tactics Archives | Ian M Rountree

When you’re learning a trade – especially one of the many trades that can be classified as “knowledge work” – there are a lot of expectations to manage before proficiency can even be recognized, much less measured.

Expect long hours. Expect trouble. Expect to drop balls. Expect results. Expect, eventually, the satisfaction that comes with knowing you’ve advanced our craft.

Do not, however, expect to be at the top of your game from day one.

You’ll be disappointed if you do. And, you’ll be disappointed if you are, in fact, the best you can be from the beginning. Early peaks don’t lend themselves to progress, or ongoing passion for your work.

I prefer to think of strategic growth – particularly for knowledge workers – in terms of three stages:

Begin as a Tactician

Even if you’re traditionally schooled, there’s always a gap between theory (school) and practice (work). Spending an appreciable amount of time doing the work of your stated trade, especially carrying out process and tactics developed by Strategists, and working with Analysts to measure your work, provides the absolute best basis for any measure of later expertise.

Excel as an Analyst

Once you’ve defined your work and abilities through protracted practice and repetition, trends will energe naturally. Spotting these trends, and their effects – and especially being able to determine the outcomes and the impact your work has had on a situation or ecosystem – is an important part of marshalling your efforts and determining how to get the best results for your next work.

Lead as a Strategist

Once your knowledge is backed by hands-on experience, and you’ve done enough to know the likely effects of a given pattern of actions, something wonderful happens; you can begin to build action plans for others, and reliably get results. You’ll know enough not to worry if the results you get aren’t the results you want – by the time you’re a Strategist, you’ll know how to roll with the unexpected too.

Learning, and earning, a respect for momentum, and building the skills required to promote sustainable growth are part of any professional development plan, intentional or not.

Where are you on the scale from Tactician to Strategist? And how are you certain?

As much as we bloggers love to focus on it, SEO is really a small consideration for us – or should be.

The heck, you say! Getting found is the paragon of publishing success!

Yes. It is. But let me explain.

Search Engine Optimization, as a process, is fairly straightforward. It’s about giving a robot, like Google, a very precise, very clear view of what your content is, how it relates to the rest of the web, and why you deserve more points for quality and relevance on certain subjects than other websites do. It’s an almost religious-scale obsession for some web workers, because we know so little about how the robot works, and what really has an effect on the rankings.

Bloggers have it fairly easy. Where some sites struggle for rankings on their own business names, we have an opportunity to work both towards our readers’ benefits, and align our sites with the robots’ required signs of quality. How? Because we know the following;

The robot loves content. New, fresh, refreshed sites draw the robot back for more. If we’d just write our darn blogs, we can already have a head start over other classes of website.

The robot loves consistency. If we make sure our content is on purpose, rather than shooting off on tangents, we’re sending signs that we’re worth authority.

The robot LOVES consistency! Schedule, will you? Keeping on top of our internal calendars gives us yet another advantage.

People love taking action, and the robot loves seeing action taken. Bookmarking, revisiting – any actions the robot can tell are available to the visitors of a site send signals that interactivity is available. It’s good for the people, thus good for the robot.

People like to share – and when sharing happens (in certain ways) the robot takes notice. Having your pieces passed on, or passing on the work of others, sends yet more signals that your site is worth paying attention to – not just to the robot, but to the people who are looking for something to pay attention to!

We all love to talk, especially to each other. Content is relevance. Updated content is increased relevance. Discussion on, around, or about your site is a huge indicator that you may be engaging with people, and the robot loves signs of interactivity. So do people, by the way. don’t we?

Back up and thing about that for a second. Content is relevance.

Bloggers have unique opportunities. Where business, individuals, and all manner of website creators have to think about information architecture, content strategy, and minutiae of all kinds, for the blogger, the content IS the strategy. We can say whatever we like, sure, but building a set of guidelines for ourselves, encouraging people to get on board with what we’re saying, and over all making our blogs useful, puts us far ahead of the game.

How can you put this into action for yourself?

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Or, read the entire SEO for Bloggers series from the start to see where we’re coming from.

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