(If you’re blogging for pleasure or your own entertainment, skip this post and read any of these wonderful stories.)

Is the purpose of your blog easy to define? What are you aiming towards accomplishing with it? How are you testing whether or not you’re reaching your desired effect?

My blog has changed a lot over the years. At first, I blogged just for pleasure. Then, I realized that I was developing a community, and that my community wanted some consistent, useful information, so somewhere around a few years ago, things started to make more sense. Here’s a little bit of the backstory.

My Blog’s Many Faces

When I started my blog many years ago (it skittered across several domains before I landed in “real” blog software), it was for fiction. I wrote stories. Then, I wrote about fitness and nutrition. Then, I wrote about self-improvement. Then, I wrote about new media. I went from that into writing about social networks and social media, and then eventually, I moved into how businesses could use social media to improve.

What am I writing about these days? Human business. It’s essentially the idea that relationships and human-shaped experiences serve business much better than cold marketing and afterthought customer service.

What will I write about next? I’m planning some changes to [chrisbrogan.com] in the near term. My redesign by Snowy Day Design is just the beginning, and you’ll be invited along for the ride. That said, I won’t change direction too far afield. You’ll most likely still like it.

Keeping a Focus and a Purpose

Your blog is a media property. It’s also a tool that allows you to build relationships (should that be of interest), to notify and inform (if you like telling the news), to reflect and react (if you like being a commentator), to report (if that’s something you enjoy doing), or a tool to educate, instruct, or establish thought leadership. It can be a call to action, a lead generator, a showcase for your talents, and many other things.

The question is: what will you choose as your focus, and how do you define its purpose?

Can you blog without purpose? Absolutely. Can you unfocus your blog? It happens all the time.

But your community (or your audience, if you’re not as close to them) are there with an expectation. They are seeking whatever it is you’ve been offering along the way. They want your best, and they want your material to enlighten, entertain, inform, inspire, or any of several other functions.

With that in mind, and accepting that things change over time, my question remains: what is the focus and purpose of your blog?

Photo credit respres

My idea: turn Follow Friday into a single tweet with a link to a blog post of the people you think others should follow.

It solves two problems: It gives you more than 140 to talk about the people you recommend, and it also cleans up Twitter so that we don’t watch a stream of @someoneawesome names rushing by all day.

You with me?

Here are some people from my list (and just a few to get the game going):

@Ed – Ed Shahzade is part of the glue of Twitter. He’s a connector and a do-er. He helps people all the time.

@MayhemStudios – Calvin Lee is a great source of information. He scours twitter quite often to find the good stuff and share it out. I learn something from him all the time.

@donmilleris – Don Miller is one of my current author crushes, and he wrote A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, one of my top 2 books for 2010.

@badbanana – Tim Siedell is just plain funny. I love his sense of humor, and he’s totally worth it.

@lmarconi – Lucia Marconi had the guts to tell me she thought I was being a bit egotistical lately, and that she liked my ideas, but sometimes felt put off by my ego. She then wrote a great blog post telling me more ideas. And we had a great back and forth on Twitter. I’m grateful. I can get but-kissing all day long, but she had a constructive, real, solid, non-jealous criticism, and I needed to hear it. Thanks, Lucia.

–

There you go. That’s a list. It’s just a starter. Make your own. Find the good people. Find people who need the attention. Find people who matter to you. Share the locals. Use public Twitter lists (if the lists are not judgment-based, such as “smart people”).

Promote others. It really does help the system.

So today, I wanted to write about my love for blogging, and hopefully, you’ll pull from this some ideas or affirmations for what you’re doing.

I go way back, but the tech is new

I’ve blogged in one form or another since 1998. I haven’t owned my own domain for that long, and my early blogs were on WYSIWYG technology (Trellix, invented by Dan Bricklin, actually), and yes, I had a Geocities account (Area 51, baby) ,and a Tripod account, and all that old stuff before I finally got a blogspot blog, then some other tech I can’t remember, and then finally WordPress. I use WordPress because it’s got a strong developer community, because it has a lot of plugins that are useful, and because I liked the themes I could get for it. I use the Thesis theme (affiliate link) and sell it because I love it so much.

My home on the web

Blogging is like my house, or in most modern times, it’s my showplace. It’s not as messy as my mental house. I keep my blog focused on helping others do human business. If I want to write about my kids, I can do that at Dad-o-Matic. If I want to complain about air travel, I have Twitter. I keep my Facebook account as a personal-ish account.

So blogging, as it were, becomes my showplace, my storefront, my “here’s where to get the best of me” site.

