How to Write a Blog Post People Will Love: Part 2

by | Nov 27, 2018 | Social Media

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When you’re trying to write a blog post that people will love, sometimes you can’t fit everything into the ideal length of 600 to 800 words. What can you do? Break it into a series of shorter posts.

Part 1 of this topic covered themes, points of view, headlines, opening words, and the ideal length. Here’s part 2 covering creating visual interest, engaging others, weaving in data and research, ending strong, editing your post, and reading other blogs for ideas and inspiration.

Make it visually interesting

Include photos, videos and/or infographics to make your post eye catching. You can also spice up your text by using subheads, bullets, numbered lists and white space. My rule is to keep paragraphs at four lines or less to make them reader friendly.

Use formatting options in platforms like LinkedIn to draw attention to call-out quotes by way of bold italics. You can also sprinkle images and/or videos throughout your post for visual interest.

Engage others

Consider how you can weave others into your post. If you can quote someone or highlight a best practice that they do, this rounds out your post with a variety of perspectives. This provides supporting points for your overall message.

It also potentially increases interest in and engagement with your post. The people you’ve included may be inclined to comment on and share your post. You can also mention them as you promote your post in various social networks, so they’re sure to know you’ve included them.

Bring in the data

Cite interesting facts and research in your post, and link to them. This anchors your post in data and supports your key points.

Influencer Neil Patel, for example, cited research that “marketers who blog consistently will acquire 126% more leads than those who do not.” If that data point doesn’t convince you of the value of blogging, I don’t know what will.

Be sure you’ve read the full link and are comfortable with its contents before linking to it. Why? Because every bit of content you create, like, or link to reflects on you and your professional image.

End strong

Your ending is almost as important as your lead. Here you want to spur your reader into action. What will they do differently as a result of reading your post? How have they accomplished what you talk about in your post? What questions do they have and will they leave a comment?

Career blogger Penelope Trunk had great advice in her online course, Reach Your Goals through Blogging. She advises to “write and write until you find the thing that surprises you.”

Edit, edit, edit

Set your draft aside and come back to it later, whether it’s the next day or the next hour. Read it with fresh eyes. Ask yourself if the piece flows appropriately from one idea to the next.

Look for areas that might need more explanation for your readers. Edit out repeated words (always a challenge for me) and unnecessary phrases. Make sure all the links work properly.

Read blogs

Study what types of blog posts and articles appeal to you. Ask yourself what specifically engages you. I love reading posts from many of my former colleagues in the corporate world – Anne Chow, Mo Katibeh, L. Michelle Smith, John Stancliffe and Jason Dunn, to name a few.

Sometimes it’s the things you don’t want to write, or that seem too personal, are what people love the most. A few recent examples on the more personal side are A Love Letter to the Amazing People I’ve Worked With and my corporate farewell remarks in Are You Doing What You Really Want to Do?

I almost didn’t write my post about 7 Things Not to Do in LinkedIn. At the time, I didn’t think I’d be adding anything new to the existing body of knowledge. But I wrote it because someone left a comment asking for it. And it became one of my most-read pieces.

That’s my moment of surprise. Sometimes the topic that doesn’t seem exciting to you will be of great interest to your network. If you look at the analytics of all your posts, you may find your own surprises to inform your upcoming posts.

What other ways do you write posts that people will love?

How to Write a Blog Post People Will Love: Part 1

by | Nov 26, 2018 | Social Media

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Blogging is a powerful way to share your expertise and establish yourself as a thought leader. My blog, as an example, has led to speaking invitations, consulting projects, publication opportunities and more.

What does it take to write a great blog post?

Here are tips to write a post that people will love. Sometimes the hardest part is getting over the fear. But what makes your post stand out comes in the editing process. During the writing process, the most important thing is to simply get the words down.

You may need to silence your inner critic until you do that. Just suspend that self-critical voice until you have a first draft completed. Write continuously for a set period of time, such as 60 minutes.

Set your draft aside and come back to it, ideally a day later and at least an hour later. You may find yourself pleasantly surprised that your first draft is much better than you expected.

This is all worth it in light of the benefits of blogging. Bestselling author Dorie Clark cites content creation as one of the three pillars of “standing out in a noisy world.”

It enables you to share your hard-won expertise, establishing you as a person with a valuable point of view. As a result, interesting career opportunities may come your way.

Here’s how to get started.

Have a theme

This is about having a strategy for what you blog about. By focusing in one area, you will be better able to build up a devoted readership over time. Be clear on why you’re writing and who you want to reach. Once you have your topic identified, you can relate almost anything to that subject.

It’s okay for your focus to evolve as your career does. My blog began as an exploration of the future of corporate communications. When my job changed after a corporate acquisition, I wrote about marketing analytics for a short time. Ultimately that wasn’t something I wanted to spend hours of my weekend and evening time on, so then I explored how people learn.

