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- Let Your Critics Be Your Best Friends
This guest post is by Barb Sawyers of Sticky Communication.
When I first started to write professionally, I hated people editing my work. To deal with these personal attacks, I would rant, cry, drink too much, and otherwise freak out.
But one day I parked my ego long enough to realize that many of these editors were highly skilled. Others knew more about the subject or the organization's perspective than I did. I needed them.
Working in corporate communication, I was still stuck with the busy-bodies who felt they had to contribute to the tangle of edits that approvals processes create. A few were convinced they were "adding value" by inserting lame jargon or grammar mistakes.
These ego critics drove me crazy, still do. But the wise ones helped me become a better writer, still do. That's why I seek out people with the skill and tough attitude to give me the criticism I need.
Seek out tough critics
With blogging and other content marketing, the more relaxed approach means many of us are spared the pain of the ego editors. But unless we’re writing for places with lots of editorial involvement, some of us don't receive the guidance that would help us reach the next level.
We may ask blog buddies to review our work for typos and glaring problems. But how many of these friends are skilled, knowledgeable, and strong enough to deliver the blows to demolish what's weak so we can replace it with something better?
Few people enjoy constructive criticism, but anyone who wants to become a better at blogging (or pretty much anything in life) has to learn how to handle the petty know-it-alls, open up to the wise ones, and grow. Many young people whose parents piled on the self-esteem building trophies have trouble with this.
Practice helps, too
But if young bloggers and content marketers combine this awareness with all the practice they get, now that everyone is tethered to a computer or similar device, what a force they can be.
I see my teenagers writing all the time, texting to friends and chatting online. I've been closely watching the blossoming of my daughter Maddy, who will be going to university this fall. In addition to her natural talent, Maddy gets top marks for her essays and other written material because she's getting comfortable with having her ideas and writing challenged.
For example, with a recent paper about literary censorship she read various perspectives and tossed them around in her head. Then, over a pleasant meal, she told me what she was thinking about writing. I challenged her, not to be controlling or mean, but to encourage her to refine her thinking.
After dinner, she wrote her first draft. The next day, she asked me to take a look.
In addition to pointing out the grammar flubs and awkward phrases, I told her where her arguments were weak or her connections loose. Without me, her talent would have carried her. But because she opened herself to constructive criticism, she went farther.
Separate the wise from the wacky
Better still, her fellow students in her Writers' Craft course critique each other. Let me confess that at first I didn't enjoy seeing these kids nitpick an essay I'd reviewed. But most of them made good points, we agreed. Maddy ignored suggestions from the ego editors only when she could make a strong case to her teacher.
If she's going to work in any field that involves writing, and so many do, she'll have to learn from other people, defend herself, and sometimes suck it up. I hope she starts out with thicker skin and a more open mind than I did.
This constructive criticism, let me add, is a two-way street. As a freelance writer who should have her work checked before it goes to a client or my blog, I appreciated being able to ask my daughter to help. Far more valuable than catching my typos is her frequent comment: "Mom, this doesn't make sense."
I'm already worried about what I'm going to do once my favorite critic leaves home. Thanks goodness our wired world means we can stay connected between Toronto and Montreal.
Bring it on
While I enjoy the "awesome post"-type comments, I love people who argue, suggest, or otherwise add to the discussion.
So readers, please tell me how you would improve this post or challenge my advice. I need you.
Toronto writer, blogger and educator Barb Sawyers is the author of Write Like You Talk Only Better, the secret to pulling ideas out of your head and onto the page.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
Let Your Critics Be Your Best Friends
Переслать - How to Source and Host a Guest Post Series
Yesterday, we published the second post in a series of guest posts written by author Greg McFarlane here at ProBlogger. And recently you’ll have noticed our multi-author series on generating blog comments.
So today I thought it might be interesting to talk about the thinking behind trying out series, and step through some of the pitfalls you’ll want to avoid if you consider hosting a guest post series on your own blog.
A little history…
If you’re a regular ProBlogger reader, you’ll know that we really love to feature other bloggers here. This is something that’s really important to me, as a way to give back to the blogging community by providing a platform for exposure and learning opportunities.
Over the years I’ve tried a variety of approaches to publishing guest posts, as I’ve found that audience preferences and interests change over time, as the industry and technology evolve. In an effort to go more deeply into specific topics, I decided to try building series into my guest posting schedule this year. I’m hopeful that this approach will have a few advantages for my readers:
- a deeper, richer look at certain topics
- the chance to publish curated content written by topic experts, which would put my readers in direct contact with bloggers who focus specifically on the questions that you have
- more coherent opportunities to learn from experienced bloggers
- stronger opportunities for readers to connect with others who were also following the same series closely, and so share your interests or issues.
