I don’t know about you but I love new. New stuff. New days. New weeks. New years. They make me smile.
The anticipation of new can be so motivating. Why else do we hold such store by making New Year’s resolutions and bucket lists?
But of course those resolutions soon fall by the way side and, as summer approaches, it can be all too easy to write off this year and look forward to the next. I hear that the summer is traditionally a really quiet time here online. Maybe this lack of new is the reason why?
Well I have some good news for you. This year is only half over. The glass is half full. July 1st is our latest ‘new’ to relish and take encouragement from.
Even if you’ve just stumbled over here and are as green as the lovely Welsh grass outside my window, getting your stuff together right now and deciding that today is the day you’re going to take action makes today your awesome.
You might like to write the first half of the year off as your time for learning and research. You maybe took the time to build a rather wonderful looking online home. Did you start connecting with people via Twitter or LinkedIn and as such, have built trust and recognition for your brand?
All of those things are valid and wonderful. They’re a great foundation for this second half of the year.
But unless you put yourself out there, show the little corner of your world exactly what it is you’re about and what you have to offer, all of that ground work will soon get grown over with weeds and you’ll waste a huge chunk of next year getting your daisies straight again.
Your 10 minute task, if you choose to accept it, is to make a list of all the little things that you could be doing that will make a difference to you and your business. We’re not looking for epic stuff right now. This is about the little things that you never seem to have time left for at the end of a busy day.
Maybe it’s the customer you promise yourself you’ll follow up with. Or it could be the emails that left unanswered because you’re a one person operation and you just haven’t got to it yet. Did you promise yourself you’d get more structured with how you hung out on twitter but you didn’t yet devise a plan? Or maybe you just need to ask for the sale?
Whatever it is that you keep putting off doing, add it to the list. And sure, I cheated, just a little, because this list might take a little longer than 10 minutes to put together. But once you have it you’re good to go.
Here’s how: Every day for the next 30 days (or until you genuinely can’t find another thing to add to your list!) choose one thing off your list and do it. First. Before anything else.
And then feel to come back here at the end of the 30 days and tell me I’m an idiot if your business hasn’t grown in some measurable way as a result.
The journey of a thousand miles might start with a single step* but it’s the one after that and the one after that and the one after that that gets you there.
What are you doing today to make the second half of 2011 brilliant?
*Lao-Tzu
Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
P.S. If you need some help cranking it up a notch, I’m delighted to tell you about a summer time business building extravaganza that I’m involved with. It’s totally free and you can enter for as many or as few of the 12 freebies as you’d like. To find out more please click here.
If you’re only just joining us, here’s what you missed so far:
Week 1: How to nail your blog’s pillar content in 4 weeks.
Week 2: Why headlines and outlines are key to your pillar content crown.
And you’re back (or carrying on because you read those posts already!) Fabulous!
As before, let’s assume that you did the steps suggested in the previous two posts and you come equipped with topics, headlines and outlines for the core of your pillar content. If you’re like most people and you skipped over the ‘do this and then do that’ part of the last two weeks, I seriously encourage you to go back and do them now.
The rest of this post will be painful without them.
So here’s where the fun really starts. Today is where you take your ideas, your cleverly crafted headlines and that all important outline, and start weaving your magic. It’s the fun part because you’ll end the process with lots of gorgeous words to show for all your effort, and that’s worth a smile right?
The good news is that with your headline and outline in place, writing the post is easy. You’ve done all the hard thinking work. You just need to sit down and get it done.
The bad news? You need to sit down and get it done!
Time for the much-cited but oft ignored advice …
Email, Twitter, Facebook, Skype … whatever your time drain of choice, if you want to get these pillar content posts done with the least time investment, it’s vital that you remove all distractions. This series was prepared and written using the advice given throughout with the exception of this one point.
While writing this I’m also in the process of cooking dinner, chatting via GTalk and checking the latest happenings on Twitter. The result? This paragraph took me three hours to write!
Sit there and write it already! Legendary copywriter Eugene Schwartz had a killer technique for getting it done. He sat in his seat and was not allowed to get out of it until his timer went off, signalling the end of the allotted 33.33 minutes. Now that might not be the way for everyone but you can not argue with the rationale behind sticking around and just doing it.
And the most annoying thing of all? It works! That this post is finished owes much to Schwartz’s method. 