After that I had a serendipitous moment at a leadership conference. Reese Witherspoon, the entrepreneur, producer and actor, talked about the white space in social media to work with people on building their reputations.

It was my “a-ha” moment. I knew what I wanted to focus on – writing, consulting and speaking about what successful people do in social media to boost their careers.

Share your point of view

People read blogs to learn, to be entertained and to be surprised by a new twist. Think about the point of view you can bring to your topic. You don’t have to be an expert to start blogging about it. If you’re fascinated by it and dedicated to learning in the process, you can bring value to your audience.

Your point of view is why people will read your posts. No one else except for you has had your unique experience in the work world. What you’ve learned and experienced along the way can be helpful to others.

Come up with a compelling headline

You could write the best blog post in the world, but if no one reads it, your light and your ideas haven’t truly reached the world. As I learned by experimenting, it’s important to devote almost as much time to creating a compelling headline as you do to writing the overall post.

There are headline analyzers such as CoSchedule that can help you improve  your headlines to attract more readers. It’s almost a gamified approach, if you keep entering headlines to increase your score. Try to write 25 headlines for every blog post. Then pick the best one.

Of course, your headline has to be true to your subject. No clickbait for you. Deliver to your readers what your headline promises.

Focus on the first few words

The first first words and sentences have to pique your readers’ interest from the start. There’s no time to warm up and get to the point. Spend as much time on your lead as you do on your headline. What are the opening words and sentences that will grab a reader’s interest?

Those first few lines show up now for LinkedIn articles in your profile. Carefully consider what you want your first 30 words to say.

Get the length right

About 600 to 800 words is ideal. This is approximately the length of a newspaper op-ed article. It’s okay, though, to go shorter or longer if your topic warrants it. For something really long, you can break it into a series, as I did for my bio posts and my research on social media.

Since this post has hit that limit, watch for the remaining tips in a part 2 post coming soon.

Boost Your Career through Social Media, Part 2

by | Apr 15, 2018 | Learning, Social Media

Why are people active on social media professionally?

This post answers that question, based on a survey I fielded in March 2018.

The main goal? To learn how fellow professionals are using social media to build their careers.

In this series of posts on the survey results, part 1 addressed the survey goals, methodology, respondents, and professional and personal social media use.

Now let’s turn to why people are active in social media to boost their careers.

Respondents could choose as many answers as applied, including an “other” option asking them to specify.

The top 3 reasons?

  1. Build a network (86%)
  2. Access news about your industry and profession (81%)
  3. Learn continually about your industry and profession (77%)

Lower down the list that I expected were:

  • Find a new job (47%)
  • Establish yourself as a thought leader (46%)
  • Raise your visibility among key decision makers at your employer (40%)
  • Position yourself for a promotion (11%)
  • Change careers (10%)

It surprised me that Establish yourself as a thought leader wasn’t higher than its spot as the #5 reason. Because social media offers such a significant opportunity to share content and establish thought leadership, I hope and expect to see this number grow in the future.

In fact, it could even be considered the flip side of Learn continually about  your industry and profession. In comments, many respondents wrote that they sought out and followed thought leaders for continual learning.

Here’s what a few said:

“I follow key leaders within my company on LinkedIn and Twitter, as well as best-selling authors and speakers and influential business men and women to know what’s happening in our industry, but also learn career advice that will help anyone regardless of industry.”

“I read articles daily on LinkedIn to find out more about my industry and learn about other industries I’m interested in.”

“I follow several thought leaders on social media … and they help me expand my horizons and my thinking, hopefully to the benefit of my entire team!”

With so many people looking to social media to continually learn new information that’s relevant to their career and industry, that creates an opportunity for YOU.

How so? If you’re not already sharing your experience and expertise in social media, consider what you could share that would add value to others who are looking to learn.

Are there questions that colleagues often ask you that tap into your expertise? This could be a place to start in thinking about the types of content you could share.

And you can begin with small steps. LinkedIn is a great place. From your home feed, share an article, photo, video or idea. Or experiment with posting an article once a quarter during the calendar year. See how your network responds and adjust your approach. More content ideas are in my post about engaging topics for LinkedIn.

You can try to same thing with Twitter. Share an idea, an article or a video. Keep it simple by sharing your LinkedIn content in Twitter as well, tailoring it for the micro-blogging, shorter format on Twitter.

Be sure that any information you share is appropriate to be posted in public, in alignment with your organization’s social media guidelines. (Note: opinions express in this blog are my own.)