Relationship Building

I love the relationships I have with the people who comment on my blog. It took me 8 years to get my first 100 readers. I cherished every one of them. I even take the occasional screenshot of how many RSS subscribers I have because I’m humble and proud each time I hit a new milestone.

And the number in and of itself isn’t interesting. What’s interesting is that so many of you are wonderful contributors to my community, to my education, and to the great pursuits that we all share.

Lead Generation

I went from a blog that only 100 folks read to being a blog in the Top 5 of Advertising Age’s Power150. It was a total lark that I joined. I forget who was kind enough to tell me there was a list. Well, the few times I’ve spent time at number 1 were fun, but to be honest, that’s only a little bit of social proof. Here’s how I get business leads from my blog.

I write about the way I see things, bits about how I might implement it, and ideas that companies can see themselves considering. Companies then reach out to me to either speak or bring New Marketing Labs in and do work for them. The blog got me the book deals for Trust Agents and Social Media 101. So, it’s really paid off well, my time in blogging mixed with my ideas on new ways to do business.

Homebases and Outposts

My blog is my home base. It’s where I want you to go when you find me on Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/wherever. Because it’s the biggest part of understanding who I am and what I know how to do. I give you a “Best Of” page so you can find some of the meat of what I believe in an easy-instead-of-chronological way.

My outposts are things like Twitter, Google Wave, Facebook. Those are places where I connect and do something, but it’s not to replace the homebase. I think all these posterous and tumblr side projects can be cool, but rest assured that they detract from the value of growing a solid community. Outposts are where you meet people in the commons. The homebase is where you derive most value.

The Blogging Practice

I write all the time. Blogging helps me with this. I wrote about the writing practice not to long ago, and I write about writing often. It’s not that blogging is hard. It’s that blogging is a lot like going to the gym and it requires a constant practice, like playing the horn, like drawing, like dating. Meaning, it’s a verb. The more you do it, the better it can get.

Blogging as a Storefront

I sell things via this blog sometimes. For instance (and much of this is affiliate links):

Thesis WordPress theme
Third Tribe Marketing (our members-only marketing forum).
Beyond Blogging, an ebook I participated in.
Trust Agents, my book with Julien.
Social Media 101, my own book.
Countless books on Amazon.com, as I read and review quite often.

You don’t have to sell on your blog. It’s just an option that’s there if you want. Those projects above have helped me go to events that I otherwise couldn’t attend, and they’re helping me save for a new home for my family. Blogging gave me that, too.

My Own Magazine/Show/Media Empire

Growing up, none of us had the opportunity to “really” make our own media. We could do magazines by photocopying stuff. We could waste all the ink in our deskjet printers and pretend we were doing desktop publishing. We could record wav files and email them to our friends if we had a week.

But these days, you can be a podcaster, a videoblogger, a blogger, and you can make your own media. You maybe didn’t think of it this way, but the Huffington Post is what “feels” like a mainstream newspaper put together with blogging technology. It’s grown to be bigger than lots of newspapers, a top blog for years running, and yet, it’s just what we’re doing, done bigger.

Meaning, you can be whatever you want. You win on a huge mix of things, but you CAN do it. Distribution is free. Opportunity is nearly free. It just takes a powerful plan and a lot of execution and refinement.

I Love Blogging

And I hope you continue to do what you’re doing. We don’t need fewer blogs. We need more passionate blogs. We need more blogs that educate and inform and instruct and give us what we want. We need more Copyblogger and more Jon Swanson and more The Oatmeal.

And we need you.

You in?

Sometimes, people say that all Thesis-themed sites look the same out of the box. That’s true, if you don’t know how to work up the design. In my case, I used a designer to give my site my own look and feel while using the Thesis theme. Pretty shortly, I’m going to redesign my site while still using Thesis, plus I’m about to launch a few new projects using Thesis. I promise that you’ll see four completely different-looking sites, but all still clean and SEO pretty. That’s why I like it. I can use the same framework for different designs.

Anyhow, if you’re thinking of ways to up the ante on making your site look more professional and improve your search results at the same time, I’m a huge fan of Thesis for doing that. I hope you give it some consideration.

Your Blog as PART of a System

In the drawing above, I list your blog as part of your content ecosystem. Here’s why I recommend you start thinking this way: because your blog is only one destination and it’s only reaching one channel of a much larger opportunity and demographic. The minute you see your blog as only “a” channel, that’s when you start thinking of other outreach opportunities.

This, by the way, is the logic behind Steve Jobs’s iPad. He didn’t make it for us. He made it for your mom, for the photographers, for people who want a big shiny viewing device for downloaded movies. It’s another way to build a channel for people to buy stuff off the iTunes store.

