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Tuesday, 1 May 2018
E-book,Software & Reviews
Case Study: How to Run a 7-Day Challenge
Today’s post is a case study with Undercover Architect, Amelia Lee.
Amelia attended the ProBlogger Evolve and Mastermind events in 2017, and adapted speaker Jadah Sellner’s 7-Day Challenge model to boost her own lead generation and course enrollments.
Here’s how she did it.
When I attended ProBlogger Evolve in 2017, I was specifically looking for guidance on how to market and run a new online program I’d been piloting. The format of “How to Get it Right” was a six-week program on a launch model, with six weeks’ membership to a Facebook group and weekly live Q&A sessions.
I already had an evergreen premium coaching program where I supported and guided homeowners through their projects over a 12-month period. This six-week program would be a standalone offering that would also give members a taste of the premium program and let them upgrade if they so chose.
During the Mastermind day on Problogger Evolve, Jadah Sellner (previously of Simple Green Smoothies) did a presentation on her signature “How to Build a Challenge” process. She’d had success using challenges as list builders, as well as great conversion tools for selling products and programs online.
I’d considered using it as a lead generator for “How to Get it Right”. But I wasn’t sure whether I’d be giving too much of the course away, or whether I’d need to come up with new content.
During one of the breaks, I spoke with Jadah about my concerns. She asked about the format of my course content (number of steps, breakdown of modules, etc). She suggested sharing the six steps in the first of my four modules. She also suggested I run a live webinar (or something similar) on the last day, and pitch it as a seven-day challenge. I could tell attendees they’d just had a taste of the full program, which they could now join and use that momentum to keep taking action on their projects.
I’d seen people using a Facebook group or page to keep generating leads during their challenges. So I wanted to incorporate that as well.
This is how we built the Undercover Architect Free 7-Day Challenge.
- We hosted the challenge itself inside our online course platformWe already had a WordPress site with the Access Ally plugin to run our online “Your Reno Roadmap” program. We built the 7-Day Challenge as a course inside there to make it easy to:
- create a great user experience
- drip-feed content
- provide extra resources.
Members also received a personal login to the 7-Day Challenge site, which gave them a taste of the technology the actual course would run on.
- The first six steps of my “How to Get it Right in Your Reno or New Home” content became the six days of the free challenge
These six steps are the first steps anyone needs to do if planning a reno or new home. But they’re often missed by homeowners. Instead of sharing all the content inside the course, I used storytelling and examples to teach the steps. I created a short video for each day of the challenge to present this information. I used my iPad Pro to shoot them in my office (with our rooster crowing in the background), and edited them in iMovie.
- We provide extra resources for each day inside the online course
We included links to blogs or podcasts on Undercover Architect’s website, and other online resources. We also created an interactive PDF worksheet to help homeowners relate the learnings to their own projects. (These were created in Canva, and then made interactive in Adobe Acrobat.)
- We ran ads on Facebook and Instagram to launch the challenge
We advertised a start date for seven-day challenge It was part of the lead up to launching the program, with day seven of the challenge being the ‘cart open’ day to purchase “How to Get it Right”.It was a great lead generator.I’ve run the challenge twice now, and it’s added more than 1,500 people to my email list, with low conversion costs on Facebook.
- During the actual challenge, we uploaded each day’s challenge video to the Undercover Architect Facebook page, with a CTA to join if they wanted to access the free resources inside the course website.
We used ActiveCampaign, and set up an automation that allowed people to opt in before the challenge. They could also opt in after the challenge had started. If they opted in on Day 3, they would get immediate access to Day 1, Day 2 and Day 3, and then be drip-fed the remainder of the challenge.
(We did this with a lot of “If/Then” settings in ActiveCampaign, and “Wait until specific date”. As an aside, if you’re an Access Ally owner, I recommend joining Nathalie Lussier’s Facebook Group for Access Ally. I got an immediate reply in there when asking a question about how to get this to work in Active Campaign).This meant we could run Facebook ads to each day’s video, and collect email addresses while the challenge was live.
And each day we sent a reminder to everyone who opted in to visit the course website, watch the video and grab their free resources.
