Tag Archives: Content

Blogging impressions: a short post about long posts

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A nice tip from a fellow blogger and it’s all in the title: “I try to leave out the parts that people skip“. Boy if there ever were a tip written just for me this would be it. Then again, if I change too much I’ll end up having to change my blog name too.

Do you really need to keep only the content you think your readers will like?

Skip or keep? Goat in spring

Skip or keep? (spring picture by ewewlo on Flickr)

Should you skip all the bits you assume people don’t pay attention to? Or will adding structure and headings keep casual readers on board, scanning your blog post for the stuff they’re interested in?

Long posts and short posts in blogging

I’ve pretty much managed to weed out two-topic posts. The question now is how long or short a post should be.

  • For posts on a corporate blog I’m sure I read somewhere that 400 words is enough. The idea is that business people don’t have time for long reads.
  • Another number I found was 500-600 words per post. I don’t recall where I read that, and that’s probably because the blog containing the information wasn’t worth remembering. Which says it all I guess.
  • Blogs containing chapters of a fictional work tend to have, well, chapter-length posts. I don’t think anybody minds the long read 😉
  • For my own blog I stay well away from the 1000-word mark. Under 900 is fine. If I manage to say what I wanted to say without sounding too dry-factual (is that a word? I just made it one) using less than 800 words it’s worth a cheer and a “Well done you” stamp in my content rambling archive.

Deliver the message – the essence of any piece of writing

So far I’ve adhered to just one rule while blogging: the right number of words for a blog post is the number of words I need to deliver a complete thought or set of thoughts about a topic, preferably with a bit of fun added into the cake mixture.

When it comes to really compact writing I wonder if anyone ever managed to beat Tacitus. Come to think of it, I remember we actually asked our teacher for a text by that specific author, because we were getting bored with translating Vergilius (Virgil) in preparation for our exam and we needed the change – and a challenge. After just a week or two, getting back to Virgil was the ultimate relaxing holiday-on-the-beach!

What’s a good post-length for you as a blogger – or as a reader? How short is a short post, and what is too long in a long post? Does any kind of ‘rule’ work in blogging?

Stuck like glue: how knowledge powers business relationships

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How does knowledge affect business relationships? It’s a matter Ross Dawson has written a whole book about. In this post I’d like to share my thoughts on knowledge in business relationships and related matters like advising (internal) clients, or even friends for that matter.

What do you bring to the table in your (business) relationships?

Knowledge needs food to grow

Tree of knowledge? Image HikingArtist.com

  • Knowledge. By this I mean your personal set of experiences. Not just your education, because your peers share much the same background.
  • Time – which may seem in short supply so you’d rather spend it on activities that add value than on stuff that really isn’t that important but “management say they want it so go do it”.
  • Social skills (if I’m being presumptuous please let me know).

It makes sense to invest your time in building a good relationship with your (potential) clients and allies. Apart from your subject matter expertise (SME), focus on extending the knowledge you have about your client:

  1. Listen carefully to what’s being said.
  2. Listen even more carefully to what’s not being said.
  3. Ask away.
  4. Keep asking.
  5. Be open about the way you work (from the start), and
  6. ask for structural feedback to help finetune your actions. When you plan your activities for a client, include a continuous feedback loop from and to your client. If that’s not possible, plan regular feedback moments.

Focusing on the interaction, on the knowledge you and your client need from each other and produce as a result of your conversations, steers you away from ‘just’ delivering your service or product.

What does this advisory role demand from you?

The interaction with your clients demands that you take the conscious decision and then muster the patience to get genuinely involved. Getting involved also means sharing knowledge, and that may lead to the following situation:

  • If you’re a veteran in your branche, you may have grown used to skipping steps. It’s been so long since you wondered why you do what you do in this specific way. But to the non-expert there is no “obviously”. There is no obvious reason for doing anything. Or for doing it in this way. So add all the steps your client needs.
  • Having someone ask you questions and giving you feedback may well point you toward things you had overseen! Listening to your clients’ questions may well teach you a lot about yourself as well as about your client. Once you’ve learned anything you need to review what you thought you knew. Improve, tweak. Review. Learn, and unlearn! Knowledge building will guide you and your client by showing you should stop doing one thing and start doing the other.

How does knowledge power your business relationships?

