Feeling Lucky With Business Blogging
March 19, 2007 by Des Walsh
Filed under Social Media
I’m only too happy to be joining my colleagues on the b5media business channel in some synchronized posting on the theme of luck.
Being so close to St Patrick’s Day, it’s a short mental jump to the expression “luck of the Irish”.
Or, as I’ve generally heard it pronounced, “luck ‘o the Irish”.
As even the most cursory lookup of the term on Google or Yahoo shows, the expression has historically a sizable slice of irony in it. And that’s the way I recollect hearing it in the transplanted and Australianised Irishness of my upbringing. In that sense, “she has the luck of the Irish” doesn’t mean at all that the person, any more than the Irish, only ever experiences good fortune. More along the lines of “well, with all the things she’s had to endure, isn’t it the luck o’ the Irish that she’s done so well now”.
And as I write, I’m thinking, I need a bit of the luck o’ the Irish to enable me to link this thread of thoughts to business blogging.
What surfaces for me is that luck is something you can help create.
Take the phenomenon of “bloggers’ block” – wanting to blog but don’t know what to write about. One way I handle that is to set up some filters for information and ideas from others in my field or a field I’m interested in, even if it’s not the primary focus of my blog. In other words, set your feed reader to catch items of interest.
Another tool I use is Google Alerts, which I can set to let me know when items appear in blogs or on the web generally, on a topic I’m interested in. One setting I have is for “business blogging”. On any given day the bulk of the alerts seems to be taken up by a mixture of out of date items and media releases to the effect that one or other person or organization has just launched a blog. But every now and then there is the germ of an idea for a post.
Today, for example, I was feeling a bit short of ideas and then I picked up an alert for a post on Blog Business Summit, about the WordPress blogging platform. That in turn took me to another blog and an interesting post about favorite blogging tools. All of this related to the Blogging Platforms series I’ve been doing here. So I wrote a post about it on my Thinking Home Business blog, which solved my blogger’s block challenge for the day, for that blog at least.
Luck if you like. Or just being prepared, so as to be able to deal effectively with bloggers’ block.
As the Roman philosopher and politician Seneca said a couple of thousand years ago, luck is when preparation meets opportunity.
A great way to get rid of blogger’s block is to read other related blogs and comment on what the other bloggers are saying. Sometimes their own thoughts will trigger ideas in your head that you can further expand upon in your own blog.
I have set topics I write about each week, so I always have something to write about. Plus my readers know what to expect. This works well for me.
Writing for one blog is challenge enough… coming up with interesting, insightful ideas for several of them is a whole other level of challenge. My hat’s off to you!
I have a box of ideas where I throw my ideas written on a piece of paper. Later when I have time and mood I will go and dig my box of ideas.