As promised today I’m announcing the winner of the Iron Blogger Contest. It was an interesting mesh of entries and the decision-making process was hard. There were a couple of entries that I kept going back over because they were that good, but ultimately I can only choose one.
I chose the winner’s entry because this blogger went beyond merely, mentioning and talking about oysters, but actually used it to create an insightful analogy, which was the point. You know you’re a proficient writer when you can take almost any subject and create a teaching analogy that conveys deeper meaning and adds element of surprise to your writing. Being able to write in this fashion will enable you to keep your writing fresh and original and will help you stand out in the crowd among thousands of bloggers. Read more »
Yesterday I started talking about five ways your blog should be growing and opened with the idea that your blog should grow warmer. Today, I want to move on and talk about how your blog can also grow deeper.
I’m a Pastor, so I preach to a congregation several times per week. There are a couple of pivotal moments in my preaching career in which my whole approach to delivering sermons changed. One of those was when I read Andy Stanley’s book Communicating for a Change.
Stanley talks about a very simple principle – preach one point per sermon. Have three good points to make? Why not break them apart and preach three good messages in a series. Why is this such a good tip? Because people will remember the one point you’re trying to get across more than they will remember each of the smaller details.
If you are a content provider, you have to stop thinking about how to get people to arrive at your website and start asking how you can get your content integrated into the cloud in which people live their daily lives.
This is what I discuss in this video, but I’ll be breaking this idea down in future posts to talk about some of the specifics.
In this short video, I’ve shared some thoughts about the single greatest threat to your blog, or even your entire blogging career. A few notes are below…
The single greatest threat to your blogging career is YOU!
Four ways you can kill your own blog…
Greed – getting anxious to see the return can cause you to mess up early on.
Self-doubt – negative thinking can kill your blog.
Let me be blunt – five minutes spent on some blogs makes me feel… dirty! No, I’m not talking about blogs with questionable material, but rather blogs that are built on greed. It’s one of my pet peeves, and it’s one of the reasons blogging is getting a bad name – greedy bloggers marketing to other greedy people.
Your next blog post might make you hundreds or millions of dollars overnight. You’ll write an ebook, teach a course, offer a certification for others who want to write similar posts, and you’ll be “successful”… right?
Many steps take place prior to making your blog public. These steps range from selecting your blog niche to the actual name of your blog.
These steps can take time or be quick, all predetermined by your overall knowledge of blogging techniques and what to do to get your blog started. One thing I have learned though is that you might have a niche picked out for your blog, but it could possibly change when you start writing your posts.
I headed out of the house to pick my wife (then girlfriend) up for church one night and took a back county road to her house. About halfway there, I was struck suddenly in the side by a deer. He jumped a fence out of nowhere and his head crushed into my fender so hard my door wouldn’t open. The impact was such that the deer didn’t survive and my car required a couple thousand dollars in repairs. That dear made a lasting impact on me, and I’m telling the story over a decade later.
I said a few posts ago that you don’t just want blog traffic, you want collisions with a promise to revisit a few important words, one of which is the word impact. It’s one of the words you should have emblazoned in your mind as the goal, the target for which you aim every time you write a post.
I headed out of the house to pick my wife (then girlfriend) up for church one night and took a back county road to her house. About halfway there, I was struck suddenly in the side by a deer. He jumped a fence out of nowhere and his head crushed into my fender so hard my door wouldn’t open. The impact was such that the deer didn’t survive and my car required a couple thousand dollars in repairs. That dear made a lasting impact on me, and I’m telling the story over a decade later.
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