By getting involved and being open about your methods you will:

  1. learn a lot about your client. You’ll understand better than anyone else what makes them tick. What worries them. What stumps them.
  2. build trust. Your client gets a genuine sense of what you know, how you think, who you are as a professional and as a person.
  3. get feedback from your client about details in their particular situation that might affect the results of your efforts.
  4. have a chance to review your own business
  5. improve your own skills as an advisor
  6. accumulate heaps of richly detailed cases you can use as examples with other clients.

There’s just one thing to watch out for. And that is getting too comfortable knowing what you know about your clients. Knowledge needs to be fed regularly if you’re to reap its fruits. Neglect your knowledge and it will lose its connection with reality. Your reality. And your clients’ reality. If you find that your attitude stands in the way of really listening to your clients – if it prevents you from being a good advisor, tell yourself to stop being a [fill in appropriate noun here].

And two (this point occurred to me thanks to this picture): remember to harvest the fruits of your labor. The point of knowledge is not having it – but using it.

Read more:

How would you describe the relationship you have with your (business) connections? Leave your thoughts about knowledge, business, clients and relationships (and possibly about glue and apples) in a comment – I will reply to anything non-spammy 😉

Towards a ‘natural’ knowledge management (part 2, nature of knowledge)

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Knowledge is almost by default inaccurate, incomplete, unreliable, partially outdated, and changing… The reason it’s all of these things is because it’s personal. What does this mean for knowledge management (KM)?

Knowledge Management Needs a Plan

KM takes a bit of planning… great image by HikingArtist.com

If you’re a knowledge manager you’re basically faced with the task of managing people. Unfortunately their manager is already managing them.

Let’s assume you convince a team to get a handle on their knowledge. What, out of all their knowledge, do you want to document in some system? And what can you document anyway? I’ve talked about these questions in my earlier post Why knowledge management is like herding cats. Things I’ll mention here are best practices, process-related content, and knowledge about your clients.

The nature of knowledge versus knowledge management initiatives

One of the (old?) ways organizations have tried to manage knowledge is by making employees enter stuff they know in a system. But knowledge tends to disintegrate into information inside a system.

  • It’s no longer knowledge transferred from one person to the other. There’s a non-intelligent medium involved which takes away the non-verbal feedback, the adjustments one makes during a conversation.
  • You need to describe your knowledge outside the context where you actually need it.
  • Often there is no real recognition for the effort you put into it.
  • If you show some hesitation, you may well hear convincing arguments like “look, the bottom line is, you have to”.

Just because your company’s interest is in squeezing the last drop of precious knowledge out of your brain before they let you go doesn’t mean it’s got to hurt. The process of entering your most precious asset into an indifferent system on pain of ‘pain’ is not exactly motivating, is it?

The nature of knowledge: learning and expertise

The learning process you’ve undergone in the course of many projects has resulted in your professional expertise. You have learned, re-learned, and even un-learned (check part 1 for more about un-learning). The ‘meta’ level of your knowledge is the veteran professional’s treasure and its the bit that tends to be missed the most when you retire.

To make knowledge sharing more personal, dynamic, and fun, your alternative is to put professionals together and have them talk about their projects, clients, and the like. My impression is that most organizations start doing that kind of thing after they notice:

  • that knowledge can actually walk out the door
  • that having a beautiful system to capture knowledge doesn’t make their problems go away.

In short, they don’t start moving until they notice what’s happening on their watch – and what that could mean for the organization. Last time they noticed some KM guy suggested a system. This time it’s clear that either the system doesn’t work or there’s more to KM than a bit of software. At this point, it’s really important to snap out of the “sh*t-we-need-knowledge-management-NOW” reflex!

One way to make knowledge management ‘work’ (I hope)

What if we tell everyone to spend 5% of their time sharing what they know with others? It could work, but it’s still something “you just have to” do.

Would a culture in which anyone can achieve the position of ‘mentor’ work? In order to avoid it turning into a punishment, I think there are three aspects which may support each other.

  1. Becoming a mentor should be a natural step in one’s career. (Let HR figure out how to make it happen.)
  2. Give ‘mentors’ the resources to document their knowledge. Which means you give them the time they need, away from their other duties. And it means arranging things so they can share their knowledge in a format that suits them.
    1. Writing (blog, article, web page, data in a system)
    2. Talking. One way to get around the ‘stupid (KM) medium’ is being interviewed and capturing the conversation on video.
    3. Training colleagues in a workshop
    4. Making a presentation
    5. Drawing cartoons (here’s a nice one on Mark W. Schaefer’s {grow} blog)
  3. Mentors need to take part in projects with others. Their sole aim is that of identifying areas where expertise is still lacking (to a degree). They either share the necessary knowledge themselves or help find the right people and learning materials to remedy any knowledge issues. Plus they will log what they found and how they resolved it. This way you form an understanding of what people in your organization need to know, but don’t.