When you’re writing the first draft of anything, it’s just that, a first draft. The most effective way to nail any content creation is to get the words out as quickly as possible. Forget about correcting spelling, don’t worry that your finger slipped on an extra key, grammar can go out the window. This is your first draft baby and as such, none of these things is in the slightest bit important.
You have your headline in place so you know where your headed. With your outline by your side you also have a map of the journey. First drafts are about filling in the details and if you stop to change sentence construction along the way, not only are you in serious danger of cramping your own style, the whole process will take twice as long (and result in a less stupendous piece of writing!)
Now before anyone has a fit, I’m not suggesting that you then hit publish. No way! This is a first draft. You get your words out there and then you go and do something else. Have a cup of tea, read a book, go for a walk, call your favourite aunt and have a natter.
And then later (and yes, I know, ‘later’ is a very stretchy word!) you return to your first draft and you read it through, twice. The first time you read it through, do so from your blog’s dashboard. At this stage you’re really just looking for the glaringly obvious mistakes, typos, spelling mistakes, things that don’t seem to make sense.
It is in the second reading where the magic really happens.
Save your blog post and then click ‘preview’ to read your post within the context of your site as a whole. But here’s the really magic bit … this time you’re going to read your post out loud. There is no single better way I know of spotting poorly constructed phrasing and fidgety grammar than this so I’m going to say it again …
It is a beautiful way to make sure you sound like you (and if you’re not already using your own distinctive voice in your writing, this is something we can discuss another time) and it is the most simple way to check that your post reads like the wonderful work of art it deserves to be.
Follow the stops above and you’ll have finished one of your core blog posts. But it’s not time for snoozing yet. You’re creating a series remember? Go and have a break, stretch your legs, get some fresh air … then come back and do it all again.
And again. And again.
My God given talent is my ability to stick with training longer than anybody else.” – Herschel Walker
You may not be training for a football game but the ability to keep at it, to consistently come back and write some more, to stick with it until you’re done, this alone will make the difference between you and the guy pulling at your shirt to overtake you.
But first, what techniques do you already use for sticking with a task and getting it done?
You’ve been around the block a few times. You know the drill.
You do your thing, write whatever shebang you had planned, hit publish, tweet, Facebook share. Then rinse and repeat. Easy. Do it enough times and eventually you’ll become the much promised stuff of small business legend.
Except when you don’t.
“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Albert Einstein
Having been lured onto the hamster wheel of blogging with the promise of more customers, happier clients, better social engagement … I’ll leave you to fill in the blanks, what do you on the days when it all feels a bit meh?
Because come on, be honest, we all have them. The meh days are one of the reasons why I quit regular blogging and started the magazine. What is it with this incessant need to churn out more content, more information, more noise?
What do you do on the days when you want to shout, “enough is enough, stop already!”
Regular readers will know that this was meant to be week three of the pillar content challenge. And it will be, just not today.
Today I have another one of my now infamous dares for you.
Close the lid on your laptop or switch off your machine (right after you’ve finished reading this of course!) Grab your keys and go outside.
If you’re feeling very brave (and come on, we know that everyone here at Tycoon Blogger is the stuff of steel so go for it!) I even dare you to leave your phone at home. The chances of you falling and bumping your head and needing to call for emergency first aid are very slim.
What you do when you get outside if your call and will depend somewhat on personal preference, the weather and where in the world you live.
However.
Here’s the key … go outside and do something that you love.
Let the grass grow under your feet a little. Do stuff that creates memories and then use that stuff to fuel your next blog post. Tell stories. Stop with the hamster wheel blogging and remember why you started doing this in the first place.
Seriously. What are you still doing here?
You were waiting for the conclusion? Too bad. You are the conclusion …
Go out and live a little, write about it and then come back and leave a comment telling us where to find your latest epic installment (remember to use your real name, not a keyword, anything else just looks like yucky old spam!) I promise to personally come over to your place and read all about it.
Go on, what are you waiting for? I dare you!
If you missed the start of the challenge, click here to go back to week one and follow the links forward from there.
But you’re still with us? Great! I’m working on the assumption that you did your homework over the last few days and you now have a stack of topics for your pillar content, lots of ideas all grouped with like-minded thoughts and pondering. Superb!
As promised last week, the focus this week will be on writing a superb collection of headlines for those ideas and then expanding your thoughts to create an outline for each of the posts you intend to write for your pillar content.
