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February 2013

10 Reasons You Should Start Thinking About Your NMX Speaking Proposal NOW

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NMX 2013 is a wrap, and even though it may seem like you have an entire year before you have to start thinking about the next show, if you have aspirations to speak, you really should start thinking about it today. And here’s why:

Reason #1: We open the proposal submission form as soon as we can.

Even though the next NMX is a long time off, we open the proposal form well before the event. So in actuality, it won’t be long before you can submit your ideas! And we make decisions early. Every year, tons of people wait until the last day to submit their proposals, but the fact of the matter is that the first round of speakers is often decided before the submission deadline. So if you apply early, you’ll have less competition.

Reason #2: Thinking about your proposed topic now helps you work toward that goal all year.

Right now, you are probably qualified to speak about several different topics. However, you’re more likely to be accepted as a speaker if you become a true expert in a single topic. When you speak at NMX, you aren’t speaking to a bunch of 101-level students or business owners who’ve never used Twitter before (at least in most cases). You’re speaking to people who live and breathe new media. If you spend the next several months really beefing up your knowledge and practical experience in the area that most interests you, you’ll be much more qualified to speak.

Reason #3: You’ll have time to review 2013 sessions.

Right now, our 2013 sessions are available at NMX University. If you become a premium member, you’ll have access to all of this content, and you can not only learn a thing or two (or three or a hundred…), but you can also get a feel for the type of sessions proposals we accept. It also means you can avoid submitting a topic that was covered in detail at the last event. Some topics lend themselves well to sessions year after year, but you’ll really wow us if you submit a really fresh idea that we haven’t heard before. In addition, when you check out these sessions, it is pretty apparent which ones were most successful and why – and that’s something you can keep in mind when submitting your proposal.

Reason #4: You have time to develop your session.

The very best sessions every year are those which have been well planned. Most public speakers will tell you that they aren’t just naturally better at speaking. They practice over and over and over. So thinking about your topic now allows you to work out the kinks by practicing at home in front of the mirror or even to smaller, local groups. That way, by the time NMX rolls around, you’ll be a much better speaker. And if you don’t get accepted? Don’t sweat it – you can always record a video for your blog or do a webinar, so the presentation won’t go to waste.

Reason #5: Good ideas take time.

Your first session idea probably isn’t the best idea you have in you. Coming up with good ideas takes time, and inspiration is something that can happen out of the blue. We want the very best at NMX, and by starting the brainstorming process now and keeping it in the back of your mind while waiting for the submission form to open, you can make sure that you’re proposing your very best ideas, not your very first ideas.

Reason #6: You can test ideas with small pieces of content.

Wondering if people will really be interested in your idea? Test with a small piece of content: a blog post, a video, or a podcast. If people are going nuts for more, you have a great presentation idea that just needs to be developed beyond the kernel of information you gave away. If you hear crickets, it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

Reason #7: You’ll have time to expand and develop a product.

At NMX, we don’t allow informercial sessions. Selling from the stage is a big no-no, so we ask that all speakers only mention their own stuff when it is extremely relevant to the discussion. That said, the biggest benefit to NMX is the exposure. If you’re an NMX speaker, people will be looking you up, often on smart phones as you’re presenting, but also before and after the event. If you’re speaking about podcasting 101 and you happen to be selling a podcasting 101 training course on your site, you have the potential to make a lot of sales. So plan your session now, and then think about how you can turn this session into an expanded informational product to sell.

Reason #8: It gives you time to edit.

Writing a proposal early gives you time to ask your friends to review. We value good content above all else, but proofreading matters. If you’re anything like me, you’re horrible at picking out your own typos. When you wait until deadline to submit your proposal, you don’t have time to ask a friend to give it a once-over before you send it off.

Reason #9: You might see us at another event.

NMX staffers are constantly attending other events. If you’re waiting in a taxi line behind Rick or see Dave at a networking reception or notice another else from NMX, please say hello! We love to meet our community. And, if you have an idea in mind for a session, you can run it by us. You won’t get a yes or no on the spot (in most cases!), but you will get an honest opinion that can help you write the best proposal possible when the submission form opens.

Reason #10: You can use the time to become a bigger part of our community.

Again, content trumps all, but we’re always much happier to see names we recognize than people who pop up out of the blue. It means you’re really dedicated to this community and you’re less likely to flake, phone it in, or pitch your products from the stage. We like that. So join us on Facebook. Be part of the conversation on Twitter. Follow us on Pinterest and Google+ and LinkedIn – whichever social networks you like best. Engage and get to know the company and the individual staff members.