Some people have a knack for teaching/mentoring. You don’t need to make it to senior manager before you start sharing what you know! How will you share your knowledge today?

Blogging impressions: how to change your journal into a blog

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This post is about me. And perhaps it’s also about you… When I started blogging I refused to explore the question who I was going to write for in detail. So now maybe it’s time to make up for that.

Who am I trying to reach? Who is my audience?

Well, for starters:

  1. People who have a brain, and are not afraid to use it. If that’s you, consider it a compliment 😉
  2. People who like to learn, and who don’t mind reading stuff that’s about different topics so long as it’s written for non-experts.
  3. People who share one or more interests with me.
  4. Experts who like to extend their own thinking on various topics.
  5. In other words, I aim to blog for people with room in their heads for new ideas or new takes on things they know (although, if they read a lot, I may not always be able to surprise them). I blog for curious people.

Change your Journal into a blogI’m writing for people who are, in a way, like me. It’s quite possible that I’m writing for me. Which I reckoned was fine when I started blogging. After all, I’m my own best-known audience. I know what I like. If you blog for a specific audience without doing research into your intended audience, chances are that you’re blogging for you. If that wasn’t your intention, all I can say is: Oops.

Does all of the above mean you’re looking at my journal right now? Yes and no… So how do I write my posts for you on this blog of mine?

How to change your journal into a blog written for an audience

Unless my planning gives me a topic to write about up front (I’ll admit I’ve been too busy lately), I start out writing about something that’s either fascinating me, or frustrating me, or worrying me, or…
I start writing and keep writing for a while, exploring the topic as I go.
Until the bloggers’ inquisitor drops in. I keep this creature outside on a leash for my ‘raw’ draft so it doesn’t chew on the furniture or drool on my keyboard while I’m busy.

The blogger’s inquisitor is that nagging feeling you may know – that may creep up on you when you’re writing… asking:

  • Why would anyone be interested in your problems?
  • What’s in here that could actually solve someone else’s problems?
  • After all you’re not so unique that you could be the only person in the world who has this issue. Are you?

Turning…

At this point I snap out of journaling mode and start writing for YOU:

  1. Sometimes it’s a simple matter of pasting “you” where I was (yes, and the verbs too).
  2. Sometimes it means I look at the issue I’ve described in a whole new light.
  3. And I start describing details of what you might run into.
  4. Then I add tips to counter some of those issues.
  5. A key issue is that I can’t pretend to have an answer for you if I don’t have one. But as a part of my blogging activities I can look for an answer and present it to you in my resulting blog post.
  6. Or I can think about what might work for you, even if I don’t know if it would work for me.

Think about it for a minute. There’s a HUGE difference between a journal and a blog.

What is a journal about?

A journal is essentially about you. It’s where your write about stuff you run into. In the case of an online journal, it allows your readers to recognize, sympathize – sometimes have a lot of fun reading about your musings. Some of your readers may take heart in the fact that you’re experiencing the same problems they’re facing.

What is a blog about?

A (business) blog is – has to be – about your readers. Whatever you put in should be written to benefit them in some small way. That doesn’t mean you should leave out your point of view – that’s the point of it being your blog – right? I’d say it’s impossible to leave yourself out – but you can suppress your presence to the point of squeezing the last bit of life out of your blog. Please don’t.

Painting the picture more clearly…

Compare writing to painting. Turning from journaling to blogging doesn’t mean you stop ‘painting’. All it means is you don’t do self portraits anymore – most of the time.

Your work still shows your choice of topic, your structure, your style, your preferred colors and details. It’s just that your readers are no longer inspecting every pimple on your nose anymore (metaphorically speaking – I hope). Instead, your readers are exploring the world through the words you paint onto the canvas of your blog.

Read more storytelling and blogging:

I hope you enjoyed this episode of Blogging impressions. You may find previous episodes here and here. And finally, leave your thoughts on journals, blogs and (your) blogging audience in a comment!

Why knowledge management is like herding cats

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It struck me quite recently:

Knowledge management shows some uncanny similarities with herding cats

The moment you try to get a whole company to embrace knowledge sharing, storage and the like, you just know at least one cat will scoot off under the sofa and another will claw its way up the curtains. And that’s before you reveal you prepared a nice B-A-T-H for them 😉

Interior with cats

Interior With Cats – Amsterdam Museum Collection (Willet Holthuysen)

Previous IT (tool) projects thought to support knowledge management often delivered digital archives where knowledge either went to die or refused to show up at all.

