[chrisbrogan.com]

Set Your Blog On Fire Posted: 22 Sep 2008 09:11 PM PDT Your blog topics are getting weak. You had a nice run with passion for a while, but now, you’re looking for better blog topics, more interesting content, and you’re still trying to grow that elusive community. How are you going to succeed? There are many simple tweaks you can make to the way you’re writing that turn posts into punches, and that turn readers into participants, and that should set you up with a chain explosion of added potential for your blog down the line. Here are some ideas. The Content Itself Build a text file of great potential blog post titles. Work on the titles every few days, sharpening them into punchy titles that convince someone to click. Get great blog topics from reading the covers of popular magazines and from seeing what makes its way to the front of Delicious.com/popular. Make your text punchy. Use short sentences, small words. Be willing to break a few grammatical rules, if only for effect. Pay attention by way of stats as to what posts do the best. Repeat often by writing new posts on the similar theme. Think long and hard on what you want your posts to do for your audience. Want them to link to it? Make a thoughtful piece they want to remember. Want more comments? Ask for feedback. Do something new from time to time. Way new. Totally and completely off the typical radar of your blog. And yet, tie it back to what your community cares about. Use pictures. Go to Flickr and use Creative Commons shared photos to punch up your posts. Deliver USEFUL information, not just opinions. Give people something to focus on. But, have a strong voice, and an obvious opinion. Write for your audience. Write as if you’re them. Write to tug at their thoughts and attention. Finish the post as quickly as you can. Let people move on. (Unless you want it saved in Delicious/popular). Promoting Your Content Try out Zemanta, a plugin that lets you find related posts (and art and other stuff). I’ve noticed that by using Zemanta, and when others use it, my posts are suddenly showing up as links on other people’s blogs, thus driving more inbound links and driving more people to my site. Write guest posts for related blogs. Bundle your best posts into a free ebook and distribute them widely. Be sure to include links on how to subscribe to your blog within the ebook. Have outposts on all the social networks. (I say this all the time, I know.) Outposts means building a profile there, and being sure that people know how to reach your blog. Keep your eye out for new tools that will spread the word of your blog even further. Make your RSS subscription buttons very visible, and also your social bookmarking tools. Send out the occasional post via email to people who might not read you daily. Be brief and tactful in doing this one. Above all else, consider who you’re trying to build the relationship with and write in such a way as to deliver that person the best possible experience with your blog they can have. Think like an entertainer in that regard. Give them the best show possible. Is there anything else I missed? What do you see in your own blog that might be made better by any of the advice above? Look at my last few posts. Am I practicing what I preach? If not, call me out. Photo credit, Focal Intent Related articles by Zemanta 50 Steps to Establishing a Consistent Social Media Practice Make Your Blog Design Work For You The Community Ecosystem Zemanta is Your Blogging Assistant

Dad-o-Matic- Week One Posted: 22 Sep 2008 08:37 PM PDT Quick report on how things are going since launching Dad-o-Matic: Dad-o-Matic Authors: 16 registered authors. Posts: 15 published posts. Comments: 75 comments. Web hits: (don’t know, stats didn’t pick any up. Gotta troubleshoot.) RSS subscribers: 37 Google references: 53 Blogsearch : 57 Technorati: (don’t know, it fell down when I was searching) Affiliate/Ad money made: $4 . It’s week one. I’m really proud with what we have, especially with the 16 authors. I just added Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins of Mashable fame, Jeffrey Sass of lots of places face, and David Petherick from Digital Biographer to name a few. They’ve got more posts coming out shortly, as do the entire team. And I hope to pry at least one more dad post out of Guy Kawasaki for next month. (Mind you, I don’t pay him as much as Amex.) So far, it’s been fun. I’m going to think about how to get more out of it, for the parents in the community as well as how to make the business of running a content blog like Dad-o-Matic make sense. What’s your take? What do you think about the project overall? What would you do differently, if you were starting Dad-o-Matic?