Other great learning strategies that respondents mentioned:

  1. Join LinkedIn groups of interest and be an active participant
  2. View Twitter trending topics
  3. Tap into YouTube for how-to videos
  4. Follow influencers, brands and trade publications
  5. Check out competitor company social media activity
  6. Search hashtags, even attending events virtually by following hashtags

It was exciting to see the focus on continual learning in the survey results.

Why?

My post on telling your career story in Instagram, cited a 2017 report by the Institute for the Future. It estimates that 85% of the jobs people will do in 2030 haven’t even been invented yet.

That’s only 12 years away. Even if this estimate turns out to be much lower than 85%, there’s still a lot of learning we all need to do!

Speaking of learning, “a blog is a learning process,” says career blogger Penelope Trunk in her online course called Reach Your Goals by Blogging. “A blog is a document of how you’re becoming an expert.”

She also says, “you MUST learn something in each post. Write and write and write until something surprises you. The ending is your “a-ha” moment.”

My learning moments? My surprises?

First is discovering that the process of writing these posts about my survey is serving as an additional layer of analysis, beyond reading and thinking about the results. Writing about the results makes me think about them in new and different ways, perhaps because it’s more active.

This led to my second learning moment – connecting continual learning with thought leadership. In simply reading through the responses, I did not reach that conclusion. Yet it became clear that one was the flip side of the other, once I could see the words on screen in this post.

If you need a compelling reason to start establishing yourself as a thought leader, here it is …

People are seeking thought leaders, we all need to learn continually, and you have insights to share.

When you share them, you learn yourself, contribute to your network and start to establish yourself as an expert.

What will you share in the week ahead?

12 Things I Learned from Blogging Every Day for a Month

by | Apr 30, 2016 | Change, Learning, Work/Life

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At the beginning of this month, I started an April adventure. What was it? To complete each of my daily dozen tasks every day for an entire month.

Why did I do it? To experiment. To create change. To get more done. To make decisions. To enjoy life more.

Here’s what I learned. Most of it was from blogging every day for a month, the one activity I did faithfully every day.

1. It’s easier doing things on most days, rather than every day. Sometimes the day’s schedule precluded doing everything on my list. And some activities shouldn’t be done daily, like lifting weights.

Days when I traveled called for extra creativity. For exercise, that meant getting in some steps while waiting at the airport. It also meant packing lighter “athletic” shoes that would fit in my bag so I could use the hotel fitness center.

They were a pair of slip-on Keds that took up a sliver of space in my bag compared with my usual workout shoes. A podiatrist might disagree, but they worked for 30 minutes of walking on the treadmill. The longer-term solution? When I replace my current workout shoes, I’ll get a smaller, lighter pair.

The benefit of doing an activity every day is that you don’t have to think about it. That makes it easier to do on a consistent basis. But once it’s become a habit, it’s easier to do it on most days of the week, rather than every day.

2. To make a new habit stick, focus on just one each month. Some days had a breathless quality of racing through activities to check them off the list. Some were already automatic, like taking vitamins. But others required chunks of time, like blogging, reading, exercising and sleeping. Even doubling up on activities didn’t fully do the trick.

What will work better? Focusing on one area each month. That’s inspired by Gretchen Rubin‘s year-long happiness project. She focused on one area of life each month for a year. In the final month, she combined all of her newly established habits and rituals.

So I’ll take my daily dozen, with a few tweaks, and assign each to a month over the coming year. The month of May? It’s a tossup between healthy eating and sleep.

Four years ago, on Mother’s Day, I became a lifetime member of Weight Watchers after losing nearly 50 pounds. And while thankfully I’m not the person who regained all of the weight and more, I would not keep my membership (within 2 pounds of goal) if I went to a weigh-in today.

It’s a struggle, this constant vigilance and self-care. The words of a Weight Watchers leaders still ring in my ears, “It ain’t over ’til you’re over.” How true.

So this May will be the month of healthy eating. Back to the healthful simplicity of the “power foods” – fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nonfat dairy and lean protein.

3. Clarify what you most enjoy by analyzing how you spend your time. What do you most love to do? One of mine is writing. It’s usually a guaranteed flow state, every time.

My April adventure clarified this because blogging was the one activity I did daily (other than taking vitamins, which I’m choosing not to count because it was already a well-established habit and takes only a minute to complete).

Whether it’s writing a report a work, or an inspiration for a community charity organization or this blog, I love to write. So I’ll focus on areas where I can do more than that.

4. Celebrate progress. One of my purposes in blogging daily was to clarify the focus of this blog. It began as an exploration of the future of corporate communications. Then it evolved into a learning journey, with a focus on the data analytics aspect of a career pivot.

And while I didn’t fully crystallize the focus of this blog, I did make progress. I know what I can take off the list. While I’ll still devote learning time to reading blogs and books about data analytics, along with some online courses, that specifically won’t be the focus of this blog.