People who still ‘do KM’ focus on separate activities that should amount to a more mature way of handling knowledge. They also typically try to instill the basics of a new attitude towards knowledge in one team after another – dealing with one cat at a time.

Why is it so hard to get people to take knowledge seriously enough to share, store, and acquire it in a structured way?

Let’s go back to where the trouble starts.

1. The nature of knowledge

The point about knowledge is that it has little in common with concepts like truth. Your knowledge is what you know about the world and bits of that world. Personal knowledge is by default incomplete, and in large part inaccurate, irrelevant, and possibly obsolete (and an information specialist’s nightmare).

2. You can’t manage what’s in people’s heads

Think about yourself for a moment. You can barely manage what’s in your own head. So-called ‘critical thinking’ doesn’t seem to start even until the age of 8. Your own most unshakeable ‘truths’ were probably instilled in you before that age. If a situation gets awkward, and you catch yourself talking nonsense, remind yourself it could well be your inner 5-year-old talking. Surely that’s a great reason to snap out of it already 😉

3. Knowledge management does (not) equal a lot of things

Crystallized applied knowledge that results from any key process in your organization is in essence your archive. Most organizations are required to store this kind of information for some years.

Then there’s basically know-how, know-what and know-who:

  • Knowing the best way to get things done (procedural knowledge).
  • Knowing the essential and other useful facts about your organization, its peers and competitors, et cetera. Who did what in a similar situation? (archive)
  • Your network as a part of the organizations ‘relation grid’. Who has had contact with whom, when, what topic? And so on. (customer database)

And there is content resulting from research or activities conducted by your organization. Which is not generally seen as archive, but (perhaps for that very reason) it can be notoriously hard to determine what content your organization has produced in its outlying regions 😉

There are more elements to knowledge, but they’re not often the major focus of KM: that’s trying to stop knowledge from walking out the door.

I think it’s time to pull the rabbit out of the hat…

Possible motivators to start managing knowledge

  1. Responsibility: Here’s all this knowledge sitting in my head, took years to collect, don’t get hit by a bus now…
  2. A love for teaching: What’s the point of gathering knowledge if you don’t intend to share it?
  3. More time for challenging tasks: Here I am instructing new employees again… I’ve explained the same thing 4 times this week. Got to write the basics down. Hopefully then they’ll only come to me for the complicated stuff.

These are my personal reasons for wanting to share knowledge. Starting with the last potential motivation: I did record most, and before I left a previous employer, all the knowledge I had about some vital procedures. And having them documented somewhere really helped me and the company. Documenting procedures was recognized as important in making processes less dependent on the good health and availability of employees. Part time employees tend to be more understanding in these matters 🙂

How to avoid beating potential knowledge sharers into submission

Would you encourage people to benefit from sharing their knowledge freely? Would you help them share their knowledge in a way that suits them? Getting buy-in from everyone means you need to sit down and figure out (together with them if possible) what is important to them and recognize what obstacles they see. At this stage it’s so easy to slip into the ‘expert’ mode and tell them how to solve their issues. Or rather: their company’s issues. Don’t!
This is where your knowledge-of-the-world meets theirs. Try to understand the picture they are painting for you. Recognize your own urge to take over – stay in listening mode. Identify the knowledge sharer’s needs. Perhaps they need to know it’s official that they can spend 10% of their time as a mentor. Perhaps they’re more comfortable being interviewed about their knowledge than to document it all in some system. Or they’d love to ‘teach’ new employees if only someone would ask!

Sometimes all there is to herding cats is to put down a bowl of milk.

More reading (found via LinkedIn: Gurteen Knowledge Management community):

I hope you enjoyed today’s post! Please add your thoughts about knowledge, management, and the art of cat herding in a comment!

Blogging impressions: the neverending story of content

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This time my post is about writing – and marketing (a bit). It started with just a title:

The neverending story of content

‘The neverending story’ refers to a story you may know. I watched the film (a long time ago, here’s a blog about movies you liked as a kid) on television and I read the book at some point. The book was originally written in German as “Die unendliche Geschichte”.Writing content: a neverending story

The film is actually just part 1: a boy who’s miserable in real life becomes a hero in the book he’s reading. His adventures in this fantasy world and his return to the real world take up the rest of the book. The main character spends a lot of time away from the real world – until he starts to forget it, and just about everything else. The last part of the book relates the struggle to get him back to his own reality.

