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What King’s “Dream” Says to Bloggers

January 16, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Lots of great advice for blogging advisors in yesterday’s On the Media segment on Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech—the single most recognizable oration in American history.

Borrow

“King saw the whole world as his sourcebook.” He borrowed from such disparate texts as Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Samuel F. Smith’s “America,” and Archibald Carey Jr.’s address to the 1952 Republican National Convention. But he added to them and shaped the amalgam into an original, powerful message.

Advice: You don’t have to create blogs from whole cloth. Take the ideas and words from others that inspire or provoke you—then add your thoughts, reactions, conclusions to them. (Give credit where it’s due, as King did.)

Test

King had been trying out his “dream” idea with audiences months before that day in late August, 1963. And he kept listening, even there on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Sensing his prepared conclusion was terrible, and hearing Mahalia Jackson yell “tell them about the dream,” he decided on the spot to change his ending.

Advice: Your blog and social media posts are an unbeatable workshop for testing your thoughts, ideas, marketing messages, and so on. Your audience will tell you what they like and what’s weak. Don’t stop listening.

Prepare

Surprise, surprise: King’s “improvisation,” like any musician’s, was actually the result of long preparation. Not even as gifted an orator as King could change tack midway through a speech and grab a spectacular ending without having been prepared.

Advice: The discipline and experience of publishing your ideas will hone your delivery and make you better prepared to communicate, in any forum. Blogging isn’t just about promoting yourself—it’s about improving yourself, and what you offer.

Listen to the first seven minutes of this podcast to pick up your own insights.

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There Is No “ROI” in “SEO”

January 5, 2012 By Leave a Comment

If you still believe that search engine optimization (SEO) is money well spent, listen to this Google engineer on how the world’s leading search engine ranks websites:

“… Google tries to make it so that sites ‘don’t have to do SEO.’ First and foremost is content, and there’s no bonus for having good SEO.”

 

Turns out that the same thing that benefits your audience most—good content—is what gets you found by search engines. I love it when that happens.

Not to say that SEO optimization doesn’t work. It can be effective, as long as you keep feeding it money. But if your content is boring, or obviously ghost-written, or just plain reeks, you’re not going to keep that audience you bought for very long.

On the other hand, spend your resources on creating good content and you’re building a marketing asset that grows over time—and pays dividends. More viewers. More subscribers. More social media followers. More mentions on other websites. Attention from the press (even the national press).

Paid SEO is like renting an audience. Publishing decent, authentic content is as good or better at getting you search results. Plus it builds real relationships over time. Which would you rather have?

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Blog Better

December 13, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Dan Frommer—a former technology reporter at Forbes, graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, and now a blogger—has set down his thoughts on what makes for good blogging (ht: Daily Dish).

Write the site that you want to read. That covers story selection, length, frequency, style, vocabulary, attitude, humor, level of sensationalism, and more. Don’t publish anything you’re not proud of. Be yourself.

His recommendations may be more apt for blogging journalists, but blogging advisors can benefit from his insights. For financial advisors, I’d slightly re-order, making the quote above step #1 and moving this one closer to the top:

Try new things, all the time. Especially those that are a little outside your comfort zone. This is the Internet — don’t act like you’re writing for Time Magazine in the 80s. Stories can be pictures, charts, lengthy essays, numbered lists, or 140 characters. Measure how your experiments do, and take the results into account for the future.

I’d also add a step and make it #2: Write with passion. (This may be restating Dan’s step #2, but humor me.) I hesitate because it’s so overused, but “passion” is the right word here. All things equal, passionate writing attracts readers and lukewarm or confused writing repels them. Choose blog topics you really care about—and don’t be afraid to show a little enthusiasm in your language and your writing style.

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A Better Way to Handle Blog Comments

December 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment

How do you interact with readers of your blog without handing over control?

One of the most graceful practitioners of the reader comment is Andrew Sullivan, who’s been writing his blog The Dish (née The Daily Dish) since 2000.

The Dish doesn’t allow direct commenting. There is no comments box at the end of a Dish post. To tender your opinion, you have to email it to the Dish—if you can find the well-hidden email link.

But you better believe these people read their emails. And when they get comments they think are worthwhile, they get published as blogposts.

A post last week about Black Friday elicited a number of email comments, which The Dish promptly turned into a blogpost:

There are many things to love about this technique:

  • Readers get a voice, while The Dish retains almost total editorial control
  • Comments can be cherrypicked to include only the best, and each comment shortened to include only its key point
  • The dialogue gets extended, with no risk of expletives, disparagement, or fights
  • The Dish demonstrates that it’s listening to its readers and holding itself accountable to them (a blogging ethic not to be underestimated)
  • It’s really easy to create—no writing necessary

This is also a great way to handle corrections or emendations:

Given FINRA’s Regulatory Notice 11-39, this approach to comments has no additional compliance hurdles if you’re already blogging. Just continue archiving and monitoring your posts.

You are doing that, aren’t you?

 

 

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