Born to Blog: Building Your Blog for Personal and Business Success One Post at a Time

By Mark Schaefer and Stanford Smith

Launch a business and ignite a movement with a powerhouse blog!

Born to Blog is filled with practical, street-smart techniques and ideas to help you create and manage a winning business blog. Learn how to attract a loyal following, promote your blog, and write powerful content that generates new business.

"If your dream is to launch a business or publish a book, then read Born to Blog! You'll realize the blogger way is your fastest path to success." -- MICHAEL STELZNER, founder of Social Media Examiner and author of Launch

"Born to Blog makes blogging accessible and fun for anyone. Read it, use it, and watch your business grow." -- JAY BAER, founder of Convince and Convert and coauthor of The Now Revolution

"Read this book, then go blog like you were born to do so." -- JASON FALLS, founder of Social Media Explorer and coauthor of No Bullshit Social Media and The Rebel's Guide to Email Marketing

"Blogging beginners and seasoned pros alike will find valuable advice they can put to use immediately." -- LEO WIDRICH, cofounder, Buffer

• Language: English
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
• Release date: Apr 5, 2013
• ISBN: 9780071811170

Mark Schaefer

Mark Schaefer is the University Chaplain at American University (AU) in Washington, DC, and Director of AU’s Kay Spiritual Life Center, one of the oldest interfaith centers in the United States. With degrees in language and law, and with nearly two decades serving in young adult campus ministry, he also serves as an Adjunct Professorial Lecturer at AU and Wesley Theological Seminary, teaching courses in Religion, New Testament, and Biblical Greek.

Book preview

Index

Introduction:

Were You Born to Blog?

We love to blog.

In fact, it is the best part of our jobs. And we’ve had some success—both of us have developed successful personal blogs that have led to new business connections, personal and business benefits, and yes, even new customers.

We’ve also built blogs for dozens of organizations from Fortune 500 giants to small retailers, schools, government agencies, and nonprofits.

Blogs are the content engine driving the social web. In addition to providing a unique voice of authority, they are undeniably critical to any digital marketing initiative. Even if nobody reads them, blogs are a powerful contributor to search engine optimization efforts, creating PR opportunities, and providing a platform in a time of crisis.

The many important and proven benefits of blogging led us to have many lively conversations around this one question: Why do so many blogs suck … and what can we do about it?

The idea for this book was born!

To let our personalities come through in this text (which will make it so much more interesting), we’ll occasionally pause and tell individual stories to make a point. Let’s start that now.

MARK: My blog {grow} was squarely in the suck category for nearly a year. I started it as an experiment. After all, if I was going to consult about marketing and teach it, I needed to immerse myself in the new media.

As a classically trained marketer, I started my blog with a well-defined marketing message that I wanted to deliver to my target audience of business prospects. It sounded good on paper.

Two things happened. First, nothing happened! I just got no traction at all and very few comments or engagement for months. Second, I became bored.

So instead of sticking to a script, I started to relax and just be myself and blog about whatever interested me. I told stories about my marketing journey and connected the dots between traditional marketing and social media. I challenged myself to try different styles. I let my funny side come through and experimented with video blogs.

Then, an amazing thing happened. Instead of me finding my target audience, my target audience found me! The blog started to grow and attract international attention. I was on to something, and this led me to reflect on the common themes of my success and the success of others. Was it possible for an individual, or a company, to be built to blog? What made the best blogs sing and hum with excitement?

STANFORD: I know the exact moment I became a Lady Gaga fan. It was June 29, 2010, the moment my post Lady Gaga’s 8-Point Guide to Larger than Life Blogging was published.

I wrote the post as a way to cleverly (in my opinion) point out how the pop icon and social media maven could offer some advice to new bloggers. I had run across a Rolling Stone article about Lady Gaga and immediately saw a decent blog topic.

In my gut, I knew that I had a cool concept. Lady Gaga was in the news after flipping off Mets fans, and I figured I could get a few extra eyeballs by drafting behind the news story.

The post took a week to write since I chickened out at least three times, refusing to publish the post until I had exhausted every excuse. The mouse icon hovered over the publish button for a full 10 minutes before I quickly clicked the button, stood up, and walked away from my desk.

It’s gone, I thought. Can’t do anything about it now.

Back then I was scared of my own shadow. I still believed that only renowned writers like Malcolm Gladwell or Seth Godin had the right to publish.

After taking a walk around the block, I returned to my desk to start my ritual of begging and pleading for attention on the interwebs.

I had a list of about 25 blogging bigwigs that I had been stalking on Twitter and discussion forums. I used Twitter to send each a direct message asking them to take a look at my Lady Gaga post. Then I waited, watching TweetDeck for mentions of the post.

In 10 minutes, Brian Clark from Copyblogger, a top-10 online marketing powerhouse, linked to the post. Next Chris Guillebeau, bestselling author of The Art of Non-Conformity, sent the link to his Twitter followers. Marketing expert Jay Baer weighed in, too, flooding my site with a new surge of curious readers.

I was transfixed.

I kept refreshing the page to get an updated count of the number of people who had retweeted the post. Every refresh added a new retweet translating into thousands of new people seeing the post.

Within three hours more than 120 people had retweeted the post, resulting in almost a half million impressions. I had my first hit post. I thought that was the end of the run.

I was wrong.

Three weeks later, I spotted a forum message from Brian Clark with an invitation to write a guest post for Copyblogger. This was a real coup since Copyblogger was known for being extraordinarily stingy with guest post slots.

