Blog Archive - All Articles

This is my blog. I write about copywriting, content marketing, SEO, and basically anything else that catches my fancy.

No More Drafts

June 1, 2011 by Ian 4 Comments

I deleted fifteen drafts from my blog this morning. Some of them, I’ve been keeping around for nearly six months. Clearly, I would never write them.

It’s liberating, every now and then, to ditch the expectational debt of having too many unfinished drafts and move on. I don’t think we give ourselves enough chances to do that.

Drafts have their place, certainly. Setting things in motion, marking down ideas – these are good practices. However, living perpetually from drafts seems to make reacting to live events hard. How can we talk about news, if our post for today is already in the queue, and we’re unwilling to shuffle the queue back because we have a schedule?

In doing the editorial and SEO work for Hard Refresh, I’m now finding that working a draft from start to finish effectively takes practice. Nic and I are getting a decent queue of articles there, but we do still have some drafts – they’re not bad things by nature, but they do suck up a lot of cycles unintentionally. Being able to call something finished shortly after starting it is important; letting your brain stew on a half-formed idea while at the same time trying to keep the original idea’s form is not.

When considering your editorial calendar, drafts can save your life. Or, they can make you completely bonkers because your half-finished ideas starve the rest of your creative process.

Some practices I’ve found to help when dealing with drafts:

Keep a list of topic ideas separate from your in-blog drafts.
Only create drafts when you have well-formed ideas, but don’t have time to write.
Write the finished article within a set period of time, or delete the draft itself.
Be willing to push the schedule of drafted posts for reactive blogging.
Mark posts in a series where appropriate, especially if you can title them as such.

Doing this for my project blogs has helped keep me significantly less stressed over publishing. While it’s led to less writing here, it’s certainly led to better writing there – and better writing is what the job’s all about.

How do you keep your sanity without completely ignoring the idea of a draft?

Consistency is King

March 18, 2011 by Ian 12 Comments

It’s easy to write one awesome post on your blog.

It’s easy to spend five hours doing research, creating relevance where none existed before. It’s easy, relatively, getting an interview done with your hero.

It’s easy to write ten awesome posts on your blog.

What you can do once, you can do again, right?

What’s hard is writing ten awesome blog posts, in a row, on a schedule, and following that with ten more posts, on the same schedule.

That’s hard.

When you know how to create content, creating content becomes the easy part.

Whenever people say content is king, I feel the inexplicable urge to giggle like a school kid. Content, as king, is dead. Long live the new king, consistency.

Being on time, every time, takes a lot of practice and hard work. It means building habits you may feel challenged for building, and doing work that might not otherwise be up to your standards all in the name of hitting the almighty Publish button every time you say you’re going to. It means asking for help when you need it, and not treating failure quite the same way as you used to.

But, in the end, if you can become consistent, you’ve won.

Because, if for every ten blog posts you publish you only have one gem, publishing eleven posts is a great way to improve your changes of finding that gem.

Remember: Repetition is the motor of learning.

Repetition is the motor of learning.

Repetition is what?

What Should I Write Next?

March 16, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

I’ve been doing a bad job lately, with this whole blog thing.

I’ve missed responding to a few comments. I’ve been inconsistent in my writing. I feel awful. How can I make it up to you? What can I do to bridge the gap and do something worth coming back for?

If you subscribe to my feed or follow me on twitter – thanks. If not, how can I convince you it’s worth your time and attention?

How about I write something just for you. Yes, you. Well, as long as you ask.

See, I have a bunch of dead drafts I’ve been pushing forward relentlessly in my Editorial Calendar plugin for the past two months, avoiding writing because I’m just not convinced this is the right place for them.

I’ve also got a few dozen ideas for posts elsewhere that I’m not ready to do the research for.

So let’s switch it up!

Get in touch with me – either leave a comment here, toss me a message on twitter, or send an email to blog@ianmrountree.com with your suggestion. Tell me whether you want some props for the idea when the post goes out.

What should I write about?

Cinnamon Toast and Success/Fail Ratios

March 5, 2011 by Ian 2 Comments

Have you ever made cinnamon toast? No? Wow. Let me tell you – it’s not the most fun thing in the world to get wrong the first time.

See, most people start off the fearless way. They think “aw, yeah, cinnamon on hot bread!” and stop there. Some butter, some spice later, they’re left with a bitter, mouth-belabouring mess that is a general discouragement against further experimentation.

I’m betting the failure rate is about 95% for first-time toast-masterers.

Success rate for people who get beyond the first fail and try again? Probably 70%. This isn’t based on a fancy manufacturing management process or anything – it’s human logic. Got bitter toast, but want not-bitter toast? Simple answer; add sugar.

Sugar? Really? Yes. However much cinnamon you think you need, add the same amount in sugar – makes for much better toast. I think I was on my seventh or eighth set of toast before I got the ratio right – and it turned out to be really simple. But that’s just me.

Your success/fail ratio is different than your neighbour’s is.

What’s more interesting, your success/fail ratio isn’t the same as it was last time you tried. Success gets easier as you practice. The more often you do something, with more attention to the details that led to previous lack of success, the easier it is to move the process toward success.

