[chrisbrogan.com]

My 50 Most Linked To Posts Posted: 04 Jan 2009 11:04 PM PST I was just looking at something on Yahoo! Site Explorer and realized that I could pluck from it the 50 most linked to posts on my site without a lot of heavy lifting. It’s interesting what you chose. I don’t agree with some of them, but when I read the titles, I know what was going on at the time, and I can see how things went the way they did. By the way, what’s your favorite post to link? Turns out, mostly numbered list posts. Like this one. So here they are, My 50 Most Linked To Posts: When Google Owns You 50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business 20 Free eBooks About Social Media 50 Ways to Take Your Blog to the Next Level Free eBook on Personal Branding 50 Ways Marketers Can use Social Media to Improve Their Marketing 100 Personal Branding Tactics Using Social Media 50 Steps to Establishing a Consistent Social Media Practice 50 Online Applications and Sites to Consider Twelve Ways to Sell Social Media to Your Boss A Sample Blogging Workflow Etiquette in the Age of Social Media Best Social Media Advice From This Site 50 Blog Topics Marketers Could Write For Their Companies My Best Advice About Blogging Nine Ways to Promote Your Blog Posts How to Do More With Less Time On Managing A Community Write Your LinkedIn Profile for Your Future Is Your Community For Sale? Five Tools I Use for Listening Ten Secrets to Better Blogging Essential Skills of a Community Manager What Social Media Does Best My Best Advice About Social Media My Best Advice About Personal Branding How to Use Friendfeed as a Collaborative Business Tool Starting a Social Media Strategy What are Some Social Media Marketing Best Practices Develop a Strong Personal Brand Online Part 1 How to Create Business From a Blog Cuil Misses Me Social Media Starter Moves for Freelancers Thinking About Trust Agents How I Tamed My Inbox You Can Do Your Job Without Twitter Make Your Blog Design Work For You How Content Marketing Will Shake the Tree Advertising and Trust What I Want a Social Media Expert to Know Workflow- Social Media for Marketers How to Listen for Opportunities on Twitter Thinking About the Negatives Threading Some Trends Together Google Gets Back to Nick (related to this). Social Media Does Not Replace Marketing Strategy Cherp is a Twitter-Flavored Agency (why?) Share Share Share Share Share The Vital Importance of Your Network Is Your Blog For Rent? I’m not sure I agree that these are my best, but they’re what people linked to for whatever reason. Maybe this is useful to folks who are new to the blog? Let me know. And thanks for your attention. Photo credit David

Log Into Twitter And Change Your Password Posted: 04 Jan 2009 09:10 PM PST Just do it. Log in. Change your password. And then think REALLY hard about which services you’re giving your password to. This phishing thing is getting stupid fast. Go to http://www.twitter.com and log in. The setting is right here: http://twitter.com/account/password Just change it. It might not be you. But it probably is someone you know. Please retweet the holy hell out of this post. Here’s why. (amended to please Steve Garfield)

