Blogackers

Read the example below, and if you want to learn more ideas like this from Dave Taylor, sign up for business blogging 8-part telecourse and Brad Fallon. It starts next Tuesday, December 6th and there are only a couple seats left. Details here: Business Via Blogging

This is the email that we are sending to the group that has already signed up. It’s from Dave . . . .

Business Bloggers,

While we’re waiting to get started, I wanted to share a recent experience I had that I think you’ll find interesting. It’s all tied to Content Generation Strategies, one of the greatest challenges most people face when they begin working on their business blogs.

I’m a member of a lot of different mailing lists, some of which are busy with useless chatter and others that are slow but full of really smart folk.

On one of those lists, we started talking about a shared web bookmark service with the weird name of del.icio.us, and I realized that the discussion really lent itself to a weblog article. Even better, the site in question is one that many people in my market space don’t really understand, so the opportunity for gaining lots of traffic and visibility was definitely there too.

The problem was, I didn’t really understand what was so compelling about Delicious either. But clearly other people on the mailing list did, as they were very briefly explaining why they used the service.

So here’s what I did…

I picked the highest profile person out of the group, Jeremy Zawodny, a well-known blogger who works at Yahoo!, and asked if he’d be willing to share his perspective on Delicious. He assented, so I spent about five minutes writing up a half-dozen questions and mailed them to him along with an introductory note:

“Great. So if you’re amenable, here’s my first batch of questions. Feel absolutely free to change them, reword them, tweak them, or even skip ‘em if they’re stupid or uninteresting, and do add more questions if you think the conversation should go in a specific direction to be maximally useful and interesting, Jeremy…”
He responded with some great information, and then I asked two more people if they’d share their views too, Jeff Barr, who works at Amazon, and Stuart Maxwell. They agreed too, and within 24 hours I had about 40 paragraphs of interesting and insightful commentary from these three industry experts.

At that point my article was 95% written. I copied and pasted each of my original questions, then each person’s answer, prefaced it with a rudimentary introduction with links to each person’s weblog or website, posted it to my Intuitive Life weblog, and voila! One of the best and most definitive pages on the entire Web about the Delicious service, hosted on my weblog, and without me having to do much more than about 15 minutes work total.

See for yourself:

Interview with Experts: What’s so cool about del.icio.us?

This is but one of the many techniques Brad and I will be exploring in our teleseminar, so get ready to learn all our insider secrets and find out how to not just get into the blogging world, but become a true luminary, an expert who everyone turns to for expert advice and products!

It’s not too late to sign up here.