Six Ways To Help Her Find you Faster…
1. Stop being sheepish about your accomplishments and build a truly savvy and transparent profile for yourself on the Web.
(Oy vey – you’re not tooooooo olddddddd to be on the Web. Seriously.)
2. Use Twitter for good, not evil. As mega-celebs close down their Twitter accounts it just means more room for your content rich, edu-focused tweets! Don’t Twitter out something you wouldn’t want your Mom reading. Keep your tweets filled with link-love and be willing to share your knowledge.
4. Don’t hate me because I’m social. (Oops, did I blog that out loud?) – what that means is don’t kill the Web 2.0 messengers, and don’t buy into everything they tell you to do. Find a good Web 2.0 balance that works for you. Many people become power LinkedIn.com users, others just operate best on Facebook.com. Whatever you choose to use, don’t let it languish.
5. Stop wishing for the good old days of cold pancakes and stale coffee networking breakfast events. Put your butt in the chair with your favorite coffee mug and spend thirty minutes a day online using all the free tools available to you. No excuses. Just Social IT!
6. Find your tribe, your peeps, your community by using Google Search, technorati search and Google Blog Search. Ready for something new? Try BING search.
7. Be present, be YOU, be Web 2.0 brave!
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1. Make writing your blog a part of your day just like anything else. Don’t wait to be inspired. Set aside 30 minutes three times a week to write a blog post.
2. Read other bloggers – you’ll be inspired and it helps you understand what you can also add a topic that has not yet been covered.
3. Don’t spend all your time on Twitter, but also think about how the things you are tweeting about can be expanded into a longer blog format.
4. Use Google Alerts to create writing prompts for you that help you blog effectively on the topics you want to cover in your blog.
5. Don’t waste time blogging about topics you’re not passionate about.
6. Don’t buy into blog-envy. It keeps you from writing what you need to share and keeps all of us from reading your great wisdom.
7. Stop worrying about how many comments your blog posts are generating and start focusing on if you’re producing good content. Keep in mind you’re building your own mini-publication or magazine and that a blog post is not just about producing comments.
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If you think of your blog as an online magazine (which you should) then one of the best ways to beat bloggers’block is to create an editorial calendar for your blog posts. Organizing your blog topics and future posts in this manner will help inspire you to write more and kvetch less about having nothing to write about.
What follows are five tips for creating your blog editorial calendar:
1. Pick five to seven general topics in your frame of expertise that you know you can generate good content with.
2. Brainstorm on each topic for 20 minutes. Write down every single thing that comes to mind under each of those content headers.
3. Look at the newly created content under those headers and divide it by days of the week. Remember if you can blog at least three days a week it is invaluable to your blog’s visibility.
4. Take the content you have and see if you can break it up into Friday tips, or Monday takeaways. In other words, establish an editorial pattern for your blogging. If you want to always blog on Fridays about how to find inner creativity, then that would always be a Friday post and you can create tons of future content around that specific topic.
5. If there are areas of your content that seemed much harder to brainstorm on then you’ll know which ones you need to do more research for and find outside sources as well as your own insight to incorporate into the blog posts.
Bonus Tip: Spend 30 minutes a day three times a week on blogging and you’ll be amazed at how quickly your blog starts building long-term community.
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In Web 2.0, no matter what anyone tells you – you can’t simply put up a shiny blog and expect that milions of people will suddenly arrive to gaze at its beauty.
Just grabbing a Twitter account, polishing up your Linkedin.com account and reading one or two other bloggers is not enough either.
In that same vein, your procession (postings) on the Web using all these tools, should never be a series of over-hyped marketing messaging with little or no real insight.
Instead of looking for the quickest way to have the biggest float in the parade, why not strive instead for slowly making your way – respectfully, truthfully, and creatively.
Don’t let people fool you into thinking that just because you’re here it means you don’t have to do anything else.
Don’t be beguiled by folks who tell you there’s a quicker way of using all these tools that don’t involve work on your part.
If you really want to reap the benefits of Web 2.0, you have to be willing to march with the masses. Let them see who you really are and contribute what you can to benefit everyone.
Don’t view this work as drudgery – view it as a way to find your peeps. Find the tools that work best for you and join in!
And always remember to simply be yourself.
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Here are my ten favorite things about writing a blog:
1. Instantaneous gratification after you’ve finished a post.
2. No writers’ block allowed or “blog block.” If you don’t have something to blog about – then take time out to thank or link to all those other peer blogs who inspire you.
3. Freedom from an editor or story slant – although note, this never means your blog should be sloppy and not congruent.
4. E-meeting tons of other bloggers who are supportive and active in the blogosphere
5. Reaching out to potential readers and establishing a rapport.
6. Interviewing other bloggers
7. Writing anything keeps you creative and focused. It’s too easy as a writer, to get lazy and not challenge yourself. Writing blogs keeps you challenged!
8. Hoping someone will comment on your blog. (Someone…anyone…Mom?)
9. Getting feedback that you’re on the right track and you’re helping folks view the world at a better vantage point.
10. Link Love – it’s fun and festive and you get to meet other link-minded folks!
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- Image by HubSpot via Flickr
Social Media Must-Haves:
1. HARO.com – Peter Shankman‘s site – free to subscribe to and well worth it!
2. PitchEngine.com – everything you need to know about the social media release. Fantastic resource.
3. Wefollow.com - Wonderful Twitter app for keeping track of all things “following”.
4. Twellow.com - register on it! Don’t ask questions, just register!
5. Pressreleasegrader.com – Free your PR releases of gobbledygook and empower them with keywords!
6. Friendfeed.com – get all your tools on speaking terms!
7. Mashable.com - amazing content all the time to keep you up on social media.
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- Image via CrunchBase
Also, just finished my copy of this week’s New York magazine. I love the mag, but was disappointed that they had a story titled, “Spam Haiku,” about Twitter where once again a journalist just used the Nielsen study on Twitter citing, “Recently Nielsen reported that 60% of people who use Twitter once fail to return the following month.”
Unfortunately, this study as I’ve written previously and other social media folks have also covered, did not take into account the other apps that people are using to access Twitter. So if you log in and create your account, post your first Tweet and then decide forever after to use TweetDeck, or Tweetie or other apps – and never login directly through the Twitter site login, then you were counted as the 60% who left after using Twitter only one time.
Ok, I sound like a tech geek here, but having spent almost ten years as a technology journalist, I have to say, “Folks, please spend more time researching stats about social media!!! Please don’t just pick one line out of a study and quote it as the seminal stat without really finding out more.” UGH.
Now be on your way. It’s memorial weekend and I’m turning my computer off and heading to the beach with the kids and hubby.
God Bless my late Gramps, Major General John M. Reynolds, Air Force who served our country in three wars.
What a blessing to have such an amazing Gramps.
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