Now, with that in mind, the easy first step is to strongly highlight the opportunity to get your blog sent to people via email (more people use email than read blogs). That’s the easy opportunity. From there, start asking yourself how else you can build out your content delivery, both offline (print, perhaps, or publish a book) and into new channels online. Then, think about products.

Your Content as Products

Think about the various ways your content can fit into different shapes as a product. For instance, is your content suitable for audio? Have you considered recording and giving away (or selling) an audio version? I’m working up some audio projects for the commuters in our lives, not to mention the fact that Trust Agents and Social Media 101 are both available via audio download.

Can you take some of your projects and turn them into slide decks and make them available to the public? Or look at Brian Solis’s Conversation Prism. That’s a project that’s gotten Brian tens of thousands of placements in presentations over the last few years. Every time I see that wheel come up, it’s a chance for us to go back and check out Brian’s blog.

What other projects can you think up based on your products?

Education: The Power of Events

Online or off, some of what you’ve created would be good for educational opportunities. What could you turn from a few blog posts into a helpful class? You might have to give more thought than what went into the original posts. There’s a gap between “informative” and “educational” sometimes (unless you’re Whitney Hoffman, who writes very thorough posts), and you have to tighten that up.

This might be turned into a live event, like a teaching opportunity. It might turn into online courses. It might turn into a private membership site like Third Tribe. But education is a really good opportunity to spread your content into a new ecosystem. And, if you get really clever, you start wondering if your content might make a good part to someone else’s parts and that it might together form a larger opportunity.

Partnerships

My friend, Matthew Ebel is a professional musician. He creates music, tours, and does all that, but he also offers his services to conference and event producers. Imagine the difference between attending an event, versus attending an event with engaging live music. Matthew can add this to a conference experience. However, as a guy who runs conferences for a living, I’m very unlikely to call up a musician to perform. I would, however, call my event planner and see if she knew someone for the event.

Thus, it benefits Matthew to partner with event planners, so that he can book more gigs at conferences. Make sense?

Partnerships with your content work the same way. There may be part of the story you’re great at and parts that others are better at explaining/providing. For instance, if you’re yet another social media blogger, how much more powerful would your site and content become if you partnered with an SEO professional, a digital marketing professional, and a graphic/interface design specialist. You’d have a killer teaching/educating/selling opportunity for people looking for the larger picture.

See how killer this one step could become?

Ecosystem Thinking

This, to me, is where things get powerful. Once you see your platform as an ecosystem and not the parts, your possibilities to grow and develop more business value. Can you see it? Look beyond your blog as being the core of things. Think of it as an outlet. From there, things get exciting.

What say you?

Is your negative commentary helping them make a buying decision? I’ve rarely seen the tactic work in traditional advertising. You can graze them a little bit. For instance, I’m a bit fond of the GM commercials where they point out that they have better mileage than other cars that seem to get credit for good mileage. That’s a kind of gentle sleight.

But if you’re spending your time crapping on others in your space, I’m curious how you think that will translate to a win for you.

You read a lot of blogs. What do you think?

Photo credit Josh Liba

Today’s your day. You’re up. I’d love for you to leave just a small comment and say hi.

Now, given that 45,000 people get this blog sent to them daily, and that another 170,000 people swing by the site at least once every month, and given that I’m good for usually 20 or so comments a post, that means that this post, if you play along, should receive something like 44,980 comments.

But really, I just wanted to hear from you. Say hi? You, the long-time reader and consumer of all things here. Just say hi.

For everyone else, my wonderful friends who give me more than I give you when you comment here, thank you. I’m grateful for your contributions to my madness. You matter.

Let’s all greet the new folks. Shall we?

If you look at this graphic I copied, you’ll see a few titles that get your eyebrow raised. I found the experiment to be interesting, and even more interesting when I picked a topic material that wasn’t really my thing. It’s amazing how just the titles got me thinking about my own blog and what I could do better.

Just for fun, I grabbed the most recent titles from my blog. Here they are:

• The Location Game – Over on OPENForum
• Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3 Review
• How Social Media Can Power Your Business – Kitchen Table Talks
• Points of Contact
• The Social Media Pie – over on OPEN Forum
• How I Use Mindmapping to Write
• Cubicle Farming
• New Job New You – a Book Review
• The Writing Practice
• Switch- A Book Review
• The Beginning – Kitchen Table Talks
• How NOT to Help Haiti
• How Systems Thwart Service
• Your Farmer List
• Living In Google Wave
• What is Your Pop-Up Store
• Get Seen- Do It Now
• Represented by the APB Speaker’s Bureau
• More Fun Than Competition
• Business Stripped Bare – Book Review
• Do One Thing Very Well
• How Heartfelt Marketing Delivers
• The Future Is Evidently Blurry
• A Customer Aware World
• Experiment- 30 Days of Bing
• Deepen Your Networks
• New Sponsor – Search Engine Strategies NYC
• Are You Ready for Fun

There are four book reviews. There are four “announcement/promotion” type posts. There are seven video posts.