And of course, comment on our blog! 🙂 Today I want to know: what’s your biggest frustration or worry when applying to speak at NMX or other conferences? Weigh in now!

5 Beginner Steps to Creating a Blog that You Can Monetize

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Last week, I wrote Follow 50+ MBA-level Case Studies in Content and Inbound Marketing about a 48-hour class that is happening at a university in Silicon Valley.

In the first week, my students wrote a combined 750-ish posts of varying length and purpose – daily posts, guest posts, link bait posts. At Top 10 Content Marketing Sites in the Social Media MBA course I listed up the best performers. You’re welcome to take a look to see just how many unique visitors, total visitors and page views that much effort can produce in sites that are starting from zero.

In this post I want to articulate the 5 first steps my students and I had to take BEFORE they could think about making money with content marketing and the challenges I faced to get them there and how I, ahem, overcame those challenges just to get the students online and writing.

Step One: Get a Domain Name and Hosting

More than 2 weeks out my trusty TA (teacher’s assistant) and I started sending emails to the whole class via the school’s learning management system. No response. What do you do when you can’t get a response and the only way to contact the students is email? You spam them until they figure out they had better do something.

About half of the 60+ students showed up with a domain name and hosting.

Another one fourth showed up thinking, “What’s the difference between having a domain and hosting? Aren’t they the same?

And still others said, “You emailed us? When? You want us to do what?”

There was no easy answer. My trusty assistant, Kevin, came to class and they drove him ragged getting everyone a domain and hosting. It wasn’t pretty. But over the course of the first 2 days and 16 hours of in-class time and a ton of emails, we got everyone in the class online with a domain, hosting and WordPress installed.

If any reader here has a better solution to this problem…by all means let me know.

Step Two: Get the Right Plugins and Set Up the Back End

With a group of students who don’t even know what WordPress is, much less a plugin, there was no easy answer to this either. Throwing something up on the giant screen and having everyone follow along just wouldn’t work. Besides I had to spend a LOT of time on Steps 3-5 and couldn’t afford the time.

I nearly killed my local and overseas staff. They were spending about 1-2 hours per site setting the permalink structure I like, getting the right plugins in place – SEO, sitemap, etc. Creating webmaster accounts for each and installing Google Analytics so we can track the results. 60+ websites at various stages of coming online x 2 hours each = a LOT of time.

Again, I knew of no simple way to do this other than throw food under the door to keep my staff happy, or at least well fed, while they brought all the sites to an equal footing. Suggestions?

Step Three: Decide What to Write About

Unlike the first two steps,  at this point I finally had everyone on the same page, in the same room, doing the same thing. I could get all 60+ students to look up and follow along.

I had all students create a tagline. My specific instructions were for them to tell me what they were going to write about in 10 words (not a magic number, but definitely less than 12) or less what they planned to write about. They were NOT to use adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions or articles. They were to come up with 3 different iterations and show them to five other classmates for feedback and pick the best one. Focus for a site from the get go is critical

Other instructions:

  • Write about something you are interested in
  • Write about something you can create an interest in
  • Write about something you have a lot to say about.

In my world, if a blogger doesn’t have a 1,000 things to say about their topic they will have a hard time making money with their site.

Step Four: Use SEO to Ensure Posts are Found

What is SEO anyway? Search Engine Optimization. But what is that?

I define Search Engine Optimization as content that appeals to real people (first) and to search engines (second). But it must appeal to both.

If a blogger only considers readers they might get read but only by the people the blogger tells to go their directly. They will not be found as well by search engines. If the blogger considers only the search engines they are likely to come up with stuff that is just unreadable. There is an ideal balance for the content. Ideal balance = optimization.

I have learned that there are some 220+ parameters that can go into an ideal post/page. I have also learned that pages can be overly optimized. But what I find of particular value is that I have also learned that there are about 20 ‘things’ you can do to a blog post that will get you 90-95% of the results you want. I will write about them in a future post.

If you can’t wait, you can buy the book – Marketing with Social Media. It’s the text book, first draft, that I wrote for this course.

Step Five: – Make a Plan and Work the Plan

For every hour of classroom work, I can require 2 hours of work outside of the class.  I am requiring my students to write 600-750 words DAILY. How hard can that be? They are permitted to adapt to their own style.

