Does Your Blog Need Video?

More and more people are incorporating video in their blogs. Many others have no doubt thought about it but are not sure how to go about it or what is involved, technically, financially or in time commitment.

Video Marketing Expert Gideon Shalwick has done the hard yards and has now shared some valuable information on the subject.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I have spent the past hour reading through Gideon’s  free Rapid Video Blogging book.

I am impressed by the quality of the information that Gideon has shared. I know having done other video marketing courses that the Video Coaching program Gideon is offering is excellent value.

Not only will you learn how to set up your YouTube channel, you will learn how to use the excellent Thesis WordPress theme and understand how search engine optimization (SEO) works for both your channel and your blog.

I also liked the interview that Gideon did with Fran Kerr who has been very successful with her video blog on health. When you get the download link for the PDF you can get access also to this live case study of someone who makes a fulltime income from YouTube and her blog.

To download your copy of the report all you have to do is click on the image below and  provide your email address and name:

The time has come to set up a regular schedule for my blog posts

I’ve been aware for a long time that having a schedule in place for my blog posting would increase the likelihood of more frequency, and would quite likely have a positive impact on the quality of the posts overall.

I acknowledge I’ve resisted the idea. Part of my not completely sub-conscious rationalization has been that having a schedule might inhibit my creativity or my capacity to write more inspirationally. My conscious mind knew that was rubbish.

The decision

But today I decided it was time for a change, time for a proper schedule.

An online search showed there was no shortage of blog posts available on the topic. Some I found thought-provoking or helpful, or both. Some covered the bigger picture, including research for your posts, commenting on other blogs and so on. My focus was on getting clues for the more immediate process of drafting and publishing the actual posts.

The wisdom of others

The first post on this topic to catch my eye was Blogging Schedule by my friend Robyn Tippins. This was written just over four years ago and includes some includes some practicalities about blogging when people have daily responsibilities for young children.

Then from 2007 there was good advice from the blogging maestro Darren Rowse (Problogger) in Plan Your Next Week’s Posting Schedule

In May last year Jacob Stoops provided a detailed explanation for those interested in using Google Calendar for their schedule.

One post I found quite fascinating was from late last year by Alex, at 16 years of age indisputably in the “digital native” camp, who nevertheless finds paper works best to help him keep on track with his schedule. His post How to create a blogging schedule you will stick with is eminently practical:

So since apps aren’t “in your face enough,” I write down my daily tasks on a piece of paper and stick it onto my cork board by my desk. Now, my sched­ule is always in the corner of my eye when I work and I will know that I have things to do that day.

Organizing my schedule

So from all the advice I’d read, how will I schedule my posts?

As a start, I’m applying these five guidelines:

1. at least one post on each day Monday through Friday – weekend posts optional
2. a structure with a theme for each day of the week
3. aim for short posts (so as not to get stuck writing long ones – which a lot of people won’t read anyway!)
4. list each day’s topic in my paper diary and check off each day when done
5. track progress and monitor for any improvement in traffic, review at the end of the month

I have a topic list will share that in a separate post.

My own thirty day challenge

In just a few days over a month from now it will be six years since I launched the first version of this Thinking Home Business blog, on Typepad, so I’m taking a deep breath and committing myself to a one month blogging challenge. A thirty day challenge, although not a commitment to blog on each of the thirty days – rather to produce a blog for every week day over that period.

Do you use a schedule for your blog posting? Or perhaps you tried it and it didn’t work? Care to share what has worked (or not) for you?

Mack Collier’s Sunday night #blogchat discussion on Twitter wins fans

One of the neat things that has happened on the social networking platform Twitter is the emergence of “hashtag chats”, where the use of a # hashtag in a tweet lines that tweet up in a discoverable stream of tweets using the same hashtag.

Anyone can make a hashtag. Not all of them attract attention.

One that has is #blogchat, set up by blogger Mack Collier – @MackCollier – on Sunday nights 8-9PM Central Time, for discussion about blogging.

That works out as late Monday morning for me and although I had other plans for what I was going to do today I found the discussion on #blogchat so engaging that some of those plans experienced some slippage.

From some of the tweets, today as on other days, I saw that I am not alone in thinking #blogchat well worth the time spent in following the discussion. There is also the fact that I got to connect with a number of bloggers I might not otherwise have discovered.

Blogging raises questions

A paradox I have learned from years of blogging and talking about blogging is that while blogging is basically a simple process it seems also to have an inexhaustible capacity to generate questions.

It is simple because with the right advice and guidance it doesn’t take much to set up a blog and get started blogging.

But once you get serious about blogging, there are marvellous possibilities for variation and relative complexity, especially when you start to delve into such aspects as the mysteries of search engine optimization (SEO).

Not to mention the scope for quite basic questions to arise, such as the hardy perennial of which blogging platform to use.

So where does the work from home professional go with questions about blogging?

From what I’ve seen to date, the Twitter #blogchat stream would be a good place to start. The tweets reflect quite a wide spectrum of knowledge and experience of blogging, from people just starting out to quite seasoned practitioners.

