Social media

A 5 step plan for how to blog more frequently

November 16, 2011 By Tom Catalini Leave a Comment

Several people have asked recently how I manage to blog as frequently as I do (currently 5 posts per week), so I thought I’d share some strategies.

1. Make a committment

First of all, you need to like blogging. If you don’t enjoy it very much, this first step is where you’ll likely stumble.

Everybody wants to post more frequently, but not everybody commits. If you can make a commitment to a concrete goal, you’ll be well on your way.

You need to be specific. “I will blog more frequently” is not specific. “I will blog once each week, on Fridays” will be far more powerful.

But I think the bigger secret may be that the goal does not need to be long term. It just needs to be long enough to establish a habit.

“I will publish a blog post each Friday for the next two months” is a powerful goal. You’ll have set specific, easily measurable guidelines for yourself, and you will have established an end goal. At that point, you can circle back and re-evaluate.

2. Be flexible

Once you’re reached your short-term goal, you can set a new goal, making adjustments where needed.

You should try different goals and different approaches but stick with each experiment long enough to determine if it’s working for you.

Good startups pivot. They retain their mission, but adjust strategies (sometimes radically) as needed in order to evolve their business model. Your blog is a startup, so you should approach things the same way.

Your commitment to whatever it is you hope to accomplish through your blog remains steady, but your commitment to the goals for publishing need to adjust periodically.

3. Build a habit

As ironic as it may sound, routine breeds creativity. The best writers will tell you that the discipline of writing is really the hard part. It’s not about sitting around thinking great thoughts, nor is it about awaiting inspiration. Rather, “the muse honors the working stiff” is often their mantra.

Trust that the ideas will come, and focus instead on establishing writing habits.

Figure out when and where you will write and then work to build a habit of doing so. It will not be fluid or natural at first, but as you persist a pattern will eventually be established. And this pattern will become key to unleashing your creativity and to simply getting the work done.

4. Be flexible (again)

A disciplined routine is key, for sure. But you’re really trying to use that routine to establish a habit. A habit that persists even when components of that routine cannot.

There are a bunch of things that can throw you off your routine. Travel, work, family, or even the weather can force you out of position. But, if you’ve established the habit of writing, and you’ve retained your commitment to doing it, you will find a way to adjust. And they you’ll get back to your routine.

It’s important to make these adjustments when necessary. Do not give yourself a pass, as it will only weaken your habit.

5. Use smart tactics

Maintaining discipline and a routine can be challenging. Even when you’re flexible, circumstances will sometimes be impossible to overcome. So why not stack the deck in your favor a bit by using some simple tactics?

When the muse appears and things are flowing well for you, write an extra post or two and set it aside for a rainy day. Publish those when circumstance won’t allow for your normal routine.

Similarly, you can build a habit of writing posts in advance. Most blogging platforms will allow you to schedule them for publishing at a later date. This way, you can stay ahead of things and not feel like you’re always writing on deadline.

And you can experiment. Trying a new type of post or writing on a different but related topic can really get the juices flowing and help you to generate new content. It’s another way of being flexible.

Committed, but flexible

Making a strong commitment and establishing habits and routines is going to get you a long way. Being flexible when needed will help you keep those commitments and habits in place.

Soon you’ll be generating more content and publishing more frequently. And hopefully that will all work in service of your larger goals. If it doesn’t, you need to adjust.

Remember, it’s ok to pivot. In fact, it’s critical that you do. So work diligently enough so that you have something meaningful to assess, but then change it when needed.

Photo credit: Stephan Mosel

Filed Under: Social media Tagged With: blog, blogging, how to, writing

Getting Started on Twitter, Part 3: Trends, Hashtags and Chats

September 14, 2011 By Tom Catalini Leave a Comment

You’ve setup your account and started following others. There are a few other interesting ways to peek into the discussions taking place on Twitter. It’s a large and chatty population – over 100 million active users and hundreds of millions of tweets generated each day. Following are three ways to find topical and interesting discussions.

1. Trends

When enough people are mentioning the same word or phrase, Twitter takes notice of the trend. The most popular words or phrases that are “trending” are listed over on the right side of your Twitter page. It’s often inane, but some newsworthy items also show up there, particularly when something big is happening. Here’s a snapshot taken at the time of this post.

Here we can see some news about Windows 8 bubbling up, people are mentioning Tupac on the 15th anniversary of his death, and some other items. Clicking on any one of those trending topics will bring you to a live list of tweets that contain these words. But sometimes it’s quicker and easier to figure out why something is trending at a site like WhatTheTrend.com. That site will also allow you to see what else has been trending recently.