You’ll be forgiven for groaning internally. I know, I know, writing headlines and outlines isn’t very sexy but get them right and you’ll get a lot more bang for each word you put out.
Having organized your ideas into groups (including one group of miscellaneous ideas that don’t fit anywhere else) you should now have a much clearer idea of what is the most important topic for your site. Ultimately you may choose to create pillar content for more than one topic but for the purposes of this month (and to save yourself from feeling overwhelmed!) choose just one group of ideas to work on.
Got it? Great.
For each of the content ideas in your group you want to write an enticing headline to draw your readers in. Think actions. Think benefits.
And yes, if you think I’m cheating slightly by sending you elsewhere for practical how to headline advice, think of this as curation at its very best. You’ve heard the phrase about reinventing the wheel? The Copyblogger team do headlines to die for so who better to learn from than the masters?
Outline baby, outline. The quickest, most efficient and most reader-friendly pillar content is created from an outline. While you could just sit down at your keyboard and start hammering out your offering, why would you? Pillar content, by its very nature, is going to be the staple diet of many visitors to your site for many months and years to come.
Take time right now to plan how your series of posts around your most important topic will lead from one concept to the next. By planning the entire series before you ever write even a word of the very first post you can be sure that you have enough content to fill the promised series and, more importantly, you’ll be covering material in the most reader friendly way possible.
Even more importantly for you if you’re pushed for time, writing a post from an outline is much faster than just writing without any plan in place.
So, forget all you learned about outlines in high school (here in the UK I don’t ever remember being taught how to write an outline but I heard that in the States it’s a popular (and very dull!) part of the school curriculum.) This is outline writing for a practical purpose.
You don’t have to follow the rules of outline writing that you may have been taught as a youngster. You just need a headline together with a plan for your beginning, middle and end of each post.
Coming up in week three …
This is where the fun really starts! Writing your posts. strategies for getting it done and time management. Monday June 6th. Don’t want to miss it?
Note: This is part 1 of The Pillar Content Challenge. For part two, please click here or follow the links at the bottom of the post.
We all know we should have it. We read excellent advice on the merits of it. But when push comes to shove, there just never seems to be enough time to get it done.
It? Pillar content of course.
It’s the awesome sauce of your small business website, the stuff that tantalizes Google into sending people your way and helps new readers know what to dip into after they’ve devoured your latest post on the front page. It’s a series of posts that together make the core of who you are and what you stand for.
But.
It’s not going to write itself. And that’s what this challenge is about.
Every week for the next four weeks I’m going to be giving you the steps you need to plan, write and organzse your pillar content in a way that will be most helpful for your readers (and least painful for you!) Depending on how much time you have, you could even get the whole lot written by the end of the month but that really comes down to you. I can’t write the stuff for you but I can help you get there by shining a torch on the steps along the way.
This first week is the most important (and the one most people will be tempted to enter into half-hearted. But you’re not ‘most people’ so you have nothing to fear!) Get this week right and you’ll glide through the subsequent three with aplomb. Don’t misunderstand me, you’ll still have to put the work in, this isn’t Disneyland, but doing so will feel painless.
Grab yourself a big sheet of paper, a white board, new google doc or mind map … however you best get the stuff out of your brain? That’s what we’re aiming for here. Turn your internal edit pen off (very important!) and then start writing down everything that you can think of that has to do with your area of business. No idea is too small, too ridiculous, too left-field. Just get it all down. If you’re prone to self-editing, try and write as quickly as possible so you don’t give your brain time to catch up!
If your business were a deck of cards, this is where you’d start organizing all those cards, first by color and then by suit and number. You’re looking for common threads between all the little pieces your brain threw out. If your blog post categories are already super tight, these should be a massive help in organizing the ideas from step 1.
(But if your blog categories could use some work I’ve got you covered. In the final installment of this little challenge I’ll include a paragraph specifically about how to relate all this to the categories on your blog.)
Visual people might prefer to do this with lots of little pieces of paper. On each piece, write an idea from step 1 then you can literally organize your thoughts by moving them around until you’re happy that everything connected is together.
Any bits that don’t seem to fit anywhere can be laid aside for now. Don’t throw them away. Just collect them into a group we’ll mentally think of as ‘miscellaneous’.
As for the rest of your collection, congratulations! You have the skeleton of your pillar content. Take some time to look over them to be sure you’re happy but don’t tweak too much! Trust the process.
