trendpreneur

With the immense prevalence of Twitter apps, hacks and mashups out there, the concept of a new idea is fast becoming a fallacy. However, I have a problem, and I’ve not yet found a handy solution.

This particular problem, as alluded to here and with various Tweets I’ve sent, is one of catching up. Before the anti-Twitter brigade get going, let’s be clear here: this isn’t just a Twitter-related problem. I subscribe to users on FriendFeed who post items there, and 95% of my Facebook friends post everything on Facebook; I’ve also got a (long unused) set of Livejournal contacts who routinely post interesting stuff, not to mention the number of blogs and del.icio.us feeds I subscribe to and don’t bother reading.

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Following on from last week’s post about finding sources, today I’m looking at the rest of the professional blogger’s daily pipeline.

Once you’ve found something to write about, it’s time to sit back, relax and let your blogger instincts do the rest. Right? Perhaps. Once you get into the habit of posting multiple times a day on the same site, a lot of the following stages in a post’s lifecycle do become second nature, but when you’re starting out it’s useful to run through the checklist in your head.

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Today I met a personal goal of mine that I started last summer. It hasn’t been an easy ride, but by gradually setting smaller goals while focusing on the big picture, altering fundamental behaviour and habits, keeping things interesting with experimentation and adding a social element, it’s seemed a lot easier than it really was. I’ve learned a lot about goal-setting and achieving as a result, but many blogs cover these topics — what I haven’t seen written about as much is what happens next.

Depending on the goal, meeting it is everything. Once that deadline’s over, that mountain scaled, you’re done. For more generic, ongoing goals – things like “I want to manage my money”, “I want to get fit”, you’re putting changes in place while achieving the goal that will help you maintain the end state once you get there. However, without anything to motivate you to continue, it’s easy to slip from the mark.

What I’ve done is extend my goal. I’m happy with what I’ve achieved, but having something slightly further away – and a lot harder – to work towards is going to keep me motivated. I’ve also built in other life goals into this one, combining fitness goals with personal finance and development ones, so I’m motivated to work on other areas as well as focus on the one I know I can achieve.

I will briefly reiterate the most common piece of life-hack advice when it comes to goal setting: be specific and set a deadline (yes, yes, be SMART). It makes the moment when you reach that goal very tangible, and also extremely awesome.

It’s a nice dream, that of the aspiring problogger. Address a fascinated Internet audience daily about a topic you – and they – love, while earning money? Too good to be true!

If you work as part of a blogging team for a large site, chances are you will be tasked to come up with multiple daily posts on the blog’s topic. While inspiration and introspection can get you so far, the job of keeping content fresh and covering breaking news means you need to establish good work habits, particularly if you’ve only blogged as a hobby before.

Blogging breaks down into handy steps:

• Find something interesting to write about
• Write about it
• Add appropriate images
• Add metadata: internal and external links, tags, etc
• Schedule
• (Optional) Promote
• Babysit – Edit, update, monitor comments

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I have to share this excellent post on ThinkVitamin: 15 tips for freelancers starting their own business. It really drives home some of the transitions you have to make from working on your own to becoming a proper business, with other people and everything.

#10 and #15 are particularly interesting. I love being the person in the middle; if someone approaches me with something that’s not quite up my street, it’s very satisfying to refer them on to someone who will do a great job — I enjoy the matchmaking itself, that sense of making connections in your head and being useful to others, far more than the hard-nosed ‘well, they’ll both thank me for it’ business approach.

As for taking notes with a notebook, a habit I’ve adopted since my university days is to simply listen to what the other person is saying and remember it, rather than scribble down every other word and not really pay attention. I don’t do well with the in-one-ear-out-the-other approach, I prefer to challenge myself to think, to listen, and to recall the important points of the conversation later (and then note them down). Should I start writing as I go? I suppose it depends on the conversation. If I’m talking to someone about how I can customise my software to their needs, not writing down their requirements might seem a bit funny.

I also love the brusqueness of “learn how to deal with different personality types”. Whether you choose Helen Fisher’s chemical-inspired 4-way classification, Myers-Briggs indicators, Merrill Reid or others, personalities do tend to fall into four different classes and you can categorise people according to their dominant and secondary traits. However, it seems to me that instinct can get you a long way; learn what sort of person you have difficulty dealing with, what the key turn-offs for you are, and don’t worry about fitting people into boxes along the way.

[image from Guille on flickr]