- Day seven of the Challenge was a Facebook Live
I debated whether to do this as a webinar. But in the end I figured there would be less friction if I just offered it as a Free Q&A on the Undercover Architect Facebook page. We uploaded it to the course website for anyone who missed it. During the Facebook live, I wrapped up the 7-Day Challenge, spoke about the launch of “How to Get it Right” (which had been seeded during the challenge) and then answered questions.
- We then retargeted the Facebook ads to the video viewers and email list from the challenge. We also ran other campaigns during the ‘cart open’ phase.
We’ve now run this challenge/launch format twice for the “How to Get it Right” program. And each time it’s been great as a conversion tool. In the most recent round, 25% of purchasers had only joined our list during the free 7-Day Challenge we’d just run.
We also found with the most recent launch that a good portion of purchasers had done the free challenge both times.
I found the challenge was a great way to provide high-quality, actionable content to the UA Community, and give them a taste of what the online program is like. I also had people emailing me who weren’t ready to join the course, but still appreciated the experience of learning the best first steps in a reno or new build project.
How has this performed against other launches? Well, the last two launches of “How to Get it Right” have certainly been the biggest revenue launches I’ve done. They’ve also been the most structured, with a lead generation strategy and marketing campaign.
With the most recent launch I used the Content Strategy Pat Flynn shared during his Mastermind session to feed the launch into my podcast content. This worked really well too.
I’m now reviewing how I can set up “How to Get it Right in Your Reno or New Home” as an evergreen offering, and how the free 7-Day Challenge will be involved. The thing about homeowners planning their renovation or new home is that it’s not seasonal, and everyone does it at a different pace. So, while the ‘launch’ strategy builds scarcity, it doesn’t serve my audience in terms of them having access to the information in the way they need.
We’re also reviewing whether the 7-Day Challenge will stay on our online course site, or whether we’ll give it a different home. I’ve noticed Pat Flynn runs his mini-courses on Leadpages, as do many other online businesses that release a video each day in the same way. We had a bit of tech management to do with each challenge as people familiarised themselves with the username/password process of logging into a site, and so Leadpages may alleviate this.
But the 7-Day Challenge is a fantastic information asset for Undercover Architect, and super valuable to those who participate. So it’s definitely something we’ll feature in our business in the not-too-distant future.
We’re currently focusing on building another complimentary online program called “Manage Your Build” that will help homeowners oversee the construction of their new home or renovation with sanity, confidence and ease.
I was incredibly grateful for the opportunity to attend ProBlogger Evolve 2017, and for what I learned there. The calibre of expertise, and the generosity of teaching and sharing, was amazing. And to have the queen of challenges herself, Jadah Sellner, give me personal advice on how to structure mine was invaluable.
So, what challenge will you create for your audience?
BIO
Amelia Lee is the architect behind Undercover Architect.
Undercover Architect is an award-winning online resource that helps homeowners get it right when designing, building or renovating their family homes.
Amelia has more than 20 years industry experience in more than 250 projects (including three renovations of her own). She brings that experience and expertise to Undercover Architect to teach you how to save time, money and stress in your project, and ensure you create a home that suits you now, and always.
With a blog, podcast and online programs to support and guide you, Undercover Architect provides the know-how you need to feel confident and in control.
Check out www.undercoverarchitect.com and get started on your future family home now.
The post Case Study: How to Run a 7-Day Challenge appeared first on ProBlogger.
ProBlogger
8 Steps to Get Higher Rankings Using Google Analytics Data
Ranking higher on Google. A ceaseless rush to get authority for your website and lots of visitors to eventually turn them into clients. Search engine optimization doesn’t have to be the black sheep of marketing. You just got to understand how to use it. You can complement your SEO efforts with lots of other marketing forms, such as analytics data. It will stop you from bleeding website data. It really will.
How does it work? You need an account on a dedicated analytics product. Then, you need to get access to your analytics data, pull up your sleeves and step in using our analytics data kit filled with actionable tips.
- Search for Landing Pages to Transform Them in Link Magnets
- Hunt for Search Queries to Craft Audience Targeted Content
- Scour for Money Keywords to Optimize Your Content
- Track Best-Performing Third-Party Campaigns
- Channel Grouping for Better Targeting
- Evaluate Website Traffic from Search Engines
- Gauge Impactful Changes in Your Website’s Evolution
- Use Advanced Segments to Shorten the Conversion Path
For our experiment, we mainly used Google Analytics. Even though from time to time we felt that the data coming from here is not comprehensive, the platform provides lots of valuable features.