Notice also at the top of the trend list is a location indicator. You can change this to see what’s trending in your city or around the world.

2. Hashtags

Hashtags are prominent on Twitter. They are a sort of shorthand to identify keywords by adding the “#” symbol to the front of a single word (sometimes words are typed together with no spaces to form longer hashtags). This makes it easy to search for items by keyword. You’ll notice in some tweets that hashtags are highlighted like links. That’s because they are. Clicking on a hashtag will automatically bring up a live list of tweets that contain it, just like the trends list.

So, in a tweet like this, you’ll notice that #webinno31 is a highlighted hashtag.

Clicking on that hashtag will bring up a live list of tweets that mention it, and it becomes quickly apparent that this hashtag is being used to connect tweets about a conference in Boston. In a stream like this you’ll notice people connecting with one another, sharing comments and photos from the event, and links to related material.

Hashtags are used for all sorts of things – events (like above), general categorization, and to tie together all sorts of discussions. If there are specific topics you are interested in, it’s useful to guess at a few hashtags and to enter them into the search bar at the top of the page. This can be another great way to find people to follow who share similar interests to you.

3. Chats

Twitter chats are live conversations tied together by the hashtags we discussed above. There are many such discussions taking place, usually at a regular prescheduled day and time. It’s easy to listen in or participate, and it’s another good way to find interesting people to follow. But it can be hard to find a chat.

Eventually you’ll notice chats mentioned by people you follow. There have also been some attempts to organize lists of chats, so a good place to start might be at this list of chats started by Robert Swanwick in Google Docs. It seems to have gained some momentum, as there are over 500 chats listed on it today.

Following, finding, listening

So there you have it, three new ways to find interesting content and people on Twitter. It will still take some time for you to sift through and find the stuff that’s most interesting to you, but these are some great places to start.

Filed Under: Social media Tagged With: chats, hashtags, trends, Twitter

Getting started on Twitter, Part 2: Who to follow

September 12, 2011 By Tom Catalini Leave a Comment

In Getting Started on Twitter, Part 1 you setup your account. You have a Twitter handle and a nice custom profile setup. Now what?

Your slice of the world

Now you need to decide who you’re going to follow. Twitter has over 100 million active users; you can’t follow them all. Curation is the key to a good Twitter experience. And while there are a lot of tools and techniques available to allow you to slice and dice Twitter streams, mastering the basics of following is critical to getting started. Here are three ways to quickly define your slice of the world on Twitter:

1. Follow people you already know, from “real life” or online. Twitter provides a tool to make this easy – you can search by email address (for those that allow themselves to be discovered that way; remember selection that option when you setup your account?).

When you login to Twitter, use the link on the right to “find friends” you already know, using one of the services listed.

2. Once you’ve discovered some people you already know on Twitter, click through to their profiles. You’ll be able to see their profile photo and information, AND who THEY follow. Browsing this list can be a very good way to discover who else you might be interested to follow. Be selective, though, as you want to keep your stream limited when you’re first learning your way around Twitter. Click on those who look interesting, check out their profile and their recent tweets. If you’re interested, click the follow button.

Don’t be surprised to find people you follow “following you back.” That’s part of the Twitter culture, but not necessarily one you should feel pressured to embrace. Following back is a sort of courtesy, but it’s also a way to quickly clutter up your stream with things you’re not necessarily interested in. My suggestion is to only follow those you are truly interested to follow. You can find more on my follow strategy in this earlier post.

3. Browse by interest to find popular Twitter accounts in your areas of interest. Again, over on the left is a link:

Here you can drill down into various categories, like “technology,” and discover some of the most popular accounts. Popular accounts are usually popular for a reason – they’re run by people who share interesting stuff. Look for a few accounts that are individuals and maybe one or two that are more corporate or broadcast.

For example, under “technology” you will find accounts like @waltmossberg that are clearly run by a single individual. This will provide a very personal experience, which is one of the more compelling and interesting things about Twitter (according to me). But it can also be interesting to follow accounts like @guardiantech that are run by a team instead of an individual and are used to stream out news updates more than anything else.

Two dozen

Using the tips above, find at least two dozen accounts to follow. Get used to reading your stream, which will now contain each and every tweet from the accounts you follow. Notice what they say, how often they tweet, what sort of things they retweet, and start to notice some of the jargon unique to Twitter. This will help you to get a feel for the environment without being overloaded with too much information.

