Chris Garrett has put together a 7-day mini course on business blogging, which you can learn more about here at Simple Web:

Of course the site talks about “content sites” but we know blogs and content sites are the same thing, right? There are a couple more things you need to know

1. Even if you do not run a for-profit site, all the same ideas are relevant

2. The site is about Joomla rather than WordPress, but ALL the principles in this course apply to any blog

3. You will need to add your email address to get all the parts in the series

Get the first part and sign up for all the entries here.

I have been taking the course over the past week or so, and here are some of the things that I have learned:

Day 1 – Planning Your Site

When many people think of creating a website for their business, organization or self, the first idea that comes to mind is the standard “corporate” style site consisting of basic “about” information, followed by a contact form.

Truth is those kinds of site have limited value. The proof is, of course, in your own online behavior. What kind of site do you visit most often? I bet you find content sites more useful and therefore visit them far more often.

We like to keep abreast of news, read tutorials and how-to guides, be informed and entertained.

This is the truth, and something that I evangelize to my clients. The important parts of the first lesson are:

• State your goal
• Define success and how to measure it
• Choose your niche and your audience
• Create the persona for your site
• Make an offer for valuable free content

Day 2 – Researching Your Niche

Focusing on your audience will mean you are always providing what people want and need, in a way that they find compelling. It’s so much easier to promote something that people actually want rather than create something then try to find a market for it!

• Challenges – If you can empathize with what your audience is struggling with then you can become their knight in shining armor!
• Purchases – What are your audience buying and why?
• Education Needs – Are there phases that your audience go through from newbie to black belt? Do they prefer text, video or a mix?
• FAQs – Which questions come up over and over?

Already you will be generating content ideas. Some ideas will be useful as articles, some ebooks, others for glossary and other reference type material. Next we need to find the exact phrases people use to describe issues, and how many people are looking for those phrases …

This is important information, as knowing your audience is vital to the success of your effort!

Day 3 – Setting Up Your Site

Features

Once site owners realize how easy it is to add features to their site they tend to get carried away. Remember your visitor is there to find useful content, not get distracted by gizmos!

The important features you might consider are:

• Contact Form – So the reader can contact you rather than copy and paste your email, also will prevent you getting as much spam.
• Comments/Community – Build a sense of community by sparking discussions
• Search – Allow your reader to find content by searching rather than click-click-click browsing.
• Ecommerce? – Do you want to sell products?
• Email Subscriptions – Keep your visitors coming back over and over by allowing them to sign up to an email service where you can notify them of any new articles or news you post up.

This too is good.

Day 4 – Managing Your Content

Writing Great Content

Here are some tips for making sure your articles have impact:

• Have a point – The most important tip of all is to make sure everything you write has a point, and gets to it. Nothing will put off a reader more than if your articles do not put forward a clear idea, piece of advice, item of news or some other benefit. Start with what you want the reader to take away and make sure your content builds up to just that.
• Think ‘So What?’ – The litmus test for if you have achieved the above “point” tip is to ask yourself if the reader will be thinking “So What”. This goes for your headlines and links too. People can agree, disagree, be motivated to take action or sent to sleep, but make sure they never ask “so what”.
• Don’t force it – Readers can tell if you are forcing out content. If it is not flowing, do something else for a while rather than try to force yourself to write.
• Write like a person – Your High School English teacher is not reading, so it is safe to write as you speak. People connect more with people who write like they are speaking directly to them rather than dry, academic style formal writing.
• Draft, then edit – Don’t edit as you write, it stunts your creativity. As much as possible get into the flow then come back to polish later.
• Read your content back – A great way to know if your writing is going to work is if you read it back, aloud. If you find yourself running out of breath trying to get to the end of your paragraphs you know you need to tweak!

You will notice I have not written about great headlines and being persuasive. While those things are important and can help you create more traffic and sales, it is also important at this stage of the game for you not to feel intimidated. Don’t set the bar too high for yourself, just write and enjoy writing. Providing you offer something, create some sort of value, and it is readable enough to make sense, then people will be happy to read.

More good advice, in fact hundreds of posts have been written about these basic ideas. I highly recommend this course for people just getting started on blogging and social media. Get the first part and sign up for all the entries here.

In the previous post I linked to an article by Kelly Forrister about being at your best in a tough situation. Here I would like to suggest three things that you can do to get back up to speed when an unexpected change comes your way:

1. Take Stock of the Situation

Stop and take a look at your last Weekly Review notes, to get caught up on where you stood the last time you gave your Actions and Projects a review. This will freshen your mind and perhaps trigger your thoughts for the coming week.

2. Review Your Hard Landscape

Review your calendar, Waiting For, and Next Actions lists, making sure that anything you might have had planned gets re-scheduled if you missed it. Some time-specific events or notes may no longer be valid, and perhaps a deadline was missed and the Next Action is no longer appropriate. On the other hand, a Next Action or Waiting For that was not pressing may now need to be moved up on your list of priorities – becoming a Most Important Task for today.

3. Plan Ahead for the Next Weekly Review

Anytime your schedule gets thrown off, by illness or an emergency situation, it is important to plan for your next review of Next Actions and Projects. Make an appointment with yourself to get back into your routine. I would recommend blocking out some extra time for this next Weekly Review in order to do some extra brainstorming and/or creative thinking about where you are and where you want to be. This kind of activity can give you a jump-start into the following week, providing inspiration for future goals rather than prolonging the feeling of “playing catch-up”.