Cultivating a Writing Habit Posted: 04 Jan 2009 07:35 PM PST I’m writing a book with Julien Smith. Since starting the project, both Julien and I have realized that it’s a lot harder to write a book than blog posts. It takes a whole different kind of discipline than what I do when I write blogs. It’s a lot harder. Because of this, and because people asked me about my writing habits, I thought I’d share a bit about the process I use. This might be useful. It might be a waste of your time. Depends what I do that synchs with what you do. Writing is as personal and varied as most things worth doing in life. Your mileage will vary. My Writing DNA Before we get into this, a bit of DNA. I’ve been writing in some form or another since grade school. I’ve wanted to be a writer my entire life. I learned how to read early, starting with Stuart Little, Charlotte’s Web, and The Trumpet and the Swan, and then rapidly into comic books. I’ve read voraciously since I can really remember. I still get through more than two books a week, even in busy times. I read a sampling of over 700 blogs a day. I’ve written since forever, and in high school, I started getting awards. I won the National Council of Teacher’s of English award. I won a spot at the Breadloaf Young Writer’s Convention at Middlebury College (where Robert Frost taught). I have written daily for decades at this point. All this to say it’s not like I just showed up at the playground and was Michael Jordan. I’ve been at this a while. Your mileage will vary. But that’s okay. The Formula: Read, Write, Write- Part 1: Read First stop in learning how to write more, write better, write effectively is to read. Read all the time. Read for hours a day if you can. Can’t find the time? Kill your television. Kill some of your video game playing (some). Kill other distractions. Reading is a super power. The more you learn from reading, the more you can improve tons of areas of your life. But what you also do is learn how others write, and you can use that. Let’s stop there. There’s a difference between just reading and reading to understand how a writer works it. Want to learn magic? Get Made to Stick by the Heaths. Learn HOW they make the book so interesting. Not the ideas, but HOW they write it. Read Freakonomics and learn how storytelling makes a book into a killer bestseller. Read every Seth book (well, except for Meatball). Want to know three fiction books that broke me down and turned me into everything I could be? Shipping News Fight Club Slapboxing with Jesus Shipping news taught me brevity. Fight Club taught me how not to pull a punch. Slapboxing taught me how to really pull raw emotions out of the air. Does this help my nonfiction writing? You bet it does. The Formula: Read, Write, Write- Part 2: Write People ask me how I write so much. One trick is that I write all day long. Not always with paper. Not always with a computer. But I’m always writing. If you and I are having coffee and my eyes glaze for a second, I’m probably thinking about how something might be worded, or I just got a new topic idea for a blog post. When I’m reading, I’m thinking about writing. When I’m at the gym, I’m thinking about posts. When I’m working on something entirely different, I’m also writing. When I’m writing, I’m writing something else. Distracting? Sure. Whatever. Get used to distractions. If you don’t, you’re doomed. Truly. There’s nothing BUT a signal-to-noise ratio. And while you try and cut noise to perfect signal, I’m finding the hidden patterns. Learn how to surf noise and you’ll learn how to jump gates. So, lesson two is to write all day. Only, this writing I’m talking about is the kind that doesn’t actually land anywhere. It just means that your mind is primed for those moments where you get a moment to write. The Formula: Read, Write, Write- Part 3: Write I write daily. I write emails. I write thousands of words 140 characters at a time into Twitter. I write proposals. I write blog posts (hey, here’s a blog post!). I write for the book with Julien. (Of these, the last is the hardest, but only because I’m afraid. Books are so… forever.) Writing begets writing. Once you get into a steady diet, you don’t fall off the wagon for much of anything. To write, think about structures. If it’s a blog post, is it a long one, a short one, a list, a what? If it’s writing for your big book, how are you going to structure things? Julien and I did our book in six major chapters, with a few minor bookend chapters to set the concepts up. Once we had that structure, we filled in each chapter with our mindset on every main point. So, we’d name a chapter after a major theme in our book, and then we’d write what we could think about to support it. We’d write it in no particular order, and then try organizing it once the chapter was almost finished. That way, we’d go back in and do transitions to make for better readability. Structures, even if atypical, are your saving grace in knowing how to write what you want to cover. My blog posts have a structure. I write a paragraph that leads you into the post. I lead with the major stuff. I build on that. I end with a question or three to get you talking. Every time. Go back and read 10 of my posts. Take them apart. You’ll see. Get in, Get Your Hands Dirty Writing isn’t an “I should start doing that” kind of endeavor. Just start somewhere. Stop somewhere. Look around. One last book plug: On Writing by Stephen King. The first half is more like an auto-biography. Interesting, but you don’t actually need it. The second time I bought this book, I started at the writing section, ripped the book apart there, and duct taped the cover back on, thus making it the book I wanted. You can do that, too. King basically teaches you to stop being such a sissy and just start writing. It’s tough love writing lessons, that’s for sure. But you know what? Writers need that more than not. The writers who need gentle writing are doing it for therapy, not business. Writing has made me a better speaker. Writing is why I’m a businessman. Writing is how I interpret the world. Others make music. Others paint. Others create code. Me? I communicate. It’s what drives everything forward for me. Does This Help? How does this influence your thoughts on writing? Did you see anything in there that reminds you of you? What else can I answer for you? You know the drill.

