Chris Bonney

3 Secrets To A Killer Blog

As I ramp up for a few speaking gigs coming up in the next month about blogging, I'm reminded of the basics. The true essence of a master blogger. Yes, focusing on a particular audience is important. Yes, being a good writer helps, too. But what I'm thinking of is the essentials. The DNA of a great blog.

Here are the three secrets to a killer blog:

1. PASSION: If you ain't got, we're not feeling it. You must desire to tell people your opinion or to solicit feedback or to dispel advice. Whatever you do on your blog, it can't be a chore. The topic needs to seep from your pores like sweat after 90 minutes on the soccer field. Do you get goosebumps just thinking about the next time you get to write on your blog? No? Hmmm. Wonder why your subscriber base is still so small.

2. SUSTAINABILITY: The next of kin to passion. The key to successful blogging is to keep doing it. If you stall, if you stumble, you will fail. Your passion should drive your sustainability, but go into blogging with your eyes wide open. It's a haul. It's a commitment. It can take over your life if you get really good at it. Sustain at all costs.

3. RELEVANCE: In my mind, the most important of the three. Love your topic, write about it all day long, but if it's not relevant to anyone, what do you have? I'll tell you. You have a diary. Make your content relevant to your audience. Don't just say you will be blogging for X audience. Know the audience, be the audience, be relevant.

So, what do you think? Is there a number 4?

Are There Too Many Blogs? Or Master Your Google Reader In The Next 30 Minutes Or Your Money Back

As a blogger, I, of course, follow many blogs. Well, let me rephrase that: I used to follow many blogs. After bouts of following over 50 blogs at one time only to be frustrated and overloaded, I decided to pare down. I spent a year trying to follow just 10. No luck. Still, just too darn much to take in.

A New Plan
So, I settled on a new plan. I will follow 5 blogs religiously for 3 months and then follow my next favorite 5 blogs for 3 months and so on for a year. The blogs that get the most reads and seem the most relevant to me over the year will make my final 5. I will subscribe only to those 5 for the entire next year. That's it. No more.

Other Blogs Still Play A Factor
Now keep in mind I do read other blogs that I'm not subscribed to. And I find great value in many of them. So, it's not to say that I won't read other blogs, I'll choose not to follow more than 5 at a time.

Here's Why
Here's my primary philosophy on this. I've learned that many blogs cover the same stories or report on the same trends. When you follow many blogs you tend to get some redundancy. Sure, you get a different angle on them, but that's not why I read blogs, to get multiple takes on the same topic.

Also, the great bloggers tend to blog at least one time per day which makes keeping up with all the reading very difficult. Keeping subscriptions to 5 blogs makes this manageable.

Lastly, there are always blogs, no matter how many I'm subscribed to, that I gravitate towards anyway. I had a habit of subscribing to so many blogs before out of fear, to be honest. Fear that I'd miss out on something. Fear that the greatest story in the history of the blogosphere would hit and I'd have to hear about it on MSNBC hours later. So, I'd scroll and scroll through all the headlines making sure nothing slipped past me. Turns out there is never really anything to miss. So, by just monitoring 5 blogs now, I've set my fears aside (listening on Twitter helps calm this fear as well) and I get content I want in chunks I can handle. 

What's My Attention Worth?
I'm reading a great book right now called Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. It talks about the power of intention and attention. Those who focus win, those leading an ad hoc, multi-tasking, pre-occupied, Blackberry-gazing life simply come in second. So, yes, my attention is worth a lot. Bloggers must earn it.

So, Who Are The Current 5?
Drum roll, please. The 5 blogs I'm following till the end of June are:

1. Seth Godin
2. Harvard Business
3. Social Media Today
4. HubSpot
5. Groundswell

Check back in early July or, better yet, make my blog one of your 5 to track for the next 3 months and you'll find out how my grand experiment is going.

Am I missing something? Is there a better way to ration my attention? What do you think?

Is Email Still Relevant In This Web 2.0 World?

Okay, to start I must admit my blogging has been slagging quite a bit lately. I'd like to say I'm all over it from here on out, but I can't say that I will be. I'm on Twitter now and while blogging is a fantastic outlet for more complex topics of discovery, I find Twitter relevant, easy and I have much greater reach there than here. (Maybe you could subscribe to this blog and help change that!)

But what loving Twitter has made me contemplate is: Where does email fit into all of this? There are definitely bouts of email immunity out there in the world, but I'm not sure that is the most pressing issue for most of us.