1. Search for Landing Pages to Transform Them in Link Magnets
Knowing exactly which pages receive organic traffic is crucial. It will help not only your content marketers to make better decisions, but it will also improve the strategy of your overall marketing campaigns. Organic search traffic is one of the first metrics on your list that needs to be tracked. Go to Behavior » Site Content » All Pages to view all the pages ordered by the highest number. In case you want to see the traffic only for some category of pages from your website, you’ll have to search for it. Below you can see an example of the Blog category:
The pages with high scores can give you a glimpse of indexation. Landing pages with a high number of unique pageviews mean that they are of interest, offer a better user experience, and are indexed better than the others. Thus, if the viewers like you, Google likes you, and that will bring the appreciation of other websites and turn the pages into link magnets. Improving those pages and optimizing them is essential to sprout your backlink profile.
Use those pages to link them to other relevant pages, because internal links have a strong signal of transferring value (therefore, you’ll improve your conversion rates, time on site and your traffic).
On the other hand, pages with a lower score (pages with a high bounce rate) mean they don’t offer what was promised from the title and meta description. Those users will always pogo stick away unless immediate changes are made.
2. Hunt for Search Queries to Craft Audience Targeted Content
Using Google data, you can see what your audience searches before accessing your content. All the hustle for searching queries and relevant keywords can easily turn into an easy and pain-free task. View the Google’s search terms from the amounts of data collected in Search Console. Access it through Acquisition » Search Console » Queries.
Here you can find plenty of keywords data. You will find all that your users searched about you before they entered your website: your brand name, services you might offer, informational queries and lots of other mixed searches. In our case, I recommend looking for the relevant keyword phrases, that could have a chance to rank higher and bring more traffic to your website. To make the strategy work, you’ll have to filter the list by the average position.
What you should do is go to Advanced filter » include » Average position » greater than » (insert arbitrary number here). In the blank space, I would recommend inserting the number 10, which basically means all the keywords that rank below the 10th position (from the second page to the last one). Baby steps. Start with the pages that have a higher chance to be pushed to the first page rather than going directly to those in higher positions (greater than 80/90/100, etc).
Look for the queries that are relevant to your business, for that type of keywords that could push the user down the funnel to turn a lead, such as very specific keywords, not informational ones. Some specific examples might be: washing machine service in Perth, home cleaning service provider Minneapolis, but that really depends on the industry and type of business.
After you’ve gathered all the keywords, search for the pages related to each keyword. Up to this point, you have the easy way to avoid the headaches or the-long-phase-pain-in-the-neck journey. The first option is to use a dedicated tool or a plugin. Keyword Tool has an option to see on which position is your content for a specific query. Below you can see the rankings for “24-hour locksmith Sydney”. In the list, you see all the first 100 positions so you can easily search with “ctrl + f” and find your site.
The hard way would be to go to the search engine you use, such as google.com and search for that particular query, manually.
After you found the page, copy-paste it into Content Assistant and optimize it. Transform the low-hanging fruits into best-performing pieces of content. We’ve crafted a step-by-step guideline, if you need any help.
Make sure you don’t rank already for a highly competitive keyword for the same page, otherwise you risk messing around your actual rankings. I know Google is working on a complicated and dreadful-algorithmic situation. For that, you’ll have to return to Acquisition » Search Console » Queries search for the main keyword. In our case, it would be locksmith and see which similar phrases you have there and their position.
3. Scour for Money Keywords to Optimize Your Content
There are some triggers in analytics that could lead to financial outcome, if you follow a well-planned strategy. Following a similar path as we talked about in the query hunting at point 2, we can look up to money keywords 
(All I see is dolla’ signs, dolla’ signs).
You have two options to scour for money keywords in Analytics. In the first case, you can find money keywords that would convert by looking into Google Adwords campaigns, which can be accessed through Acquisition » Adwords » Keywords.
A bit of keyword research and analytics SEO never killed nobody. Order keywords by cost, then select the ones that have a higher cost and lots of clicks, because those are the most successful ones.
