On reflection using my personal blog as a way to work through the exercises in Darren Rowse's latest ebook (see my first post on this from yesterday) isn't going to be useful, since it is primarily aimed at business bloggers. However given I downloaded it as a chance to rethink through choices I make at work, where it's relevant I'll use this blog for case studying, but where it isn't I'll just summarise what I will do back at the office.
Chapter 2 asks me to set up measurable objectives for the site: drive traffic, build brand, convert readers to customers etc. I have no such lofty aspirations for this site, although if I invest more time, then I would expect to see some associated uplift in traffic as a result.
At work, do our blogs have clearly defined goals and measurable targets? It's something we're working on quite hard right now, but how good are our evaluation criteria? Something to reassess.
Chapter 3 considers hosting your blog. I chose Blogger for this blog as I used Wordpress at work and wanted to learn a different platform. It was interesting to read the recommendation to always self-host your own business blog, I.e. Using Wordpress.org rather than a 3rd party one. The reasoning is of course that on a hosted site you are always at the mercy of the host's t&c's. More to come on this in future posts.
Sunday, 26 June 2011
Saturday, 25 June 2011
Working my way thru the latest ebook from Problogger's Darren Rowse
So yesterday I downloaded the latest ebook from Darren Rowse, the creator of ProBlogger.
In an effort to make the most of my time reading this, I'll be working through my exercises from each chapter on here.
So, up first: competitor research.
Well, that's an interesting one for me, since really I didn't set this up with a clear audience in mind. I mainly wanted somewhere to write thoughts on my continous learning, with the aim of having something to regularly come back to when I wanted to think about my professional development. Also I guess it was a way to share thoughts on my industry and on PR. Somewhat of a surprise to me is that having not been on here for quite a while, there is nevertheless traffic coming in via 2 main sources: my LinkedIn Profile, and my Twitter feed. Well, that makes sense, since I'm more active on those channels, and my blog is linked from those channels. Sheesh. Really ought to invest some more time on here ;)
So, I guess that would mean this is a blog that is a) a shop front for me professionally, plus b) a source of information on PR and publishing, so that is how I'll pick my competitors.
1. The Google blog search
The ebook says have a dig through the search results (i.e. not just p.1) for five similar niche blogs. I started out with "PR and Publishing" as my search.
2. The top result
The top result in was http://howdoyoudo-marketing.co.uk/blog/. A nice looking site from digital marketing company "How do you do". Actually quite like this site and will be subscribing to the RSS. in terms of style (the ebook says look at this), each post has a photo/illustration at the top of the post, and is broken down into sub sections. There is some twitter activity, but low commenting on the blog itself.
3. The Case study sharer
This is a good looking blog with lots of interactive links/media: http://digital-examples.blogspot.com/. The posts are short on the whole, but always with images or video. Seems to get good traffic, and again a site I'd happily subscribe to. Amazing how much you find when you search around a little.
4. The learner
Actually this is a lot more like my own than I had realised: http://priceent08.blogspot.com/. This is a student writing about insights into the industry they want to pursue, as part of an internship at another agency. There are generally lots of images, although this does vary from post to post.
5. The uber blog
This is the "wo, how funky is this' one: http://abranddayout.wordpress.com/#!/cover. A very attractive site from a consultant, with an interesting mix of content that I would really like to read. Having said that it's the uber blog, I have to say it wasn't the easiest to navigate, and I don't think all the functionality was working on an iPad. There is however a standard version wihtout the funkiness which is better for mobile. Of all the sites, I saw the most engagement on this one, and actually that's probably down to the focus of the content, which is well written. There is again an image associated with every post.
There was a commonality across all the sites, which was the sharing of interesting finds from the industry, nothing about product or service as such. There was a good deal of advice sharing, plus some opining. This was a quick skim and I'll learn more through spending more time reading the feeds from these sites.
In an effort to make the most of my time reading this, I'll be working through my exercises from each chapter on here.
So, up first: competitor research.
Well, that's an interesting one for me, since really I didn't set this up with a clear audience in mind. I mainly wanted somewhere to write thoughts on my continous learning, with the aim of having something to regularly come back to when I wanted to think about my professional development. Also I guess it was a way to share thoughts on my industry and on PR. Somewhat of a surprise to me is that having not been on here for quite a while, there is nevertheless traffic coming in via 2 main sources: my LinkedIn Profile, and my Twitter feed. Well, that makes sense, since I'm more active on those channels, and my blog is linked from those channels. Sheesh. Really ought to invest some more time on here ;)
So, I guess that would mean this is a blog that is a) a shop front for me professionally, plus b) a source of information on PR and publishing, so that is how I'll pick my competitors.
