The video above talks about my buddy Marty Boardman and how he is using his blog, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to build his real estate investment business. He has done this through writing great content, storytelling, and keeping a focus on his mission. Ultimately his passion shines through these social outlets.
About two years ago he had hit rock bottom with his real estate business, after generating millions in business. He and I are very close, he was best man in my wedding. So I taked with him about using a blog to start taking control of his message and use it as a focal point to educate the public about his business. Every two weeks on a conference call, we would chat about his successes. He started using his blog to write passionately about real estate investment, his business, and his goals. He started using Twitter to build relationships online and research other real estate investment news and opportunities. He started using Facebook to build a community of people with the same interests and used YouTube to show his properties and also as a video blog.
By writing and generating great content, writing passionately, connecting with others…he has leveraged these tools as a major business focus. Via these tools, he has built quality relationships that have led to over $250K in investment opportunities over the last year. He is a storyteller and he used his storytelling skills to engage his audience with passionate writing and focused content. Because of this content, the community found him and engaged with his passion.
This post is in response to a great post by Margie Clayman’s Post: “Does Passion Pay The Bills?” It was also feature as a response to her thoughtful post!
For over four years now, I have been preaching to my clients and my business relationships to write passionately. I have been writing in my blog about passionate writing for close to six months. I am a firm believer in passionate writing and telling rich stories. Do I think passionate writing in the context of a blog secures business…maybe yes and maybe no. There is no universal right or wrong answer. But I know this…my business is built around clients and relationships who have the same passion and fire for the advocacy we choose. I write with heart and passion and I encourage those I work with to do the same. I encourage them to dig deep and find the stories in their organization that brings passion to their readers and audiences.
Passionate writing and storytelling does a few things. First, it allows our audience to see the world through our lens. For that moment in time, they can see life through our senses. We want to help our audiences, our communities see our view as if they were sitting in a theater and their peripheral vision disappeared, fully engaged. This is true sensory engagement, allowing the audience to feel our vision.
From a business standpoint, passionate writing via a blog is a credibility piece. When we meet someone for the first time, they go out and “Google” us. They look at our digital resume. Our blog is a part of that digital resume. We want potential business relationships to make the right choice by wanting to work with us. This passionate writing allows those potential clients to see our viewpoints, understand our positions, relate to our business practices. As entrepreneurs, we want to work with people that are equally as passionate. So this allows potential business relationships have a barometer on our business practices. Writing passionately, with focus, allows potential relationships make an informed decision.
I do not think writing passionately is this new digital discovery that is going to break open the spectrum of blogging. Blogging is just another tool that allows readers to connect with our thoughts. Why not use it a way to reveal the true editorial side of our business. It is the place where we can communicate in our own voice…that is how blogging began. Writing about the topics that make us get up in the morning and enjoy life is what fuels our fire. And if people connect with us through our passion, then it is time well worth it…IMHO.
Passionate writing in the blog paradigm is a no-brainer.
I was working with a group the other day around topics for their blog and ways to tell passionate stories for the audiences. We were listing topic areas, stories, and putting a rough schedule together to build consistency in their writing. They were extremely focused on the schedule so much so that they were worried about breaking outside of that schedule of writing. I have a few points to make here that will yield to my thesis that writing passionately yields community writing.
I told them that this schedule was just merely a barometer, and when you find a compelling story to tell…sit and write. Share your story and share it often. I think about writing for my blog almost like the way I began dating my wife. When, I first met my wife in graduate school…I fell in love. I knew I was going to marry her. It just took me two years for her to agree. As we began dating, we would go out, talk on the phone, meet for coffee, and learn to get to know each other. I had the three day rule.
The three day rule meant that after we would go out, I would not bother her for three days. I did not want to encroach on her space. I valued her friendship and I wanted to get to know her. But, I did not want to push her away…I wanted her to want to enjoy our time together. I was passionate about our relationship. Overtime we grew closer and the three day rule slowly disappeared.
