How to Deliver the Highest Impact with Each Post

Posted: 10 Feb 2010 03:45 AM PST

This is a guest post from Leo Babauta of Zen Habits. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

In the last few years at Zen Habits, I’ve gone from 7 posts a week to two or three … and yet my blog is growing in readership faster than ever.

That’s not to brag, but to illustrate a point: frequent posting isn’t necessarily effective blogging.

If your goal is to reach a wider audience and establish yourself as a blogger, your aim should be to have a big impact with each post. And if your goal is just to put your thoughts out there, maybe to stir up some discussion in the blogging world … you should also aim for high-impact posts.

High-impact posts are measured not in terms of page views, but on how they affect discussion. Are people talking about the post, on blogs or Twitter or forums? Are they responding in comments or via email? Are they forwarding the post to friends via email, Twitter, and other social networks? Are they bookmarking it on Delicious or voting for it on Digg or Stumbling it? These are just some of the ways you can tell what kind of impact your blog is having.

Low-Impact Posts
First, let’s look at the opposite of high-impact posts. These are the kinds of posts you’ll see on many blogs, by the hundreds, that no one will find useful and bookmark or forward or talk about:

What I did today
A few favorite links
What I ate today
Sorry I haven’t been blogging in awhile
Tagged: Why I blog
Blogging love
A dream

None of these posts are useful to people, or interesting. They’ll go out into the world and make not one drop of difference.

High-Impact Posts
There’s isn’t a formula for writing a high-impact post, but here are some tips from what I’ve learned:

Extremely useful. Be as useful as possible on a topic that people want to learn about.
Complete guides. An extension of the above tip, but as complete as you can be — someone should be able to read the guide and do whatever it is you’re teaching.
Great headlines. The headline should make people think, or curious, or promise to be really useful.
Controversial. Don’t just say controversial things in order to get noticed, but if you can think beyond the conventional and say something different, or in a different way, you’ll get people thinking and talking.
Short. Not all high-impact posts are short — in fact many aren’t — but if you have a post with one brilliant idea, written concisely and memorably, it’ll have a great chance of getting spread. See Seth Godin for some great examples.
Memorable. Don’t ever be run-of-the-mill. Do something different, in a way that people will remember. Be bold!
Consistent. One memorable post is good, but if you’re consistently useful and memorable, week in and week out, people will come to expect it of you and each post will have greater impact.
Full of resources. Link to other guides or great blogs or books. Save people hours of time researching a topic by giving them the best resources.
New ideas. Don’t repeat the same ideas — come up with some of your own.
Looking at new angles. Even if you don’t cover every aspect of a topic on one post, you can go into a lot of depth if you consistently cover different angles of a topic. The more angles you can look at in different posts, the more completely you’ll cover a topic.
Fewer posts. While the big blogs like Lifehacker and Gizmodo can put out a dozen posts a day, smaller blogs have to make their posts count. By reducing the number of posts you have, you are less likely to overwhelm the reader — and so the reader will be more likely to read your posts. They’ll also be more memorable if you can pour everything you have into each one.

Leo Babauta writes about simplicity and productivity at Zen Habits. He’s also running a bootcamp for beginning bloggers: Blogging 101: How to Create a Blog that Rocks that starts next week.

Original Post: How to Deliver the Highest Impact with Each Post

Book Review: Crush It!

Posted: 09 Feb 2010 06:29 AM PST

crush-it I just finished reading Gary Vaynerchuk’s first book last week, so lets get on with its review. The title is Crush It!: Why NOW Is The Time To Cash In Your Passion.

1. The book: Crush It! is a book about finding your passion and profiting from it online. Gary V. did just that, and he wanted to share with other people how to follow on his steps. The book has 132 pages, which means you could read it within a week.

2. The content: The beginning of the book is about why you need to follow you passion, and how Gary did it with his wine business, taking the revenues from $4 to over $60 million annually. After that Gary talks about the important of personal branding, the online platforms you must use, and the strategies you should use to promote yourself and your business.

3. What I liked: I already have a good experience with online marketing, publishing platforms and other web tools, so that part of the ebook was pretty trivial to me. What I really liked, however, was the energy that Gary is able to transmit through the text. He does that in video, so it should be no surprise. In fact it was this book, and Gary’s approach to business in general, that motivated me to start hustling. You can grasp that from the quote I used below.

4. Who would benefit from this book: People who want to start using social media tools to promote his business and people who want to get motivated about succeeding with an online or offline business.

5. Favorite quote:

I’ve said over and over that if you live your passion and work the social networking tools to the max, opportunities to monetize will present themselves. I’ve also said that in order to crush it you have to be sure your content is the best in its category. You can still make plenty of good money if you’re fort best in category, or ninth best, but if you really want to dominate the competition and make big bucks, you’ve got to be the best. Do that, be that, and no one will be able to touch you.

With one exception. Someone with less passion and talent and poorer content can totally beat you if they’re willing to work longer and harder than you are. Hustle is it. Without it, you should just pack up your toys and go home.

Original Post: Book Review: Crush It!