Since Flagship Blog Project: End of the first month (and start of the second) things have been a little hectic workwise - I’ve just had my first weekend totally clear of client work in several months and the batteries are slowly recharging 
In On Polyblogging I discussed the advantages of running multiple blogs (and the drawbacks).
My Flagship Blog Project entry for February 2008 is, accordingly, Polyblogging.com - Tips for Managing Multiple Blogs.
I’ve used the Mimbo theme - slightly modified in the same way as I did for On Blogging Australia.
There is not much there yet - it might take a while to start to be useful. I am going to add a few more posts before the end of the month prior to marketing the new blog.
Wish me luck
Just to bring you up to date: IntrapreneurBlog.com hasn’t changed much since my last post on the Flagship Blog Project. As previously mentioned, I did finish writing Intrapreneuring: A Process but I haven’t marketed the blog very much at all yet. The shell is there, it just needs filling with more pillar content.
But January is well and truly upon us, so I’ve been working on the next blog in the series - and it relates back to the Get A Real Blog series I wrote here. At the time, I grabbed the getarealblog.com domain name - what better way to distribute an ebook on blogging than through a blog?
So, ladies and gentlemen, I am proud to announce the birth of the Get A Real Blog ebook and the accompanying blog.
The blog is going to be about the ebook project as it progresses, so it will likely be fairly low-traffic and not in need of a content strategy as such. I admit that this is a bit slack The time this saves will allow me to work on some more pillar content for Intrapreneur Blog.
As a goal for this whole 12-month project, I would like to have eight of the twelve project blogs in the Australian Top 100 Blogs Index. I may not make it, but this is a worthy thing to aim for.
I know I’ve paraphrased this dozens of times, but here it is written out semi-formally - Boyd’s Law of Blog Link Acceptability:
Any link is acceptable to the reader provided it is relevant in context and adds clear value.
OK, so I didn’t invent this - other folks have been saying similar things for years about web links in general - but the title sounds cool
“Relevant in context” means that it makes sense - the linked material is directly related to the whole post in general, and the particular point suggested by the linked text. There are no unmet expectations or surprises. “adds clear value” means that the link is not there for the sake of the link but actually adds value to the reading experience. This applies equally to blogrolls, links within posts, and links within social linksharing applications.
What do you think?
Week 3 of the Flagship Blog Project didn’t go so well - the pre-Christmas work rush really got in the way. By December 22 I was supposed to have achieved the following:
I didn’t get the linkbait post finished until December 26 as Donna and I took Christmas Day off. I’ve since promoted it through Twitter, Bloggerati.com.au and coRank, but haven’t gotten to complete the other steps yet. Que sera sera.
In week 4, Maki asks us to look at setting up a sustainable system for growing the blog.
Week 4: Maintenance and Transition
- Ensure that hired writers write a few posts. Give feedback.
- Create a regular posting schedule for yourself or your writers.
- Develop a second link bait and release it on social media channels.
- Reduce the amount of time spent on the blog by 50%
- Make preparations to allocate time for the next cycle.
As I said earlier, I am not paying writers (yet, anyhow) for Intrapreneur Blog. What I will do, before the start of 2008, is:
There are memes everywhere in the lead-up to Christmas. Awards, gender-swapping on Twitter, and eight things.
Maria Murphy tagged me for the eight things meme. She said nice things about me:
Andrew Boyd — He is one of my friends who has encouraged me to blog. He has a lot of ideas and cares about others.
Thanks Maria, I will blush for sure now
Like all memes, this one is replicatable and encourages participation. Here are the rules:
- Link to your tagger and post these rules
- List EIGHT random facts about yourself
- Tag EIGHT people at the end of your post and list their names
- Let them know they’ve been tagged
So here are eight random facts about me:
- Random loud noises tend to freak me out but I find loud music soothing when driving - KMFDM, White Zombie, Hilltop Hoods and Metallica are current favourites.
- I once represented the ACT in TaeKwonDo at the Australian Nationals (yellow belt division, and I didn’t last long, but I was there!).
- I eat weird stuff for breakfast and love it - leftover Chinese takeaway is my favourite, but I also love leftover curry, leftover pizza, and Curry Tuna and Corn Soup.
- I do not have a whole degree - the two half degrees do not add up to a whole one Despite this, I manage to make a decent living as a consultant information architect (IA).
- I am interested in serial killers - not obsessively, but I did start MonsterWatch.net and I am a big fan of Dexter.
