Writing shorter posts is one thing, but if I’m going to ride the
next digital wave I’d better smarten my act up around here. Putting a
bit more effort into my posts, y’know small things, like finishing
sentences.
Writing the post and then saving it and coming back to it when I’m ready to edit it seriously.
Posting at a smart time, like a weekday morning or afternoon, not in the dark hours of sunday morning.
As I said, I’m doing okay, but if I want to lift my game and get up
there having these muddled posts is no good, you’ve got to make a
commitment to value for your audience.
It’s lower value, lower quality if you’re not making the effort to be presentable.
It’s easy to say oh y’know it’s just my blog, i’m just gonna throw
some words up to keep it fresh with my SEO and such but if you really
want to engage and go from hundreds to thousands of daily visitors,
you’re going to have to present a “professional” image.
You need to look as if you’re serious.
Spelling mistakes and unfinished paragraphs with concepts that go
all over the place is not going to be taking me to the next level. I’ll
get leads sure. You’ll pick up some fans here and there. But not that
many.
Gerd Leonhard made a great
metaphor while he was drifting down the digital content stream in his
little boat in a recent talk, he compared your audience to puppies.
Feed them content and they’ll be the ones waiting for you to come home,
who’ll follow you everywhere.
You can’t ask a puppy for $1 on Itunes. All you can do is give it love.
It’s sad the decaying structures of the traditional music industry
model are still held in place. This is indicative of our general global
situation here, vested interests have too much too lose to progress.
This is what a recession looks like to me. It’s when a lot of
accepted practices that no longer provide value are removed from the
production chain out of necessity.
It’s a correction for most. Except for those who were right all along.
The digital music realm is only going to thrive in these conditions.
I’m not saying 2009 will be all candy. But if you can survive it, it’s just going to get easier.