Content is something a lot of people seem to spend all their time looking for and crafting. I’m busy doing pretty much that myself. It’s easy to forget why you wanted to blog when you first started – unless you wrote it down at the time. Along your blogging journey you need to remind yourself if you’re in it to write, or whether you had other goals in mind.

Is your blogging story about writing content or about content marketing?

Content creation and content marketing are two entirely different things. You don’t need to write a single blog post, or have produced a single video, to be a content marketer. It may help to have tried your hand at it so you know what it takes to create original, relevant content. And you may need to create content on a regular basis if no-one else is doing it.

The content marketing point of view

If you’re into content marketing, you won’t mind limiting the subjects you write about. You write only about subject X, which will get readers in and potential customers. If you want to write about anything else you do it elsewhere. If you lack inspiration to come up with relevant posts several times a week, you haul in guest bloggers to lower the pressure. Which is exactly what I see long-time bloggers like Jeff Bullas, Darren Rowse and others do. Of course they first put in a lot of work themselves.

Content as the result of your writing process

Like I stated in an earlier post, I started my blog because I wanted to write. So in marketing-style bloggers’ eyes I’m probably not a good blogger. That’s fine for now! I didn’t call this blog “Content Marketing Wiz” because I wasn’t expecting to take a marketing approach, even though I know a few things about marketing: I know a few things about a lot of things 🙂

Writing tip: If you want to practise your writing, start by writing about anything you are comfortable with – anything you know. It may be everyday life, or it may be SF because that’s what you read. Any topic will do when you start. Get used to the creative process and start to feel familiar with how it works. Explore any topic bit by bit. Share as you go along.

One blogger said by the time he was onto his third blog he knew more or less what he was doing, how he could get an audience and make a living through his blog.
So either take the business route from day one – or ramble along happily just like me. It won’t hurt – much 😉

To do (pick your own time): update your approach

At some point, you may find that your initial approach to blogging is no longer working for you. Think it over and then change it. Sometimes people just stop blogging – only to discover they can’t really not write any more. Not writing becomes an itch. It may take a while to happen, especially if you blogged til you ran dry. But it will happen – it will creep up on you eventually.

At some point, I may start a blog about art history. But the subject of art history is so far removed from where my career has brought me in the past 10-15 years it would take a lot of time and research to hit ‘Publish’ even once. I’d want to go out there and dig around in museums and archives. I’d need to take days off work. I must admit it sounds absolutely divine – but I’m not yet at the point where I’m willing to put the time and effort in. With a 3-year-old at home, I need my days off for family stuff and for ‘me-time’. Which may mean I take an extra nap to help me kick that flue-bug out the door. It’s that time of the year again!

More reading for writers

Enjoy your writing experience! Share your thoughts about your blogging, content and other neverending stories in a comment.

The content priority matrix – focus your blogging efforts

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In my previous post I applied the Eisenhower priority matrix to companies/investors’ priorities. In this post I try to answer the question: how does the money issue affect the nature of (corporate) blogging? I also give away 6 tips for single-topic blogging and my thoughts about part-time business blogging.

The two sides of the content priority matrix for blogging

What is the main issue with blogging to make money in whatever way?

Content Priority Matrix for Blogging

Content priority matrix for professional bloggers

It could be this: the point of anything you do to influence other people is that there are two sides to the window (or priority matrix) you’re looking through.

Where there are bloggers looking out, you’ll find readers looking in. At least, I sure hope so.

Content priority matrix: focus for professional blogging

Professional bloggers, from their side of the ‘window’, would be interested in these aspects of potential blog topics:

  • Money generating topic – adjacent but non-commercial topics
  • Expertise – no expertise

As a full-time professional blogger you would invest most of your time on topics that let you share your expertise and that could yield money by addressing people’s urgent and important needs. If there were a related topic that could make considerably more money you’d spend some of your time extending your expertise in that direction. The other bits you’d leave out or use to add interest to your otherwise fact-ridden business blog.

The ‘expert-no money’ quadrant is also amply filled by personal blogs. ‘No money’ may in fact not be an accurate description, because showing yourself to be an expert at anything, including being consistently funny, may still end up in some kind of business or career opportunity!

What matters to business blog readers?

