Branding David

I am all about new projects. I dislike being stuck doing one thing for any lengthy period of time. This is pretty apparent in my career, but it is a personal failing that I am working hard to alleviate. Today, on twitter, I asked people how they stick with projects over the long term, and these are the responses I received:

@andrea_r wrote: set a time line, get someone to hold you accountable (re: Nag you ) Pick one to finish first.

I got this same response, more or less from @jeremywright who wrote: for me, 120 day plans. Gets you out of forest for the trees mode. Consecutive ones keeps you moving.

See, I knew this tip and tried to do so when writing my work in progress novel. I had actually paid someone to help me in part by nagging me about updates. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel accountable to this person, and they weren’t the type to push me hard enough to deliver results, and so the project fell by the wayside.

I am getting ready to pick it back up, but before I do, I wanted to work towards learning the tricks to keeping the project going to completion.

After Jeremy, came a response from @chrisgarrett and @malcolmbastien about accountability as well.

Doing something in the public light doesn’t equal accountability though. As sort of a double-shot at trying to give my writing the potential for success, I published it online as I wrote it, in its unedited form. I had hoped the story would gain a small following of people that would help compel me to continue.

This didn’t work out and even today, most of the traffic to the site is related to spammers.

@chrisgarrett then put forth the idea that I didn’t really want to complete the project, saying “sometimes we don’t actually want to finish, no matter what.”

I felt a little attacked by his message, but, at least in part, he was right. People that really want to finish something are able to find the determination that others lack. For me, determination is linked to my perceived sense of difficulty. I’ll skip sleeping to figure out a programming problem. I’ll play the same level of a video game hundreds of times to unlock the secret to beating it. The potential reward at the end has very little to do with my interest in completing the puzzle. I just like victories, and I like feeling victorious as often as possible.

Many people have noticed and commented on this trait of mine, both in a positive and negative way.

andrea_r then said “so.. what’s holding you back? Not into the project? Is it still viable, still a good idea?”

Thankfully, the projects I want to complete are still good ideas, and they are still viable. All they need is some time and attention, and maybe setting them down for a while, to focus on other things will, in the end, have benefited them.

I have always found it hard to pick back up on a story though, as my emotions, ideas, and experiences shape how I attack the story, and lead to it being very disjointed. Personally, some of my best articles, posts, and stories have all been written within a day to a maximum period of a week.

I don’t yet understand how other writers deal with this constant shift of perception and emotion, but as a barrier to continue a project, it is fairly weak, and something I need to be aware of so that it doesn’t stop my progress.

chrisgarrett then asked, “what is different about the projects you DO finish?”

To which I responded, “they are short term, highly focused, with a very finite beginning, middle and end. They are challenging.”

I think my issue on focusing over the long term has more to do with two things: goals and perceived challenges.

chrisgarrett then gave me two great tips: “my secret for writing books? In my head they are not books, they’re blog article series. Write an article at a time” and “find someone who is also doing the same type of project and make a bet”

These tips bring together the two things I need most in order to keep pushing ahead. They help me find a challenge by putting myself in direct competition with someone else, a technique that I’ve used successfully before in tracking my blog against other blogs in my same niche, as well as reminding me to give myself constant goals in order to stay focused on the smaller victories that will help build out the larger project.

I will likely follow both of these by working on making public goals once again on this blog, tracking my progress publicly and finding someone, hopefully, on the Problogger.com forums that would like to have a friendly competition with me.

In the end though, any long term focus has to come from me. I need to take this advice, and practice it. I won’t always be successful, and since I am also my worst critic, I also need to learn to be more forgiving when I stumble or hit a wall, so that I can then turn around and start running again.

If you are on twitter, I hope you all follow:
andrea_r
jeremywright
chrisgarrett
malcolmbastien

They are great people, with great advice.

Recently, a co-worker asked me how he could get blogs to allow him to post guest posts. And while it isn’t all that difficult, since most blogs are looking to have others write for them, it can take a bit of effort to figure out which blogs you should ask, and the process you should take before asking.

Here is my pretty simple formula for maximum guest post approval on the “right” sites. *The right ones being the type of sites you are most interested in.

1.) Go to AllTop.com or Technorati and find sites listed under the niche/topics/tags you are interested in. List them all out in a text editor or a spreadsheet application.

