Guest blogger Randa Clay is a designer and marketing consultant providing custom web site design, blog design and customization, and logo design. Randa can be found online at her main site, personal blog, and two other niche blogs.
7 Habits of Highly Effective People is a mega best seller and has influenced the way many people approach the business of life. I’d like to review these 7 habits and see how they might help us all be a bit more effective in the virtual world. With apologies to Mr. Covey, I’m going to rearrange the order just a bit.
- Begin with the End In Mind.
Before you begin a blog, clearly lay out what your purposes are for it. Having a specific “end” in mind will guide you through the design and implementation of the site, as well as through the planning of posts and categories. Do you intend to build your business? Choose a theme that is clean and uncluttered. Do you intend to monetize it? Design the site so that ads will be optimally placed, while not obscuring your content. One of the most important questions may be who you want your audience to be. Plan your blog with your primary audience in mind. - Put First Things First.
What are your highest priorities for your blog? To help others? To make extra income? To entertain? Keep your priorities front and center every time you write a new post. It’s very easy to lose focus when blogging, and you find that you’ve gone a month without writing anything that reflects the true intention you had for the site in the first place and your readers start to drop like flies. - Think Win/Win.
Blogs that are purely self-promotional can quickly fizzle out. Be outwardly focused, rather than self-focused. Think about how you can help your readers. People will come in droves if you help them solve problems, become more successful, or even just regularly make them laugh out loud. They win and then you win by maintaining a loyal readership. Link generously to other bloggers and to those who contribute to your site by commenting . Aiding in the success of your readers and your fellow bloggers will be profitable in the long run. - Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood.
Seeking to understand what your readers’ needs are and what solutions they’re looking for will help you to provide the most valuable content. If you’ve defined who you want your audience to be, make sure you understand them. For example, if one of your goals is to gain more subscribers to your feed, but your target audience is comprised of those who might be less experienced with the internet and blogs, they may not even know what a feed is. Understanding that, you can easily address the issue by including a “what is this?” link which will provide more information, and maybe even feature an e-mail subscription more prominently than the feed reader option. - Synergize.
Find other bloggers in your niche that you respect and work with them rather than against them. Some might think this sounds a bit counterintuitive – “shouldn’t I be competing with other blogs in my niche for readership?” Let me give you an example: I have a site called FreeStuff4Kids and I met someone a couple of months ago who has a site called Printables4Kids. Both sites provide good content while being heavily monetized, and it would seem at first glance that rather than sharing ideas, we would want to keep them to ourselves in order to come out on top. However, because we collaborate and share ideas, we send traffic back and forth between our sites and hope to sort of “corner the market” in our niche. By helping each other succeed, we are both more successful. - Sharpen the saw.
Get away from the computer once in a while and do something recreational or creative. This will have a positive effect on your writing as well as your general wellbeing. It will also keep your rear end from becoming permanently flat. - Be Pro-active.
Being “proactive” means taking responsibility for everything in your life. When you’re reactive, you blame other people and circumstances for obstacles or problems. I recently read a blog that contained multiple posts complaining about how horrible the A-list bloggers were that they would never link to his blog, and how this circumstance and that person caused him to lose readership – it was all “their” fault. If you choose to believe that others are responsible for your ultimate success or failure, well, that’s unfortunate. If you choose to adopt that tone in your blog, you will probably find a readership of those who also feel that way and you can commiserate together endlessly. The rest of us don’t have time for it.
Technorati Tags: randa clay, stephen covey, covey, 7 habits, effectiveness, blogging, habits, planning, priorities, monetizing, design
17 Comments
you were wondering... I believe in rewarding commenters!
Nice cool tips and just 7. Indeed, going out into the real world does makes wonders for the creative mind. It’s so refreshing.
Well done Randa! All of these tips are very meaningful - and I happen to like #5 the most - blogging is such a great way to meet like minded professionals and work together for everyone’s success.
That is completely ironic that this was posted now. I posted the 7 habits of highly effective connectors a couple of hours ago. Random!
That’s very true. For point #6, I just come back from smelling nice spring roses. Hm very relaxing after been a while in front of computer.
Great post, Randa!
This might be one of my first visits to this blog. I like the layout, so good work Alister!
Great post. Thanks! concise and relevant
Great Post!, I am actually sharpening my saw right now. I just took a vacation
Great tips Randa!
I’m going hassle Alister to invite you back again!
Great post looks like i’ll have to put some of those things into Practice.
@Brent - very smooth, mate. Verrrrry smooth!!
@Nick - great minds think alike, as they say
Thanks everyone else for the kind words to Randa. It was a great, concise and thoughtful post. Well done.
Thank you!
This is a great post and I like especially parts 3, 5, and 7. I think just following these principles will not only make you an effective blogger but and effective person as well. Thanks for your insight.
i really need to “synergize” more. good tips!
Sometimes I wonder how people come out with simple tit bits on ways to be effective and successful. For me its time to get myself reorganized and work in the way u simply put.
Thanks Randa for sharing.
It’s kind of hard to find other webcomic blogs to trade links with, since wordpress isn’t the easiest webcomic platform. I modified my theme to work pretty well for webcomics, although it needs some work in IE6.
Good post. Enjoyed reading it. Keep it up
Hi Alister,
Thanks for this. I realized I need to think Win/Win a bit more.
Hovewer, you are a Wordpress user as well so you know that the current solution “Yes-or-No-nofollow” is not ideal at all.
If you go for “yes-nofollow” (the Wordpress default), you’ll have no comments. If you go for “no-nofollow”, you’ll get lots of rubbish.
I saw Ronda’s campaign and I am currently lobbying for better granularity with regards to power over the comment’s link-love.
Do you want do help with this issue? Vote for
wordpress.org/extend/ideas/topic.php?id=1112
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