Bonus Tip: Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for Help

Letting things go for a while due to unforeseen circumstances can create feelings of frustration and anxiety. Remember that (in most cases) you can ask someone for assistance. You have friends, associates, family, and co-workers that you can likely go to for some assistance in completing tasks that need to get done. Asking for help is not a sign of weakness, it is a sign of perspective.

Asking for assistance can be one of the greatest gifts that you can give yourself.

This is the final post in this weeks’ Periodic Review series. It is inspired as my own productivity practice has evolved quite a bit over the past two years, since I have been writing about Getting Things Done and other workflow systems.

In the previous posts we looked at how to manage your Periodic Reviews, starting with a high level of granularity and developing a personal method that works well for you.

In this post I am going to show you some of the tools that I use to manage my workflow.

I have tried and evaluated many different tools and applications, and changed everything more than once. Here are some things that I have learned about myself via this process:

1. I do not like digital or online applications, for whatever reason, so I do not use them properly and any workflow system that I try to use that relies on one will collapse.
2. I do like my notebooks and paper lists. I like them very much, and any workflow system that allows me to utilize these sorts of tools works. I mean really works. Since I started using the new notebook method in January I have not missed a Weekly or Monthly Review!
3. It is important to make things as simple as possible but no simpler. For me this means two things:
   • Having just enough complexity to keep things interesting without letting things get lost in the system.
   • Requiring just enough effort that I get a feeling of satisfaction simply by completing my tasks.

Here is a short video of how I manage my lists:

If you can’t see the video, click on the title of the post

I realize that there are people out there that swear by their smart-phones or PDAs, but they just do not work for me. That is the most important part of any productivity workflow system – it has to work for you.

Later this month or in mid-May (UPDATE: the e-book is being finalized now and will be released in August, 2009) I will probably be releasing a new e-book that describes how to really get down to the core of what works for you in your productivity system. If there is anything specific to your own situation that you would like this book to address, please send me a e-mail with the form below.

[CONTACT-FORM]

This is Part Five of the Periodic Review series. Originally written in the Spring of 2007, “The Weekly Review” described how I went about completing this part of the GTD system.

My own practice has evolved and grown into a richer and more useful review appointment. Therefore I am up-dating this post and adding some additional details and practices that may make your own review practice easier and more productive.

Growing out of the system

After using this checklist-oriented system for a full year, I decided to take a look at how it could be streamlined. After asking some of the readers who had been following along and using the system as well, there was a consensus that it was just a little too much.

At least, after a while, it was too much, and not something that everyone needs to do 64 times a year. We determined that the Weekly Checklists were a very good training tool for getting control of your inputs and your workflow tracking system. It also allows you to find the holes in your system and plug them. Depending on your own level of ability and motivation, the checklist-based system might not be the best for you.

What should you do?

The most important feature of any productivity workflow system is that it works for you. If this set of checklists is too constricting, or too vague (I have heard that it is both!), then by all means pick out the parts that work and use them. Perhaps you have no need to perform some of these steps weekly, or at all. Cut them out.

Perhaps you need to do some of these checklist items at the beginning of the week, and some at the end. Split your Review appointment.

The checklists are not written in stone.

Accountability and Goal-setting

After some time I stopped doing complete Weekly Reviews, because I was managing some of the contexts more or less frequently than the checklists called for. After this happened I started to notice that some tasks and actions were dropping off the list due to changing priorities and conditions, which normally is an acceptable and predictable situation.

But I wondered about two things, if those listed items were important (even urgent) at some point in the past and now they were not important or necessary, what happened:

1. What had changed that I did not need to “do” the action, and perhaps more importantly,
2. Why had I not completed the task before the situation changed?

Where was the accountability? David Allen’s Getting Things Done system explicity avoids prioritizing your tasks and actions, and I believe that this is a mistake, or at least a weakness. What is needed is a way to analyze one’s tasks and next actions in the context of how important they are in the current environment and the expected future situation. What is needed is less emphasis on a weekly analysis of tasks – replaced by an increased emphasis on a daily evaluation.

Likewise Goals need less monthly attention, rather they need more explicit action steps with more frequent progress checks.

Creating a Mixed-use Solution

The Lovely Bride and I did a lot of traveling this winter, 7,000 miles in 4 months. It is pretty hard to maintain any sort of complicated system while traveling cross-country in a car. I needed a simple, low-maintenance solution that kept track of all of my tasks and provided an opportunity to achieve the goals that I had set. This is what I came up with:

My weekly review process is now more of a journal entry, with an emphasis on taking a good, hard look at what got done last week – and what didn’t.
The first part of the entry is a list of the tasks that I had set for myself that did not get done. These are tracked by my daily MIT lists. Now that I am giving this daily list more attention every morning the items that are ‘left over’ are much fewer.

I can then analyze these tasks and determine why they did not get accomplished and what can be done in the future to prevent or avoid that condition.

The second part of the entry is based on this list of Questions for Review (download).

• What will I improve on next week?
• What was my biggest accomplishment?
• Am I closer to my Life Goals?
• What was hard for me this week, and Why?
• What was the biggest waste of time?
• What was the best Return on Time Invested?

Asking myself these questions every week has had a very powerful and positive effect on my daily activities. I continue to utilize the Monthly Review Worksheet each month, with a greater emphasis on setting specific actions for longer-term goals.

I look forward to getting your feedback, please leave a comment.