In the last case, you can see the search terms from your own e-commerce website/ online shop. Go to Behavior » Site Search » Search Terms. If you have an e-commerce website, I bet there are lots of people that might search for something else, once they’ve entered your website. You can find what they were looking for and try to use those search terms to your advantage, such as creating new content, optimizing product pages for those specific keywords or other similar pages.
Usually, when navigating an ecommerce website, visitors search for a category of products, a specific product, color or even an SKU (stock keeping unit – the identification code).
After you’ve gathered all the keywords and made a list of them with the corresponding page, you can start optimizing the content you already have, as we discussed previously or you can create new content.
4. Track Best-Performing Third-Party Campaigns
If you want to see data from the various third-party campaigns ran by you, you can use Analytics. Look at all the campaigns you have through Acquisition » Campaigns » All Campaigns.
This analytics tool category includes promotional campaigns created on other websites that point to yours through dedicated landing pages, discount codes, articles and so on. All the links from each campaign must use a UTM code to make it easy to track in Analytics. A UTM code is attached to a custom URL that can be used to track a source, medium, and campaign name. You can also use it for email campaigns.
All the data gathered from third-party campaigns can help you understand which website performs better and can bring lots of clients back to your site. We all know that links bring a lot of value to your domain. The more powerful, the better. Links are a strong ranking signal, so make sure you take advantage of what you’ve got.
Select the keywords that are grammatically correct and relevant for future articles or actual keywords optimization ideas for published content. Priority goes to keywords with lots of users.
Another interesting strategy would be to look at the keywords that bring traffic to your website, which can be accessed by Acquisition » Campaigns » Organic Keywords. You can use those in your optimization process to generate new content ideas. They have a strong indicator of quality search.
5. Channel Grouping for Better Targeting
It is critical to know where your visitors are coming from. Think of it this way: it’s like when you have a defined profile, with all the attributes and metrics highlighted and a group with all sort of unfiltered, uncategorized, unstructured data with lots of inconclusive info. Which one would be easier to go through?
Jeff Sauer, Google Analytics consultant, explains how the journey of the user and how channel grouping can help over-simplify the traffic coming to your website:
| Channels represent the paths visitors take to arrive on your website. Some visitors type in your URL, some search your brand name, others search by topic and find your content. | |
 | Jeff Sauer |
| Founder of Jeffalytics | |
Analytics allows you to see some of the default channels at first, but they can be easily customized in order to view detailed categories. It is best to use the channel grouping feature from Google Analytics: Acquisition » All Traffic » Channels.
In the example represented above, you can see a list of channels. There is a variety of channels you could create. You just have to make sure all of them are relevant and useful to your business.
If you don’t know where 15% is coming from, that’s a problem, right? Using granular channel grouping will ease up your decision-making process because this way you’ll have an accurate view of your data.
Paul Koks, Analytics Advocate at Online Metrics, points out the benefits for customizing channel grouping to get an accurate view of your marketing performances:
| Goals are crucial to analyze the performance of your landing pages, channels etc. A proper structure and suitable naming conventions for your goal sets are extremely helpful for you and other people that have access to the same reporting view. | |
 | Paul Koks |
| Analytics Advocate at Online Metrics | |
6. Evaluate Website Traffic from Search Engines
Traffic has a high connection with high rankings, but they are also in a constant battle, at the same time. You shouldn’t focus only on one or the other. Tracking keywords that send traffic to your site is one of the most important pieces of the pie. In Analytics, you can view the organic search traffic for all the searched terms in a specific period of time. Go to Acquisition » All Traffic » Channels.
Once you get here, you need to click on Organic Search and a new list of search terms will load.
Here you can view all the keywords that are successful and bring a lot of users. Gauge your website’s performance in terms of search traffic (visitors, sessions) and opt to use only those that can bring a significant amount of traffic for content that you’re under-optimized for.
Make sure you avoid seasonal keywords and seasonal periods (Christmas, Easter and other local events and celebrations) that potentially could spike the traffic because they are in demand only at that specific time.
7. Gauge Impactful Changes in Your Website’s Evolution
Besides all the data analysis methods, Google Analytics can provide some shortcuts to your reports and historical data. Annotations are a great feature you should use to keep track of your changes. They are some notes you can add to mark important events.
If you want to add annotations to flag any important changes, you’ll have to go the graphic you’re interested in and click on the small arrow to expand and create your annotation.