Some like to write multiple short posts.

Some like to write one long post each day.

Some like to do a combination.

It doesn’t matter to me.

Additionally, the students are required to guest post weekly at my home site about their progress (you can read their posts at Bill Belew Guest Writer AND guest post at one classmate’s web site that is relevant. Lots of link love happening that will only get better and of more value as the sites mature = get more content. Lastly, they are required to write one relatively higher quality post – link bait style.

Ongoing:

All 5 of these steps were done in the first 2 days of class, each a full 9-hour day, counting lunch. The students are off and writing at this point. Some get it, some don’t. Every educator knows that just because you tell somebody something, it doesn’t mean they learned it.

In the meantime, in about 10 weeks, this class will wrap up with some 15-20,000 posts being written over a large variety of niches and at various paces and different lengths and with different intensity and interlinking. How cool is that?

What do you think I can learn from this?
What would you like to learn?

What you can do:

Step 1 – Subscribe to the Bill Belew.com/blog to get more immediate updates from me at my home site. You will also be able to read the inbound and content marketing student experiences first hand. 

Step 2 -Subscribe to this NMX blog to get updates when they come out here.

Thanks for reading.

NMX Speaker Paul Kontonis’ Predictions for Web TV in 2013 [Video]

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“We’re beyond linear growth. We’re now at explosive growth.” – Paul Kontonis

During the IAWTV awards this past January, BeetTV got a chance to catch up with IAWTV Chair and NMX Speaker Paul Kontonis, who gave some predictions for the world of Web TV over the next year. Now that we’re almost two months into 2013, do you think his predictions are still on track?

If you want more from Paul about the future of Web TV, check out his NMX session, Where Is All Of This Headed? The Future Of Digital Entertianment, which is available to NMX University premium members.

The Unintentional Thought Leader: Seven Steps For Small Business Blogging

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When I launched Marketing Sparks three years ago, “thought leadership” was not a goal. Discuss issues I care about? Yes. Stoke my desire to write? Absolutely. Maybe even attract new business as a bonus? Of course.

Over time, though, I discovered that a certain style of writing could help position my small business blog as an authority and go-to expert. That said, I use the term “thought leadership” hesitantly and humbly—it tends to sound lofty—and there are no hard and fast rules defining it. When it comes to blogging, my definition revolves around having expertise on a topic, shedding light on issues, offering a point-of-view, and sharing innovative thinking…and doing this is easier than you might think.

Here are seven steps you can take to start your own thought leadership blog or tweak your current one to elevate your content from standard fare to superior must-read.

1. Write About Your Passion

It starts with a clichĂ© we’ve all heard: “Write from the heart.” Nothing could be more true in a thought leadership blog. That doesn’t mean pontificating or talking down to your audience, it means sharing your interest and expertise and giving that information to your audience freely. In the process, your readers will feel smarter too. Spreading insights through a blog that excites and energizes you—the kind you can’t wait to share with the online world—is contagious, and your readers will ultimately share with their own networks.

2. Choose Your Audience and They Will Choose You

As Daniel Rasmus said, “Go vertical or go home.” Pick an area to cover and stick with it. Let’s face it, we can’t all be experts on everything, and frankly, generic information is pretty useless. Think of it as a marketing campaign: Who is your target audience? Who will care about your knowledge base? What can you offer them that they can’t get elsewhere? Once you start adding value to your audience’s professional or personal life, you will slowly be viewed as a trusted source and develop a loyal following.

3. Get A Hub With Spokes

Now that you found your audience, it’s time to stimulate, educate, and even entertain them with your expertise. The key is to write on a variety of topics from your knowledge base and cast the widest net possible. When I take on my “hub” of marketing, there are a lot of “spokes” in that wheel: I write about branding, advertising, social media, events, technology—the list goes on. I also sprinkle in a diverse range of blog styles so that unpredictability is the only thing my audience can count on. That means:

  • Opinion
  • Interviews
  • Breaking news
  • Guest blogs
  • Follow-up pieces
  • Evergreen/timeless topics (my PowerPoint alternatives blog post from two years ago still garners steady hits)

Click to tweet this quote!

