Successful Blog

Drive a High Performance Blog and Watch Your Numbers Go Up

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How to Blog Series

High Performance Blogging

Most folks are blogging for some sort of visibility — making money makes visibility even more important. Like a great car, a great blog works best on the right fuel, and the right fuel with the right driver can take a great blog to performance numbers that hit the top.

We have to use all we are and all our blog can be to hit peak performance. Still it’s worth it for the community and the response.

The Engine

The content is the engine. High performance content

  • is factual and accurate.
  • is original and adding value.
  • is well-expressed and well-structured.
  • is timeless and linkable.

Outstanding content is so engaging that we’re drawn into the experience or the story. We forget that we’re reading and move along from thought to thought.

The Handling

High performance design and presentation is

  • is simple and elegant
  • fast and intuitive in navigation.
  • enhances the written communication.
  • offers white space and visuals to support the text.

Top-notch presentation doesn’t call attention to itself. It underpins the content with a feeling that helps to define the experience.

The Driver

The high performance blogger makes the blog a beauty to watch. A high performance blogger

  • has a presence and a voice that readers respond to.
  • gets jazzed by readers’ ideas and what they say
  • isn’t afraid of the blog or a crash now and then
  • knows that performance is all about the fans

A high performance blog is fun to watch and even more fun to be part of. Make a high performance blog and watch your numbers go up! Remember to keep it and yourself tuned and fueled regularly.

In which areas is yours already a high performance blog?

Be irresistible
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

10 Ways to Kill the Kudzu and Get Your Blogging Mojo Back

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Time to Kill the Blogging Kudzu

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Kudzu. It creeping and invasive. It’s a slow moving pest that overtakes our most creative thoughts. It’s not writer’s block. It’s not procrastination either. I call it The Blogging Kudzu.

Blogging Kudzu is debilitating. Like its vegetative counterpart, left uncontrolled it obliterates new ideas. It covers them right over. The nasty creeper wraps around our brain, cuts off our creativity. It leaves us dead in the water, wondering whether we even want to blog at all again, ever.

BUT unlike the green, leafy version, we can clear out the kudzu in our heads without much trouble. We can get our mojo back. In fact, we can come back stronger than ever, if that’s the goal we set our minds to, and why wouldn’t we? A blog’s quite an investment to let wither and die.

Here’s how to kill Blogging Kudzu and come back better than ever.

10 Ways to Kill the Kudzu and Get Your Blogging Mojo Back

The first thing to know is Blogging Kudzu needs two conditions to flourish — a tired blogger, who takes blogging a bit too seriously. With that in mind, here are 10 Ways to Get Your Blogging Mojo Back.

  1. Peel off your blog. Get out from behind the dashboard. Turn off the computer. Stay away a day. Watch what happens. Nothing. The blogosphere doesn’t need us to make sure it survives.

  2. Have a heart-to-heart conversation with yourself. Point out that the lasting links you’ve made are with people, not bits of code. Those links will still be there when you get back from recharging and refueling.

  3. Make plans. Have an experience. It hard to blog your experience, if you never have one. If you’re out of practice, ask a friend to plan something for you to do together. Then, for blog’s sake, go do it!

  4. Do something spontaneous. Go to a farm, a city, a movie, a concert, a planetarium, a museum, a place you’ve never been, a place you’ve been a 1000 times, a place you grew up, a place a famous person lived, a place you don’t know where it is until you get there.

  5. Have a real conversation. Call a friend you haven’t spoken with in too long. Catch up on all of the details of life.

  6. Sit in the sunshine and watch the sky. Do your best to think about nothing. When your mind gets busy, read your favorite book or make up stories about the people who walk by.

  7. Tell people you’re a web publisher. Ask them to tell you a story. Listen to every detail. Watch how they tell it. Capture every gesture and expression in your memory. Ask questions until you feel you are a part of their experience.

  8. Ask advice from a child under the age of 7. Listen carefully. Repeat back what you are told to be sure you understand. Then do your best to follow it, if you possibly can.

  9. Spend some quality time with yourself, your favorite music, and your favorite food. Make an appointment to do that. You deserve to be the center of your own time once in a while.

  10. Read your favorite blog posts in your archives — the ones that you love, those that show your best self in action. Now go do what you do so well just one more time.

Once in my publishing career, I told a friend I couldn’t get my head to think about what I needed to write. She gave me this advice.

Go take a day off, take two, take three. On the day you come back, you’ll do 5 days work 10 times better than if you keep going now. You’ll find yourself miles ahead, and everyone else will be trying their best just to keep up.

She was right.

That’s how to get your blogging mojo back.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related
Writing–Ugh! 10 Reasons to Get Jazzed about Writing
Writing YEAH! 10 WHOLE NEW Reasons to Get Jazzed About Writing

Get Edgy: Contest Ideas to Push ANY Blog to the Remarkable Edge

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Writing Contests as Edgecraft

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Writing contests, I know you’ve seen ’em so have I. I’m a writer and I don’t have time to enter them. I imagine that most techies and other nonwriters pass them by completely.

If you want my attention, doing two things is important.

Mix something successful from over there to something you have here.

Find the edge of here — be noticed, outstanding, and remarkable.

Seth calls moving out to that remarkable edge edgecrafting. It’s knowing who you are, knowing what business you’re in, and not letting tradition or the perceived risk — that perceived risk that edging out comes packaged in. It’s investing in, inventing, or trying new things to make a mark that will get people remarking about what you’re doing.