Before starting to create new annotations, observe the following tips:
- Give a relevant and specific name to make it explicit.
- Keep it short, to avoid overlapping with your other annotations and make it harder to read.
- Record all marketing campaigns that run online and offline or other events that could potentially influence the traffic.
Farid Alhadi, an analytics expert, performed lots of experiments and analytics researches and saw the value in annotations. They are best put to use to avoid breaks and irregularities, but also to take advantage of all the natural spikes from the website’s results.
| These “sticky notes” might seem insignificant, but can often be a life-saver, providing insight as to why your data sometimes looks the way it does, especially anomalies or outliers. | |
 | Farid Alhadi |
| Sales Director at E-Nor | |
8. Use Advanced Segments to Shorten the Conversion Path
What’s SEO success if we don’t create segmented audience? How will we know on which type of client we should focus our attention more, or for which we should interfere in the funnel to convert them? Segmentation will provide you with lots of insight data on your audience to get a deep-dive into everything that happens with your website. Advanced segments in Analytics can help you get deeper information for isolated groups established through parameters.
Dave Chaffey, co-founder at Smart Insights, has an interesting story about the overall behavior when it comes to Google Analytics usage:
| The best marketers put effort into understanding their customers’ behaviours, characteristics and needs, so at first glance, Google Analytics can be frustrating to use to help marketing since there isn’t an obvious report about customers. The closest we can get is the visitors report, but these seem anonymous and undifferentiated. | |
 | Dave Chaffey |
| Co-founder and Content Director of Smart Insights | |
He rather said an honest and hard truth:
| If you’re using Google Analytics and not using Segments, you might as well not bother using Google Analytics other than for trend reporting. | |
| Dave Chaffey |
| Co-founder and Content Director of Smart Insights | |
To create segments, you need to go to your property, where you’ll find a button that says Add Segment » New segment.
After that step, you get to the point when you have the option to create conditions or sequences. Conditions are best out to use in situations when you want to understand how something on your site influences the visitor, for example. Let’s say you want to find how your blog impacts the revenue.
You should use sequences if you want to measure which users took specific actions in a certain order on your site; the evolution, the journey of the user on site. For example, create a sequence for users that go to a specific page and then they click to create an account and convert. That way, you could analyze the aggregate data regarding user behavior and the differences that appear from the other ones.
Getting the SEO analytics you specifically need can turn into a “light-bulb” moment.
Kunle Campbell, an e-commerce growth consultant, points out in a few words the main goal of the advanced segments and the high-driven value it can bring to a website:
| Advanced segments are good at determining acquisition channels that drive quality traffic to your site. You can also create segments for different demographic groups, to see what pages they visit most and how long they stay on your website. You can segment users and sessions with specific keywords you are targeting. Custom segments are available for importing and sharing with others. In short, advanced segments is a powerful tool for investigating important sets of website traffic and for revealing weak areas in your site, to address. | |
 | Kunle Campbell |
| Founder of 2X eCommerce | |
Conclusion
Let me tell you a short story I know from my grandma about three countryside brothers from a small village. All of them were raised by a single dad who had an orchard. One day, their dad was hit by a rare disease which weakened him day by day. Knowing that he didn’t have much time left, he wanted to see which of his sons is ready to take over the orchard. Each one of them received one bean.
They were told that the first one who manages to grow a leaf from that bean will take over the family legacy – the orchard. The first one put it in the ground and watered it every day in the evening. The second one placed it in a glass of water on the porch to receive light. The last one thought of doing something different. First, he gathered more information on how to grow it and he found out that the best way was to put ii in a glass on a piece of wet cotton wool or a sort of wadding and place it somewhere when it can receive light, watering it from day to day, always checking the piece of cotton. Days passed, the first started to rush and put a stick to attach the beanstalk to be prepared when it grows. The second one drowned the bean and it never grew. The interesting part of the story is the fact that the third son always checked the bean and kept track of what was happening to it, keeping a note with what he did and what happened.
After a few days the first leaf appeared. The third son was ecstatic. The father was happy and the orchard had a new owner. The interesting part I was trying to point out through this story is the fact that in order to make something work you need to search, make the right steps at the right time. Don’t rush into things, like the first son did. Don’t try to do your job just one time and forget about it like the second son did, but try to track the evolution, analytics data, keep reports and establish goals like the third son did.