Writing passionately is sort of the same concept. I try to build a relationship with the people that read my blog. I may not be the best, but I try. I try not to write too much to overload the “Internet” space and the people that receive my blog via email and Google reader. My wife is my barometer with this rule. She has been writing for close to five years on her blog. She writes about the following topics: life after her mother (who died of breast cancer), fighting infertility, against cause marketing, and her family. She writes about these topics and she writes passionately. She writes when she is inspired. Sometimes she writes everyday, and sometimes she writes after a month off.
She has built a pretty good community of readers. She has attracted successful authors and other bloggers like herself to share in her mission. But here is the thing, she is now writing with them. What do I mean by that? She will write about a topic, people will comment, she will respond, she will read their blog posts and respond, then she will write another post sometimes based on how her community is writing or responding to her. She has built a conversation around her blog, a community of people that have common interests and passions. She gets regular emails from her readers.
How does she do this? Well, she has a focus for her blog and she shares with her community. She writes straight from the heart…when she feels led to write. There is no set schedule, there is no checklist…just a passion for her topics and for the people that respond in her community. She regularly is reading her friends blog and genuinely responding to their posts. She is building a community and this community’s writing is influencing each other in a way that they are writing for each other.
So here is my point. Writing for a blog has three elements: Focused Content, Passionate Writing, Engaging with Your Community. This is a barometer that I think will lead to a community of people that share your same interests.
Blogging is so hard to wrap our heads around. Finding our voice is even harder. We sit down to write and nothing comes out…nothing translates to from our head to our fingers. Who are we talking to…who are we trying to relate. Are we trying to write to inspire ourselves or writing to inspire others?
Sometimes it takes defining our motives…looking deep inside to define our voice and and defining those who we are writing with and for.
Do we write to meet a length quota or do we write without recognition of length, unknowingly fulling our space inside the walls of our blog…inspiring thoughts to inspire others. We write for ourselves but we write to be “read”. We want to articulate…we want to connect…we want to be heard.
So why do you write. Do we write to fulfill other people’s parameters or do you write with the same passion you find in life. Are we so wrapped up in the technology that we forget to write our thoughts that bring inspiring thoughts to our daily lives. Watch out, we might say something that inspires another person…and create a culture of change.
We must write…write what drives our soul. We must ignore the constraints, forget the technology, forget the competition, and write the inner most passion that makes us get up in the morning and conquer the world.
We are entrepreneurial writers at heart…we believe in our ethic…to write passionately.
You know what is so much fun…the greatest joy, it is helping others find the path to tell their story. This past week was a big for a friend.
Telling our own story is one the hardest things to achieve…especially when it comes to exposing our thoughts online. Blogging for a top executive at a major organization has major implications. There is the tremendous opportunity to “own” your message. The hardest part is finding a voice…that leadership voice, online.
The online leadership voice is far beyond the sound bites and quotes for the media…it is the whole contextual quote. It is a chance to not only communicate with an external audience, but also engage an internal audience (employees)…one the largest employers in the region.
When we first started down the path, choosing which “hat to wear” when writing was tough. When we write, we are not only a family person but also a leader in the business world.
Last week…the voice was unleashed and writing began to happen naturally. Email after email were coming into my inbox, “check this post”…”how does the video fit”…”should we include the powerpoint”…questions. Each email led to me logging in and looking at the progress. The writing was wonderful. It was focused, passionate, and brought true leadership to the table.
It is fun to sit and watch executives step out, take the leap, and write for the whole world to see. Leadership is an awesome opportunity.
For many young bloggers and writers, the discovery phase of writing online is so new and confusing. There is a huge perception that what we write is going to be viewed as the gospel, and those comments can negatively impact our message. It is my humble opinion in that discovery phase of writing and blogging, that content is king.
It is important to create a focus for the content; learning how to communicate the message clearly. As bloggers/writers begin to find their niche, writing with a community takes it’s focus. It is this discovery phase that allows our internal engines to see what responses we receive and allow community driven content to naturally take shape. Obviously the joy is that we are using analytics to see where we engage certain audiences.
Here is what concerns me, so many times we read there is a heuristic or model to become a successful blogger/writer. Evverywhere we look, there is the “five steps” for this or that. To me, blogging is like an entrepreneurial experience.
