I was talking to a friend on the Third Tribe forums (disclosure: I’m a co-founder) about a sponsorship opportunity she had, and I gave her my advice for her specific circumstance (that’s the cool thing about over there: we do a lot of good one-on-one interaction in the forums). I realized that I have more to share here and so thought I’d give you some ideas about sponsors, audience, and your role as a content creator.

Sponsors Want Your Audience

First and foremost, if someone approaches you to sponsor your blog, your event, your whatever, what they’re saying is, “We’ll pay you in exchange for having access of some kind to your audience. They ultimately want to either a.) sell, or b.) show thought leadership in a space by connecting via your platform. More often than not, it’s A.

It’s up to you to help them achieve this goal. But of course, it’s also up to you to preserve your audience, and to not make them feel like you’re selling them to the highest bidder.

Your Audience Wants Good Content

Whether you’re a blogger, a conference, a TV show, or some other kind of media, the people you’ve gathered around you most often come to you for entertainment and education. If you’re Hanley Wood, you’re educating people in the building and construction world (for instance). You’re attracting contractors, builders, architects, and other related professionals to an event with information and opportunities that they won’t find elsewhere. If you’re Mark Horvath’s Invisible People, you’re attracting people who want to know what the world of homeless people is like, and want to hear stories that compel them to give.

Your audience wants the best of what you can put out, and they want to know that you’ll protect them from scummy people. For instance, if I go to a conference, and my inbox suddenly fills up with spammy emails from exhibitors I’ve yet to meet or signal that I want more information, I probably won’t go to that show again, and I’ll probably raise holy hell until my name is off every list, etc. Your audience never wants to feel sold out. They want your best, and they want your protection.

You Have to Make Good

You have to give sponsors the opportunity they need to sell or spread their influence. You have to give your audience your best content and your protection. By getting into the sponsorship game, you’re accepting responsibility for this relationship on both sides, and you’re promising to protect everyone involved. Once you understand this, you can determine when it’s a good idea to take sponsorship or not, you can decide whether your sponsors are the right ones for your audience, you can decide how best to give everyone in the triangle what they want.

It’s a big responsibility, but it’s definitely one way to exchange value.

Any other questions? How else can I help?

Oh, and this is the kind of stuff we’re talking about at Third Tribe Marketing, or some of it. You can ask any question there about marketing and get a bunch of responses. It’s been really fun for me, and others are saying mostly good stuff about it. I’ve also started recording some new exclusive audio content for there that will start airing in a few weeks, so if you jump on now, you’ll get notified. Good?

Hope you enjoy.

Quick Customer Touchpoints.

Content is a means to deliver interest. It’s a gathering place for you and the people you hope to entertain/attract/educate/equip. That doesn’t make it the king.

Kings rule. Kings make hard decisions. Kings try to maintain the balance of the good of the country (you history buffs pipe down; it’s my story). Kings do have egos, by the way. It’s part of being kingly.

But content? That’s treasure. That’s salve. That’s wood for the fireplace around which great stories are told.

Work hard on content, but focus on relationships. Be a good king. Be a servant. Be a steward to your people.

And use content well.

What do you say?

If I say they’re secrets, you’ll treasure them more, but the thing is, I share this with you daily. I do it right in front of you. But just this once, I’ll slow it down, and walk through it all. Fair?

27 Blogging Secrets to Power Your Community

Starter Moves

Failing that, posts with numbers seem to work. Especially weird or odd numbers. 27 is odd.

