What I’m Doing Wrong

Yah. I said it. I’m doing some­thing very wrong. In fact, with respect to blog­ging and social media, it relates to one of the biggest pieces of advice I’d give other peo­ple. Not that I’m such a big advi­sor, I just have a big mouth and am “a lit­tle” opinionated.

That advice is “par­tic­i­pate” in the con­ver­sa­tion. It’s very obvi­ous when you run across a blog where the per­son just talks. They don’t usu­ally ref­er­ence other con­ver­sa­tions or ideas. They also don’t refer to com­ments they’ve made, and impor­tantly, they don’t link to other articles/posts/items.

I did this when I first started blog­ging over at Progress, and it was a suc­cess­ful way to get my voice added to the sym­phony. I’ve let that prac­tice slip over the last 6 months, and that’s a shame.

So, here’s some advice you’ve prob­a­bly heard a mil­lion times before. This makes it a mil­lion and one.

1. Spend more time com­ment­ing on other people’s blogs than writ­ing your own. It’s being a good cit­i­zen, but also helps to estab­lish cred­i­bil­ity. And, we all like read­ers to our blogs, and are more likely to read a blog for some­one who reg­u­larly par­tic­i­pates on our own. (duh) 
2. Link to other arti­cles. It makes your writ­ing more valu­able to a reader who may not know your topic well enough to find the “good” writ­ing, but also improves our blog’s search ranking. 
3. Being open to other people’s ideas (in my case, prod­uct and mar­ket strate­gies) helps you grow pro­fes­sion­ally. I read a lot. I often bring what I read into my work (and frankly, into my train­ing… but that’s another story). Some­times I bring it in suc­cess­fully, some­times, not so much. Either way, it keeps my brain from get­ting too set in a par­tic­u­lar way of think­ing or approach­ing problems.

One of the most prac­ti­cal and use­ful books I’ve ever read on a topic was Naked Con­ver­sa­tions: How Blogs are Chang­ing the Way Busi­nesses Talk with Cus­tomers. I highly rec­om­mend it still as a must-read guide for peo­ple who want blog successfully.

So, that said…

I’m off to Peru in about 3 weeks. When I return, I’m going to make more of an effort to read and com­ment more, and involve myself in the con­ver­sa­tion more than I have been. I’m going to track my read­er­ship more closely, and see if I can be more con­sis­tent and use my own advice to grow my readership.

This, by the way, also ties in nicely to my new role here at Progress. Appar­ently, I’m on an org chart some­where, but my role is not yet announced, so I’m going to keep my mouth shut for the time being. I will say, I’m work­ing on a cou­ple of inter­est­ing projects, and am enjoy­ing the change.

My col­league Julianna Cam­marano has started blog­ging about Actional. Check out her first post. It’s about rodents (and she’s not talk­ing about the com­pe­ti­tion). Julianna’s respon­si­ble for Actional’s prod­uct mar­ket­ing, and I’ve learned a lot about how mar­ket­ing can con­tribute from her, so I’m look­ing for­ward to her future posts.