You need to have a unique blog. People will unsubscribe it is not unique. David Armano blogs at Logic + Emotion. Check out his presentation on Slideshare to see the best presentation I’ve ever seen.
How do you define success? A great blog experience combines excellent content with conversation + stimulation. In the end, you connect with your communities. That is one of the best metrics of success.
Blogs as brands. Think of 3 brands. What kind of brand do you want to be like? The unique ones, probably. You’d want to be BMW or Apple rather than Kodak or K-mart.
Do you have a blog brand? Are you representing your personal brand? Your blog should be an extension of your personal brand. A brand is your gut feeling about a product or a service. It is creativity, insights, and ideas combined with logic and emotion.
Design a better blog experience. The 4 Cs of blogging:
- Community
- Consistency
- Clarity
- Content
Community – invest in your readers by listening and getting involved. Cultivate your community by asking them about their opinions and don’t provide all of the answers, let them fill in the blanks.
Consistency – find your voice, which requires you to speak up. Write about things your care about and be true to yourself. Experimentation leads to great things, but do it consistently. Don’t just do it once.
Clarity – see where you want to go even if you don’t know how to get there. Vision is everything. Conversations need to be clear and concise. Don’t ramble. Clarity combines vision and agility.
Content – frame your content, don’t just report things (like I’m doing now). Seek others’ opinions. Share your know-how and serve your readers. If your content has no value, neither does your blogging effort.
Stop calling yourself a blogger. Seriously. As a brand, bloggers have a lot of baggage. You have gone all the way through life before now as this or that, not a blogger. You have a blogger, you are not a blogger. Bloggers are on-dimensional. People are not.
Find your passion and use that to let your blog flow. Let it shape your blog. For example, David’s passion is design. It creates a unique experience and isn’t just about making something pretty. Design is problem-solving. Everything is designed, everything needs good design.
You->Passion->Conversation->Relationships->Affinity. Think of yourself as conversation architects. Dialogue fuels the “conversation economy.” Have any of you talked to a 7-year-old after they go on an exciting vacation? They can tell you exactly what they want by what they tell you about what was fun. Readers visit, engage, and come back for more.
As a side note, this was the most amazing and effective PowerPoint presentation/pitch I have EVER seen!!
[tags]SOBCon, SOBCon07[/tags]
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