Two Important Speaking Tips Posted: 22 Sep 2008 02:41 PM PDT Here are two really fast and important speaking tips for you to learn and understand. Start with answering your audience’s most pressing question: “what’s in this for me?” And then finish by giving your audience actionable takeaways. Making these two speaking tips top of mind becomes vital in delivering a presentation that matters. Too often, we have a tendency to clear our autobiographical throats before we dig into educating an audience. Then, we end with no real sense of what comes next. This means we leave people excited, but with nothing to do. What’s In It For Me? (WIIFM?) Here’s one way to help your audience understand what’s in it for them: start by asking them a question that sounds like it came from right out of their head. If you’re giving a session on how the communications industry will be changed by audio podcasting, ask something like, “Do you think people REALLY believe that podcasting will change the world?” This is actually two tips in one. It relates to the “what’s in it for me” (WIIFM) issue, but it also does something I love to do in presenting: take away their sword. This means, start by making sure your audience (especially if they’re skeptics) knows that you’re on their side. So, ask a question that might come from your audience’s head, such that it sets them in the right frame of mind to absorb the brilliance you’re about to bestow upon them. Takeaways This is something I learned to do better after working with Stephen Saber at CrossTech Media. He stresses that every presentation I do for the company have five takeaway points: things people can do with the information I’ve given them during the presentation. That’s the whole “next steps” stuff that people seem to crave at events. Since I started adding “takeaways” to my presentations, in one form or another, I’ve found that people have started to rate my speeches much more useful. I score high on entertainment, but now, with making sure people know what comes next, they also get scored pretty high on usefulness. Takeaways should be very actionable. If you’ve finished up your speech on how podcasting changes communication, give people an assignment to find five podcasts on iTunes and subscribe for a month. Take notes on the ways each show introduces information, etc. Review your current corporate communications documents. Do any lend themselves to a potential audio format as well? Things like that. How These Help People love structure. In my recent post on Cirque Du Soleil, I failed to note just how structured the experience was from start to finish. From buying tickets to being seated, from the opening curtain to the final bow, everything in the experience was crafted such that we, the audience, didn’t have to think much about the mechanics of the experience. We could just watch the event and absorb the experience. By starting with WIIFM and ending with 5 takeaways - even if you do it in a creative way that breaks the mold a bit, people will feel like they better understand and appreciate your efforts to educate and entertain them. Does that make sense? Have you done something like this? How do you improve what I have here? Photo credit, Brian Solis

How Cirque Du Soleil Shows Social Media Love Posted: 22 Sep 2008 08:13 AM PDT This past weekend, I had the pleasure of meeting Jessica Berlin, the social media head from the Cirque du Soleil, the uber circus entertainment experience that just can’t adequately be summed up by being called a circus. She and I talked about how successful their Facebook group is, and about the MySpace group a fan is running that has over 40,000 very active members, without her official effort. But above all that, Jessica went further than just talking about how Cirque feels about the social media and blogging space. She participated in a giant way. In essence, she lives a trust agent move that Julien and I call being “one of us.” Jess came to this year’s Blog World Expo, and hung out with us in the sessions, the blogger’s lounge, and all around. More importantly, she also came out to the party events as well. And that’s where we learned about what the Cirque Du Soleil thinks about we blogger types. We were at a party that was a little too crowded. As I pushed through to leave, I saw Jess leaving as well. I asked her, “Hey, where’s somewhere we can go to stretch out a bit? Know a decent club that could hold maybe a hundred of us?” Jess said, “Why not go to Revolution?” Revolution is a Beatles-inspired night club/lounge run by the Cirque du Soleil inside the Mirage hotel and casino. It was intimate and colorful and very much themed to match the Cirque show “Love,” which features the music of the Beatles. It also had a line of people waiting out front. But that turned out to be no problem. Dan Kramer, the VIP host out front, had received word from Jess that the bloggers were coming. The bloggers were coming. Dan was every bit the professional, and when I arrived, gave us the most special, personal treatment I could imagine. He knew we weren’t his typical flashy, special guests, but he treated us like royalty right away. (Dan also served two tours in Iraq as a Marine scout, the guys who go out wayyyy before the main military body, and thus, are pretty much on their own in a bind). We had a great night. Lots of folks came by the party, and everyone was treated well, as far as I know. There was a dress code, so a few friends got turned away, but I suspect had I heard about it, I might’ve been able to convince Dan to waive that, too. (But hey, it’s their place, and we have to keep by their rules. No foul there.) I also got to attend the Cirque show Love, featuring the music of the Beatles. I’m sorry that I can’t exactly describe what I saw. I can tell you that I spent the majority of the show going “oh wow!” and “no way!” and “oh jeez” (like when this guy on a kind of swing over the top of the event kept looking like he was going to freefall plummet 40 or so feet. You don’t have to love Beatles music to appreciate the event, but it helped. In the end, what this said to me was that Cirque du Soleil was live and active in our space, had interest in what we were doing, and were interested in doing social media projects of their own. I’m grateful for the kindness of Jessica Berlin and everyone else I encountered in their organization, but mostly, I’m encouraged that a large entertainment operation is doing good social media work both from the web side and the human side. It was a true trust agent move to have Jess there in our midst. Have you seen one of their shows? What do you think of Cirque? Photo credit, Erin MC Hammer

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