This is the third in a series of articles about business blogging. The foundation of any successful inbound marketing program is remarkable content. It’s the reason why people will pay attention to you and the motivation to hand over their email address and opt into your messages. Downloadable content is certainly an important part of a content marketing strategy but blogging is its lifeblood. The data is irrefutable; more blogging equals more quality traffic and higher conversion rates.
Creativity is a hungry beast. It needs food; lots of food. If you’re going to crank out one or two (or five) blog posts each and every week, you need to need to have a very healthy and steady flow of raw materials from which you can build those posts. In this article, we’ll talk about how to prepare yourself for becoming a blogger.
ABC
Getting started with blogging and social media is intimidating to many. It took me time to develop the confidence, skills, and habits that make it possible to deliver content on a regular basis. More than anything, it requires a 24/7 mindset that I call “ABC: Always Be Collecting,” which is a take on the fantastic movie Glengarry Glen Ross.
If you’ve never seen the movie, you can get a good sense of the plot from this seven minute clip of Baldwin’s passionate, insulting and obscenity-laced motivational speech. Warning – there is some strong language in this scene.
“Always Be Collecting” means establishing a commitment and habit to always be thinking about collecting content for your blog, Tweets, and Facebook updates. This mindset will only have limited effectiveness without a support structure. Here are 4 tips to help you get going.
- Intelligence: Gathering intelligence means performing reconnaissance on your topic areas. Read books, subscribe to RSS feeds, follow thought leaders on social media, etc.
- Raw Materials: Creating compelling blog content requires visuals. You can get many of them from stock photos and creative commons but using original material really puts the icing on your content. I am always snapping pictures with my smartphone when I see pictures that could end up in a future blog post. A good screen capture tool is also important.
- Total Consciousness: As a blogger, you need to get yourself into a content creator’s frame of mind. It must become a habit and something that is always on your mind.
- Be Prepared: Ideas are fleeting – especially for the attention-deficit afflicted like me! You need to be prepared to jot down an idea the very second it occurs to you.
Intelligence
Sow how exactly can you gather all of this intelligence needed for business blogging? My number one Weapon of Mass Construction is Really Simple Syndication (RSS). RSS is a technology that allows publishers to send new articles to you so you don’t have to keep going back to their site to see if there’s anything new. At last count, I subscribe to 254 feeds using Google Reader. I scan over 1,000 articles every day, skimming about 100 and reading a dozen or so. This makes sure I stay informed about my topics and also gives me ideas for blog posts. Most email clients like Outlook or Mac Mail can also subscribe to RSS feeds.
Another source of information is question and answer features on social media sites. Two of the best in this regard are LinkedIn and Quora. Depending upon your blog topic and industry, there are certainly many, many others as well. One of my favorite blogging tricks is to find questions that I can answer and then repurpose that answer into a blog post. Most of these question sites provide RSS feeds so you can be notified when new questions are posted.
Another tremendous source of intelligence is Google Alerts. This is a free tool that allows you to configure Google searches that will be mailed to you daily or weekly. You can also set up RSS feeds for them if you prefer. This is a powerful tool that can keep you up to date on the latest content on the web for a given set of keywords.
Tools
The whole idea of tools is to make your work easier and/or more efficient. There are some indispensible tools I use for my blogging but the mother of them all is Evernote. If you’re not familiar with this free product, their tagline is “Remember everything.” It is an extraordinarily easy way to collect, tag, organize and retrieve information that you will need at a later time. As discussed at length, capturing your ideas and raw data are critical to blogging success.
I use Evernote to trap ideas and content sources for my blog posts. Many of my ideas come from other blog posts. Evernote has a web clipper that can be installed in any browser, making it quick and easy to grab a web page. When a note is created it gets tagged with a keyword that I use as a filter later on to go back and review.
Once again, my smartphone comes to the rescue here. I have Evernote installed on it and all of my blog ideas end up there. I can snap photos or even use the voice recorder. The important thing is to trap those ideas in a repository before they’re gone.