What Facebook Fan Pages Taught Me About Relationships Posted: 04 Jan 2009 03:52 PM PST It seems that I’m nearing the arbitrary 5000 people limit on Facebook. People like Jeff Pulver and Robert Scoble and Loic Le Meur and others are in the same boat. To fix this, one has to launch a Facebook fan page or just stop adding friends. It really led to a lot of thoughts and some conversations on Twitter (where else?). Here’s what I think. Facebook Fan Pages and “Friends” At this point, it’s a bit different for me. I have to accept that from time to time. But it’s a weird feeling. According to Facebook, I can’t possibly know more than 5000 people. (I feel silly writing this. Tons of people have already written this same blog post.) So, the next step is to create a “fan” page. The fan page acts pretty much the same way as a profile page, except that the owner of said page can actually do a few more things, include mass messaging. So in a weird way, the “punishment” for having so many friends is that Facebook gives me a way to blanket message them. Huh? The next question this all brings up is “friends.” Ari Herzog was halfway there in comments on Twitter, spawned from an exchange with me and Alexa Scordato, who offered to “unfriend” me so I’d have some room. This was followed by Meg Fowler offering to unfriend, too. So wait, it goes further. The next action for people with 5000 “friends” is that my real friends all offer to abandon ship, knowing that they can reach me other ways. So what does that tell you about the kinds of friends you capture and maintain on Facebook? At least from this example, it tells me that my friends and I aren’t using it as a real social hub, that we reach each other on other channels (mostly Twitter). Fan Pages and Facebook Overall I use Facebook as part of an outpost strategy. This recent experience all started because I was thinking about where I could put notes about fitness and non-chrisbrogan.com material. I thought maybe I’d use Facebook, but then I realized I was already up to 4694 friends. With a cap of 5000 friends, I wouldn’t be able to build a relationship there. So, I had a quandry. Start a new platform like a Ning site (as Ari Herzog suggested)? No. That’s too much like filling a pond and stocking it while all the fish are jumping and thriving in the big ocean. Start a Tumbler blog for it? Naw, again, just a bit too much work reminding folks to visit. So, I opted for a Fan page. But what will really come of it? Not entirely sure. Not sure that it’s the right implementation. But I’m trying it out. If you want to be my (*cough*) fan, or at least connect on Facebook, please go here. By the way, if you want to read some great blogs about Facebook, there’s Inside Facebook by Justin Smith (suggested to me by Kari Rippertoe), and there’s Why Facebook, by Mari Smith. What do you make of all this?

Understanding Your Guests Posted: 04 Jan 2009 06:30 AM PST Disney theme parks know more about how humans will flow through their systems than any other organization probably knows about its customers. They know how far apart to space trash receptacles. They know where the rest rooms should be. They understand what makes a family linger in a gift shop versus what moves them to the next potential upsell point. And all of those things are invisible to the typical guest to the park, because after all, you’re there to see Mickey or Jack Skellington or whoever your character is (we all have one). Can we think this way about our online presence? I think so. And it’s important to realize that, just like above, though I know you come here to experience the content, that I’m thinking about the trash receptacles, the rest rooms, and the gift shops along the way. Understanding Your Guests When I write a post like 27 blogging secrets to power your community, I know what will happen. It will be bookmarked by people using Delicious. People will pile on bookmarks, which means that it will reach Delicious/popular. That will trigger it to be picked up by Popurls. Then, several robots, including those on Twitter, will pick that post up, and it will get lots of traffic. I know this because it’s a list, it seems handy, and you want to go back and refer to it later. What makes a post like that useful? That one’s fairly obvious. It’s promotion. More people find the blog who haven’t seen it before, and that means I capture more new friends and potential community members to have conversations with. Are there other traffic experiences where I know the outcome ahead of time? Yes. Here’s a list. Traffic Experiences in My Park Big list posts - visibility by tons of bookmarks. (see above) Videoblog posts - few comments, but a nice level of engagement. The videoblog posts are a way to show you my human side, which is more of a loyalty experience. I do that so you see that I’m real, and human, and just like you. Posts about sharing thoughts - posts like your 3 goals for 2009 are designed for the community to share and talk with each other. The goal there is for me not to be the center, but the starter. What also happens, as you can see by the 48 trackbacks (and counting) is that people link to a post like that to make sure their post about the same topic is discovered. Trackbacks tell Google that there’s something useful happening over at chrisbrogan.com Posts about software - when I write a piece about something like how I use Twitter at volume, I’m not expecting a lot of comments, but I know I’m going to get lots of eyes on the post. The reason is simple: we’re all looking for ways to improve how we use the web. This sometimes translates to links, but definitely always translates to new community members. Pointer posts (where I write just to link to something else) - do just that. They shunt traffic to places where I want eyes to be. Posts like 8 Marketing Bloggers to Watch in 2009 are written so that you’ll visit those other people, and not stick around the blog. That’s also the goal of any sponsored post I write. I’d rather you check out the sponsor than get into it with me in the comments section. The Importance of Knowing Your Guests People want to have a good experience with your content. They want their expectations met. If you come here, you’re hoping that I’ll give you another thought about business communication. Thus, if I write way off topic, I know most times what you’ll do. If it’s a “woe is me” post, you’ll be comforting. If I write a “my family’s awesome post,” you’ll agree. That’s because you and I have built a relationship. We know each other enough to celebrate each other’s successes. But I know why you come here, and so I never intend to dwell on matters that run too far afield of business communications and emerging technology. It’s important to build your content, your online experience, the interaction of humans and your digital “stuff” such that your guests have the experience you hope they will with you and your presence. What do you think about all this? Does the above make sense? Can you see where your own sites and your own material does different things for different types of posts? Am I seeing my own site and your experience with it accurately? Photo credit banoootah_qtr

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