 5 times a day when you have only 3 people subscribed. A better approach is to post once every two weeks for the first month or so, just to get your blog established and indexed in the search engines. Then start posting every week while you work on building subscribers.

Once you get some regular readers, maybe start posting twice each week and eventually move to once per day (if it is appropriate for your topic). During the time where you are posting once per week, you can still be writing content for the future. When 100 people read one of your posts, it has a better chance of spreading than when 25 people read it, so ramp up your post density as you acquire readers. Otherwise it is easy to get burned out.

The idea of posting slowly while still writing posts for the future also helps give you momentum. You may be only posting once per week with 10 readers now, but when you get to 50 readers, you have the ability to post twice a week without increasing the amount of time you spend writing because you have a pool of posts to pull from.

It use to be that simply having a blog was enough to get lots of readers because the amount of content (particularly blog content) was very limited. Now you have to get to a certain escape velocity before your blog really takes off on its own. By starting slow, you can reserve some of your momentum to push through difficulties. By difficulties, I mean the times where you may be discouraged because the number of readers you are attracting doesn’t seem to be growing or when you just don’t feel like writing.

Use a a slow start to build up enough good solid posts to help you slingshot and take advantage of opportunities. For example, lets say you are posting one post per week and suddenly one of your articles is featured on the front page of Digg. Immediately posting another killer post is a great way to encourage people to come back to see what you post tomorrow. If you have a pool of these posts to pull from, you will be ready to leverage a spike in traffic instead of scrambling to try to retain readers.

Productive Blogger: Promotion vs. Production

Most bloggers have the idea that blogging is 97% writing and 3% promotion. This view places way to much emphasis on writing. It isn’t that writing isn’t important, but if you write 5 posts per week that no one knows about as opposed to writing 1 post per week that get spread around the web, which do you think will be more effective?

Network With Peers

There are a bunch of ways to promote your content. Getting on the front page of Digg or Delicious is great, but you will probably have better results over the long term by focusing on good old fashion networking. You need to meet other people in your niche. Subscribe to their blogs, comment on their posts and email them offers to help them out. Once you have a relationship established, it shouldn’t be a problem to email them once in a while to say “what do you think of this post?”

If your goal is just to get them to give you a link, you are going about it wrong. If your goal is to actually develop friendships, you are headed down the right road.

Technorati is a great place to find peers. Start with people who have similar Technorati and Alexa ranking. Also look for people have a similar number of RSS subscribers. You’ll have an easier time connecting with your peers than trying to get in direct contact with the writers for the most popular blog on the internet.

Submit Tips to Top Blogs in Niche

A lot of top blogs have a “tips” email address where they solicit story ideas and links from readers. If you are familiar with the site and write a story that would be of genuine interest to its readers, don’t be afraid to submit it to the tips email address. This doesn’t mean you should email them every single post, but sending your best post every few weeks is appropriate.

Keep in mind this isn’t a mass mailing process. You real goal is for the writers at the top blogs to like your work so much that they subscribe to it in their RSS feed. This will put your content in front of them automatically. If you email them only about highly relevant well written stories, you increase the chance that they will want to subscribe.

Productive Blogger: Create a Series

Some topics are too large to be a single post. As you write a post ask yourself if you need to step back and deal with other related subjects as well. If so, then you might have a good candidate for a series.

The best way to write a series is to start with your recap post. This is the post where you link back to all the posts in the series so people can find them all from one place. Write this post first and list the different posts that make up the series–even though you haven’t written them yet. Then take this list and write a post for each item. Sometimes it is easiest to do this in a text editor so you can see all of the posts at once. This lets you jump back and forth if you find a better way to organize something.

Once you have the series written, post each one to go live over a period of time. Usually you’ll want them to go live every day or on a particular day of the week. For example, you could post one item from the series every Wednesday for the next 5 weeks. If your series is only of interest to a subset of your readers, then doing a post on a particular day of the week is probably better. You don’t want to alienate half of your readers with a 10 part series on something that doesn’t interest them. If is a single post each week, you are less likely to lose readers who aren’t interested.