As one might expect, there is no shortage of opinions delivered with supreme confidence as the *only* answer to some questions and if you tried to follow all the advice given on #blogchat you would go totally barmy. But there is plenty of useful information being shared.

So, as long as you maintain some objectivity and think about what you want to achieve rather than what someone else thinks you should do, you should be able to get some valuable information and some good tips – “tricks of the trade” so to speak – as I do each week on #blogchat.

Would love to know how you go if you try it.

If I wrote a new book on business blogging, what would be a good list of topics?

It seems to me that with blogging, as with anything you’ve been doing for a sufficient length of time, it’s easy to fall into the way of thinking that some things are quite obvious, even though they weren’t obvious to you when you started.

The thought has been prompted by a few conversations lately, where I’ve been reminded that, although no one seems to look quizzically any more at the mention of blogs or blogging, for many people the purposes and practicalities of blogging, especially business blogging, are still not evident.

And there seems to be interest being expressed in actually blogging, by quite a few people who have up till now not shown such interest.

So much so that I’ve been thinking about doing a fresh book on the topic.

Like my e-book 7 Step Business Blog, a new book would be written for the (primarily) non-technical business owner who wants to get started and keep going, safely and productively.

A lot has changed since I wrote 7 Step Business Blog in 2005-06 – which is why I don’t sell the book any more, although it has been updated a couple of times and is now available free of charge for anyone interested in downloading it.

I’m thinking one of the key challenges for a new book will be in situating blogging appropriately within the broader framework of social media, which has evolved dramatically since I started writing that earlier book back in 2005.

My sense however is that some of the key challenges will be pretty closely aligned with the key challenges back in 2005.

Consider, for example, this list of topics which formed the agenda for the Blog Business Summit which according to my records was held in Seattle back in 2005:

Keynote Address:  The Blog Advantage

Blog Business Models: What Strategies Make Money

Building Traffic: Posting isn’t Enough!

The Entrepreneurial Blog: Monetizing Your Interests

Picking a Platform: Blogging Engines Compared

True Voice: The Art and Science of Blog Writing

Good Blog Design: Speed, Accessibility, Transparency, and Clarity

Corporate Blogging: Strategy and Policy Marketing

Strategies and Tactics: PR and Beyond

Dealing with Bloggers: Partnering and Defense Strategies

Enhancing Internal Communications with Blogs, Wikis, and More

Media Blogging: Podcasting and Beyond

On the last item in the list, Media Blogging: Podcasting and Beyond, I find it a fascinating illustration of the speed of change that video, now so big, wasn’t deemed worthy at that time of even a mention in the list. The topic “Dealing with Bloggers: Partnering and Defense Strategies” would now have to be re-worked to relate to Facebook, Twitter and other social platforms.

And with the effective takeover by WordPress of at least the non-enterprise blogosphere, the discussion about blogging platforms would have to be different now.

But still an interesting list.

Assuming I go through with the idea of producing a new book on blogging, I’d love to hear suggestions from readers of this blog as to what to include in the book.

Please share your thoughts here in the Commenst, or via the Contact page. I will appreciate that very much.

The Top Sites page on this site now has news aggregated from leading sites about work from home

Recent visitors to this site may have noticed an innovation, with the Top Sites page showing feeds from a number of sites.

What prompted me to set this up was my frustration on a few occasions in trying to find interesting and informative sites on home based business.

There was no shortage of sites on or about working from home, but it was a chore ploughing through the ones which were very basic in terms of content and essentially just promo sites for specific products or landing pages for an MLM business (not that there’s anything wrong with that, just not the content richness I’m looking for).

So I decided to set up an aggregation site here on Thinking Home Business, along the lines of Popurls and Alltop. Hence Top Sites.

The explanatory note on the Top Sites page reads:

This page incorporates RSS feeds for sites related to home based business. It is a work in progress. While I would like to build up over time a substantial set of feeds from useful and/or interesting sites, I am not in a hurry. I should say also that my decisions will be guided largely by my quite subjective views about relevance and quality. Maybe I’ll make up some guidelines on that. In the meantime, if you know of a site which you feel would be a good inclusion here please let me know via the Contact page. That could be your own site.

I’m pleased to say that the first sites to be listed here are all high quality sites and I look forward to adding more progressively.

In fact, I’m wondering why I didn’t do this a while ago.

Actually, given that the home based business sector is so huge, well established and fast growing, I’m surprised there is not a page on Alltop for sites focused on the sector. But when I searched today the only category that came up for a search on “home” was Home Automation. I’ve been a fan of Alltop pretty much since it launched and my Des Walsh dot Com site has been featured there on the Social Media pages, but to this day there is no evident sign of any interest in sites to do with working from home, working at home, or home based business.

Maybe it would help if I submitted this site to Alltop and proposed a new category?

In the meantime, I’ll get on with the job here.

As I say on the Top Sites page, if you have a site to do with working from home or know of one, and think it would work well here, please let me know – contact details here. Please understand that, at least at this early stage, I’m going to be terribly subjective about what goes in and what doesn’t. It’s not for nothing that the title of this post refers to My Top Sites (not The Top Sites) although naturally I hope the selection will meet with the approval of well-informed folks.