If you’ve got an idea worth spreading, I hope you’ll consider this random assortment of rules. Like all rules, some are made to be broken, but still…
•    You can name your idea anything you like, but a google-friendly name is always better than one that isn’t.
•    Don’t plan on appearing on a reality show as the best way to launch your idea.
•    Waiting for inspiration is another way of saying that you’re stalling. You don’t wait for inspiration, you command it to appear.
•    Don’t poll your friends. It’s your art, not an election.
•    Never pay a non-lawyer who promises to get you a patent.
•    Avoid powerful people. Great ideas aren’t anointed, they spread through a groundswell of support.
•    Spamming strangers doesn’t work. Spamming friends doesn’t work so well either, but it’s certainly better than spamming strangers.
•    The hard part is finishing, so enjoy the starting part.
•    Powerful organizations adore the status quo, so expect no help from them if your idea challenges the very thing they adore.
•    Figure out how long your idea will take to spread, and multiply by 4.
•    Be prepared for the Dip.
•    Seek out apostles, not partners. People who benefit from spreading your idea, not people who need to own it.
•    Keep your overhead low and don’t quit your day job until your idea can absorb your time.
•    Think big. Bigger than that.
•    Are you a serial idea-starting person? If so, what can you change to end that cycle? The goal is to be an idea-shipping person.
•    Try not to confuse confidence with delusion.
•    Prefer dry, useful but dull ideas to consumer-friendly ‘I would buy that’ sort of things. A lot less competition and a lot more upside in the long run.
•    Pick a budget. Pick a ship date. Honor both. Don’t ignore either. No slippage, no overruns.
•    Surround yourself with encouraging voices and incisive critics. It’s okay if they’re not the same people. Ignore both camps on occasion.
•    Be grateful.
•    Rise up to the opportunity, and do the idea justice.

I get calls sometimes from people wanting me to help them build a website. I respond to these calls by asking them what is their marketing plan. I don’t like to build a site for a client unless they have taken the time to formulate a comprehensive marketing plan that will include building a website.

This may sound picky, pretentious, or expensive but in truth it is none of the above. The results that you will achieve as a result of formulating a good plan far outweigh cost. So are you starting a small business or looking to build a website? Great, I can help you with that, but lets talk first about your plan. Then 6 months, a year, maybe 2 years down the road we will have earned the right to light one up and say as the great Hannibal Smith, “I love it when a plan comes together.”

In a recent blog post, marketing guru Seth Godin addressed this issue of tasks versus solutions. He wrote:

“If you ask people for the next task on the list, if you allow them to define the thing they are buying from you, you have abdicated responsibility. Your work product becomes dependent on the insight and guts of the person giving you an assignment. This is especially dangerous for consultants and freelancers, because the answer might be, “nothing.” Or it might be a paying gig that’s profitable in the short run but a career deadener over time.

Far better to reach a level of confidence and skill that you can describe solutions rather than ask for tasks.”

Those words are worthy of reflection. What are you asking of your clients and what are you delivering?

This week, I came across an article on www.corporatedollar.org that highlights a huge advantage that blogs have over traditional websites. Here is the article:

Using a blog platform, like WordPress (with the Thesis theme, of course), to run your website means that your non-profit will get more love from Google.

Search engine optimization, or the tweaking of your website to rank high in Google, can be summed up in a simple business objective that Google holds near and dear to their hearts:

“Lets give the most valuable, relevant and current results to folks who use our search engine!”

I’ve broken down the video into these three “content qualities“:

• Valuable – Traditional websites generally have content that is broadly smeared throughout all of it’s pages. Blogs, on the other hand, allow for highly-concentrated silos of “topic niches” in each post.
• Relevant – Because of the highly-concentrated lumps of content within a post, trackbacks are frequent. This linking encourages Google to rank these blog posts higher because they have already been “tagged” by real people.
• Current – Google is not in the business of serving up stale, crappy web-pages. Blogs allow for frequently produced content; websites tend to go stale each time the intern quits

HT: www.corporatedollar.org

So how do you produce good content? I’m glad that you asked and to help you get a grasp on this I am going to post material from one of the world’s most successful and innovative bloggers, Mr. Darren Rowse.

Here is a post from Darren’s blog entitled Writing Good Content. I hope you enjoy and heed his advice.

What is Good Content?

Ultimately defining what is ‘good content’ is a subjective exercise (perhaps in a similar way to defining what is a ‘good book’ or a ‘good movie’) and so a post like this one is likely to cause a little debate as each person will define it differently depending upon their personality, their needs, the topic that they are talking about and perhaps even their ethics. Not only will bloggers themselves each have a different view on what is ‘good’ content – but readers tend to also. I know that every time I ask for feedback on ProBlogger and what I write more about I get a real spectrum of responses.

Future posts in this series is an attempt to unpack some of the elements of content that might go towards making it good – or not. At most points along the way there will be debate but hopefully out of it readers will be able to mix and match the elements and identify what works for them.

So without any more introductory remarks, lets get into it with the first element of writing quality content:

Usefulness and Uniqueness - As this post is a part of a series of posts that get back to the basics of blogging and so I will start unpacking the topic of ‘writing good content’ with perhaps the most basic and obvious point of all:

‘for a blog to be successful your content needs to be useful and unique to your readers’

As I say – it’s not rocket science but it’s a factor that I think bloggers need to continually be asking themselves about as they review their blogging. Is your blog useful?

Back in the days when I studied marketing I remember sitting in lecture after lecture getting more and more frustrated as I heard my lecturers drum into us the same thing time after time. Although they said it in different ways, the lessons that they communicated was largely the same in every instance and boiled down to this:

‘Start with the customer – find out what they want and give it to them.’

This is a good lesson for bloggers also.