4. Circle-Slash Vanilla Views 

Rehashing a trending hot topic—say, Apple’s court battle with Samsung—is more about content aggregation than delivering any meaningful insight to your readers. You might get a lot of Google hits, but are not illuminating anything new. Blogging as an authority means taking a stand and doing it authentically. One of the keys is not just to understand a topic fully, but to offer readers an alternative point of view or additional insight. In other words, content that makes your blog worth reading and stand out from the crowd. As Jessica Northey said at this year’s NMX in the  panel session How To Build Your Blog Community: Three Top Bloggers Share Their Secrets, “Tell the truth, make it matter, and never be boring.” Amen to that.

5. Do Your Homework

Having earned a living as a reporter early in my career, I’ve always had a nose for news, curiosity, and a desire to ask questions. And when my reputation is at stake, I take that very seriously—and your readers will too. They count on you to do the background and research for them. Make sure you are using the best and most current information before you hit “publish.” If an important data point is missing or there is sloppy attribution, your credibility suffers. Conversely, if you get corrections from readers, cop to it, update your blog, and even thank the person for pointing it out. We’re all mere mortals…even those gunnin’ to be a thought leader.

6. There is No “Self” In Promotion

Ever heard the old saying, “Let someone else say how great you are”? Don’t promote your business or anything that smacks of it in your blog. Readers will sniff it out and run the other way. With so many choices on the Internet to spend their precious time, readers come for new ideas and practices, not thinly-veiled or overt pitches.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t market the heck out of your blog on a regular basis: Promote it to your personal and business network, leverage your social media channels by sharing and starting conversations, and of course reciprocate with other bloggers in your field. Don’t forget to mention your blog to clients and prospects when a related topic comes up. And, yes, in case you were wondering, I have gained new clients from my blog posts. Not only do prospects get a shortcut to your knowledge and skill set, it builds instant confidence in you before you’re even hired.

7. Leadership Versus Readership

There are so many blog styles: newsy updates, opinion blogs, branded blogs, affiliate marketing blogs, mommy blogs, and on and on. Choosing to do a thought leadership blog is a quieter and narrower path—dare I say “quality over quantity.” It takes time to grow your audience and build credibility, so be patient.

For most small business owners, blogging is a “sideline” to the busy life of running a company and does not pay the bills. Yet if you stay the course on the slow but sure path, you will be rewarded handsomely in personal gratification, respect, and potentially new work.

How could your blog be changed by adding a thought leader slant? What benefits would you gain from doing so?

Measuring the Performance of Your Facebook Page

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You have invested the time, effort and money into making a Facebook page for your business. Is your business reaping the rewards from this?  I love Facebook and write about Facebook Ads and engagement all the time.  It is easy to tell with one look if you have a lot of activity on your business’s Facebook page, but is that activity actually doing anything good for your company or is it actually harming business?

Today we will show you how to analyze your Facebook page’s performance and find the answers to these questions, so you can find out what is working and what isn’t.

Social Media Engagement

Measuring the social media engagement on your Facebook page is a good starting point to determine your page’s performance. However, it can only tell you so much. Measuring the number of fans, page views, comments, tab views and etc. that your page has by using tools such as Facebook Insights will tell you how many people are looking at your business, but it does not tell you how many people are actually purchasing your services or products.

That being said, it is still a good source of information to see if your social media efforts are being seen. You probably will notice peaks of activity in these stats. Some peaks will be due to holiday seasons, but some peaks may be due to promotions you have been running. By looking at these peaks, you can tell which social media efforts have been most effective.

Social Influence

Having activity on your Facebook page is one thing, but is it all good PR? It’s important to measure the type of activity you are getting. The saying “there is no such thing as bad press” does not apply to your Facebook page. Negative comments on your page or about your business elsewhere on the web can have a detrimental impact on your business.

On the other hand, positive comments can increase your customer base. Use tools such as Klout, PeerIndex, and Kred to measure your social influence. The statistics these sites can give you will enable you to determine if you need to make adjustments to your Facebook page and/or business practices.

Performance

Now that you know how much activity your Facebook page has and whether it is positive or negative, you need to determine how that data is actually affecting your bottom line. A good social media presence is great, but if it does not actually translate into increased revenue for your business, then your social media impact is little more than an ego boost. Measure the performance of specific links to see if your social media posts are resulting in sales.

Google Analytics can be a great tool to do this with. It can tell you how many hits on your website are actually coming from your Facebook page, and which links they are coming from. Using this data, you can determine which Facebook posts have been most effective.