- In the past I have collected stamps, coins, science fiction paperbacks and cacti; bred fish, reptiles, parrots, poultry (including quail, fowl, waterfowl and pheasants); written science fiction, science fantasy, heroic fantasy and fan fiction; coded in C, C++, Modula 2, VBA, Java, Javascript, perl and PHP; moderated various online forums and pre-Internet, assisted friends with Bulletin Boards.
- I fear stupidity more than I fear sharks/lightning/savage dogs/spiders/venomous reptiles/heights/the number 13/voodoo/you name it put together - for stupidity kills more people than all these things combined.
- I once ate some rockmelon just before being very ill with food poisoning - it was not the rockmelon’s fault, I had eaten some dodgy lentils (Ronny Biggs was right - never trust a hippy!). Even though this incident took place more that 25 years ago, the smell of rockmelon still makes me feel slightly nauseous.
The eight people I would like to tag are:
- Meg Tsiamis of Dipping Into The Blogpond: Meg is an inspiration and a good blogfriend. She has done a lot for raising the idea of community within Australian blogging in a very short time - she promotes community first and herself a distant second.
- Snoskred: Snos gives 110% to all she touches.
- Darren Rowse: I am sure that Darren doesn’t get tagged by this sort of thing often enough He is one of my blogging heroes.
- Steve Collins: I razz Steve all the time about showing off his iPhone which he takes with good natured humour. Steve is a good guy and incredibly generous with his time.
- Ruth Ellison: Like many IAs, Ruth works too hard but still manages to get to my speaking engagements when she can - more so than many of my close colleagues, which is saying something.
- Seth Godin: where would intrapreneuring or marketing be without Seth?
- Zern Liew: a good example of blogging with a heart and an inspiration to Australian intrapreneurs and authors.
- Stephen Hall: my mentor and national service offering lead within SMS. The world is a poorer place for Stephen not blogging - he is a very good IA, the consultant’s consultant, and a good friend.
And the people I would have loved to have tagged but Maria got to them first
- Matthew Hodgson: Matt inspired me to blog properly and continues to inspire others.
- Donna Maurer: Donna inspires me every day to be a better IA and a better person.
As memes go, this is a fairly harmless one. Even if you aren’t tagged, I recommend that you get into it
In week 3, Maki asks us to market the blog.
Week 3: Marketing the Blog
I’ve started promoting Intrapreneur Blog as discussed in my last Get a real blog post. I’ve started promoting it via social media (claiming the blog on Technorati, creating a Squidoo Intrapreneuring Lens, and adding it to the BUMPzee Australian Blogs Community).
By 22 December 2007, I plan to do the following for Intrapreneur Blog:
Note: a little promotion goes a long way - I now have the number one spot for search term intrapreneur blog on Google.
I’m creating a content development strategy this week for Intrapreneur Blog as part of the Flagship Blog Project Week 2.
Maki’s advice is as follows:
Creating a Content Development Strategy for Blogs
- Decide the most important goal for your blog. For example, you might use blogging as a branding tool or a means to generate direct or indirect revenue.
- Make a list of content types that will achieve your goals. Create a weekly schedule which includes these content types (e.g. expert interviews, industry roundup, mullet baits or resource lists etc.)
- Observe the type of content that other blogs in your niche produce. Find an informational need that is poorly fulfilled by others and create content to plug the gap. Experiment with different content types to attract attention.
- Differentiate your blog by altering the content focus, type and format. Effective differentiation tactics involve creating a authorial persona, writing from experience, sharing your opinions and revealing your personality.
Following are my current thoughts. They may change, but they are an important starting point - and having something to compare against expected behaviour is the first step in a self-improving system.
Decide the most important goal for your blog.
I would like Intrapreneur Blog to (a) get famous and make me some money and (as a subsidiary goal) (b) spread awareness of intrapreneuring.
Make a list of content types that will achieve your goals.
Content types that fit the intrapreneuring niche are:
- Expert interviews (although I am not sure about expert interviews as a more than monthly thing - I’d be surprised if there are more than a couple of dozen expert intrapreneurs)
- Intrapreneur blog roundup (a set of links to other blogs that have covered intrapreneuring in the past week)
- Book reviews (again, only a few books around on intrapreneuring, so I can’t see this being more than a weekly thing until I run out of books to review)
- Tip of the week - now this one has some legs. The issues that intrapreneurs face are legion, and include include finding the pain, developing the solution, finding a champion, dealing with obstacles, managing successes as well as failures, and a lot more besides.
- A resource list on a separate page.
- News that is important to intrapreneurs - such as notable successes making it into mainstream media
Maki then suggests that I create a weekly schedule. Here goes:
- Monday: Interview/Book Review day (one or the other)
- Wednesday: Tip of the week
- Friday: Intrapreneur blog roundup
As a separate category, Intrapreneurs in the News will happen whenever new things come to hand.