I have two friends that have very good definitions of entrepreneurship:
“Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. The act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.” – John Warner quoting Peter F. Drucker
“Entrepreneurship is an activity that involves the discovery, evaluation, and exploitation of opportunities to introduce new goods and services, ways of organizing markets, processes, and raw materials through organizing efforts that previously had not existed.” Sean Williams, Ph.D
If you read these two viewpoints, this to me parallels the blogging world. Bloggers specifically can become innovators with a capacity to create wealth. Bloggers find a need in the market place and focus their writing. This discovery engages that market place.
But…with writing and entrepreneurship, there is not always a clear path to the end and so we have to leverage our communities, and focus on our content. We also have to be passionate about our “product” and write about that passion. Even if the community is going in one direction, we have to be willing to explore new avenues to write about passionately…which engages thought leadership.
I think that there is more than a one stop model for each person in the writing process. Yes, if we a blogging for business…we need focus. But I do think we have look beyond reach, action items, and engagement; and allow ourselves to write in way that allows more of that discovery phase to shine. Writing and blogging can be a place to explore new ideas, new strategies, and empower people to find the voice they never knew they had.
What inspired you to start blogging? What was it? What made you that one day, sit down and set-up your first blog. Can you remember. I sure can!
It was my wife…and maybe I am a little bit biased. But what inspired me about her that made me start a blog. For starters, I had nothing to say. Really, nothing at all. She…on the other hand. It is September 2006 and Sarah had just accepted a new job here in the area. We were living in Charlotte both with good jobs. We were starting to find ourselves professionally when her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. So, we felt this pull to get closer to home. She was the first to find a job and was hired as a strategic buyer at a large manufacturing group. Life was getting ready to flip upside down.
We had been living the high life for the first three years of marriage, fresh out of graduate school. We wanted to move back home, closer to family and pay off debt. So we sold our house, sold our expensive cars, moved into a crappy apartment, and used those good jobs to pay off debt. At the same time, Sarah’s mom was fighting breast cancer. That new job she started, well she hated it…but it was a good paying job. So, she started a journal. It was in a Word Document that started as a stream of consciousness. After a while, the document got so long, she moved it to a blog on Blogger.com. In 2006, she started blogging…journaling about life. Life with her mother fighting breast cancer, paying off debt, working a shitty job, living in a town that did not feel like home.
Over the next year, her mother got sicker and she wrote more. In the Fall of 2007, her mother lost her battle to Triple Negative Metastatic Breast Cancer…her blog was her coping mechanism. Her writing was raw and honest. This whole time we had been trying to get pregnant with little success. A year after her mother died, we got pregnant and life was great. Then we had our first miscarriage. After three miscarriages, she wrote plenty. She wrote about research, her experiences, doctors she found, and the list goes on. Sarah’s blog is our families journal.
We have family dinners and someone asks what happened last year and we know we can go to her blog to find the answer. Her focus of her blog has been her life struggles and life’s passions. She writes about her family, her mother, infertility, and cause marketing. She is not a big fan of those who benefit financially by exploiting those fighting breast cancer. She writes with passion.
A year after her mother passed away, she quit her job. She was tired of working for something she did not believe in…now works for a daycare taking care of two year olds. She loves it. The people in the daycare have no idea she has a Masters Degree, graduate top of her class in both undergraduate and graduate school, was homecoming queen in undergrad, and was her high-school’s valedictorian. She is one smart cookie and one hell of a writer.
She has yet to spend any money on her blog using the free platform of WordPress. She does all the design work. She does not use social media and other outlets to promote her blog. She does not have it professionally optimized with targeted SEO. She does not Tweet or Facebook her blog posts. She writes passionately…and people read! She has a few notable children’s book authors reading her blog on a regular basis. How does she know, well she password protects some of her posts. She does this because she knows family members read her blog, and she writes like it is her journal. So she only let’s certain people read password protected blog posts. Those author’s make a request for the password. Trust me, she gets lots of requests for the password.
Her blog is semi-private…meaning she does not use her last name on her blog yet has our picture posted. Some knows that it is her, but some have no idea who “Sarah” is right here in Anderson, SC.