Free Tools

It may be true that you have to spend money to make money, but not when it comes to measuring the performance of your Facebook page. There are professional services that can help you, but there is still a lot that you can do by yourself. To do this, take advantage of one or more of the free tools out there, which we have listed below:

  • Hootsuite measures and monitors your social media engagement
  • Bit.ly measures the click-throughs on your links
  • Social Mention tracks mention of your business and its competitors on the web
  • Serps Rank checker – This is only a 30 day free trial but will help you to get everything you need!

So now you know the performance of your Facebook page and what efforts have been fruitful. Hopefully, you are getting the results you want. If not, it is never too late to make changes.

Top 3 Reasons to Attend SOBCon

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There are several unmistakable signs of spring. Warm weather, birds chirping, kids in soccer uniforms, and everyone begins talking about SOBCon.

If you’re not familiar with SOBCon, it’s the brain child of Liz Strauss and Terry Starbucker. A conference for social business professionals who are truly interested in a collaborative learning experience when they attend a conference. If you’re unfamiliar with SOBCon, or have heard of it but don’t know if you should attend, here are a few reasons why it’s worth the investment.

1. It’s small

Because SOBcon takes place in one room, and one room only, only a certain amount of passes are sold. This isn’t to ensure exclusivity, it’s to keep out the fluffy stuff and make sure the emphasis is on what’s important. Small means real networking where you really get to know everyone in the room, and small means everyone is listening and not spending all their time staring at their iPhones.

2. Check your egos at the door

Speakers aren’t chosen because of their names, they’re chosen because they have something of value to share with attendees. If you’re looking for photo opps so you can tag yourself next to other influential people, move along, SOBCon isn’t your conference. This isn’t the place to see and be seen, or party with your clique, SOBCon is where the thinkers and doers come to share and learn.

3. The focus is on collaboration and conversation

SOBcon’s focus isn’t on social media “experts,” parties or swag lounges. Instead, attendees gather to learn and share ideas. Everyone is important and everyone has a place.

SOBCon takes place in Chicago from May 3 – 5, 2013. Get your tickets while the getting is good, because they won’t last long.

NMX Joins Food Network and Mashable for a Pinterest Hangout [Video]

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I’ve been running the NMX Pinterest account for about a year now, and have had a deep passion for this social network since the day I started using it. I even wrote a 100-page ebook about Pinterest, teaching you how to get started using this platform to market your content.

So, when I was invited by our friends at The Shorty Awards to take part in a Google+ Hangout all about Pinterest, I was more than excited to talk about the topic. I joined members of the social media team from Mashable and Food Network to chat about how we use this network: our mistakes, our successes, and our advice on how others can use Pinterest better.

Check out the archive of this Hangout if you missed it:

Pinterest is a topic we will continue to cover here at NMX as it keeps growing. In addition to our ebook, you can find latest blog posts about Pinterest here, and NMX University Premium members have access to Debba Haupert’s 2013 NMX session all about Pinterest, which you don’t want to miss if you’re interested in learning how to be more repinnable.

Follow 50+ MBA Level Case Studies in Content and Inbound Marketing

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I, Bill Belew, wondered to myself, what if I could get a bunch of, say 50+ MBA-level students together in a classroom setting and have them take content and inbound marketing serious? Could I learn something? What would I learn?

More prone to acting than just sitting around and thinking about things, I approached a university in the Bay Area of Silicon Valley about offering a course on content and inbound marketing in their MBA program. They hopped right on it and a class called – Marketing with Social Media – was born.

On the first day of class 65, count ’em, of  74 enrolled students showed up. The other nine students missed class for one reason or the other and are playing catch up.

There were some 16 hours of instructions over two days on the first of three weekends for a full 48-hour course.

The university allows that students be given two hours of outside-the-classroom, I think that’s called homework, for every one hour in the class room

Think big smile! I gave my students 96 hours of work EACH to do on their web sites.

Calculator says – 96 hours x 74 students = 7,200 hours of dedicated effort to creating good, meaningful, original content on brand spanking new web sites.

Give or take a few dropped students and some overachievers and I am reasonably expecting at least some 5,000-6000+ hours of, ahem, quality (more on the challenges in future articles) work to be done in a variety of niches on different blogs by business-minded content creators who have a vested interest in their sites. Vested interest = they will fail the class if they don’t do what I require or they really want to launch a business idea that they have been mulling over and they are using the class to do that.

