True, that frequency has taken a beating since I started the online BA that’s still in progress. Blogging is the first to go out the window when I’m busy. Still, I’m trying to do a better job of collecting my thoughts by jotting down quick ideas and finding possible photos and illustrations ahead of time.

The category “word cloud” on the right reveals that I talk a lot about words and communications, both worlds where I basically spend my days. I also like to share writing tips and post about the independent life, social media, marketing and life in general. And I just can’t resist the occasional “general nonsense” that often includes fun with (what else) words.

What I have learned from keeping up my own blog and reading and responding to others:

• If you like a blog post enough to retweet it, why not take the time to comment on the blog first? We can look at our stats and see which posts are more popular, but unless readers comment, we don’t necessarily know what struck a chord.
• Blogging is a great way to meet and get to know people, especially if you take the time to comment and get into discussions with others.
• It’s okay to let people know you’ve written a new blog post (on Twitter, for instance), but in my opinion, it’s better to let your readers point to it on their own rather than asking people to retweet it unless it’s a type of public service announcement.
• To paraphrase Mark Twain‘s famous comment, reports of the demise of blogs has been greatly exaggerated.

Thank you to the people who have taken the time to read what I’ve written and comment here on the blog or when I’ve seen you in person. It means a lot.

Oh, and happy 5th anniversary to fellow blogger and strategic communications planning expert Les Potter, ABC. We met after cosmically starting our blogs about the same time before meeting in person at an IABC conference, and I am now privileged to call him friend.

Photo credit: Rawich and FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

Blogs used to be considered just online diaries, but these days, individuals and organizations are using blogs for business reasons, including personal branding, building relationship and getting business.

Donna pointed to now-well-known bloggers like Dave Fleet and Chris Brogan, who have talked about the many opportunities that came their way because of blogging. Her own experience is that blogging has led to meeting people in real life, expanding her network, and to job and speaking offers.

Other benefits are that search engines love blogs, which increases traffic to your site because you update it frequently. You make connections, especially when you comment on other blogs. As any blogger will tell you, we love it when people comment. (Hint!) And you get a chance to flex your writing muscles on something important to you. Because, of course, the whole reason you have a blog is to talk about some you are passionate about, right?

Some blogging best practices:

• Set goals. Do you want to be known for expertise in a certain area? build a personal brand? build relationships?
  
• Blog consistently, with your goals in mind. You don’t have to blog every day, but start with a couple of times a week.
• Write for humans, but keep search engine optimization in mind. Search engines don’t “get” humour or clever word plays, so make the headlines descriptive and to the point. Include key words in a natural way.
• Use photos, graphics, audio and video to keep it interesting.
• Keep it short. Use lists and subheadings to break up the copy.
• Make it easy to share posts you like or subscribe to get the posts by RSS feed or email. My recent refresh of this blog including adding the ability to share a post on Twitter, Facebook or other platforms just by clicking a button.

What to blog about?

• Something you’ve learned or an experience you’ve had. Tell a story; it doesn’t have to be news.
• Talk about your company’s or your client’s success stories, with permission.
• Link to other people’s content, with your own commentary. Remember to always give credit where credit is due!
• Promote events you’re involved in, as I often do with IABC/Toronto’s Professional Independent Communicators and Halton-Peel Communications Association meetings.
• Review a book, a course you attended or an event, as I’m doing here.
• Interview an expert.

Once your blog is up and running, don’t keep it to yourself. Let people know you have a blog by including the URL in your email signature and on LinkedIn and Google+. Comment on other people’s blogs, making sure to include your name and URL there, too. Use social networks to promote your content, mentioning it as appropriate on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and so on. But don’t keep saying “new blog post!” — describe the content and why it’s valuable. Find other blogs where you can offer to do a guest post.

If you’re still not quite sure you’re ready to start your own blog, Donna advised starting with Twitter, which is a micro-blogging platform, after all. If you’re an IABC/Toronto member, you can also start by contributing to the chapter’s new blog, called Commversations (member login required).

If you were at last night’s session, what tips stood out for you? Are you inspired to start a blog? Is anything still holding you back?

Image credit: IdeaGo and FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

Lately, I’ve been struggling. I’m distracted, not paying attention or making those mental notes as often, and written notes to self don’t seem to make the leap to a blog post. I’m not keeping up with the other blogs I usually follow, either. I’m spending way too much time reading and replying to email. Client work has kept my days too busy (but that’s not a complaint!) to make any headway on my schoolwork.