What writing is there on the window sill on the outside – the side of the readers of a business blog? You might learn more by taking a peek at the matrix I made for this post, in which I try to visualize the way we (sensible consumers that we are) prioritize our purchases 😉

  1. Relevant – not relevant (‘important’)
  2. Urgent – not urgent

If a blog post deals with a relevant topic, you’ll read it – note that this involves a decision to invest your time! Now, if I try to coax you towards signing up for more, I’ll have the greatest success if I’m not only spot on topic-wise, but if you’re also convinced that:

  • you need to know more
  • you need to buy this service or product urgently

You’ll find plenty of blogs out there that tell you how you should tackle the issues of being utterly relevant, building trust, and connecting. Crafting a sense of urgency is an absolute knack of some sales folk. You know, the ones who catch you viewing stuff like door locks and come up with a special offer only for today to “help you keep your precious family safe” from the big bad world outside if you’ll go for the Complete Burglar Alarm Set For Pros. Them.

If you don’t want to be pushy, remember not everyone responds well to the “buy now or miss out on a life-changing experience” approach. You can opt to be more subtle.

6 tips for single-topic blogging

“Stick to one topic and forget the rest” is the advice professional bloggers/content marketers give to others who want to make money blogging. To make a single-topic blog work, you need to:

  1. check every month which of your posts got top numbers in readers, subscriptions, and conversions.
  2. skip the rest and focus on the stuff that works
  3. keep experimenting by introducing the odd off-topic post and check the results
  4. plan ahead so you don’t run out of content juice
  5. haul in guest bloggers to take the strain off your blogging or to increase the frequency with which you post
  6. keep an eye on similar blogs for more ideas.

Part-time blogging

As a part time (business) blogger you might find yourself running into a serious writers’ block if you tried to stick to just one topic and write about it several times per week. The alternative is to blog once or twice a month. That’s often enough for blogs that are part of a business website. You’ll keep fresh and relevant content coming without it costing too much time and effort.

The main thing is that you think about your blog and make decisions. It’s fine if you change your mind later – just remember to make another informed decision rather than drifting into a blogging routine you never intended to develop. Especially in corporate blogging, focus is key.

If you run into unexpected topics on this blog, I hope you find them a pleasant surprise. Add your thoughts about content, priority, money – please share this post – I hope I’ve given you food for thought 😉

Blogging impressions: 5 tips from my content creation ‘desk’

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Sometimes the only way to get going is to sit down and start writing. At the beginning of this month I felt there were things I needed to share with you about LinkedIn even though I know it’s not for everyone. This time I want to share some tips from my first 6 months of blogging.Content Creation

I started this blog in order to find out if I could write, and write on a regular basis without simply running out of ideas really fast. Most of the time I have some idea of the subject before I sit down and write more than just a few lines – but sometimes I start my content creation process from scratch. All in all I guess I have the content as well as the rambler bit covered 🙂

Well-known important blogging tip: keep some ideas and drafts handy

It’s really helpful to have a couple of ideas for posts. But just now I reviewed my drafts and found they looked rather stale. Mark Schaefer reported something similar happening to him a while ago when he forgot his routine: whenever you have an idea, jot it down somewhere.

I’ve been meaning to write another “blogging impressions” post for a while, because it is about half a year since I published my first post.

My blogging tip: prepare for change so it doesn’t mess up your blogging routine

One major development which may impact my blogging frequency is the fact that I’m now back to my 32-hour work week (4 days). On my day off I tend to do way too much to entertain my son and myself. And my son is no longer taking naps in the afternoon. This means I have less time to let ideas for new posts form and to jot them down for later use. I have yet to find a routine that fits my new schedule. I may need to go back to posting once a week for a while. But we’ll see what happens 😉

How have 6 months of blogging on Content Rambler affected me?

Well, I’ve felt a lot better about my work and related activities. Because blogging helps me share all the things I read and learn along the way. I enjoy sharing my knowledge far too much to let it depend on occasions like presenting a topic to my team. Based on my early blogging experiences, my answer to the question:

Why should you blog?

Would be that your reasons to blog may include:

  1. Improving your writing skills
  2. Being creative
  3. Seeing tangible results of your efforts, starting with the existence of another published post (possibly followed, at some point, by a like or a comment online or IRL)
  4. Feeling better about yourself thanks to 1-3.
  5. Testing your ability to keep it up (discipline or passion?)
  6. Not depending on others to contribute something sensible (or funny) about subjects that matter to you
  7. Sharing your knowledge

Some of these reasons are purely personal. Others could be relevant for business purposes. Some listed benefits touch upon definite drawbacks.