Over 90% of business communication is still conducted over email. We learned in the Ashton Kutcher v. CNN battle that 94% of CNN viewers are not on Twitter. So, there is still a major contingent out there, regardless of what the mainstream media wants us to believe, that are still monitoring their inbox for vital messaging in their work day. Day after day, week after week. Many still do not know what Twitter is.

When will Twitter take over the workplace like IM did? Well companies like SocialCast are hoping it will be soon. They have a great product. Makes a lot of sense. But the question becomes when? When will we tip to 140 characters over the free form platform of email?

Have any thoughts? Any speculations?

By the way: Who is John Galt?

Do You Know What The 3 Biggest Email Mistakes Are?

My buddy and fellow email management dude, Randy Dean, was just featured in a podcast interview where he talks about the three biggest mistakes he sees people make when it comes to managing their inboxes. He talks across the globe on email management to hundreds of companies and thousands of people, so he's seen it all.

Can you guess what the 3 mistakes are? They might surprise you.

Find out here. It's a quick and very informative listen.

Also, check out my updated Squidoo lens here. It reveals the new name for the book I'm attempting to write.

In Case You Don't Quite Get Twitter Yet

Hear Evan Williams, one of the founders of Twitter, talk at TED about how Twitter is changing the world.

What's Your Email Intention?

So, why do you send email? Seriously, do you think about what your intention is behind sending an email? What do you really want to happen?

More than likely you'd say:

- to dispel information
- to persuade someone to do something
- to confirm information
- to delegate action

And, yes, these might seem like motivations, but consider context and consider intention. People say they got married because they were in love, but their intention very well may have been to marry someone who can support them financially. One is an acceptable motivation, while the other is their true intention.

So, consider your intention. Who are you sending the email to? At what time of day are you sending it? Is it the weekend? Who's copied? Suddenly, you're not just dispelling information or delegating action, right?

You may be:

- Covering your ass for something you put off doing
- Pointing blame in a different direction
- "Delegating" work you should actually be doing
- Perpetuating a 24/7 work culture
- Putting forth a false impression that you're someone who works late

So...
Have the integrity and grit to refrain from sending emails with negative intentions. Be honest with yourself in email and it can have a ripple effect throughout all of your business communications. Be bigger than the next guy. Know that it's okay to wait till Monday to respond. Know that by sending your subordinate a non-urgent email late on a Friday you're sending a cloaked message along with it that says, "Don't think about getting out of here early today."

It's not an easy thing to admit, but if you're serious about a remedy to your bloated inbox, this is a magnificent first step.

Top 11 List: Ban These Words From Your Emails

David Silverman at the Harvard Business blog had a great post today called, "10 Business Words to Ban."

My two favorites listed are "net-net" and "value add." There are some other humdingers, so you should check out the post in case you're wondering how annoying you really sound to other people.

David recommends banning them from your biz speak and I'd like to second him on that and relate it to the focus of this blog: email. When writing it's even more important to be cognizant of how you're using these outdated, no substance terms. Are you guilty of using them in email?

To make this a top 11 list, I'm adding one of my own. I commented on David's blog with my entry. Here's what I wrote:

How about: "Let me know if you have any questions?"
What are we really saying? I know I've probably just given you erroneous, confusing information so if you don't understand it, let me know? Or are we saying I know you probably don't feel like you can normally ask me a question, but in this case it's okay?

"Let me know if you have any questions" is a lazy out for lack of a better way to end a conversation or email.

How about you. Got a 12th?

This post is one from my "Email 50" project. The goal is to publish 50 consecutive posts providing helpful advice on how to do email better in this information overloaded world.

The Power Of P.S.

Have you sent an email to someone only to discover upon their response that they clearly didn't read your whole email? Because, of course, if they had read it they wouldn't have asked you the question you already answered right there in your original message...in paragraph seven!

This isn't a post about keeping your emails short (though you should), it's a post about love. Well, sort of.

Ever seen this written? "P.S. I love you."

The power of this statement is not the "I love you" part, but the "P.S." part.

It's a long known fact to copywriters that the most read part of a direct mail letter is the title. Second most read part of a direct mail letter? Yep, the P.S.

Why? Well, we're intrigued by the informality of it. The seemingly ad hoc nature of it. It's an afterthought. It's a piece that needs it's own context. It's an important thought to leave you with just here at the very end.

Well, lately I've been trying the P.S. trick in my own business emails to great success.