As for school, it’s pretty much unrelenting. Right now, there’s a weekly 42-slide (or so) presentation to review, and multiple complicated articles to read every week — and re-read several times, in many cases, to try to make sense of dense concepts like postmodernism and poststructuralism. My current course also requires a blog post once a week on our school site. We’re also supposed to discuss various concepts online every week, but I notice all of our cohort has been pretty quiet lately.

So with all this energy channelling elsewhere, something has to give, and it looks like it’s the Red Jacket Diaries, along with the rest of my online life. At least until the current course is done the end of June…

But enough of MY whining. How are YOU? Are you keeping up with all the demands on your time? How? Advice is more than welcome.

Photo credit: Salvatore Vuono and FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, roughly one in 10 adults is keeping up a blog or online journal. However, only 14% of online teens now say they blog, down from 28% in 2006, although millennials rank “reading blogs” higher than any other age group.

Pew notes that “while the act formally known as blogging seems to have peaked, internet users are doing blog-like things in other online space.” So instead of blogging, teens and young adults are “micro-blogging” (on Facebook and MySpace, for instance).

Pew notes that teens aren’t much into Twitter (8%) but they do love their text messaging (66%). Most “wired American teens” (73%) use social networking sites, up from 55% in 2006, whereas only 40% of adults 30 and older use them.

Do you think this is a generational thing? If Baby Boomers are into something, that’s a clear signal to younger generations to stay away!

Happy anniversary as well to strategic communications planning expert Les Potter, ABC, who launched More With Les about the same time. In fact, thinking we had by cosmic coincidence started our blogs on the very same day — it was actually two days apart, so still pretty cosmic — led to online conversations that have resulted in a treasured friendship. And that’s one of the valuable things about blogs; you meet and have conversations with people you might not normally encounter.

What else have I learned in my four short years of blogging?

• You need to set aside some time for blogging; to find and check links, find an image, write something thoughtful.
• It helps if you get into a rhythm. Decide how often you’re going to blog and make a point of meeting that number (always supposing you have something to say!).
• A busy stretch of work can derail frequent posts, but you can still squeeze in a short post on something meaningful to you. It helps if you…
• …Keep a cheat sheet, a Word document where you drop the interesting links or random thoughts that inspire you to write a post. Then you have something to expand on later when you have time to write.
• It’s okay to tell other people about your newest post (say, using Twitter) but it’s even better if someone else sees it and does the telling for you.

I’m not sure I’ve found my blogging voice, but some posts have spoken to my readers, and some of you have been kind enough to say so. You particularly responded to my post about referrals helping independents diversify, and another fondly remembering a print newsletter; about going back to school, why you need balance in your life, and how to find balance. You were also touched by expressive writing in a book about love letters, and a post encouraging lurkers to come out of hiding and comment.

So thank you to the people who have told me, either in comments on this blog or in conversation, that you read and enjoy what I write. Here’s to my fifth year!

A couple of trends Technorati notes:

• Bloggers are increasingly using social networks, such as Twitter, to share blog posts.
• Mobile blogging is a key trend, with 25% of all bloggers using smartphones and tablets to update their blogs.
• Women and mom bloggers are growing in influence, especially since they are most likely to blog about brands.

I haven’t heard people warning lately that “blogs are dead,” but there is definitely a shift. More people these days are sharing their thoughts and pointing to interesting links using Twitter instead of blogging about them; when they do blog, they use Twitter and LinkedIn to point people to the post. And people seem to point to blog posts they like without commenting. Many of us are blogging less often, although in my case it has more to do with workload than anything else.

How about you — if you blog, are you posting less often than you used to? Are you following as many blogs?

By coincidence, writer David Murray blogged about just that topic yesterday, in a post cleverly entitled, “If a writer types in the forest, does it make a sound?”

He notes that “They say no one knows the influence he or she has in the world. That’s especially true of writers.”

So if you’re reading someone’s blog and something inspires you, touches you, or even just rings true from your own experience, why not take a minute to say so? The writer will love to know he or she has made a sound. And as you pass along to your friends and colleagues the treasures you find on the web — retweeting interesting blog posts, “liking” Facebook pages, sharing funny comments — please take the time to comment first.