15 questions I want answered:

  1. Are short articles better than longer ones? And for whom or for what?
  2. How long should articles be?
  3. Is it better to post once a day, multiple times a day, weekly?
  4. What about linking internally to one’s own site?
  5. What about linking externally to other quality sites?
  6. What’s a good reasonable strategy for acquiring back links from other sites?
  7. Can my students get mojo if they link to each other and there is a relevance to the sites that are linked together?
  8. What about images? Captions? Descriptions?
  9. Do some niches perform better than others when starting out? When already established?
  10. What about traffic from the other social networks?
  11.  Inbound traffic – is it better coming from search, referrals, direct, paid or the social networks?
  12.  What are some of the challenges, lessons learned when going from zero to 65 people online working on creating quality content for marketing purposes?
  13.  Is content marketing a good strategy to generate revenue from impressions, for selling affiliate products, for offering services, for local, national or global traffic?
  14.  Is getting a group like this together to create a network even copacetic?
  15. And what about plugins? Are some better than others? Are there some that are more important than others? Are there some that are essential?

I expect to KNOW as oppose to guess at the answers to many of these questions above as well as to questions I haven’t even thought to ask yet, which is why I’ll end this article with some questions for the reader.

5 questions I want to ask you:

  1. What if you were me?
  2. What would you do with this class?
  3. Where would you start?
  4. What would you teach?
  5. What kinds of requirements would you make of them?

Please meet me in the comments and let me know your answers.

Consider following this series as I provide insights, lessons learned, victories and failures (if you promise not to judge) from the case studies generated in and out of this class.

3 Steps for those who want in on the content marketing discussion:

Step 1 -Subscribe to this NMX blog to get updates when they come out here.

and/or

Step 2 – Subscribe to the Bill Belew.com/blog to get more immediate updates from me at my home site.

Step 3 – Read the inbound and content marketing students experiences first hand. The students are giving weekly updates in the Guest Writer category. Oftentimes, you might read about their experiences BEFORE I do. That’s right. My editors might push them through before I see them.

PLEASE: If my students blast me in one of their posts before I see it, let me know. 😎

How to Better Develop Your Web Series Characters using Secrets

Author:

If you’re producing a fictional web series, you’ve probably spent a fair amount of time developing the story arcs. While I don’t personally produce web series, I have written my fair share of fiction, and today I wanted to share with you a character development technique that I learned from a fiction-writing class and that helped me create better characters for my fiction.

The One-Sheet

The first step of this character development technique is to write up a one-sheet for each main character, starting with your protagonist and expanding to include any character with a recurring role or any character who is important to a single episode. Essentially, if the character is given a name, you probably want to write up a one-sheet profile.

Each one-sheet includes as much information as possible about the character’s background, even when the details aren’t shared in your web series. When was your character born? How did he or she grow up? How does your character react to stressful situations? What does your character like to do on the weekends? Is your character healthy? Fill up the profile with details, details, and more details. Then, when you think you’ve written enough, add more details!

The Secret

Next, take a look at the one-sheet you wrote and give each character a secret that makes sense.

In life, we all have secrets. Even very innocent people have secrets. Maybe your character shoplifts. Or maybe he or she has a bank account the spouse doesn’t know about. Maybe your character cheats on his or her diet. You can make the secret as big or little as you want. If your character is likely to have several secrets, focus on the secret he or she finds most important and is least likely to tell anyone.

The Telling

Lastly, you want to write a quick scene where your character spills the beans. What would possibly get your character to tell someone else his or her secret? For a character who is pretty innocent, this might be as easy as admitting it to the person behind them in line for coffee. For someone more secretive, the answer might be that they tell someone while on their deathbed.

Again, this secret and the scene where they tell it do not have to be related to your web series at all (though it might give you some good ideas). You can get as detailed or be as vague with the scene as you want; just make sure you think it through. What would your character really keep secret and why would he or she ever tell someone?

What Have You Learned?

After completing the exercise, think about what you’ve learned about your character. You can incorporate this into the rest of your story to make a more realistic, cohesive character. For example, when I completed this exercise for a character in one of my short stories, my character was a mother who kept very little secret – other than the fact that she often got very bad headaches sometimes and was too afraid to see a doctor. This led me to thinking about how mothers, like the one in my story, often take care of themselves last and although they can seem superhuman at times, they have fears just like the rest of us. I incorporated what I learned into the story and it was much stronger than my first draft.

