One of my company designers sent this to me. Thank you, Michelle Lydon of Symbiosis Designs in Toronto.
Here’s the YouTube description:
Behind the scenes tour of of an award-winning creative farm, juicing process and distribution in South West England.
The South West produces some of the UK’s finest creative work (animation, web design, design, fashion, architecture….) Now you know why….nice conditions, space to breathe and opportunities with some of the best firms around.

Your turn… what’d ya think? Creative or not? Or do you have to appeciate British humor to enjoy it?

I think not. There is hope for refreshing and reinvigorating our posts to keep our readers interested, and I don’t believe it includes writing less.
Here are some of my thoughts. What are yours?
1. If you haven’t already done so, create a plan with measurable goals. Doing so will keep you focused and consistent, helping your readers understand what matters to you. If you don’t know wwhy you blog and where you are going, how can your readers follow your journey. And if you aren’t tracking goals, how do you know the impact of your blog.
2. Search the news and business wires for today’s hot business topics.
3. Cover those topics using a slightly different angle and ask questions for your readers to think about and reply to if they wish.
4. Write shorter. Most of us don’t have time to read a long treatise on any subject.
5. Inject your opinion but not so strongly that your readers feel no room exists for their thoughts.
6. Write the way you talk. Write simply. Save the big words for your great American novel. No one wants us to prove how smart we are. The writing shapes the ideas, not our vocabulary.
7. Keep to the subjects promised in your masthead and “About You” page. If you are a marketing blog, mostly stick to that subject. Readers seek familiarity when they visit.
8. Throw in a fun post once a week, such as interesting tidbits about others or music or books or TV or movies. Make it a regular feature so your reader’s expectations are met.
9. Occasionally, be provocative, which is a great way to get readers involved in big ideas. Be sure the subject is big enough to handle provocation.
10. Use names, pictures and stories of other bloggers. We like to see our names in print.
Finally, write for readers, not links. When we write for readers, we create words and ideas that are authentic, heart-felt, credible and worth reading. Readers are the audience, and in writing for our audience, the links will come. Going back to my first professional writing job, my editor told me repeatedly to write for readers, not for myself. All of my subsequent editors ensured that I remembered that lesson.
Your turn. Agree or disagree, share your secrets and ideas. How do you keep your readers coming back? What works and what doesn’t?

Mack is a friend, a smart blogger and a big-hearted soul. I admire him in many ways. But on this subject we disagree. Inherent in Mack’s title question is the idea that if we bloggers make money on our blogs, we should find ways to share it with our readers. I love you Mack, but either I don’t get it or you are just wrong on this one. Here’s my view, and then let’s get all of yours.
Most of us in the MarketingProfs community, including the writers, are marketers, designers, PR types, advertising specialists, entrepreneurs and business managers or executives. We do what we do for two reasons: 1) we love our work (I hope) and 2) we need to make a living.
To that end, our blogs, including this one, are designed to do several things: 1) to share ideas and information freely, 2) to provide reader value, 3) to build our brands and our businesses, and for some of us, 4) to provide additional income. I believe these reasons are ethical, values-based and smart business.
Mack asks in his post: How can we share our revenues to provide readers with value? How can we share the profits? (It is a question not a diatribe on what we should do.)
I believe we provide value in our words, wisdom, and sharing. As an author, when someone buys my book, I am appreciative, and I am confident they will receive value for their purchase price. It is a basic business principal: You give me something, usually money, and in return I provide value in the form of a product or service.
As a marketer, one of the services you give me money for is advertising. Not on my blog, because I don’t sell space, but where I can best get your ads placed that will reach your target audience and grow your business. Your value is in the advertising’s effectiveness.
The same is true for blogs. If MarketingProfs sells advertising here at the Daily Fix, they are not compelled to share that revenue with us. Nor is any other blog. You receive value in the posts and in the contents of the advertising, as well, if the product, service or idea is something you want or need. If you don’t receive value in the posts, you won’t return.
In conclusion, if we monetize our blogs, I believe we insult our readers by sharing that revenue with them and cause harm to the basic business principal of fair exchange. If we share our revenue, it is bad business and doing so implies that our posts are crap and offer no value in and of themselves. It’s akin to buying a washing machine, sharing in the sales person’s commision, and then getting home to discover the washing machince sucks.
So there you have it. The value is in the words. Bloggers keep any revenues they make because they earned them. Now, let me have it. Maybe in our conversation and comments we can find a way to discontinue this conversation (or maybe not). Is the value in the posts or should we be sharing whatever monetization of our blogs exists?

I pointed Walaika Haskins, who interviewed me for the story, to some of the stories she included, like Dell Hell and the blog coverage of the Scooter Libby trial. Nice to be asked for input!

“Just a few years ago,” she writes, “blogs were looked down upon by many media professionals and even bloggers themselves. However, it’s not unheard of for a blogger to be the one breaking the news on a big story. Blogs such as Perez Hilton, the Wonkette, the Daily Kos and others have changed the way people get their news and the way the media covers news.” (Hmm, when did bloggers look down on blogs?)

The article also states that “Blogging will peak in 2007, according to a Gartner report. The company estimates that there are already more than 200 million ex-bloggers … [Gartner] expects the number of bloggers to top off at around 100 million.”
One hundred million writers with their own “printing presses” is nothing to sneeze at, but I believe there aren’t more than 10,000 bloggers worldwide with significant numbers of readers.
However, blogging is about influence, not numbers. Some bloggers who have influence don’t necessarily have a million readers, or scores of comments on every post. Influence is harder to measure than pageviews, and the perfect measurement system has yet to be developed, despite ongoing efforts by Technorati, Google, BlogPulse and others.
Influential as some bloggers may be, it was just yesterday that a friend asked me “Don’t people have anything else to do besides read blogs about other people’s lives?” To which I responded, feeling a lot like Rodney Dangerfield, “Yes, they can watch ‘reality’ shows and stupid sitcoms on television.” So, the are bloggers journalists debate is sure to continue. Sigh.