She has a tremendous community. She calls them her “Bloggy Friends” and they all read each others’ blogs like clockwork. Each of them have come together because of a circumstance in their lives. One may write about breast cancer, one may write about her infertility story, or some just find each other because they are just funny. Regardless, they have found each other and they share with each other on their blogs. They write with each other…and they check on each other. If one has not posted in a while, they drop an email to check on each other. Sarah’s blog is her community and she always feels the need to write not only for her creative enterprise but to keep her “Bloggy Friends” in the loop.
Sarah’s blogging is an extension of her life, she is writing her story as she lives it. She writes straight from the heart. She writes with passion. Her blog has caused many family disputes, where she will write about a situation and someone will read her interpretation of the situation. They sometimes are not happy, but what they do not realize…her writing is her coping mechanism. She has thought about taking it down or going totally anonymous, but I have told her I support her writing 100%. The only thing I ask is that she not write about our personal marriage topics and also refrain from discussing the private part of my business.
Sarah is also a reader. She likes to read others’ blogs because she is genuinely interested. She treats this like and in-person conversation. She reads to learn and this reading turns into reciprocation. She is passionate about the blogs she reads and believes in her community.
Sarah is my inspiration. Her writing has inspired others. People read her blog when dealing with breast cancer, infertility, paying off debt, or just to read. She has had more people thank her for her writing…helping them deal/cope with a particular life situation. She is not writing for a mass market…she is writing to write. Her focus is her life and her passion is her family.
There is not perfect formula for blogging. You can read all the “experts” about blogging, SEO, neccessary technology…BLAH, BLAH, BLAH! But I do know this…you do not need a beautiful layout design, you do not need the best SEO expert, you do not need to pay for a blog! What you need is to write passionately. You have something in your heart that you are most passionate about…write about it. Sarah writes on a consistent basis, uses pictures, and puts her whole heart into each and every post.
Each time I start working with a client, I do not even allow them to set-up a blog until a few things have happened. First, they have a focus for their writing. I ask them to write a mission statement for the blog. Second, I ask them to write ten posts on a Word document based on this mission statement. Then I ask them, who do you think will read your blog…who are you writing for in every post. Blogging is not about the platform, the SEO, the distribution…it is about the writing, and the technology is just the platform to present your writing. Write passionately! BTW…I used Sarah as an example with each corporate client I work with. The example I explain…write passionately.
Here are some of the blogs I have helped start:
South Carolina Hospital Association’s President & CEO Thornton Kirby’s Blog: http://scha.org/thornton-blog/
Blogging…what an interesting topic to write about. There are so many people out there who have better things to say about this platform…but I cannot hold back anymore. I am hearing and reading so many people struggling with this idea. I have so many clients who want to blog, or have tackled the idea…and they are struggling. So what is blogging? Well, if I could define it in one post…then something is wrong. Blogging is a personal experience. Blogging is about community. Blogging is about writing with passion. Blogging is about letting the technology give us a platform to articulate our thoughts for public consumption, then connecting with those who share in that passion. Yes…passion.
Over four years ago, my wife started a blog as a journal. She kept it semi-private without sharing her full name and her location. It was her journal. It was her place to write about her mother fighting breast cancer and loosing that battle. Her writing was candid and raw. Her blog was also about infertility. You see, we have experienced three miscarriages. This was her tool to write and greave. She has pissed people off by writing candidly about family and personal experiences during this time of grief. She has thought about moving the blog and going completely anonymous. But, she has stuck to her guns, wrote with passion, and built a community of people who share the same thoughts. We could not have paid for a better therapist than WordPress.
She writes with passion and she writes with focus. She shares her inner most thoughts, experiences, and ideas. She did not spend money designing some beautiful blog. She did not spend time paying someone optimizing for the SEO. She writes with passion. She also reads with passion. She seeks out other bloggers to learn about them. When she sees someone new commenting, she goes to their blog to learn more about them. She uses her blog as her social space to build friendships all over the country…and she knows more about them than some of our friends right around the corner. She does all of this for free on WordPress.