1. A picture per blog post has been my trick for a while. It draws your eye, whether or not you want it to. We’re wired for it. I use Flickr Creative Commons photos to do that. (Make sure you give them adequate credit. I show that in this post, too.)
2. Did you ever notice most of my posts open by asking a question? That’s a secret. When I do that, you stop and think about the question. But more importantly, it shifts your mind to the “what’s in it for me” sphere that you started reading from in the first place. Make sense?
3. Break things up visually. Notice that I have an H3 tag (html speak) title repeating the top title, and that I’m using a list to give your eye some natural “chunking.” Go back and read cafe-shaped conversations for an example.
4. Oh, maybe I should’ve started the post by saying that it helps if you write something useful for people. People want posts they can use to improve themselves or their business.
5. Brevity rules. I mention this a lot. People just don’t read long posts (usually). There are exceptions. I read every word Ann Handley writes, and often wish for more.
6. Write “unfinished” posts. Having ways that others can add to a post or improve on it invites participation. This might just mean asking for ideas or getting a sense of what others’ experiences are.
7. Mix up the length of your posts, so that people can read varied length articles, like magazines and newspapers do.
8. Consider an editorial calendar, where you write down which TYPE of blog posts you’ve written lately, and which you intend to write. This helps you from doing recurring posts, and gives some variety to what you’re writing.

Technical Stuff

10. A nice clean blogging theme goes a long way. I’m a huge fan of Thesis for WordPress (so much so that I became an affiliate for it).
11. Make it easy for people to subscribe to your post. Most people stop at putting a big orange RSS button up in the corner of their blog. Check out my sidebar. Check out the Financial Aid Podcast. Look how many ways we show people how to stay connected to the community. That’s not by accident.
12. I’ve said it before. Claim your blog in Technorati. You don’t have to like Technorati. You don’t have to think it works well. But it triggers mechanisms you need.
13. Consider changing your permalinks structure. (In WordPress, this is in Settings/Permalinks. Where is it in MT or Blogger?) I learned this from Chris Pearson. Change it to custom and put /%postname%/. If you click on any post including this one, you’ll see it all written out in plain English without extra info. (This is a preference).
14. If you worry that a post might get “lifted,” or if you encourage people to repost your work with attribution (which I encourage), include a few links in the original post that will politely show people where the content came from. I learned this from Christopher S. Penn.
15. Consider every plugin and widget. Do they improve your blog or slow it down? Do they help you blog smarter?
16. Learn a little more HTML, just a bit. Learn how to make links, how to add photos, how to bold and italicize things, and that. If you’re stuck, Google or “view source” on blogs that do what you want to accomplish. (For example, I had to learn how to stop and start a numbered list with ol start=”10″ to write this.)
17. Don’t force people to register for an account to comment on the blog. Lots of people won’t. (Your mileage may vary, but corporations try this all the time because they’re worried about someone leaving a “your company sucks” comment on the blog. It doesn’t fix that. It slows down real discourse.)
18. Technology should serve your community and your content, not just be there. Consider every technological change with that lens.

The Bonus Round

19. Share your posts politely via social platforms. In Twitter, I usually ask a question, and provide a link to the blog post to see what people think. I don’t “blurt” the blog posts automatically. Not every post is worth Twitter.
20. Facebook has tools like Simplaris Blogcast that integrate your blog into Facebook. So does LinkedIn. This falls into my outposts strategy.
21. Link out to other blogs often.
22. Comment on other blogs often. Thoughtfully. Adding thoughtful comments to other people’s posts builds friendships. I was a passionate commenter on Copyblogger back when I had 10 subscribers on my blog. Brian was still really nice to me.
23. Remember to comment in your own comments section. Conversations with your readers turn them from readers into a community.
24. Showcase your community. I do this with my Rockstars page (which needs updating) and by taking the occasional guest post.
25. Be consistent. You don’t have to blog daily, but if you blog once a week, get at least a post a week. Need blog topics?
26. Repoint to the old stuff occasionally. It’s often still useful to new community members.
27. Keep giving. When you can’t think of what else to give, give some more. Being helpful is the #1 thing you can do for your community. Share your secrets. You can’t execute them all anyhow.

Need more? I have a collection of my best advice about blogging.

Your Ideas

What would you add to the list? Which blogging secrets have helped you? Are there any questions my thoughts gave you that I didn’t adequately answer? Let’s talk about it more.

(Oh, and that’s a secret, too).

Photo credit, Trials and Errors

These are questions that we all have opinions about. People and companies have been vilified for their choices. The righteous burn their effigies on the front lawn of any blog that mixes free content with advertising. The very notion that commerce and information exchange be permitted to mix seems incongruous. Never mind the fact that media works that way. Never mind the fact that CHURCH works that way. There has to be a strong distance between the exchanges, or else it seems evil. You’re charging your community, etc.

I’ve been thinking about this for quite some time. Partly because it’s my job to understand how to mix information and money-making. The other part of it is because I like to help people figure out how to do business in the Internet age. I experiment, share the results, and experiment some more.

I also run conferences, both professionally, and for passion. Between media making, conferences, and the other ways that I work in the information-for-money business, I’ve got some ideas, and I’m going to share my perspective. I predict this post will be one of the more polarizing of my last several months. You’ll either get it and agree, or you’ll tell me why the world must all function on what’s free. I can argue both sides of the coin.

The Triangle

In the fall of 2006, I quit my day job and joined the circus. Jeff Pulver, legendary VoIP pioneer and long-time producer of the VON conference series hired me. In the waning months of 2007, I parted ways and joined Stephen Saber’s CrossTech Media. During this same time frame, I also worked with Christopher S. Penn and Whitney Hoffman on PodCamps.

In events, there’s a triangle. I learned this mostly from Jeff. If you can, the best of all worlds goes like this:

* Attract the brilliant people and make them the community.
* Charge the businesses who support this community for the event.
* Make it worth it for those businesses, so that they want to keep supporting the event.

So, if you want your “friends” to come to a conference, make the event such that it will help them do their job better. Then, don’t ask your friends for money. Ask their employers for money (ticket cost). Then, ask exhibitors and sponsors who want the friends as customers for money. Then, you have enough money to run a conference, and make a living trying to build information.

For the content, focus super hard on the people/friends. Don’t look to what the sponsors/exhibitors think the story is. They know more about the today than they do the tomorrow. Unless you make friends with tomorrow-focused companies (my favorite plan).

That’s kind of traditional conferences in a nutshell. It’s WAY not easy. But that’s the rough premise.

Unconferences, like PodCamp and BarCamp and the like, do it differently. The premise is like this: we can all get together for a minimal cost and run something that’s useful, without making it a business unto itself. We can subsist, and everyone will leave better educated.

With PodCamps, we’ve built and built on the experience, such that the ones we run in Boston cost more than a typical *.Camp, but the payload is (hopefully) much more focused. We’ve asked for more money from the community, but we’ve turned that back around into a quality event. We find sponsors who want access to our community, and then we try to matchmake that relationship a little, so that everyone understand’s each other’s potential value. BUT we do it without a lot of heavy-handedness at PodCamps. It’s more organic. That’s the whole unconference thing.

YOU can start an unconference. You don’t need anyone’s permission.

So there are two models.

Content on Websites

The web has crushed a lot of former money makers. Look at newspapers. Look at magazines. We are VERY used to getting our content for free. We love it free. And we are finding more and more ways to get top shelf, quality content for free. It’s a great and wonderful thing. How many of us would pay a few bucks for a blog? Not very many. (Well wait, aren’t Kindle users doing just that?)

So there are all kinds of people churning out quality content, and the basic premise is that they’ll get their money elsewhere. I sure do. Lots of people do. But let’s go deeper for a second.

You learn actionable things from ProBlogger, from CopyBlogger, from Seth Godin, from me, and from others. All that content is free. It’s out there for you to learn from, profit from, build business with, and hopefully succeed. Heck, if we’re not helping you succeed, then why are we doing this daily?

Often discounted in these conversations are blogs about making money online. Those fall into another whole category of the web. And yet, some of those folks, like Ted Murphy are out there just trying to come up with new ways to build better relationships between people who have something to sell and people who want to facilitate that sale. There’s a whole culture out there figuring this stuff out, and I’m getting to know more and more of them. As I do, my mindset on how blogs interact with advertising and marketing has changed a great deal.

My Current Thinking Boiled Down

• Making money isn’t evil. HOW you make money can be. Keeping the whole picture in place helps. (For instance, in my case, I sell certain services and information – like the New Marketing Summit, but then I give others away free/cheap – my blog and PodCamp).
• Disclosure is key. If you’re going to sell something on your site, disclose that you’ve got a relationship with that company/product. ( I show my disclosures on my About page).
• Maintain the triangle. I don’t want YOU to pay for my content. I want people who need my help professionally to pay for my distilled thinking.
• Keep context. My site is about educating you. If it becomes about products to market, that’s a context swap. If I decide to build a site about selling you things, I’ll make that another URL, and you can opt to visit or not.
• Someone has to pay for the picnic. There are some really great bloggers out there who are blogging a bit less lately. I won’t name them. They have jobs that require them to focus down hard on revenues right now. I try my hardest to have the things I’m paid for (like conferences) keep me out here on the blanket giving away delicious snacks. But someone always has to pay for the picnic.

Your Take

It’s your turn to weigh in. Why should everything be free? Why are ads evil? Where do you think this money should be made? If you were running the business, [chrisbrogan.com], or Scobleizer.com , or Annhandley.com , or whoever, what would you do differently? How would YOU make your money?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Photo credit, Timothy Lloyd

Well, we’ve launched one more.

Announcing Dad-o-Matic, a blog for dads, written by geeky web dads of all types. The goal of the site is to cover news, views, reviews, and advice, given to you by dads, for parents. What’s up there for posts right now are mostly advice. I think we’re still early into getting our voice, but man, look at who’s writing there:

• Dorian “Paisano” Carta – from Mashable and other places.
• Mike Chapman – from Every Dot Connects.
• Jeremy Toeman – from Stage Two Consulting.
• Grant Griffiths – from Home Office Warrior.
• Scott Kiekbusch – from Adjustafresh.
• Ryan Ozawa – from Hawaii Blog.

Oh, and there’s a very very special guest post by Guy Kawasaki. (I say “guest” because I haven’t yet convinced him that having seven or eight regular blogs to write for is worth it yet.)

We have many more authors contributing to Dad-o-Matic over the next months. Look for folks like Shel Holtz, Darren Rowse, and a few other swell folks who happen to be dads *and* on the web!

Why Do it?

Dad-o-Matic stems from about three things I wanted to do. Number 1: I’m a dad and a very proud one, and I think there’s lots of information that we can provide that’s useful to other parents, including even some more tech information for how parents and kids navigate the digital world together.

Number 2: I wanted to try a content blog with many authors, and try a few things out. For instance, you’ll notice that we have ads. I want to try out the media model of a group blog and see what I learn and can share with you about it. If I’m not eating my own dogfood, why should I expect you to follow my advice? So, there’ll be Dad-o-Matic project updates posted here on [chrisbrogan.com], but more from the “business outside the business” perspective.

Number 3: I wanted a group project. It’s really fun to put together fun things like this, and if the dads involved keep posting, and if we build up even more dads, the work load of writing the occasional dad blog post won’t overwhelm the fun of being part of something fresh and interesting. I’m thrilled that we have some great dads putting out interesting (and often different than their main stuff) from their typical online stuff.

Please Check It Out

I’d love for you to check out Dad-o-Matic and tell me what you think of it. If nothing else, check out some of the great work from Jeremy, Guy, Scott, Ryan, Grant, Mike, and whoever I might’ve just forgot in listing that.

There’s so much more to come.

All content projects grow that way. The people who create the project (or those who eventually own the project) must start somewhere with putting something there. Otherwise, it looks horribly empty and barren. If you visit a farm, you don’t want to see a big stretch of brown soil. You want to see lush patches of greenery, promising the harvest that will come next. The same is true of a platform built for content and conversations.

When starting Project Dogfood, I set up several conversation threads, and started the first questions in all of them. I wrote three different topics for each thread, with the hope that people would join up, get involved, and have a conversation. And it worked.

Right now, the project is still heavily tended and seeded by me as community manager. But over time, some of those seeds will take root, will grow, and will become whole, rich crops of delicious information for us to tend, harvest, and celebrate.

Building something from content requires seeds.

What are you doing to help?

Photo credit, starmist1