In The Experience Economy, Joseph Pine and James Gilmore argued that in an era when consumers were more sophisticated than ever before, it was no longer enough to meet their needs with commodities, goods, or services.  They argued that to compete in the modern era, you had to make their interaction with your business an experience, compelling enough to be memorable such that the memory itself becomes the product.  They relied heavily (and convincingly, in 1999 anyway) on examples from Disney, Starbucks, and Nordstrom to make their case. Read more »

There’s nothing like the warm, comfortable feeling of knowing that you’ve mastered your subject matter.  Whether you’re blogging about it or presenting to a room full of people, it sure feels great to have all the answers.  But after a time, doesn’t it seem like you’re starting to cover some of the same material over and over again?  I know it does to me.  Here’s my idea for fixing that: Every now and again I’m going to blog about stuff I know almost nothing about. Read more »

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 »

I’ve enjoyed writing this week about five dimensions for growing your blog starting with growing warmer, then deeper, and yesterday, stronger. Today I’m tackling how your blog can grow broader.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Here’s a link to the YouTube version of Get Your Content Into the Cloud.

Also check out my new Better Blogging Vimeo channel.

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.
• Laziness – success ALWAYS involves hard work.
• Stupidity – just don’t do anything stupid!

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.

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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?

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