Observe the type of content that other blogs in your niche produce.
There aren’t a lot of other blogs in this space - as a matter of fact, if you google on Intrapreneur Blog two of the top ten results are from earlier posts in the Get a real blog series. That said, I will be watching the following:
Differentiate your blog by altering the content focus, type and format.
Maki gives the following options for differentiation through content:
- creating a authorial persona,
- writing from experience,
- sharing your opinions and revealing your personality.
Of these, I’ll take the last two
So I’ve set this in motion by sending out an interview request for next Monday. Wish me luck
Intrapreneur Blog and I survived week one of the Flagship Blog Project I’ve put the story so far into the Get a real blog tweaking post.
In week 2, Maki asks us to develop a strategy for creating a stream of content.
Week 2: Developing a Strategy
- Develop a content development strategy.
- Start writing down content ideas and file them for future use.
- Create the necessary pages (Set up a great About page etc.)
- Subscribe to the RSS feed of news sources and notable blogs in your niche.
- Create an email marketing folder with contacts of blogs in your niche
- Create a list of social media channels that are relevant to the blog.
- Put up an ad looking for writers and monitor their applications.
- Write a few more posts for the blog.
Here is what I intend to do by Friday 14 December:
- Create a content development strategy (and this is a bit complex, so I will make it the subject of a separate post),
- Look at content sources (people I know that I can ask to contribute), the right mix of quality vs quantity, and affiliate links vs internal content,
- Think about adding an automated intrapreneuring news page,
- Look for social media channels that mention intrapreneuring and engage with them where possible (and I’ll include the BUMPzee Australian Blogs Community and Bloggerati.com.au in this search), and
- Write the outline of a blog series and a set of individual post headings.
As I said before, I won’t be engaging paid content writers for Intrapreneur Blog, at least not initially. It will be interesting to see what happens next
I’ve decided to put some subtle adverts back on On Blogging Australia and this blog. This article covers why I did it, and how.
The history: why the ads went away
I gave up on advertising on my main blogs after Meg’s megarant. At the time I decided that I didn’t want to be anything like John Chow. I still don’t. While his “make money at any price” philosophy is offensive, it also isn’t as sustainable as being a decent human being (like Yaro and Darren).
Why they are back
The ads are back because I promised Lightening that I’d write an article on how she could make a little bit of money with her blog. Advertising is part of this simple plan - and I didn’t feel right talking about it but not doing it myself.
How I put them back
The ads are in the post footer between the post text and the comment block - they look like this:
It is a fairly simple job to add advertising like this to the page footer in a self-hosted WordPress (also known as WordPress Multi User or MU) blog.
- In the Dashboard, go to Presentation > Theme Editor
- Select the Single Post template.
- Insert the code you want displayed between the <?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/theloop.php’); ?> and <?php comments_template(); ?> lines.
- Have a look at the result by selecting Update file then click on the View site link - and note that it will only show up when a single post is selected. If there isn’t enough space between the text and the ads, or the ads and the comments, put a few break <br> tags in and look at a single post.
That is all there is to it.
Time will tell if I do make much money from this strategy or not - I know that it does make a small amount fairly consistently. I’ll let you know
I announced via On Blogging Australia that I’d be joining in on Maki’s Flagship Blog Project. This involves setting up a new blog every single month for a year - the idea is that at the end of the year participants will have a dozen growing blogs.
I mentioned that I might also use it as an opportunity to rehabilitate some of the many blog projects that started well and then went by the wayside as I’ve concentrated on this blog and On Blogging Australia.
In week one, Maki has asked us to do the following:
Week 1: Setting up the Blog
- Research your intended niche and check out the competition
- Choose a domain name that is easily brandable.
- Pay for a good web host and set up Wordpress
- Hire a skilled designer or customize a free Wordpress theme
- Install all the necessary Wordpress plugins or addons
- Develop consistent branding (tagline, usernames, logos etc.)
- Optimize the website for visitors and search engines
- Write your first blog post.
I’ve decided to start a blog on intrapreneuring. An intrapreneur is an entrepreneur who develops crazy useful stuff inside a large organisation - in other words, people like me.
I registered the intrapreneurblog.com domain name back in August and haven’t really used it yet - it’s been parked over at NameDrive awaiting an excuse to get started.
I’m in the middle of setting intrapreneurblog.com up - it is the subject of my most recent Get a Real Blog series post. By 7 December, I will need to have:
- finished the installation and setup,
- developed and implemented a branding strategy,
- finished optimising the blog, and
- written my first post.
No sweat
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