After spending three weeks in academia, with no time to read newspapers or watch the news, let alone be active on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and such, it’s been interesting getting (slowly) back into the swing of things. Today, in between researching topics on peer-reviewed journals for a paper I have to write, I caught up on some blogs. (Er, can you spell “procrastinate,” class?)

I’ve been neglecting blogs, and not just my own. Looking through my feeds, I see several blogs that have 200 posts I have not read, nor is it likely I will get to them. The ones I do read regularly — and make sure to catch up on during times like this — are written by people I know, feel I know, like and respect, or that make me laugh or are related to work or inspire me. It seems the ones that fall into the category of 200+ unread posts are the ones that just post too darned often. And yes, every day is too often, no matter how brilliant you are.

But having time to write for and read blogs is all a matter of maintaining balance, something my team tackled in a group presentation we had to do last week for the Public Speaking course (go Team 3!). We took the position that cramming the extra 15-20 hours of work that will apparently be required of our BA program is doable. We tried to make it clear, though, that adding extra schoolwork means adjusting time spent elsewhere, not taking away family time or neglecting our health. After all, if Canadians typically watch about 22 hours of TV a week, how difficult can it be to pry ourselves away from the tube and instead hit the books?

By coincidence, one of the blog posts I read today touched on the very topic of balance. The always inspiring Colleen Wainwright, Communicatrix, suggested shared an update to the instruction often given by agencies and independents: “Fast. Good. Cheap. Pick any two.” In other words, if you want it good and you want it tomorrow, be prepared to pay extra for it.

Colleen suggests credits the hilarious David Sedaris (writing in The New Yorker) for the “Four Burner” model worth aspiring to: “Family. Friends. Health. Work. Pick any three.”

The idea is not that you can’t have all four; Colleen says, “it’s that you can’t have an exceptional level of all four at once.” So if you are a workaholic, and your family and friends are important to you, then maybe your health is going to suffer. Or if family is everything, one of the other three is going to get a lot less attention. Or, you’re going to keep juggling all the balls in the air by merely doing the best you can, and that’s fine. Her advice:

“Pick one to hit out of the park or pick a life that lets you gracefully enjoy a bit from the sampler plate of all four. Pick, though. Pick today, and then pick again tomorrow…”

The key here is making it a thoughtful choice.

(In case you’re wondering, the photo above is the bridge in the Japanese garden at Royal Roads University in B.C.)

HPCA’s social media expert Rob Clark will discuss web analytics, and his colleague Kyle McKeown will talk about inbound marketing and search engine optimization. A couple of HPCA guinea pigs (including me) have offered their web sites for closer inspection.

The event takes place Wednesday, May 26 at the Halton Region Museum, 5181 Kelso Road in Milton, ON (at the Kelso Conservation Area, between Appleby Line and Tremaine Road just south of the 401). Networking starts at 6:30 p.m. and the presentation runs from 7 to 9 p.m.

The event is free to HPCA members and only $20 for guests. Guests, please book your spot online.

See you there?

You know you’ve noticed it. Some bloggers you follow simply don’t post as often. Others have replaced blog content with their running Twitter commentary, or they select links found on, again, Twitter for a “best of” round-up. (Not a bad idea, and one I may shamelessly steal borrow.) A Google search on “lost my blogging mojo” pulled up 714,000 results.

Yes, I’ve lost my own blogging mojo. It appears to have started slipping away during a frantically busy week leading up to a week off in San Francisco. Once back in town, the pace continued, and between my freelance writing business and networking/volunteer activities and personal life, I would find myself shutting down the computer at 11:30 p.m. and thinking, “I’ll blog tomorrow.” Or before writing a post, I would just “dip into Twitter,” which quickly ate up my allotted non-work time. Meanwhile, Dr. Evil cranked the Mojo Vac on high and “tomorrow” kept getting farther away.

When I launched this blog in January 2007, I worried about getting into a regular rhythm of posting, having found it difficult to keep up a hand-written journal. But for the most part, I managed to maintain a regular two- or three-times-a-week schedule. So I know if I can only get my mojo back, I’ll be good to go.

If you’ve got any advice for getting blogging mojo back, I’d love to hear it. And if you’ve seen my mojo, let me know. If I see your mojo, I’ll be glad to do the same.