2.) Go to each site and check to see if it shows off its subscriber count. If it uses Feedburner and doesn’t have the subscriber count, add ~fc to the url before their feed name, and if Feedcount is active, it will show you their count. (http://feeds.feedburner.com/myfeed becomes http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/myfeed)

3.) Do a quick scan to see how many comments its articles get. This can also be a great way of judging popularity, if feed count is not available. Sites with more comments can be more popular and thus usually gets more inbound links.

4.) Remove sites from your list that don’t fit what you are looking for or filter them away to be done later when you have more time.

5.) Take the sites that are left and check their Google PageRank, Alexa, and Compete rankings. While not a perfect judge, this too can help you determine the size or popularity of a site, especially in the USA and even more so when creating a measuring stick for sites in the same niche.

6.) Next, take the ones you’d like to target and run their sites through PostRank. Look at their more popular posts over the last month or two, and start leaving comments. Don’t spam! These comments, because they are popular posts, give you the best chance of creating conversations, and gaining a little traffic through the link in your comment associated with your name.

7.) Once you’ve left comments for about a week or two, (might only be three or four, but fewer great comments are better than many forgettable comments) contact the author and ask if they’d be willing to publish a guest post from you on their blog. Be completely honest about what’s in it for you, and make sure to give them a good idea of your skill, expertise, and potential topic choices.

8.) If they say that they are interested, make sure to have the guest post ready quickly. I sometimes write guest posts before hand, and then fine-tune them for the site that it will be published on, thus saving time, and making it easier for me to get things published on sites willing to run my content.

The great thing about guest posts is that both people get something from the content. Guest posters get a platform that might be larger than their own, access to a community, and even a chance to get a natural looking link back to their blog. The blog owners get free content and hopefully a boatload of traffic and links.

While everything I’ve listed might not always be a factor in your guest posting work, I suggest making each guest post count for as much as possible towards your marketing and community growth efforts. In my experience, the acceptance rate is usually around 75% and up, and so for every ten sites you ask, make sure you have around eight posts or post ideas ready to go.

I’ve been thinking about Problogger.net for some time now, and watching how Darren is evolving the site, and one thing that has always bugged me is how many guest posts he features on his blog. Most of us aim for Darren’s success when we think about our own Problogging careers, and as such, getting a post featured on his site must feel amazing for those involved, but is Darren getting more than he’s giving?

Guest posting can be an awesome way to build up your own blog, and getting your posts on high powered, top tier blogs can be amazing for growth, but I haven’t heard much from those getting a guest post on Darren’s site about the effects on their own brands, sites, and goals.

Taking a look at the last month, from November 9th, 2009 to December 9th, 2009, I looked at the posts, and found twenty-two of them to be by Darren, and eleven to have been by guest posters. Out of the twenty-two posts by Darren, one was a video shot by someone else that he added a small commentary to, and a few were focused on Problogger.com updates, his re-launched newsletter and his e-book. Two were in depth reviews of blogs, leaving around fifteen posts written by Darren to help teach.

Fifteen posts in a given month of unique, original content organized to reflect on things he’s learned and help you blog better. I’d hazard a guess that most of us would still be deeply interested in his writings even if his blog only featured these fifteen posts, but with the addition of the posts done by guest bloggers, I begin to wonder what effects they have on the overall brand.

Darren gets more content, thus providing a stronger attachment to his own brand, and bigger net of keywords for grabbing search visitors. Guest bloggers get their content posted on an upper tier blog with a loyal audience.

Even if you wrote the best blog post on Problogger.net, I wonder how long it would grab people’s attention before Darren either adds another guest post, or puts up something of his own?

Also, as a reader, I wonder how these posts are being edited, filtered and controlled? Are we really receiving the best content available? Don’t we visit Problogger.net to read Darren’s insights?

Still to this day, despite Darren’s hard work to change this issue, people assume all posts that appear on the site were written by Darren. When this happens, it is probably a testament of how well written the guest author’s post was, but if people make such assumptions, where is the brand benefit to the contributor?

If more blogs were run in the same way, what would be the net effect for guest blogging as a whole? Would you give up one third of your blog to guest bloggers? Would you give up one third of your blogging time to write guest posts?

For me, I think it would be more valuable to my audience and brand building to have Darren guest blog on one of my sites rather than spend my time to guest blog on his.