Rock Your Stage

Blogs are your own personal concert stage. They are your speech in front of the crowd. They are a way to bring your ideas out to people and to see if they feel you out there, as the hip hop crowd might say. So, if you’re going to bother going through all the hard work of writing something, or posting pictures, or recording an audio or video podcast, why not make sure you put your whole heart into it, and give them the very best of what you can produce!

Start Strong

Launch with your topic really early. The only thing that works better by building up is fiction or mystery stories. If you’re going to take someone’s time for your blog or podcast, start with the best stuff first. Lead with your lead. Give them an idea where you’re taking them, and then go.

Brevity

You wouldn’t know it, but I try to keep my blog posts brief. Why? Because I know you have other things to do. I need them to have enough info for them to be useful, but then, after that, I want brief. Because your time is valuable to me.

Make It About Them

Participation is my best secret. Build community, build traffic, build awareness, build whatever by using participation. Why is PodCamp so successful? Because it’s YOUR PodCamp. Mr. Penn and I just started it. Why is my blog taking off? Because YOU are contributing and commenting and finding things YOU can use. Participation is the secret sauce to any community.

Give Your Ideas Handles

Sometimes, I think that idea will go on my tombstone. I say it all the time. What do I mean? Make it such that the person can run with an idea and port it to other instances. Meaning, if I talk about me, I’m really talking about you. If I talk about you, I’m really talking about you with some me sprinkled in it. Right? Otherwise, you wouldn’t IDENTIFY with this all.

Finish Strong

I love comments. I really love conversations in the comments section. Sometimes, I can’t answer everyone. But I always try to poke my nose in and get a conversation going. Part of that is Liz Strauss’s fault. She really has the best comment section of any blog I’ve ever seen. So what *I* do to drive comments is ask questions, or seek your opinion. I do this because I know you’ve got ideas. You’re smart. You’ve got ideas I haven’t considered yet.

I try to end every post with a question, because I hope it drives participation. Does that work for you?

Encore

Any rockstar knows they might be called on for an encore. In blogging, this means being sure to have your next post in mind. Be sure to comment on other people’s posts. Be sure to give them a reason to come back, and a way to surprise.

How about you? Did I miss anything?

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

Photo credit, larksflem

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

ChrisBrogan.com runs on the Thesis Theme for WordPress

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.

• Go on a guided video tour of Thesis and see the amazing things you can do with this theme! Seriously, you’ll love it.
• Check out the Thesis demo site
• See more Thesis-based sites in the gallery showcase