6 steps to Blog Heaven

The another day Amanda Gome rang me for some advice on how to run her business to have a chat about some future events. We got to talking about blogging and how difficult it was.  I was in the first group of Bloggists for Smartcompany (around 20 of us) of which there is now only a handful left.

I asserted that writing your first couple of blogs is easy because everyone has a couple of articles in them.  However then it gets really hard because you have to deliberately create something new rather than just empty on to the page what you already had.

Amanda agreed as she regularly gets approached by new bloggists and now she just can just tell when someone is only a “3 or 4 blogger”.

I reckoned the issue was caused by the fact that the average wanna-be bloggers aren’t generally trained as journalists or even writers by their nature.  So blogging seems like a great idea but becomes hard quickly.  You can see this issue everywhere as CEO’s are conned into marketing by using social media tools such as blogs, but they run out of steam quickly when the reality of being “creative” sets in.  I regularly run into corporate blogs that have lost steam after 3-4 posts.

Amanda pointed out that I am a non-writer who managed to get through the 4 blog barrier, so what was my secret?

So here it………….

How I write

1. Pick a time -I’m a systems guy so I like to organise things.  Monday after lunch is the time I have programmed into my Google Calendar for writing.
2. Get an idea -  Finding something to write on becomes easier as time goes  on.  However the cheats way is to find a prolific twitterer or two on your topic who will uncover new things to investigate and share.    For me Guy Kawasaki http://twitter.com/guykawasaki posts about twenty items a day on new things around entrepreneurship, technology and interesting ideas.  I can’t keep up with all of Guy’s posts.
3. Make your point – Simply re-posting a web link doesn’t have value.  I like to think about how and why rather than report on the what.  I like to create a number of dot points on the topic.
4. Remember an Anecdote – Nobody wants to read a report, everbody wants to hear a story.  Revolution in Russia?  Make it the backdrop to a lovestory (Dr Zhivago ).
5. Put flesh on the bone – Write the article starting off with your anecdote which then leads into the points you want to make.
6. Finish it off. – Nobody wants loose ends so I find it much tidier to link the point of the article back to the opening anecdote.

I developed this as a process when I almost burst my brain trying to write blog number 4. According to my records I have now written around 110 weekly blogs.  Not bad for technical guy that came close to failing English.

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