1. The Google blog search
The ebook says have a dig through the search results (i.e. not just p.1) for five similar niche blogs. I started out with "PR and Publishing" as my search.
2. The top result
The top result in was http://howdoyoudo-marketing.co.uk/blog/. A nice looking site from digital marketing company "How do you do". Actually quite like this site and will be subscribing to the RSS. in terms of style (the ebook says look at this), each post has a photo/illustration at the top of the post, and is broken down into sub sections. There is some twitter activity, but low commenting on the blog itself.
3. The Case study sharer
This is a good looking blog with lots of interactive links/media: http://digital-examples.blogspot.com/. The posts are short on the whole, but always with images or video. Seems to get good traffic, and again a site I'd happily subscribe to. Amazing how much you find when you search around a little.
4. The learner
Actually this is a lot more like my own than I had realised: http://priceent08.blogspot.com/. This is a student writing about insights into the industry they want to pursue, as part of an internship at another agency. There are generally lots of images, although this does vary from post to post.
5. The uber blog
This is the "wo, how funky is this' one: http://abranddayout.wordpress.com/#!/cover. A very attractive site from a consultant, with an interesting mix of content that I would really like to read. Having said that it's the uber blog, I have to say it wasn't the easiest to navigate, and I don't think all the functionality was working on an iPad. There is however a standard version wihtout the funkiness which is better for mobile. Of all the sites, I saw the most engagement on this one, and actually that's probably down to the focus of the content, which is well written. There is again an image associated with every post.
There was a commonality across all the sites, which was the sharing of interesting finds from the industry, nothing about product or service as such. There was a good deal of advice sharing, plus some opining. This was a quick skim and I'll learn more through spending more time reading the feeds from these sites.
Monday, 21 March 2011
Learning to pod
Today was the first of four days of training for me this week. It was the turn of the podcast today. We had arranged for JISC Digital Media to deliver a bespoke training course for two days, firstly podcasting then videocasting. Joel from JISC was fantastic. Kept things very straight forward and avoided too much jargon. Also his enthusiasm for all things sound came over - shared some interesting facts that I had not known before, for instance what the "X-bit" means (he drew charts: it's about the number of times that a sound file gets pin pointed when converting to digital, so determines how accurate it then sounds - higher bit then higher quality).
We had much better mics during the training today than I do at home, and I'm intending to invest in more kit for the office, but nevertheless felt it was as good a time as any to try out my newly acquired skills. So, courtesy of my laptop mic, here's my first podcast... on podcasting... how meta am I.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10753745/mithutest.mp3
We had much better mics during the training today than I do at home, and I'm intending to invest in more kit for the office, but nevertheless felt it was as good a time as any to try out my newly acquired skills. So, courtesy of my laptop mic, here's my first podcast... on podcasting... how meta am I.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10753745/mithutest.mp3
Wednesday, 6 October 2010
Kindle for Web
Learn about Kindle for Web here, Amazon's new tool to encourage bloggers and publishers to link back to their store by embedding a chapter or chunk of book content.
This is pretty cool. I can't recollect whether you could already do something similar with Google Book Search (some small dull memory on this makes me think that you could?) but nevertheless Amazon's Kindle portfolio is growing rapidly and there is a lot of content I'd be quite happy to feature a short section of on my own website.
So without further ado, having read all about this I headed over to the Kindle store to try it out. Could I locate a book with the 'read it for free' button? Could I 'eckers like. I tried my most recent purchases, my favourite purchases, then headed for the most popular purchases on the Kindle store. None of them. Not one. Incidentally some of the books in the top of that Kindle chart? Bizarre...
So I'm left wondering, is this launched yet? Is it for US customers only? Am I missing something? Sigh.
This is pretty cool. I can't recollect whether you could already do something similar with Google Book Search (some small dull memory on this makes me think that you could?) but nevertheless Amazon's Kindle portfolio is growing rapidly and there is a lot of content I'd be quite happy to feature a short section of on my own website.
So without further ado, having read all about this I headed over to the Kindle store to try it out. Could I locate a book with the 'read it for free' button? Could I 'eckers like. I tried my most recent purchases, my favourite purchases, then headed for the most popular purchases on the Kindle store. None of them. Not one. Incidentally some of the books in the top of that Kindle chart? Bizarre...
So I'm left wondering, is this launched yet? Is it for US customers only? Am I missing something? Sigh.
Tuesday, 28 September 2010
Magazines and Newspapers on the iPad
This makes me excited: Mashable posted an article recently about possible talks between Apple and publishers to get magazines and newspapers onto the iPad.
Ok you can already do this to an extent - I've bought an issue of Wired for example just to test out the functionality (watch a demo on YouTube if you haven't seen one). And you can buy single issues of various publications. Exact Editions do this for example.