A nonwriting blog — say a techie blog — having a writing contest is a remix with posibilities. Curious at the very least, don’t you think? Gotta get past curious to way out there, in order to be at the edge.

I’ve got some ideas . . .

How to Set Up a Contest that Works

Nothing is less fun than a contest where no one shows up. So let’s start with the basics that tilt the balance in your favor.

  1. Keep the rules few and the task simple.
  2. Keep the deadline definite and the timeline short, but not too short — a week is good.
  3. Announce it as many ways as you can. Remind folks daily on your blog. Send out email. Ask friends and colleagues to pass the word. Seek out and list your contest at sites such as competizione.

That being said, what kind of writing context might catch readers’ attention and get them to participate?

I’ve got a few ideas. . . .
[Read more…]

Leaving Folks Room to Comment — Why It’s Imposstible Most of the Time

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In April — Advice from Readers Yea!

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The conversation finally occurred on a Sunday last April. I’d been trying to work out why something was happening. It seemed the more I wrote, the less folks were commenting. Then finally someone said something — a lovely compliment — that put words to what I’d been feeling might be the issue. He said.

I used to comment more than I do now, but she writes so completely that I find it difficult to add my thoughts to hers.

That thought led to me writing, An Open Thought: Please Take the Keys, a post where I said . . .

Please Take the Keys

Movie stars have directors. Olympic athletes have coaches. I’m just a blogger. I have you.

If we’re talking about customer think–brand you and me–what better case study than this blog itself? You can’t hurt my feelings talking about my writing. I know it’s not who I am. I’d like to know how to get myself off the stage and back into the audience again. Will you tell me what you see? Would you do me that favor? Just say YES.

Sometimes the customer needs to be in the driver’s seat. Please take the keys.

How will I learn if you don’t?

And after a few moments of testing the waters. YEA! and Thank you! for everyone who did.

People gave me lots of feedback and great advice. I grew a lot as a blogger that day. Leaving folks room to talk was a big take away for me.

In August — Advice from Liz Uh-Oh

In August when I wrote the post, 10 Reasons Readers Don’t Leave Comments, I was sure to include that — always leave room for people to comment.

I bring it up here because, I have to say that I’ve found that about half the time it’s bad advice. Some kinds of writing need to be complete. End of story.

So I’m here to say that,

It would be silly to leave out part of a how-to post so that people can add it back in as a comment.

It would be frivolous to drop out a fact from a persuasive argument.

You might not want to omit an event in a retelling of a news story.

The only place I’m sure that you can leave room safely is when you’re writing a list post. I’m sorry I gave you bad advice. I’m a long ways from perfect.

By the way, I’m still doing all I can to get off that stage and back into the chair beside you. I still appreciate any help you have on that. I like being eye-to-eye with people I talk to. It’s friendlier.

The keys to the blog are always there on the sidebar.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
If you think Liz can help with a problem you’re having with your writing, check out the Work with Liz!! page in the sidebar.

Related articles
An Open Thought: Please Take the Keys
10 Reasons Readers Don’t Leave Comments
5 Sure-Fire Ways to Break the Promise of Your Brand
Bad Boys of Writing: Just Write and It Will Be Spectacular

Bookcraft 2.0 Why Read the Date Archives Not the Categories?

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What’s Established vs. A Fresh Look

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I’m still sorting the pages I printed out when I read through Phil’s monthly archives. As I was sorting, I thought someone must have this question.

Why not just use the categories Phil already has?

It’s a great question and it’s an idea with value. Staying with the categories that are already established offers these benefits.

    It saves time.
    The structure is visible.
    The categories are familiar to Phil’s readers.

There are compelling reasons to ignore the categories and take a fresh look. [Read more…]

How to Make Your Writing Unforgettable — Using the Music of the Gettysburg Address

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What Makes Writing Unforgettable?

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When people tell me I write well, it’s because I do something extra. After I finish writing and revising a piece, I go back again to listen. I listen to the rhythm and sounds of the words. I listen and make small tweaks. It’s like being a technician at a sound board. I’m mixing the music of the language. I say that seriously.

One guy who understood what I mean, who really had it down, was Abe Lincoln, the 16th U.S. President. He understood that fewer words and more music would deliver more meaning. To me, that’s the reason his Gettysburg Address — less than 300 words — is considered the most remembered American speech in our history.

Listen to the Music of the Language

Read the first paragraph of The Gettysburg Address below. Read to see what the words say.

Now read to hear the music, don’t think about what the words mean. Read them aloud slowly, evenly. Listen to how they sound. Read the paragraph aloud two or three times this way.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. — Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address

Do you hear the rhythm, the rat-tat-tat of the syllables? It’s kind of fun to say the words, especially liberty,. dedicated, and proposition. Those words seem to stand out at the right spots.

Can you hear the difference that occurs when you change that last word equal to the term the same. The sounds change too. The two syllables of equal have more stress on the first syllable — E-qual. That difference in stress doesn’t happen with the two words — the same. It doesn’t sound like an ending.

Without that ending, without the feeling of closure, the impact of the whole sentence is lost. The final word doesn’t ring and stay in our ears — or our minds if we’re reading silently. Unconsciously we’re waiting for the next word, the way we wait for the next shoe to drop. The sentence feels incomplete rhythmically.

Abe Lincoln understood how words make meaning and how they make music.You could almost sing the Gettysburg Address. It wouldn’t surprise me if folks already have.

It’s not hard to do what Abe did.
[Read more…]