Of the titles, I think I did okay. I think they could be better. I’m sure Brian would tell me I could do better.

So, what do you think? How do YOU stack up? Does looking at other people’s titles and ideas help you think about your blog?

Can you see the value in comparisons, or, as I talk about in More Fun Than Competition, are you just competing with yourself?

If your blog was the next Wired / BusinessWeek / FastCompany / whatever-for-your-industry, how would you rate it?

It’s practice. Practice the verb, in this case.

The Spark of an Idea

Last night, Kat and I were at Ruby Foos in Manhattan for dinner after a movie. The server, Jenna, was pretty good at her job, but when it came time to try and sell us dessert, I noticed a flaw in her service. She said, “Do you think you’re going to have room for dessert?”

The answer to this should always be no. To say yes is to say that you’re gluttonous. It also isn’t very appealing. It requires more questions.

Instead, if Jenna had said, “We make the most amazing molten chocolate cake here,” I might have raised an eyebrow. Even if chocolate isn’t my thing, my head would immediately go to the dessert I wanted, but then I’d already be shopping for it. Make sense?

There. That’s the spark of an idea. Just a little moment in time with a server at a restaurant, and I have something to talk about: suggestive selling and the benefit of leading your prospect.

Sparks are everywhere. We just have to look for them. I look every day. Need more help? Use your phone’s camera. Snap weird things that you see. I write many blog posts based on weird photos that I snap.

From Spark to Fire

Having a good idea is one thing. Turning it into a blog post is another. If you want the complete rundown of what I do each time, check out 27 blogging secrets I’ve given you here. In short, for a blog post to be useful, it has to be useful to more people than yourself.

Fires start when you get them in many minds. If I share something of interest to me, that might only stay a smoldering spark in my head. If I share something that you can run with, now we’re talking. That’s the goal. Always look for ways to turn your spark into a fire that will fuel other people’s imaginations and set them to burning with new ideas.

The Actual Practice of Writing

I’m writing this to you while I’m waiting for someone to get some webinar software rebooted. I find time like this everywhere. I wrote about this in 2006 when I covered time quilting. The thing is, you have to practice writing when you can. I don’t think it’s good enough to say, “I’ll write every morning,” or “I’ll write after the kids go to bed.” When I say this, I understand that you have to find time where you can, but the actual practice of writing is something I want you to try doing all the time.

How?

Think about pieces to write. Jot notes about those pieces. Record little snips of audio or leave yourself voicemail or write on the back of receipts. Whatever you can do, think about what you’re going to write.

Grab paragraphs where you can. I’m writing this paragraph in the back of a town car in the Lincoln Tunnel in New York City. This piece of writing has officially been crafted in three places (I started in an airplane).

Read other people’s stuff. This actually counts as writing practice, provided you read as a writer, and then develop what you need to do to make your writing better from it.

Publish often. Another place where our practice falls down is that we keep tons of drafts of things around, but never publish. Here’s the truth: If it’s not out there, it doesn’t count as much. (Journal keepers, I don’t mean you. Put down the purple pitchforks.) Get your work out there onto the web, onto blogs, into the hands of other people, whatever. Get it out there. The more you publish, the more people will take swings at it, the more people will riff off it, the more you’ll get the chance to get feedback.

If At First You Don’t Succeed

I spent a good chunk of my life believing I was destined to be a fiction author. The moment I threw that away, I found great success writing my blog and then writing a New York Times bestseller. Life throws curveballs. Don’t forget that the practice of writing might lead you somewhere you didn’t anticipate. Be open to this as much as you’re open to anything else in your experiences. You’ll sometimes surprise yourself.

And keep writing. Keep practicing. Keep trying new things. The only way to improve is to work with it, to practice, to learn from what others are saying about you, to learn what you think about others.

So, Practice

And in that practice, share what you find. Okay? Do you find that when you share what you’ve learned it helps you and others? I do. Maybe you will, too. And I hope you share it with us.

What else? What did I miss? What can you add to this?

Photo credit C.C. Chapman

Let’s talk about it.