While I would also recommend that you start with yourself as a blogger and blog out of your own passions, experiences and knowledge – it is essential that you are aware of your reader and that you create content that will add something to their lives. Give them something useful.

What is ‘useful’ content?

Of course ‘useful content’ to me is different from what it is to you, but could be any of the following:

- Entertainment – increasingly blogs are being used as entertainment. People are going to them for laughs, for gossip and for fun conversation.
- Education – some blog readers are primarily interested in learning something about a given topic.
- Information – many successful blogs are built on the thirst that some have to be informed on an issue, product or topic
- Debate – some blog readers want a place that they can have a good old fashioned dialogue, debate or even a fight over an issue
- News – many blog readers just want to be kept up to date in a field
- Community – I’m aware of some very successful blogs that tap into the need that people have to connect and belong. Quite often the topic is secondary to these connections.

This list could of course be a lot longer (feel free to add to it in comments). Each blog has the potential to be ‘useful’ in a different way and it would probably be unwise to start a blog that tried to be all of these things at once (although many blogs do do a variety of these things at once).

Research your Readership

Perhaps the best advice that I could give on developing useful content is to research your readership (or potential readership). If you already have a blog do this by surveying your readers (either formally or informally) or by asking for feedback. I regularly seek out the opinion of my blog readers to find out what their needs and desires are in the topic I’m talking about. If you don’t have a blog already then you’ll need to work a little harder to research your potential readers. I tend to survey friends, look a lot at other people’s blogs on a topic (especially their comments section to see what types of questions people are asking) and particularly look hard in forums and discussion groups on topics where there is usually a lot of question asking going on. As you do this you’ll begin to put your finger on what people are wanting and what you might be able to provide to meet these needs.

Unique Content

Another factor to consider when thinking about ‘good content’ is whether it is ‘unique’.

With a blog being created every second and with blogs on virtually every topic you can think of, the challenge for bloggers is to build a blog that stands out from the crowd. I see blogs every day that provide ‘useful’ content that have no readers simply because people are finding that information in other places.

Distinguish yourself

My advice to new bloggers trying to break into a topic where others are already blogging is to take a surf through the other blogs and websites in your niche and do some analysis upon what sort of content that they are producing. In most niches you’ll find that sites are all presenting very similar information in pretty much the same voice, tone and style. As a new blogger on the topic you have a choice – you can either replicate what they are doing and try to do it better (difficult as they will already have loyal readers and unless you’re brilliant at it you’re unlikely to convert these readers over to you) OR you can distinguish yourself in someway from what others are doing.

This might mean tackling a slightly different topic (perhaps a sub-niche) but could also mean writing in a distinct voice (take a look at Manolo’s blog for an example of a blogger who has grown a cult audience by writing about an odd combination of topics as an anonymous blogger writing in the third person). It might also mean writing in a different genre of posts (ie if everyone else is writing ‘newsy’ posts you might like to write more ‘opinion’ type posts).

Bring together the elements of both Useful and Unique content and you will be one step closer to a successful blog.

Original Content – You will notice that I have chosen the world ‘unique’ instead of ‘original’ in this post. There is mixed opinion in blogging circles on whether original content is always best. Regular readers of this blog know that not all my posts here are completely ‘original’. There are some posts where I use short excerpts (quotes) from other blogs as part of my blog entries. For example in a earlier post in this series on ‘what is a blog‘ I used a number of quotes from other bloggers as part of the post. As a result that post might not be classified as ‘original’ as such – but it is somewhat ‘unique’ (and hopefully useful) as I put them together in a way that they had not been used before (side by side) and then added my own comments to them.

My main advice on ‘orginal’ content is that writing is generally best as it won’t be found anywhere else in that form – however clever and fair use of other people’s content (always giving credit for it and using it within a ‘fair use’ way – ie only using short quotes’) CAN be worth doing IF you use it in a way that is useful to your readers.

HT: Thanks Darren. Keep the good stuff coming.

Shortly after joining Twitter in June of last year, I began developing a social media strategy for the church I serve, Grace Baptist Church.  This strategy included redesigned our church website with a WordPress integrated blog to keep content current, a Facebook group, a church planting resource blog, and a church twitter account.

Over the past nine months, I have considered various ways in which twitter can be particularly helpful for the local church.  Relatively speaking, Grace Baptist is a small church, but that does not mean that we have to have a small impact…

The rest of his post can be found at Tim’s  entitled Provocations and Pantings.

Bill Seaver, founder of Micro Explosion Media, wrote a post recently that summarizes this concept in a very “Seinfeldian” way:

It’s Not You, It’s Me (except in social media)
If you’re a Seinfeld fan you’ve inevitably seen the “it’s not you, it’s me” scene. As funny as it is, it’s exactly the opposite in social media. In social media, particularly in corporate blogging, podcasting, video, etc., it’s not about you and your company. Not all the time anyway. It’s about giving the right people something they deem valuable.

I just think companies assume people are more interested in them than they really are and don’t feel like they have to earn the attention they desire. Social media works when you earn and retain attention, and that is best done by not making it about you (all the time) and adding value to the people you want to reach.

It’s entirely possible SeaWorld San Antonio is all over this and I just had a skewed perspective when I read the post and watched the video, but I suspect this is a bit of a strategic shift they’ll need to make to really succeed with their social media strategy. I recommend they, and any company, remember these three things:

• Social media tools like blogs and video are primarily for content. Conversation is secondary.
• Social networking tools like Facebook are primarily for conversation. Content is secondary.
• When you are creating content, use the Old McDonald approach. That will ensure you add value to the people you want to reach.

I hope SeaWorld San Antonio does well. If they do, they’ll become another great example of what social media has done for companies. Every company just has to remember that it’s not about them primarily. It’s about you.

HT: Bill Seaver

- Mike