When you post a series, do an introductory post to let everyone know what to expect. Once the posts are all life go back to this post and add links to the series. If someone finds the introduction weeks later you want it to be easy for them to navigate to the posts.

Your summary post should also contain links to all the posts in the series. It is a good idea to post this at the end of the series. A similar recap a few months (or even years) later can help point people back to your content and make it easier to find.

Productive Blogger: Make a Top 100 List

Every blogger eventually feels like they have run out of ideas. To help counter this, you need to have a repository of ideas ready to go. I suggest trying to write a list of 100 tips. You may not ever publish this list, but having it gives you a place to store those little ideas as they come to you. More importantly it gives you a place to go when you need inspiration.

I use this method for Productivity501. When I have some time to write, but none of my ideas seem good, I’ll browse through my list and usually I’ll find something that clicks. This idea is very similar to the post about inspiration not being evenly distributed. You have to capture inspiration when it comes to use when it is lacking.

The nice thing about a 100 Tips file, is that it can turn into a nice post. Top 100 lists are the types of things people love to bookmark and share with others. By taking the time to capture these little ideas as they come, you’ll give yourself some good fodder for inspiration as well as developing what could be a flagship post.

Productive Blogger: The Distribution of Inspiration

Most successful blogs, post new content every weekday.  People looking to start successful blogs, look at this and think “I guess I need to write something every day.”  The problem is that inspiration isn’t evenly distributed.  One day you may have ideas for 10 posts and the next two weeks–nothing.

To be a productive blogger, you need to learn to use the mountain tops of inspiration to help fill in the valleys where you can’t think of anything to write about.  This can be as simple as keeping a wordprocessor document of future posts.  If your blogging platform supports it, I suggest using the scheduled post feature.  Write your post when inspiration strikes but set it to go live when you know you will need a post.  You can sit down and write posts for the rest of the week or the rest of the year.

For example.  If you take one Saturday each month and write one short post per week for the next month, you’ll have a huge head start.  Even if you get busy with other things or can’t think of anything to write about, your blog will remain active.

It is takes discipline to schedule a post for later.  Once you finish a great post, your first instinct is to put it up so the whole world can see it. This tendency causes many blogs to be sporadic.  They will be silent for two weeks and suddenly have a dozen posts go live a 2am Saturday morning. If all your readers are using RSS, this might not be that big of problem, but running a successful blogs means getting people to integrate it into part of their daily pattern.  Your blog needs to become a habit.  Your reader is more likely to return if they know you will have new content every week or every day than if they think it is just random.

Also keep in mind that one of the things people like about blogs is the “bite size” content.  Publishing the equivalent of 50 pages spread out over a bunch of posts all at once, is probably going to get less brain share than a single post each week or each day just because people can’t take all the information in at once.

So to summarize:  Write your posts when you have the time and inspiration.  Post them when it is most convenient to your reader.

Productive Blogger

For the next several Monday’s we are going to be doing a series of posts on Productive Blogging.  I’ve kind of avoided meta-blogging (blogging about blogging) in the past, but I think enough of the readers here are running some type of blog, that it will make for some useful content once a week for a while.

If this is or isn’t useful, please let me know.

Your Turn — Three Questions

Previously I interviewed about 30 bloggers asking them to answer three questions. The responses (linked below) were very insightful.

1. What is the single biggest way people waste time without even realizing it?
2. What change has made the most difference in making you effective in life?
3. If someone were to read just one post from your site, which would you recommend the read and why?

However, as with any large group interview, it is easy to leave out people who have some great ideas to share.

So if you would like to give your opinion on any or all of these questions, please post the answers to your blog and I’ll link to them in this post. If you don’t have a blog, feel free to answer in the comments. Just drop me a note at mark (AT) productivity501 (dot) com with your URL and I’ll add you to the list below.

Here is the list:

1. Joyful Jubilant Learning
2. Juggling Frogs
3. Matton Marketing
4. Xtreme Computers
5. Your Answers Here.