Do Your Homework

All bloggers aren’t the same. Big numbers don’t mean big response. Just because someone writes about X doesn’t mean that your product is actually X to them. Bloggers can be fickle and often work to the beat of their own drum.

I get dozens of pitches a day. I delete almost all of them unread, unless I know the person, and then half the time, I delete those, too. The reason is that people aren’t considering what I write about before pitching to me. I rarely ever cover software here, so if you’re showing me a software story, it damned well better have a human angle.

The same is true for any of the bloggers you need to reach. Not sure where to find the bloggers you need? Use these resources:

• Alltop – the Internet’s magazine rack.
• Google Blogsearch – search by topic.
• Twitter Search – find bloggers by what they tweet about.
• Postrank Topics – search by topic.

Once you have a sense of who you might want to reach for your stories, it’s all about building relationships.

Be There Before the Sale

This is something Julien and I wrote about in Trust Agents, and it’s the first part of making your blogging outreach more successful. If you want people to write about you, they should probably know about you first. Quick ways to get that started:

• Follow them on Twitter.
• Comment on their blog posts.
• Set up Google Alerts and comment on related articles.

Is this more work than just blanketing someone with email and hoping a few write about it? Yes. Is it worth it? Yes.

The trick is not to talk about your stuff. You should have started this outreach weeks and weeks before ever needing anything, and it should be genuine. Be interested in the people you hope will take an interest in you.

Make It Easy

People that I like in the outreach department work to find the people who she thinks make the most sense for the story. They deliver tons of information and preparation. They do lots of checking and double-checking (because bloggers can be fickle or forgetful). They make everything as seamless as possible. Some ideas:

• Make everything dead simple.
• (Tyler in the comments suggested) Be clear what you want the outcome of the outreach to be.
• Provide URLs to everything, so that bloggers can refer.
• Provide photos to go with the piece, or a video, or whatever other content.
• Keep your outreach emails brief, and keep the details highlighted and bolded appropriately.
• Make sure your FIRST email does nothing but get the buy-in to pitch the story.

Let’s pause on that last point. Some people disagree. They want the whole pitch in the first email, because two becomes a clutter. I’ve honestly seen it done both ways. I know that when Cathy sends me an email asking to pitch me, I’m going to ask for the pitch. I’ve seen others send me the pitch in the first email and it’s been okay, but more often than not, I prefer the two-email system. You can dispute this. Really.

To me, making the effort simple is a good thing.

Ask the Right Questions

I’m often given business books to review. I’m a voracious reader, and I like sharing the good ones with people. However, I also tell people who send me books that I don’t guarantee a review. Sometimes, the book is okay, but not my favorite. Other times, I really don’t like the book. If the people who send me the book ever push for a review, I usually explain that it might not be as positive as they’d like. As an author, myself, I don’t like giving bad reviews.

To that end, think about some questions that might let you have some guidance on how the blogger acts.

• Can you tell me how long it takes to post from when you receive the product?
• May I check back in a few weeks from now?
• What do you do with negative reviews?
• If you have disagreements or problems with the product, could you email me first to make sure you have all the information?

Questions like this and others can be really helpful to you setting your own expectations.

Above All Else, Don’t Push

If not this story, the next one. Believe me, relationships in this space run long and weird.

Christina Pacelli from Red reached out to me to cover the Eye Fi (a USB-to-wifi cool gadget) over a year ago. She sent me one. I couldn’t really get over my own techno-idiocy to make it work. A year later, Christina and team got smart and mailed me a new Eye-Fi (still have the old one, by the way) and a Novatel Mifi device (which acts like a wandering hotspot). Combined with BOTH, I’ll be able to use this product on the show floor at my next event and report back what I think of its benefits to various groups.

A year. Christina has been politely persistent for a year. And it will pay off. (Who knows? Maybe the links already make it pay off.)

Don’t push bloggers, and just accept that sometimes the story doesn’t hit. I’ve had a series of situations where things seemed right, and upon checking them out, I just didn’t feel good about blogging it, or wasn’t moved to blog it, etc. As the person pushing that particular product, I’m sure it doesn’t feel well when your push goes nowhere. I’m so sorry when I’m the cause. I imagine bloggers also have their own reasons and feel bad, too.

In most cases, it comes around to the better at some point. This is a long game for lots of us. Be patient. Learn who doesn’t work out. Move onward.

An Imprecise Science

There’s more to it than all this, but this is a good start. If you’ve questions, I can definitely add more. What do you think? What have you tried that’s worked? What else have I missed?

Photo credit 蓝莓兔子