We marketers spend so much time thinking about the number of clicks, whether this logo should be bigger or smaller, the right web URL, commenting system, etc. What we forget…write with passion. Find a focus for your blog and write with passion. Then, go out and find similar people and read what they are writing. Use commenting as an opportunity to take a genuine interest in people. If we are business bloggers, find that business focus and write with passion. Show something personal about you so people have something to connect.
Sarah also does something very interesting. She password protects certain posts, only allowing certain people to read certain posts. Talk about generating interest…she has more people asking for the password than I have hits in a day for my business blog.
We think way to much. We also think if we just set-up a blog on WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, Posterous, etc…that people will just come and money will start flowing. UHH…HELL NO. Blogging is about writing…articulating thoughts, your thoughts. Blogging is that editorial place to share opinions, facts, information….through our eyes. What is your passion…write about it! Write about it consistently! Then, go out and find others that interest you…read their blog. Comment with passion and be authentic. Do not worry about technology, let the technology be the provide the platform to allow your writing flow freely.
Blogging is just a place to really express thoughts, ideas, passions…it is editorial and can be a place of free flowing ideas and thought streams. But monetizing a blog is very entrepreneurial. During a Sunday night #BlogChat on Twitter, Mack Collier’s (@MackCollier) weekly discussion group around blogging on Twitter, Daren Rowse (@problogger) moderated the topic focused on monetizing your blog. As I was sitting back and watching the discussion, I posed the question to Daren…”At what point did you begin monetizing your blog, what was your tipping point?” Daren posed this response:
At first I took as a simple smart ass response to avoid a longer discussion amidst this fast past, Sunday night chat. Pfft. But, I sat back and thought for a few minutes. I realized his quick response had merit…spoken from a true entrepreneur. Now, he knew there was a big need out there for great content, but he knew that he needed to pay for his passion instead of letting the expense of the blog not provide a return.
Monetizing a blog is VERY entrepreneurial and *can* have a very small return on investment, maybe??? But let’s think about that for a second, how do you measure return? What is the basic business question…what need is out there that we/you can provide a solution and bring it to market and bear a “profit”? What do you deem as a profit? Monetary profit, web traffic, PR, exposure to services, expressions of thought/ideas???
Think about this for a second: Did You Know…
According to WordPress, “There are over 27 million WordPress publishers as of September 2010: 13.9 million blogs hosted on WordPress.com plus 13.8 million active installations of the WordPress.org software.”
According to The Future Buzz in January 2009, ” The number of blogs indexed by Technorati since 2002 are 133,000,000 and the number of people who globally read blogs are 346,000,000.”
According to Technorati on November 3, 2010, “After Hobbyists, Self-Employeds make up the largest cohort, representing 21% of bloggers. Such bloggers say they ‘blog full time or occasionally for their own company or organization.’ 57% say they own a company and have a blog related to their business, while 19% report that their blog is their company. 65% say they manage their blog by themselves. Reflecting their professional nature, Self-Employeds are the most likely to blog about business, with 62% saying they have much greater visibility in their industry because of their blog.”
Point being…there are a lot of people blogging and a lot of people reading. Lots of competition, you better have a tremendous business plan behind your blog if you intend to “monetize” those very words you so carefully craft. Yep…monetize your thoughts, your passion, your eloquence. You think you can just sit down and write and expect they will come…sounds like the pipe-dream of a business that cannot make it past year two with an SBA loan. The ole “Field of Dreams,” if you build it…they will come!
In the movie…it nearly bankrupt the family. They were not waiting for the players to come out of the corn fields, they were waiting for those people with $20.00 bills to see those ghostly players take the diamond, to enjoy America’s past time. Risk…lots of risk.
But what do we really risk by putting a blog out there. I mean, you probably are only spending a monthly hosting fee, design time, maybe paying someone to build it for you? Maybe the most hard costs incurred is at most $600 in a year. Then you are talking about that creative time, that creative tension…that passion that you so eloquently craft with each word in the hopes you will connect with your audience. But at some point, after the confidence has been built and your realize your investment…it is time to make some cash! Yes, you are an entrepreneur…take that little bit of hard costs and lots of that sweat equity and turn into a monthly little bonus. And, if you can work hard…you begin focusing your writing (according to audiences), take part in some adwords and other paid ad campaigns, and you really generate traffic, clicks, and cash. But did you set out to make cash or did you set out to be heard? Or did you set-out to generate interest for your business as a small business owner?