I’ll continue to write about learning in general. It’s something we’ll all need to do throughout our lives, regardless of the the specific subject.

In my work, I’m intrigued by the intersection between data science and communication. As I find a way to link the two in an interesting way, that may be the subject of some future blog posts.

5. The more effortless you make your goals, the easier is it to accomplish them. With WordPress on my MacBook, iPad and iPhone, I could draft and post to my blog wherever I was. My Spanish is app is the same – all I need is 10 minutes and I can do my lesson for the day. My library is with me all the time with my Kindle app. And so on.

This is where I was especially proud of my employer and the vision to connect people with their world, everywhere they live and work. (Opinions on this blog are mine.) This is a great enabler – perhaps the great enabler – of what’s the most important in each of our lives.

Other enablers? Keeping my yoga mat and workout gear in my car. Having my PFD (personal floatation device) stacked beside that for standup paddle boarding sessions.

6. Complimentary activities help you get the most out of your day. For me it’s walking on the treadmill and reading (or streaming favorite TV shows on my DIRECTV app).

Thinking about 3 things I’m grateful for in the last 24 hours while brushing my teeth (thank you, Shawn Achor).

Maximizing family interactions by sitting in the dining room while I’m reading or writing or whatever so when my teens stroll by and want to engage (yes, they can be like cats), I’m there. This works in an office environment with colleagues, too.

7. Don’t try to do too much. Yet doubling up on activities only works to a point. Sometimes I struggle with enjoying the present moment. Being fully there. Not racing ahead to the next thing that I feel needs to be done.

By consciously limiting the number of things and activities I commit to, I know I’ll do better in that smaller set of activities. Given my goal to blog daily, I feel the quality of my posts wasn’t always what I wanted it to be. I didn’t have time for research, for reflection and for revising.

But I did learn some helpful strategies. When I finished one post, I’d start a new draft post and jot down my ideas in a brief outline. Then when I re-opened it to start writing, the initial thinking was already done.

This goes back to the principle of taking small steps. It also relates to my Spanish studies. While I’m not devoting big chunks of time to it, I can spend a few minutes a day. Studies are showing this goes for exercise too.

8. If something isn’t working for you, let it go. I don’t have to do everything. If something isn’t a fit, I can let it go.

This is one of the reasons I’m excited to read Angela Duckworth‘s book on Grit when the pre-order downloads to my Kindle app on May 3. This guru of tenacity and perseverance says it can be okay to quit. Just not on your hardest day.

One of my daily dozen was 2 minutes of power posing, inspired by Amy Cuddy‘s book on Presence. I’d like to think it made me stand up and sit up straighter during the day, and to take up more space. Why? To feel more confident and live life more fearlessly.

But I don’t need to do it every day. I can save it for times when I have to give a big presentation or otherwise tackle a tough challenge.

9. Relationships with people are more important than checking tasks off a list. When my daughter or son wants to talk with me, I stop what I’m doing (as hard as that can sometimes be) and I listen and chat.

Here I’m inspired by Shonda Rhimes and her Year of Yes. Whenever her daughters asked her to play, she’d stop what she was doing to spend time with them. It doesn’t take long. But it means so much.

My daughter and I have had lots of chats this month – on the road and at home as she’s been choosing her college. It’s been a learning experience. Sometimes you don’t end up where you expected, but there can be a whole new world of possibilities. It all depends on your perspective.

10. Intense activity can’t solve all of your problems – or the world’s problems. There are still sad moments. Anxious moments. Frustrating moments. We live in a world that seemingly gets crazier and more unpredictable every day – with events that are beyond our control.

Keeping busy all the time won’t solve those problems. But it will help you make progress in your own life. And that’s what makes us happy.

11. We can still control an awful lot in our lives. Our minds – with thanks to Carol Dweck and her growth mindset concept. What we do – or don’t do – every day. How we show up and share our gifts. What we choose to do and who we do it with. Being clear about what we can control and what we can’t.

12. Love is all there is. My sister Katie shared this with my last year during a very sad time her family’s life. This was a favorite saying of her mother-in-law Sylvia, who was unexpectedly near the end of her life. It makes me smile through tears to think of Sylvia, Katie and the rest of the family.

But in the end, what could be more true? Love really is all there is.

As someone who’s all about achieving goals – sometimes with a relentless zeal that my immediate family enjoys teasing me about – this one made me stop and think. Especially this month as I figured out how to cram a lot in every day.

Life truly is about the people and the relationships.

And there’s always something to love about others. No matter who they are. It helps to remember that everyone is carrying a heavy load and traveling a difficult path, even if their life appears perfect on their Instagram feed. I’ve learned to be kinder to myself and to others.

Because love is all there is.