Blogging tips 3-5: how to deal with the drawbacks

Just start writing Sometimes you think you have no idea what to write about. You need to just get started, writing about anything, and when you review your text you’ll probably find the start of a new post in there. It’s how I started this post, and I’ve left the first bit in to show you how it works. At some point I realized I had tips based on my blogging experiences that I wanted to share.

Blog when you think no one cares – a blogging tip from Jeff Bullas this time I think. I read too much. No response to your post is something you need to get used to. Some bloggers get around this by bringing all their Facebook friends onto their blogs. If you don’t have that option, look up other blogs via your WordPress reader and spend some time liking and commenting on interesting or funny posts. After all, your fellow bloggers are putting in their time and effort just like you! Show your appreciation for a good post and let ’em know you exist. Maybe they’ll visit your blog as a result, and maybe they won’t. It’s called free will, and you need to deal with it.

Trigger actions This ‘blogging’ thing takes time. The writing, editing, getting images, looking things up to avoid talking complete rubbish… unless you limit yourself to writing only about topics you’re completely knowledgeable about and you skip editing. Or you don’t write (much) but post photographs instead. To help the ‘discipline’ bit: instead of saying you’ll sit down to blog at 8.30 PM, build in actions that trigger your blogging routine. In my case, as soon as my son is in bed, I go downstairs and sit down to blog. Once I’m blogging, there are times when I’m oblivious to whatever crap is on television but first I need to get started. My routine is “go downstairs and blog”. Easy. No thinking, no decisions required.

Finally, not really a tip because I haven’t looked at possible answers yet: knowledge sharing (#7) Sharing your knowledge may sound great but if you want to know how many people are actually reading your (business) content, you should know WordPress statistics don’t register every view (see their support pages). You notice something’s not right the moment you get more likes than registered views. If you have any suggestions apart from going self-hosted, please let me know.

That’s it – five ways from my content creation desk to help you “Just do it” instead of running into the brick wall called writer’s block. If you’d like to add your thoughts about blogging, my comments section is always open 😉

5 key questions to help you write your LinkedIn summary

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After my rather long 16-LinkedIn-tips post of last Friday I’d like to stick to just one detail of your LinkedIn profile in this post: your summary. If you’ve left it for later like I suggested, great. Today you can fill the gap.

Why do you need a summary on your LinkedIn profile?

Writing Your LinkedIn Summary

In real life (IRL) you may meet someone, chat a bit, find you have common (business) interests and decide to exchange either business cards or anything ranging from email to phone number or Twitter handle. Just so you can follow up a pleasant and potentially beneficial contact.

On LinkedIn, your summary should give a first impression of you as a professional as you’re not present to introduce yourself.

Who are you as a professional?

If you’re having trouble deciding what to tell the world about what matters to you most, ask yourself what tasks or situations bring out the best in you. A few examples:

  • Suppose you’re completely result-driven. There’s no better moment than when you get to present your solution to a nagging issue your colleagues or clients have been working around for ages.
  • You’re a people person. Helping people out is what you get up for in the morning (or would, if you didn’t have a job that doesn’t suit your personal strengths). Or, nothing can beat having meaningful conversations that allow you to really connect with people – some call this ‘networking’ and treat it like a chore but for you, it’s the air you breathe.
  • Or say you’re both. There’s no buzz like the one you get after you’ve helped resolve a really sticky problem that was ruining someone’s life. You can do this kind of thing in absolutely no time at all – you power up, get things done, and make your co-worker, client, or a complete stranger for that matter, immensely happy.

Describe who you are in a business setting. That’s you as a professional.

What do you put in your LinkedIn summary if you’re a student?

Exactly the same kind of information. Except your ‘business setting’ is the projects you’ve done, an internship, a part time job, tasks you performed as a volunteer. Anything anyone ever asked or required you to do for them. What activities or situations are the spice in your food?

How should I use key words in my LinkedIn summary?

You can add key words to appear in search results but they should look natural in the context of your summary. Do NOT just open a text book and select anything you think would attract potential employers or clients. Your summary is not about what you studied, but what you (intend to) do with the knowledge and skills you’ve gained as a result.

How long should my LinkedIn summary be?

Think of your LinkedIn summary as an “About the author” bit above or below a blog post, or a Twitter bio. It can be anything from 30 to about 100 words. If you go well beyond 100 you’re probably adding too much detail to your ‘first impression’ and chances are you’re repeating yourself. See what details you should rather use to describe individual projects, jobs or other activities. Or add a link to your “About” page if you have a blog, or to a short video.