One of the things my many cinnamon toast experiments have taught me about success/fail ratios, is that there’s an expectation of “mediocrity” that eventually follows accepting success.

Once you know you’ve done something “well enough” – how hard can it be to find a better way unless you need it? Things like lacing your shoes, tying a tie, or preparing some toast. Success, in these cases, is often measured by way of “acceptable/not acceptable” rather than “optimum performance.” We even treat our health this way, believing that the absence of symptom equates to wellbeing.

Let’s jump tracks. Are you treating your online work the same way?

Are you writing the best possible blog posts? Are your tweets the best use of 140 characters? Do you have every subscriber you’ll ever need or want? Are you leveraging every opportunity to get better in an intelligent way?

Is your business “big enough” or just “big enough for today?” Are you being paid enough to say you never want a raise for the rest of your life? Is your house perfect? Your kids learning everything they need to at the pace that will set them up for a perfect life?

Or are you good enough for today, but not good enough for tomorrow?

Let yourself get better. Yes, it’ll take practice. Yes, you’re going to end up with some bitter toast. But if you’re always optimizing, always ahead of the details and minding the ratios, you’ll be better every single next-time.

Go ahead. Make some toast.

Your Klout Score Means Nothing

February 19, 2011 by Ian 8 Comments

It’s not that it doesn’t mean anything – it’s that it actively means “nothing”.

For something to have meaning, you’ve got to be able to use it. Meaning, strictly speaking, applies to what’s done with a thing, or a piece of knowledge. Anything with ‘meaning’ must directly apply to something else. So; a score, made by an algorithm, has no strict meaning until applied. This is as true of Klout as it is of your Twitter follow count, the number of Friends you have on Facebook, or the number of recommendations you get on LinkedIn. Meaning requires application.

Sure, according to my Klout profile, I’m a 58. That’s nothing to sneeze at… Or is it? Could it be that, even in this semi-limited, pseudo-meaningless platform, there are some indicators of how a person behaves, how they prefer to communicate, and how you can learn how they do their work so you can better yours?

Now, this week’s #usblogs topic is supposed to be about online and offline klout, but I want to focus on a few meaningful uses for the Klout score and it’s associated meta-data first, before we talk at all about offline klout (which is far less well documented, and thus harder to quantify). Offline clout may come later, or may not. Partly because real-space communities have far different parameters to online ones.

When I look at a Klout score, I see an aggregate that equates to the curtain behind which hid the Wizard of Oz.

When I look at a Klout profile, like my own for example, I see:

Klout displays a graph of activity to go along with the Score metrics it displays.

This is the base range of information that comes beside a Klout score. Most people pay attention to the three numbers beside the Score itself – I almost never do. Under these, the badges, are much more informative regarding a person’s real activity. Number of list memberships, unique retweet count, total retweets, total comments – these show not only the wattage of a person’s activity online, they show the depth and consistency of that activity over time.

Yes, these numbers contribute to the aggregate of the Klout score, but the mix of badges you see matches strongly the kind of person you’re looking at. For example, this graph shows an even level of “Total Retweets” and “Unique Retweeters” – this tells me that the individual messages I’m sending are getting some traction among a broad range of people, but that traction has little depth.

Based on this graph, and the information relationships within it, I can adjust my actions in the future, if I want to (for example) learn how to create messages that gain depth as well as width of interaction. In this way, my score means nothing, but my profile is a learning tool.

In addition to the activity graph, Klout displays an Influence chart.

Take a look at the people on this chart. Do they match who you’d expect to be influencing me? Better still, do they match who you’d expect me to have influenced? I mean – yes, Mark, Chris, Amber and Matt have an effect on me. They legitimately influence me. But David McGraw? Really? An outlier, clearly.

Klout believes I’ve influenced my web host, MediaTemple. That interests me. In part because it’s an outlier, like David is. In part, because it’s amusing.

It also tells me where on the social chart I fit against my peers. The little orange dot on the graph is me. I’m a socializer. If I got a little more broad in my topics, I’d be a thought leader. I take issue to the idea that thought leadership is measurable on a chart, but these are the terms they’ve chosen to represent people – and by and large, they’re accurate.

The Influence chart can be used to give you a sense of what kinds of relationships the person whose profile you’re reading has. Do they interact with highly professional people, or highly social ones? Is there a broad mix of specialties represented, or a wide mix of opinion? Is there a tendency to focus solely on their own area of expertise, and disregard anything else coming into the mix?

At the end of the day, what you do with any of this data is what gives it meaning. A 60 Klout twitterati is not automatically more influencial than a 45 Klout socializer – unless pure wattage is all you care about. And, honestly, if all you care about is a bigger megaphone, you’ve lost the social media game already.

Keeping focus on what’s important is a good idea when conducting research and analysis, whether you’re doing so before, in the midst of, or after any marketing or business activity. Focusing on the wrong data, like a Klout score alone, can lead to terminal myopia.

No matter the numbers you’re looking at, making sure the numbers match the need is important. Do yourself a favour and look beyond that big orange number at the top of the screen.