A question I received this week was, “How often should a business post to their blog?” This is a very common question and usually driven by a small business owner’s fear of having to spend a lot of time creating the post and the frequency of posting for the effectiveness of the effort. In new bloggers’ nightmares, it takes hours to write a 400 word post and she has to do this every day. Neither of those is true.
A question I received this week was, “How do you balance the 24/7 of social media with an 8-to-5 work day?”
“Always on”, 24-by-7 is kind of scary. I live an area that, this winter, has lost power about 7 or 8 times in the past 2 months, so “always on” is kind of relative, but I digress…
Awhile back I was working through a visualization exercise mentioned in Steven Pressfield’s book “Do the Work”. My first post regarding this can be found here and if you search my blog you’ll a number of other visualizations that I’ve found useful using this. Let me summarize what this entails:
- Imagine a box with a lid. Hold the box in your hand. Now open it.
- What’s inside?
- It might be a frog, a silk scarf, a gold coin of Persia.
- But here’s the trick: no matter how many times you open the box, there is always something in it.
Over time I’ve found a golden table, a pressure washer, wood floors and a few others.
I hadn’t exercised my imagination in this way for a while, so I decided to give it a go and opened the box afresh. Today I found……a fish.
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The online world is utterly obsessed with content. This takes a number of forms, from articles and blogs to photos, graphics of any kind, videos, podcasts, and any re-mix thereof. It is an attention economy and if you can get your customers and visitors to focus on JUST YOU for a bit, you have achieved something pretty impressive.
However, this is only getting harder to do well. If you have the goal of creating or highlighting something of real value and relevance to your audience (as opposed to distraction or “click-bait”…) you have to be thoughtful, intentional and resourceful while balancing the other needs of your business and life. While the standing approach can still be called “Fail Fast” or “Do It Wrong Quickly“, you still need to cultivate an acute awareness of the real value of what you publish to your audience. There are numerous articles, sites, books and courses about content marketing available. Still, navigating it all as a solopreneur or small business owner can seem like panning for gold, and you just don’t feel like you’ve got the time or resources. You’ve got a business to create and run.
I’ll keep this to the point to save you time: here are three views of content that can help you use the resources you have more effectively. Frame your efforts with these in mind and you will find you come closer to “hitting the mark.”
Do you have any views of content you feel are foundational? Share in the comments and make your case.
It’s the last few days of 2014 and the Internet is packed with looks forward and backward, best of/worst of lists and the like. I’m not immune to assessing some of the more significant resources I use regularly, and so am passing onto you a short list of six of the most enlightening, not to mention entertaining, authors that I read and ponder.
Any kind of strategic planning requires time, space and an approach that most of us don’t utilize so much in our day-to-day
Marine Institute Ireland, Strategic_Planning_Symbol (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
business. This is too bad, but not surprising. We’re focused on the day-to-day, tactical bits of the business and the strategy time is time not spent on keeping the whole thing moving forward.
Authentic Voice 