Commissioning a series
If, like me, you rely on would-be guest posters to come up with the topics that they want to write about, creating a series will probably require you to change your approach a little.
Firstly, and most obviously, you’ll need to commission the series—ask a blogger, or group of bloggers, to write the content. This can be a big shift for some bloggers, but if you’ve established a good rapport with your guest posters, and know where their interests lie, you should be able to come up with a good plan for a series, and put a name against each post (or the series as a whole) fairly easily.
My plan for the single-author series we’ll start publishing tomorrow began with a goal I gleaned from my ProBlogger census: teach some methods for selling blog products in a tough economy.
From there, you could map out the series yourself, listing the topics you want each article to cover. That’s probably a good way to set your own expectations of what the series should contain, to make sure it meets your readers’ needs.
However, my content manager Georgina decided to take a looser approach to commissioning the series. She got in touch with a blogger she felt had expertise in the field of monetization and finance, explained the goal to them, and invited them to submit a series outline if they were interested.
This can be a riskier approach—especially if you’ve never commissioned content for your blog before. To give you an idea of how she pitched the idea to the author, I asked her to forward me the email she sent. Here’s what it said:
“A few people in the ProBlogger census commented that they’d like to get ideas for selling products during hard economic times. Some are selling luxury items; others aren’t, but say they target “frugal audiences.” I’m not sure where I’d go with this, but I’m guessing the series might cover issues like:
- audience targeting and close segmentation
- understanding needs/getting inside the heads of readers so you can understand what they might buy
- understanding actual buying motivations
- trying different approaches to pushing hot buttons with everything from marketing strategy to product strategy to copywriting in the effort to hone the approach to be most effective
These are just some ideas off the top of my head; I’m sure you’d have plenty of others. What we’d be looking for would be structured, prescriptive, perhaps tutorial-style content that readers could work through at their own pace.
I’m not sure if this is the kind of thing you’d enjoy working on, or if it sounds like too much work. I have another author in mind for it if you’re not keen, but I thought I’d run it past you first in case you are. Let me know either way.”
From there she was able to work with the author to map out a coherent series, but if she’d been inviting a number of authors to write the series, a clearer brief for each piece would probably have been needed.
Managing series submissions
Creating a guest post series requires you as the blogger to take on a lot of responsibility—perhaps more than with usual one-off guest posts. This is because you need to make sure that each piece in the series fits the need you’ve identified within your audience, and that it works with the other parts of the series to form a coherent whole.
A good, clear, bullet-point series brief will help you to make sure the author or authors stay on track, and should make it fairly easy to see if anything’s missing. You might want to set a schedule for delivery of the content with your author or authors, just so everyone knows when to expect the content, as well as what to expect.
Setting the publication schedule
When you contact the author/s (and when you’re planning the writing schedule with them) you might want to give them a rough idea of when you’d like to run the series on your site, as this will help motivate you toward getting the job done.
When we decided to schedule this series, we had to consider the rate of publication, as well as the dates themselves. With the comments series we ran, we decided to publish the posts on consecutive days, but with this single-autho series, we opted for weekly publication of each article—and to publish the pieces on the same day each week (Friday) for five weeks.
The reason we did this was that we didn’t want to swamp the site with a single voice for five days straight. For years, ProBlogger has presented multiple voices over the course of each week, so it didn’t feel right to narrow that scope to a single author for a week.
Also, I know that not every ProBlogger reader is interested in monetizing their blog, or monetizing through products. So to publish on such a targeted topic for five days straight would risk boring a portion of readers—which is the last thing I want to do!
Finally, as Georgina’s original email explains, the series is intended to be practically helpful, so we wanted the people who were following it to have a chance to take on and digest the information the series presents. Daily publication of a series like this might overwhelm readers—again, not something we wanted to do.
If you’re publishing a multi-author series, however, daily publication may be appropriate, especially if the ideas are simple to grasp (as was the case with our series on comments). Ultimately, how you schedule your series will depend on the topic, your audience, and your regular publishing schedule.
Tips for a successful series
- Know what you want, and be clear about communicating that to your author or authors.
- At the same time, let the author develop the content using their knowledge and skills—you chose them for their expertise, so let them use it.
- Don’t start publishing a series until you have all the parts of it in hand, and you’re happy with all of them.
- Don’t forget to interlink parts within the series as they publish, so that the content remains useful for as long as possible after publication.
- Work with the author/s to get as much traction from the series as possible, perhaps using social media, comments, etc. to maximize exposure and conversation or buzz.
Have you ever run a guest post series on your blog? Do you have any tips you can add—or questions you’d like answered? Let us know in the comments.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
How to Source and Host a Guest Post Series
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