10 Lessons in Blogging Learned the Hard Way

steamboatwillie Tomorrow marks the 1 year anniversary of the Wordful.com blog, and I’d like to share some meaningful lessons on what it means to blog. Since there was no way I could have known any of this when I started, consider it hard-earned wisdom. This is valuable stuff! Without further ado:
  1. Blogging is not directly about making money. It’s about intellectual real estate and personal branding. If you want to make money online, you need to first  [Read more...]

Where Content Marketing Meets Branding

museum After years of gawking over web design, flash animation, scripting languages and relational databases, I think we can now safely agree the internet is made of and for content (it’s King alright). It’s the impetus for nearly all innovation on the web. But if you’re a content specialist like me, the career path feels a lot like the Wild West: opportunistic (make thousands a day from home with Google!), risky (do I blow my next paycheck on the latest and greatest blogging course?) and discouraging (out of work writers/journalists/editors). Thankfully a few qualified content specialist genres exist. Let’s briefly examine them: [Read more...]

How to Walk the Walk of Content Marketing

ducks

Be a publisher first, marketer second.

When your content is stellar, your marketing become easier. Certainly not the other way around. Keep a healthy, obsessive focus on this.

Actually do something.

Stop talking. Go out and build a site around some great, marketable content. Publish it. Get people passionate about it. Sell them something cool. Measure it. Do it again.

Be experimental.

There are a few emerging theories on content strategy and marketing, but it’s your job to go out and test them as well as try out some of your own stuff. Content marketing is a slowly blossoming industry and now is the time to take some chances.

Limit your consulting.

This may sound strange to some, but I see more value in setting up your content marketing business as a B2C rather than B2B. This means building content-rich sites for consumers rather than helping other businesses set up their own websites. There’s higher risk but much higher reward.

Think Big, Act Big

If you can build one successful site, you can probably build another. And another. And another. And so on. Pretty soon you could be sitting on a small publishing empire. Imagine the possibilities.
Photo by wili_hybrid.

Blogging Needs a Sharper Image

hawkWhen you hear the term “blogging” or “blogger,” does it resonate as credible publishing? Or amateur hobby? I sense that most people still regard blogging as personal hobby or marketing enhancement, or both (which is okay), but not the lucrative game-changer of the publishing industry. This is about to change, and here’s why:

The Future of Blogging

Blogging has its roots in personal publishing and more recently—paid personal publishing. We need to brace ourselves for what’s next. Modern blogging won’t be the same from what it is today, but the fundamentals will remain: niche sites with excellent content and aggressive self-branding. The first thing this shift will eliminate is [Read more...]

The Modern Rules of Domain Names

nametagIt’s almost 2010 and the internet is only getting bigger and better. You absolutely will need a great domain name to help you stick out from the masses.

Here are 5 quick and snappy rules to keep you clean and out of domain name trouble:

Take the .Com

If you’re looking to build a business and make money online, ditch any domain name that doesn’t end in .com. If you can’t get your perfect name in .com, then it’s not perfect. Find a new one. [Read more...]