In short, use your summary to introduce yourself as a professional. Stick to what you know to be true about yourself. This way it’s clear to everyone that “what they see is what they’ll get”. Wouldn’t it be great to get an interview based on who you are?

I hope you enjoyed this post and found it useful. If you did, please share it – I would really appreciate it! You may also leave your thoughts and questions about your LinkedIn summary in a comment – I promise I’ll reply to anything non-spammy 😉

Incoming! Using a content ‘landing strip’ for your visitors

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Anyone who tries to get marketing to ‘do’ social media is in danger of ending up in another tiny unit next to the established teams, like I mentioned in my previous post. The effect of ‘siloing’ – chopping up anything to do with customer/contact into ever tinier areas of specialization – is that you get people adding social media ‘on top of’ whatever content is produced by a different team, or probably several teams.

Providing a content ‘landing strip’ to your visitors

Content landing strip for your visitors

Perhaps you’ve found that there are considerably more people who visit your web page than actually click through to a specific piece of content you’d like them to view.

You may be looking at visitors who walk off after passing through layers of information that are not in sync with each other.

A perfect landing strip provides a consistent experience every step of the way toward a particular piece of content you want a certain type of visitor to view.

Compare the following situations.

Situation A: Content and distribution coming from isolated teams

  1. You spot a super-interesting message on a social network you’re using. It fits right in with an issue you run into as a part of your work. You want to know more.
  2. You click the message which leads you to a page on a website. The subject that triggered you to click through doesn’t seem to be there: this page contains a general text about issues people in your business role encounter. There is a report on the page which the message also mentioned, but nothing on the page mentions the specific issue you are interested in.
  3. Now I’m sure there are people who are interested enough, and who know your company well enough to know that you deliver real value in your reports, to click through to the report.

This is no comfortable ‘landing strip’ for your visitors – this track is more fit for a bit of off-the-road experience!

Situation B: Content and distribution coming from collaborating teams

  1. You spot a super-interesting message on a social network you’re using. It fits right in with an issue you run into as a part of your work. You want to know more.
  2. You click the message which leads you to a page on a website. The subject that triggered you to click through is the main topic on the page. The text gives you an example of the issue mentioned in the social media message you clicked on, and refers you to paragraph 3 in the report on that page.
  3. You decide to click through knowing more or less what you’ll find, and where to look for it.

Example number two gives you a consistent experience. It triggers your interest and doesn’t allow you to get ‘lost’.

Is a content landing strip necessary?

Some – perhaps most – customers are able to find their way to your most precious content regardless of what you do. Unless of course you make it too hard for them. My point is you are not the person who decides what is too much work to get at your content. That decision lies with your visitors.

My bit of amateur psychology:

  • Curiosity, and the optimistic hope that you may have something good to offer them, is a ‘happy’ state of mind triggered by your initial message.
  • If you throw up any kind of barrier that makes visitors to your website ‘work for their money’ some may leave. And they may not come back for a while.
  • Others will still click through but they’re in a different state of mind: searching, analysing which part of your report is the most relevant. For some, solving this problem is a reward in itself, but anyone who is pressed for time will expect more value for, well, ‘money’. You end up having to make your content better to counter the “So what?” attitude you’ve just created yourself!

How do you improve your visitors’ experience?

Creating your landing strip

Work your way from the inside out. Things to consider while designing your visitors’ experience:

  1. Who do you want to view your masterpiece? What do you offer them?
  2. If there are people with different needs out there, you need a bit of information on your website that addresses those precise needs. Two or three ‘bits’ if you’re talking about a major industry report that addresses issues that are relevant to people with different interests.
  3. A marketing guy will want to see different information than someone in customer service. You may point them towards the same section in your report – but you’ll invite them in different ways. You need to decide if you want to do all this on your website, or on a social platform.

Evaluate the result going from the outside in. Once you’re happy you have every step covered, walk a mile in your visitors’ shoes. My tips for this:

  • Take every step a visitor would take from your social media message down to your content masterpiece.
  • Act stupid while you do so.
  • Do this when you don’t have a lot of time, you’re tired and generally fed up to make sure you nag about anything that’s not perfect 🙂

That concludes my thoughts about a content landing strip to suit your visitors – leave a comment to add your thoughts on the topic and I promise to reply to anything non-spammy!