Filed Under: Social media Tagged With: following, getting started, Twitter

Getting Started on Twitter, Part 1: Account Setup

September 7, 2011 By Tom Catalini 1 Comment

Twitter is a popular social network with unique characteristics – it’s easy to use, accessible from anywhere (it’s a particularly mobile network), and fun. It can be a great resource of information, and a great way to share your personal insights, ideas, and items of interest with friends and the world at large.

Twitter is simple, but it takes a bit of effort to get acclimated. This series of posts will help you ramp up quickly.

To get started, you’ll need to setup your own Twitter account. It’s easy, but here’s a walkthrough of the process with a few suggestions.

8 Steps to Setup

1. Mozy on over to twitter.com and fill out the simple form to get started. Type in your name, email address and a password. Click ok and you’ll see this screen next. Here’s where you get to pick your Twitter handle.

I suggest that you simply use your real name, if it’s available. Most cute and clever handles you see are from older accounts or those who wish to remain anonymous. I think it’s simpler and clearer to just use your name, which will help establish your identity and personal brand more effectively.

2. Skip the next three steps (suggestions, interests, friends); we’ll come back to these later. It’s better to just finish setting up your account first before diving in.

3. Twitter will tell you about a new feature, the ability to insert photos into your tweets. Just click ok.

4. Finish setting up your profile by uploading a picture and providing a short bio. You can click on the links to the right to get you to the proper screen (either link will work, they go to the same page).

5. Upload a nice headshot, ideally the same photo you use on other social networks like LinkedIn. Don’t put up a cartoon, logo, or other gimmicky photo – people want to connect with people, not icons.

Fill out the rest of the information – location and a website link (to your blog, if you have one, or maybe to your LinkedIn profile, or your company’s web page).

Write a short bio (and it must be short – 160 characters!). Share something about yourself and your interests. This is a good place to be cute or clever if it helps to get your point across.

6. Go to the Account tab and decide if you want others to be able to find you by your email address. This is a good way for friends and other contacts to find you, so you may want to leave that on. Adjust your time zone. And click on the “Always use HTTPS” security option at the bottom to secure all transmissions between your browser and Twitter (like your username and password).

7. Go to the Notifications tab and review the settings. As a new user you may find it helpful to leave all of these on. Since you probably won’t be on Twitter too often in the beginning, it’s best to ensure you’re notified by email when someone is engaging you on the platform. You can come back and adjust these to your needs over time as your use of Twitter increases.

8. Finally, click on the Design tab. Change your design from the default. It’s an easy and quick way to reflect your personality and taste a little bit.That’s it. You’re setup, customized and ready to tweet!

Filed Under: Social media Tagged With: getting started, how to, Twitter

The WordPress community

September 2, 2011 By Tom Catalini Leave a Comment

WordPress is a free, open source software program for websites blogging. It’s easy to use, flexible and powerful.

But it’s biggest asset is its community.

Google+

I was an early adopter of Google+ when it burst on the scene this summer. Google+ quickly became very popular and the buzz around the new social network ramped up quickly. I thought it would be neat to add a “follow me on Google+” type element to this WordPress blog in order to let readers know I was there and how to find me on the new network.

Sure enough, within days someone in the WordPress community had created such a plugin and made it available to all WordPress users for free. It’s called googleCards, and I blogged about it here.

Working without a net

Since there is no official way to connect to Google+ (no an application programming interface or API), this was a clever workaround. As such, it proved to be a bit fragile and broke a couple of times as Google+ changed things on their emerging platform. This required a few fixes and updates (which are very easy to apply in WordPress since the app store is well-integrated into the administrative dashboard for the program).

The downside, of course, is that all of us who installed this utility were dependent on the original programmer to make these updates. At one point, he seemed to get sick of it, and just left the broken program lingering in limbo.

So, this little utility that came in with such good timing with a bunch of eager adopters (nearly 10,000 of us had downloaded it), simply vanished.

That’s the downside of a free, community-supported ecosystem.

But then

But then, since the plugin is also open source, another programmer took the broken program and fixed it (see the updated portion of my post on googleCards).

So, a clever idea that was put out there with some early hustle caught on. And when it’s creator lost interest, someone else in the community took charge and helped everyone else out.

That’s the upside of a free, community-supported ecosystem.

—

Updated (9/8/11): The original author is back on the job, and a new update was released. The steps in the original post work again. Enjoy!

Filed Under: Social media Tagged With: community, open source, WordPress

Get Free Updates

Follow me on Twitter

Archives by category