But it'll be fascinating to see who Apple signs up for this, what the models will be, and how interactive the publications will be for the device.
Ok you can already do this to an extent - I've bought an issue of Wired for example just to test out the functionality (watch a demo on YouTube if you haven't seen one). And you can buy single issues of various publications. Exact Editions do this for example.
But it'll be fascinating to see who Apple signs up for this, what the models will be, and how interactive the publications will be for the device.
Monday, 27 September 2010
"If he hurts himself he'll learn not to do it again"??
This wise old mantra is one we often tell ourselves, notably when talking about letting a child do something they will probably regret. So what happens when they just don't learn?
An example on Bad Pitch here - it'll make you smile, but more importantly it'll remind you to pay attention to feedback and learn from your mistakes!
An example on Bad Pitch here - it'll make you smile, but more importantly it'll remind you to pay attention to feedback and learn from your mistakes!
Sunday, 26 September 2010
Book rentals: where are we heading?
Catching up on a few weeks' worth of reading this evening. Obviously, working in publishing the business models for selling book content is a fascinating and important topic for me. Particularly academic publishing. So this article from TechCrunch was an interesting one. The growth of book rentals (725% growth for one retailer mentioned in that article) is really interesting. Particularly how much growth there is in the textbook market for this model.
In a way, it shouldn't be surprising that the rental model works for students, since in a way it mirrors the the way students generally engage with their learning. They will use a particular course material for a short period of time: during a particular course or period of their learning. Once they've gained what they need from that resource, they typically don't return to it, except perhaps for revision.
But is that the way we'd actually want our students to engage with scholarly content? Unlike with a fiction title (or actually generally any read-for-pleasure title) I think textbooks are things you dip in and out of over and over again. I guess that depends how many titles, and how relevant. But I know that I still have books I had in college that I turn back to, and the same for several business titles and professional development titles, not to mention light psychology titles!
The traditional models for accessing content over and over again like this were previously: : owning a copy of a book and knowing it's there on your shelf; or having access to a library copy which you can return to over and over again when required.
There are downsides to both options which the book rentals service would suggest it gets around. For the purchase option, the book rental claims it'll save you money. For the library option, there's the risk that 10 other college kids have gone in to find the same book at the same time.
You have to remember at this point in time I'm still talking about TRADITIONAL print publishing.
So how does the rental model hold up in a digital world? When I first started reading the TechCrunch article I immediately assumed that it was digital rentals. I mean, surely in the world of iTunes that is where our rental experiences now lie? I'm amazed that a printed rental model is proving so successful and am happy to admit I have some scepticism, based on the dip-in-briefly-but-often model I set out above.
So in digital? Does Rental overshadow ownership? Digital is immediately more attractive: for one thing providers (e.g. Vitalsource) provide tools so you can annotate and add notes in a way you could never do with a loaned print copy. The model (a la iTunes) is also more familiar here, and much more accessible/immediate compared with the print rentals. But is it better than ownership?
I think I need some more time to think about this one.
In a way, it shouldn't be surprising that the rental model works for students, since in a way it mirrors the the way students generally engage with their learning. They will use a particular course material for a short period of time: during a particular course or period of their learning. Once they've gained what they need from that resource, they typically don't return to it, except perhaps for revision.
But is that the way we'd actually want our students to engage with scholarly content? Unlike with a fiction title (or actually generally any read-for-pleasure title) I think textbooks are things you dip in and out of over and over again. I guess that depends how many titles, and how relevant. But I know that I still have books I had in college that I turn back to, and the same for several business titles and professional development titles, not to mention light psychology titles!
The traditional models for accessing content over and over again like this were previously: : owning a copy of a book and knowing it's there on your shelf; or having access to a library copy which you can return to over and over again when required.
There are downsides to both options which the book rentals service would suggest it gets around. For the purchase option, the book rental claims it'll save you money. For the library option, there's the risk that 10 other college kids have gone in to find the same book at the same time.
You have to remember at this point in time I'm still talking about TRADITIONAL print publishing.
So how does the rental model hold up in a digital world? When I first started reading the TechCrunch article I immediately assumed that it was digital rentals. I mean, surely in the world of iTunes that is where our rental experiences now lie? I'm amazed that a printed rental model is proving so successful and am happy to admit I have some scepticism, based on the dip-in-briefly-but-often model I set out above.
So in digital? Does Rental overshadow ownership? Digital is immediately more attractive: for one thing providers (e.g. Vitalsource) provide tools so you can annotate and add notes in a way you could never do with a loaned print copy. The model (a la iTunes) is also more familiar here, and much more accessible/immediate compared with the print rentals. But is it better than ownership?
I think I need some more time to think about this one.
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