I also was selected as a Top 50 Netsetter by Jade Craven, a respected networker and blogging talent spotter. The listing led to Pushing Social getting included in several other award lists and attracted hundreds of visitors to my new blog.

One blog post was the starting gun for a string of opportunities that led to new friends, business contacts, and a platform to help thousands of bloggers.

But something kept poking at me. Slowly over two years I put words to the question that became an obsession: Could anybody successfully start and grow his or her own blog?

A year ago, I decided to see if there were more people like me. It didn’t take me long to find them.

In fact, the web is packed with successful bloggers who are scared to death of blogging. They were as mystified by their success as I was. Puzzled, I read hundreds of About Me pages hunting for clues to their accidental success. I dissected an equal number of posts looking for their secret sauce—the magic that transformed them from shy scribblers into powerful and influential bloggers.

What we found surprised us. The bloggers we came to know and learned from all had common traits and applied a similar set of skills. Depending on the blog, they were dreamers, storytellers, persuaders, curators, or teachers. Some stuck with one dominant skill. Tim Mazurek, the publisher of Lottie + Doof, an award-winning food blog, is an engaging storyteller and uses his skill to bring his food recipes to life. Patricia Zapata from A Little Hut is a methodical and prolific curator of DIY crafting projects that are fun to make and eco-conscious too.

We realized that these skill sets aren’t exclusive to bloggers. We all have them, to some degree. We all dream about our future, tell stories, persuade and advocate for what we believe in, curate information and objects that matter to us, and teach in formal and informal ways.

What connects us is the challenge of finding the right medium for expressing ourselves and sharing what we’ve learned and observed. While technology has offered paper, canvas, radio, and TV, it’s only recently that we’ve had blogging as an elegant tool for expression and two-way dialogue.

Through blogs, we’ve gained the capability to express our thoughts while benefiting from the collective experience of readers. Along the way, we’ve discovered that blogging isn’t just a publishing tool, it’s a stage for our beliefs, values, and dreams. It’s a place to establish our personal power and help our companies stand out. Millions are discovering that once they step on that stage, they begin a process that transforms lives.

YOU HAVE THE SKILLS YOU NEED

Many people think blogging is an all or nothing deal. Either you have a talent for blogging or you don’t. This notion haunts us because it is wrong.

The goal of this book is to show you that anyone—with a little coaching—can blog. We’ll go one step further and argue that you already possess most of the skills you need to be an extraordinary blogger.

Blogging is also a tool that any business can use. It is not reserved for deep-pocketed corporations. The Born to Blog approach can transform every employee into a talented blog contributor. Instead of looking for the perfect blog writer, businesses can focus their attention on empowering individuals through the enterprise.

How to Get the Most Out of Born to Blog

We begin Born to Blog by examining the essential traits and five blogging skills that everyone possesses to some degree. Each of these skills can become the foundation of an effective blog. We show you how to recognize your particular skill and ignite it for your life and business writing.

Next we present you with specific business tactics and approaches that naturally flow from your business’s culture and unique value. We also explore how personal blogs can be used as a platform for turning hobbies into profitable businesses.

Then we examine the key characteristics of exceptional personal blogging. This will help you to identify and use your innate strengths to create and grow your own blog by examining the work of exceptional bloggers and their unique approach to creating blogs that matter.

Our Philosophy

Blogging and social media are a lightning rod for strong opinions and viewpoints. We know how easy it is to get distracted with minor details while missing the major principles. So we want to lay out our philosophy.

1. There Aren’t Any Right Answers (Yet). There are many bumper-sticker sayings in social media that masquerade as truth. While some are helpful, such as Be Human, others are so abstract that they are rendered useless: Be Authentic. We are not shooting for platitudes and are loath to contributing more buzzwords to the conversation. We are simply offering suggestions based on our observations and experiences. Experiment and use your own results to render an opinion on whether our points are right or wrong.

2. Respect Your intuition. Blogs influence their writers in unique ways. Pay attention to your instincts and let them guide your actions. Our goal is to give you tools for sharpening your perspective and expression of your beliefs.

3. Relate, Don’t Compare. There will always be a blog that is bigger and gets more readers or retweets than your own. Trust us—you don’t want to get in a comparison game with other bloggers. Instead, find the similarities and lessons you can learn from other blogs, but stay focused on your unique strength. In the end, you’ll protect your sanity and make quicker progress.

4. Why Before How. Born to Blog is an exploration of how blogging is changing people and businesses from the inside out. In the end, we believe that once you understand the connection, you will be able to use your blog in surprising new ways. It’s easy to get sidetracked by technical details and blogging tactics. A quick search on blogging will deliver hundreds of millions of articles on the practice of blogging. While we could fill this book with this type of information, it wouldn’t help you.

Instead we’ll tackle the inner game of blogging first. We’ll show you how to recognize the five core blogging skills you already possess and teach you how to put them to work for you and your business. Once you understand the spirit and mindset of exceptional blogging, you’ll have the confidence and vision to implement blogging tactics.

So let’s begin, with the help of a medical doctor who had a really, really lousy blog.

CHAPTER 1

The Common Traits

Reviews for Born to Blog

[publiusdb-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

If you're a novice, beginner, starting a blog in a new market, this might be the book for you.
As it is, though, I've been blogging for half a decade. Much of the advice in Born to Blog feels like rehashed advice, stuff I already know.

That said, if someone asks me how to start, I'll hand them this book, recommend they read it, and then suggest we get together to discuss how to apply it to their situation. There's no way to beat experience, but this can help provide a lay of the land for getting started.