Ways to Feed the Blog Content “Monster”


“There are two ways to “feed the content monster”, Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick suggest in their book The Art of Social Media:
  1. Content creation
  2. Content curation (finding other people’s good stuff, summarizing it and showing it)
However you’re finding – or ”birthing” your content, the authors tell us, there are dictates to follow:

Be valuable. (What happened? What does it mean? How can readers do that?)
One way to talk “value”, we teach at Say It For You, is to translate a benefit that a product or service has that isn’t typically expressed in dollar terms.

Be interesting. (Don’t assume your followers want to read about only a narrow band of subjects.)
Blog content writing is the perfect vehicle for conveying a corporate message using a a seemingly unrelated piece of trivia.

Be bold. (Express your feelings and agenda.)
Whether it’s business-to-business blog writing or business to consumer blog writing, the blog content itself needs to use opinion to clarify what differentiates that business, that professional practice, or that organization from its peers.
Be brief. (People make snap judgments and move along if you don’t capture interest quickly.)
While blogs should be “small” (readers should not need to scroll down to read “the rest of the story”), the way to make blogs exciting is to find the “bigger idea”.  
Be visual. (Every post should contain “eye candy”.)
Engaging blog posts need to contain visuals, whether they’re in the form of “clip art”, photos, graphs, charts, or even videos, to add interest and evoke emotion.

Be organized. (Structure information in chunks.)
Chunking is one way business bloggers can offering technical information in “chewable tablet form”, because it refers to the strategy of breaking down information into bite-sized pieces so the brain can more easily digest it.

Be a Mensch. (Make positive and intelligent comments, suggest resources.)
Providing external links from your blog post to a news source or magazine article or to someone else’s blog post on your subject shows you’re staying in touch with others in your industry and that you’re confident you have special value to offer within a competitive environment.
Feeding the content “monster” over weeks, months, and years is certainly a challenge. Luckily, as Shakespeare pointed out many moons ago, “There are “more ways on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in philosophy” Could the Bard have been foreseeing the art of social media?
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