I hope this exercise helps you with your own character development. If you give it a try, leave a comment below letting me know if it worked for you!

Blog Gamification: The Key to Community Growth?

Author:

I look at my clock and it’s less than an hour until my next deadline. I haven’t had time to eat a proper meal in days, nor do I remember the last time I got a full night’s sleep. Heck, I haven’t even had time to shower yet today, and let’s not talk about my pile of laundry. Must work. Must get this done before time runs out…

And then my phone buzzes to tell me that it’s my turn to play on Draw Something. Somehow, I find the time to play.

Does that scene sound familiar? It does for me. A few months ago, I had to quit mobile/social games cold turkey because they were actually starting to interfere with my work. These games can be intoxicating, addictive even. And it’s no accident. Gamemakers know exactly what they are doing when they make games. They want you to spend as much time playing as possible, since that means you’re viewing more ads or even spending your own money on customization options.

It’s no wonder how Farmville, one of gaming powerhouse Zynga’s most popular games, has 2.5 million active daily users. What blogger among us wouln’t kill for those stats? Games are addicting; they keep people coming back for more. Maybe there’s something we can learn from that.

Could gamification be the key to building your blog community? Could it be the element you’re missing, the reason your stats haven’t yet exploded?

Gamification, Blog Style

Gamification doesn’t mean that you make your blog agame. It simply means that you use game elements to make the experience more interactive and addicting for your community members.

Blog posts as an evolution of the article already bring some of these elements to the table. For example, blogs were the beginning of a more social web. For the first time, published articles weren’t just a one-way street, with the author talking to an audience. Most blogs allow comments, which makes the conversation two-way.

Being able to add to an article and start a conversation makes you invested. You’re talking to the author and you’re talking to other members of the community. You’re involved now.

Comments are so common online, though, that they don’t have the same effect as they did at first. So, how can you take these same gamification elements and expand them to get your community involved even further?

Gamification Examples

To better understan the concept of gamification, let’s take a look at some examples of bloggers adding these elements to their sites:

  • Featuring Community Work at Six Sisters’ Stuff

Over at Six Sisters’ Stuff, the blog is host of a weekly link party, where other food and DIY bloggers post links to their favorite projects from the past week. This already adds a level of interaction, but even more importantly, the sisters feature their favorites every week, choosing a handful from the projects submitted to promote to their fans. It’s a mini competition every week, with the community encouraged to participate every week in order to be considered for the honor of being featured.

  • Leaderboards on Social Media Examiner

To complement their highly successful blog, Social Media Examiner also launched community discussion forums. Called Networking Clubs, this area of the Social Media Examiner site allows users to continue the discussion even away from traditional blog posts. It’s a great community element. But there’s a gamification element too. On the Social Media Examiner sidebar, you’ll see a “leaderboard.” Here, ten members are featured, so it’s a game among members. The more you participate, the more likely you’ll show up on the sidebar. You also earn a higher “rank” the longer you remain an active member.

  • Rewards with Comment Luv

Comment Luv’s premium version isn’t free, but it does allow you to enable some gamification on your blog posts. With Comment Luv, you can allow readers to include a link to their latest blog post every time they leave a comment. This in and of itself is gamification, as you’re rewarding people for taking an action that you want them to take (in this case, the reward is the link and the action is the comment). With the premium version, however, you can also allow them further rewards for taking more actions. For example, you can set it up so that readers who comment a certain number of times get access to post not just their most recent link, but any of the ten most recent links.

You can increase the gamification of this by including a “top commenters” widget on your sidebar in order to recognize readers who comment the most. This is something we do here on the NMX blog. Our sidebar shows the top non-staff commenters over the past 30 days, which encourages people to comment more and reach the top of that list.

The Elements of Gamification

Basically, gamification comes down to two elements: a rewards system or competition. The best systems allow for both. You want to offer something of value for people who participate in your community, whether that’s a link or a special feature or something else. You also want to pit community members against one another to see who can be the best at something (always making sure the competition is as fair and friendly as possible). The three examples above aren’t the only ways to do this on your blog.

Businesses are starting to realize more and more the benefits of gamification. Offline, this translates to items like punch cards (buy seven coffees, get one free!) while online this translates to items like Foursquare check-in coupons. Blogs, however, have been a little slower to the world of gamification. What examples of gamification have you seen on other blogs? Do you think this is a good way to build a community?

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