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Chris Brogan & Penn #pcb6

As friend and fellow blogger Chris Brogan did, so am I: if you read this blog on Google Reader, it’s going away on July 1. How else can you get the blog? Well, you can bet that Feedburner is in the crosshairs for Google next, so don’t go there. Instead:

1. Subscribe to my newsletter. You’ll get a recap every week on Sunday night (or Monday) of what I’ve blogged, and as a bonus, it’s what I’ve blogged on multiple sites, not just this one.

2. Follow me on the social network(s) of your choice:

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3. Share this idea by linking either Chris’ post or this one to your friends and doing a similar one on your blog. This post will be shared frequently, probably once a week, until the lights go out on Google Reader.

4. If all else fails, bookmark this site.


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Off for the holidays

Fire in the fireplace

Food for thought: it’s generally accepted that the business world will restart in about 11 days, on January 3rd. For reasons unknown to me, people around the office and online are not counting January 2nd. I suppose that’s so people can recover as well as dig out from their email.

If you wrote a lengthy blog post every day for the next 11 days of 1,000 words or more, you could assemble them all and have a new 11,000 word eBook ready to kick off the year with strong promotion on January 3rd. Or, let’s assume you work a bit for Christmas Eve and the 3 days after Christmas, plus New Year’s Eve and keep your inbox clean so January 2nd is productive. That gives you 5 days – 40 hours – to crank content when no one else cares. If you write a measly 500 words per hour, that would give you a 20,000 word full-size book by the time businesses spun up on January 3rd.

So consider doing what I’m doing. Take the week off publicly, but hammer away privately, and when everyone else is dusting off the cobwebs on January 2nd, you’ll hit the world hard. Keep the fires of your mind burning, but don’t rest unless you have to.

See you on the other side.


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I recommend:

for small business incorporation.

Take a look at the bottom of your content barrel

Bottom of the cup

For folks doing the December rewind, you’re now nearing the end of the really good content and starting in on the pretty good content. Chances are, people who you weren’t connected to earlier in the year are seeing your best stuff for the first time and responding accordingly, which is a great way to showcase what you’re all about. So here’s a brain bender for you. Go back into your analytics and look at the year, but now sort your page views in ascending order.

What’s in the bottom of your content barrel? Are those posts just unseen because you hit bad timing? Are those posts stinkers that you probably shouldn’t have blogged? In looking at my 5 bottom of the barrel posts, one’s a full promotion, three are “phone-ins” where I basically blogged that I wasn’t blogging that day, and one was such inside baseball for Warcraft players that it wasn’t obvious what the value was for the non-Warcraft reader.

What are the lessons from my bottom of the barrel posts?

Going forward, I think it’s safe to basically never do a “not blogging” post because it doesn’t get any attention anyway. Warcraft posts need to have more obvious value in the headlines, and promotional posts… well, I suppose it’s a good thing that I don’t have a whole lot to sell, because it doesn’t resonate terribly well as standalone content.

What have you learned from the bottom of your barrel?


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Marketing White Belt

Basics for Digital Marketers
is now on Amazon & B&N

I recommend & use:
SEOMoz SEO Software
SEOMoz SEO software.
I recommend:

for small business incorporation.