For example, I recently sent this as a P.S.:

"I really thought that webinar was great by the way. Can you forward me the slides?"

This is an email whose primary message was not answered for another 24 hours, but I had those slides within 20 minutes. The power of the P.S.

Again, if your email is a wall of words, the P.S. isn't going to mean much, but when you really have a request you'd like to make sure gets through. Try tagging it at the end as a P.S. Then come back here and let me know how that goes for you. I'm curious to hear.

The Resolution I Hope You Didn't Make This Year

So we're a couple days into the new year. You've no doubt tried to resist those left over sugar cookies and have maybe even hit the gym once already in an effort to kick start your resolution to lose weight. Or maybe you've made that connection with the old friend you've resolved to keep in better contact with. Or maybe you've cleaned out your inbox top to bottom because "this year's gonna be different!"

It Won't Be Different
Here's the truth. Next year won't be different from this year. You won't lose 20 pounds and you won't keep your inbox empty. The reason you won't is because you weren't doing those things -- or better yet, being those things, just 3 short days ago. How have you really changed since Wednesday?

You Can't Change Your Lifestyle
It's now become popular to explain how you're not simply going to diet to lose weight, you're going to change your lifestyle. We can thank Dr. Phil for that nugget, but the fact is changing your lifestyle is not the goal.It is the effect of achieving your goal. Your goal should be specific. You don't want to lose 20 pounds, you want to stop eating french fries 4 times a week. You don't want to have a more manageable inbox, you want to create 3 email accounts and use them accordingly: business, personal and inbound only. By making incremental steps toward a broader reaching goal, your lifestyle will change, but not because you set out to do it, but because you're becoming someone new.

Resolutions Are Bunk
Being specific or not in your goals, of course, really isn't the point either, though when setting goals it's where your head needs to be. No, resolutions are bunk because they imply a future state. You're resolving to do something. You're not doing it now, you're going to do it. That mentality is why you'll not achieve your weight loss or keep in touch with your friend or keep your inbox empty. You're not doing it today so you won't do it tomorrow. Resolutions are for people who want to dream, who want to talk about what they'll be someday.Doers do...today.

You Should Be Different
What if you tried something different? What if every day, every single day, you woke up in the morning and resolved to do something? Make resolving part of what you do every day, or, better yet, who you are every day -- continually striving for more. Don't blow off October, November, and December because you know this new idea, endeavor, desire, or want would be better suited as a new year's resolution. Resolve October 1st to call your friend. Not in the future, not next year, right now on October 1st. Resolve on October 2nd to create your 3 email accounts, resolve on Oct 3rd to not eat french fries on that day. Resolve right now, right this very moment, to be more resolute...more often.

Don't get suckered into the cultural vacuum of new year's resolutions. Be the change. Resolve daily. The resolution I hope you didn't make this year is the one you did.

How Much Attention Do You Think We Have?

It's about headlines.
Seth Godin's post today about headlines catapulted me from my den of complacency and apathy (check out the date of my last blog post) back into the sphere of inspired blogger. That's what happens when you read something that resonates. In fact, I've said something similar before about how subject lines of your email should be like headlines...or else.

Or else: No one will read them anymore.

Our attention is stretched.
Our energy tapped. Send me an email with no subject line? Well, I delete most of them, sight unseen. Reply to an old email from me, keep the same subject line but start a new topic within the email body? Gone! Keep it vague and simple? Like "Project Update." Bottom of the priority list.

It's a headline world, like it or not.
If you want to get responses to your email and, let's face it, there are a few of us who still do, then you'll need to take the time to make it worthy of attention. Pique my curiosity. Make it impossible for me not to open it. Grab me by the throat and promise to let go only upon opening.

Here are some subject lines that, if found in my inbox today, would prompt an immediate open:

1. URGENT: Blago mentioned your name today
2. Action Required:  In 2 days the failure of this project will be your fault
3. You're the only one not attending. Why?
4. She said she knew you
5. 7 reasons why you're the only one that can help

Get the idea? Here are some hints: urgency, relevance, timeliness, accountability. Bring these elements into your headline/subject line and find yourself cutting through the noise, getting responses and fast!

Bring the bourbon, not the egg nog.

Lastly, my complete podcast interview is now available at Jim Canterucci's podcast website. Tell your friends to listen to it then tell you if it's worth listening to. Check out the other interviews he has published as well. Some really great thought leaders like Chris Brogan, Scott Ginsberg, and Jeffery Gitomer are just a few.