In 2006, my wife set-out to write a journal. Overtime it turned into a full scale blog that tackled topics like breast cancer and infertility. Slowly over time, she gained an audience and built some online relationships. It became her support group…her place to release her thoughts and connect with like minded individuals. She shared her joys, pains, laughs, and cries as she wrote openly and honestly about loosing her best friend, her mother to breast cancer. She revealed to all her struggles with infertility. She had not built a community…she found her voice. But wait…she was not looking to generate any money. She did not set-up those pay for click campaigns…but how is she monetizing her blog? Her value came from the community…her place to share open discourse. Is she any less of an entrepreneur? No…she is more of a social entrepreneur.
I think it is up to us to find what we want to monetize in a blog. With so many audiences and so many spaces to fill with the free flowing words that come from our hearts…we must have a focus in our writing. We put ourselves out there, and for the first time in this world of publishing, we have a platform to feel somewhat equal to those journalists and accomplish authors who make money from their published/broadcasted voices. It is still about community and we as entrepreneurs still have to find a need, a reason to write…because ultimately we want someone to read. Thanks Daren for making me think a bit! Monetize this!
I have been really enjoying the conversations lately on #blogchat, hosted by Mack Collier (@mackcollier) on Twitter. The weekly Sunday night chat is wrapped around blogging, and this past week was specifically geared towards monetizing your blog. Why do we blog? Seriously.
Businesses and organizations use blogs for many reasons, but I think it is specifically to position themselves as thought leaders in a specific discipline or arena. It is a great way to have an immediate position on a topic or ideal and generate traffic when audiences are looking to consume information. The ulitmate goal, drive traffic to your “mothership” in the hopes to gain some monetary goal or position a viewpoint to raise some awareness.
My wife has been blogging for over two years. She has no reason what-so-ever to gain any type of moentary position from her posts. She used it as an outlet when dealing with the loss of her mother and our two children. It has become her outlet to articulate thoughts, connect with others, and theraputically sooth the soul.
So why do we blog? I honestly think…we as humans just want to be heard and we want to connect with like minded individuals. Whether it be gaining business from our thoughts or connecting with loved ones, we use it as an outlet to organize thoughts.
So why do we as business owners blog? This is why I am writing this post. It is more than just the SEO perspective. It is more than gaining business from blog posts…even though we will not admit it. Blogs are a place to articulate our thoughts and help us keep focused in our business. This iterative process requires time and thought to critically think, “why are we dedicating time to an outlet in the hopes to generate cash?”
Blogging takes focus! It requires us as business leaders to write a mission statement for the blog. The blog is our sounding board for business, our credibility platform to justify to the world we know what the hell we are talking about. It requires us to define a goal for each post and justify whether it warrants a post, then focus it to specific key words that closely align with our business objectives.
Blogging is our creative outlet to work through creative ideas. Through this online discourse, we find ourselves creating an argument for a great project, a great proposal, a great business plan, or even just get some responses on an idea.
Some of the smartest marketing gurus and most successful business people have successfully found a focused voice in their blog. They have a community of followers, a one stop focus group (or usability testing facility) for ideas and thoughts. They have used their blog as a platform to successfully write their business plan. We should learn from them…because it has probably taken them lots of time and diligence to refine their blog, their online business plan.
Big-box business have a hard time wrapping their heads around how to “monetize” a blog because the voice is way to big. They are having to go micro and use individuals within the organization to focus the objectives. But…they use other marketing platforms to generate their own equitable “SEO”.
Our thoughts are our voice, if focused they will engage those with like minds. When you hear the heavy blogging gurus talk about focus…it is more that just focusing the blog, it is focusing the business of writing the blog.
The video above talks about my buddy Marty Boardman and how he is using his blog, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to build his real estate investment business. He has done this through writing great content, storytelling, and keeping a focus on his mission. Ultimately his passion shines through these social outlets.
