Review Your Output

August 4, 2007 · Comments

Looking Back We create, and we create a lot. We blog, post photos to Flickr, podcast, Twitter, shoot video. But how often do you sit back, pop some corn, and review the output of your work? It turns out to be an important step in your community process.

What To Look For

In your blog, determine whether you’re talking all about yourself, or if your posts have some value to people outside of you. If you WANT your blog to be all about you, cool. But if you’re considering your blog part of your communcation / community / messaging strategy, you’ll want to see that your messaging and conversation is facing out towards your audience. Is it engaging? Are you asking people questions, giving them value?

In your photos, just enjoy. Look back at people you’ve snapped, and ideas you’ve covered. This helps your creative juices, and/or reminds you of fun times.

In Twitter, see whether you’re contributing, communicating, and collaborating. It’s not a place to dump blog links. It’s not that great to just read about your meal status and whether you’re bored.

In your media making, listen with a critical ear. Watch with a nitpicker’s view of your content. Decide what you can do better. Determine how much tighter you can make it. Because if your name ain’t Cammack, Kownacki, or Long, your stuff can be wayyyyyy tighter.

Next Steps

Decide what you’re trying to accomplish with all this media making. We sometimes do it because we’ve BEEN doing it. But what’s the purpose? Where are we heading? Is this still bringing you to where you want to go? Put your head into this for a bit and see what comes of it. I promise you, you’ll be surprised.

Anyone daring want to do this and report back in comments?

And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider subscribing for free.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to have future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Tagged as:

ChrisBrogan.com runs on the Thesis Theme for WordPress

Thesis WordPress theme

Thesis is the search engine optimized WordPress theme of choice for serious online publishers. If you’re a blogger who doesn’t understand a lot of PHP, Thesis will give a ton of functionality without having to alter any code. For the advanced, Thesis has incredible customization possibilities via Thesis hooks.

With so many design options, you can use the template over and over and never have it look like the same site. The theme is robust and flexible enough not only to accommodate a site like ChrisBrogan.com, but also to enable the site to run far more efficiently than it ever has before.

  • and then you have a website like this: http://cryingwhileeating.com/
  • We talked about this post on the recent Pod 5 Talkcast: http://www.talkshoe.com/talkshoe/web/tscmd/tc/3...
  • Daniel's right: more important than whether your blog is accomplishing x, y or z is whether your blog -- or your photos, Twitters or anything else you create -- is accomplishing it's intended goal (whatever that goal may be).

    Chris, you hit it on the head when you said, a lot of us keep doing this BECAUSE we've been doing it. When videoblogging (or what have you) becomes part of your routine, it's easy to lose track of why you're supposed to care about it -- or why anyone else should.

    Before you start: ask yourself WHY you're doing it. WHAT do you hope to accomplish? HOW will you measure your (relative) success? HOW OFTEN will you check to see if you're still on the "right" track?
  • I can see where you're coming from, but I can't say I agree with you completely.

    What if the purpose of a blog is to "navel-gaze"; i.e., serve as a "down engine" of sorts? Should someone not blog because others are not interested in that sort of thing?

    "An artist's first responsibility is to himself." -- Miles Davis, via QuotesBlog

    At the same time, I can see that such a blog will not sustain an audience for very long, so I suppose we need to evaluate the direction for our content. Are we trying to sustain an audience? If so, then I agree wholeheartedly.

    Does this make any sense?
  • What? You're not interested in what I had for dinner? I'm shocked! LOL

    Just kidding, of course. That's great advice, Chris. Best wishes to you! Hope you have a fabulous weekend! Dropped you a note yesterday, hope it didn't end up in the dreaded spam bucket (eww, so greasy in there)
blog comments powered by Disqus

Previous post:

Next post: