Are you blogging? If not, why not? It's networking on steroids, your chance to make friends and to influence people. Everyone wins when you blog ... well hopefully.
With the new ServiceNow Community it's so much easier for customers, partners, and employees to blog. If you tried and gave up on the old Community site then please try again — the new blogging experience is just like creating a Microsoft Word doc. In fact you can create your blog in Word and then cut-and-paste it into the blog "form." It's what I just did. So what are you waiting for?
If you are struggling to create compelling blog content, then I offer you a few tips based on the 100+ blogs I've written over the last couple of years. They are things that have helped me in writing these blogs, they may or may not help you.
Getting started
Writing a blog might seem too steep a challenge for some. It's not. Just give it a go after considering the following points:
- Understand that your knowledge is valuable — many people don't blog because they think they have nothing of interest to say. Just focus on what you know and you will be surprised at how helpful it will be to others. If you are worried about your blog, and need a "safety net," then send it to a friend or colleague to review before posting it (or to me if you like). The more you blog the easier it will become.
- Your blog doesn't have to be "War and Peace" — blogs are ideally 500-600 words long (or so I'm told). If they are longer or shorter, so what if the content is worth reading? The main thing is to think of the reader, their attention span, and the value-add relative to the word count. For instance, this blog will well-exceed 1000 words so I decided to split it into two parts following the advice of the legendary Stuart Rance.
- You don't have to start a blog from scratch — instead you can build on another article or blog. For instance, you could read something interesting and continue that school of thought. Start by quoting or summarizing the key point(s), and then add your own thoughts and opinions.
- Realize that blogs can start in different ways — some people wait for all the elements of a blog to be in place before they write it. Or they sit down to write a blog to find that they have no suitable subject ideas. I personally capture possible blog topics in Trello as they occur to me. Sometimes it's a subject area (like "consumerization of IT"), sometimes a catchy title (like "Escape from Planet of the Ops") or sometimes it's a point that I want to make (like that employees probably know more about what they want than the IT organization).
- Find the best time to write — each of us perform differently at different times of the day. I tend to start a blog at the end of the day as it is something I enjoy doing. I can also continue writing for as long as I want interrupted should I need to do so (well until dinner beckons). It also allows me to let it rest over night before a final reread and publishing the following morning.
Writing
- You don't have to write a blog all in one go — in fact I rarely do. It's also often good to put a blog down and return to it for a number of reasons: to add in extra content that you have since thought of; to remove content that is superfluous or potentially open to misinterpretation; and you can better assess whether you have made your point.
- You don't need a brilliant blog title when you start writing it — my blog titles are often things like "Dublin Blog" and the title comes once the blog is part-written or complete. Sometimes the blog title changes as the blog is being written, usually as the content changes the blog context.
- You don't need to start at the start and end at the end — just write as ideas come into your head, so you might write the last paragraph first. Dropping a number of key points down, reordering them, and then joining them together is an easy way to write a blog. You could say it is blogging-by-numbers but it works for me. My colleague Sarah Manning uses the great line "don't get it right, get it written" in her article "How I Became a Ruthless Self-Editor and Much Better B2B Writer."
- You can have multiple blogs in various states of completion — following on from point 8. If you are struggling with a blog, just start a new one. Coming back to a part-completed blog allows you to see it in a new light or in better writing conditions.
- You can start a blog and then finish it later when it's hard to do other work — so assemble the bones of the blog when you are in blogging mode. If you don't finish it don't worry, just pick it up again when on a train or waiting in an airport. It's something productive to do when in a less-than-productive working environment.
Well that's nigh on 900 words so time to break this long blog in two.
So in my next blog I'll cover off "assessing blog quality" and "increasing blog readership." Hopefully I'll see you there.
Image source: Flickr: hgjohn's Photostream
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