This article is not a guide to Google Analytics, nor a list with Google ranking factors or an SEO checklist. It’s a list with actionable steps that you can take in order to improve your marketing strategy and get the most out of your current marketing campaigns by using the data you already have. Also, this blog post will not guarantee you SEO success but it will surely help you with your conversion rate optimization, with your SEO rankings and will ultimately improve your organic search traffic.
As analytics data is the first insight you get about your business and the audience. It can bring a lot of value to start mushrooming your SEO strategy.
The post 8 Steps to Get Higher Rankings Using Google Analytics Data appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.
SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies
Digital Marketing Tools Customized for Your Role
Here at Conductor, we like to talk about customer-first marketing. Since our launch in 2010, we have worked with amazing brands like Citibank, Jet.com, WeWork, and Athenahealth to empower their marketing teams to be customer-first leaders.
And we have observed again and again that the more marketers across a team who adopt a customer-first mentality, the more successful the team and business are in the long term.
The challenge today is that many teams are siloed— using different digital marketing tools, different data sets, and different processes. The result is teams aren’t efficiently able to share customer insights like how customers are searching for their products and how their content is getting found online. These insights are invaluable and essential to achieving digital marketing success. So it’s not surprising that according to Salesforce, 86% of employees and executives blame a lack of collaboration or poor communication for team failures.
We challenged ourselves to take a step back and consider: How can we help teams break down these silos? Can we make Conductor even more intuitive and accessible to everyone on a marketing team? What workflows are most important for each role to be successful?
Our product and design team interviewed, studied, and observed thousands of our users at businesses big and small across marketing functions. They examined the different digital marketing tools they were using in the platform, and identified the best-practices and workflows for each role.
Armed with these insights and best practices, we designed intuitive workflows in the platform for each role that are mapped directly to role-specific goals and processes.
Introducing Role-Based Views
Role-Based Views give each team member a “view” with access to just the most relevant features for their areas of responsibility. The views are designed to streamline workflows and remove the noise, so every team can maximize the value they get through Conductor Searchlight.
The views available map to the core workflows of the highest frequency user roles in Conductor. The views we’re introducing are:
- Complete
- Search Marketing
- Content Marketing
- Paid
- Executive Essentials
- Research
By tailoring the platform to the best practices of our customers, we’re making it easier for each team member to focus on the activities that drive performance. This enables cross-functional teams to work more collaboratively and share insights in one platform.
Let’s take a look at what we found to be the most important activities for each role based on where they are spending their time and what’s available in their view.
Search Marketing:
Content Marketing:
Paid:
Executive Essentials: 
Research:
We also offer a Complete view which allows user to see all features available. The Complete view is ideal for users who have a broad set of marketing responsibilities across channels.
Customers have the ability to activate or change views at any time— giving them ultimate flexibility as responsibilities evolve.
The success of marketing teams is tightly coupled with how well they are able to collaborate and communicate, and Role-Based Views are just one step toward realizing our vision of aligning teams around a customer-first marketing strategy. Going forward, we will continue to invest in solutions designed to enable teams and provide more depth of insight for all digital marketers.
Role-Based Views are available today for all Conductor customers. Not yet a customer and want to learn more? Contact us.
The post Digital Marketing Tools Customized for Your Role appeared first on Conductor Spotlight.
Conductor Spotlight
245: Why Shiny Object Syndrome Is Sometimes a Good Thing
Why Shiny Object Syndrome Can Be Good for Your Blog and Business
Do you suffer from Shiny Object Syndrome? Are you easily distracted by something new – a tool, medium, tactic, or income stream?
Whatever it is, it captivates and distracts you in the moment. And it can easily take over your day, week, or even month.
Shiny Object Syndrome has the power to take you away from your core business, which can be destructive.
But it can be a good thing, too.
JR Caparas asked me how to avoid Shiny Object Syndrome in blogging. My answer? Don’t avoid it. Just make sure you put boundaries around it.
Sometimes shiny objects can give you energy, spark new ideas, and help you discover new ways to engage your audience.
So rather than avoiding shiny objects, make time for them. But don’t let them hijack your business, your time and your life.
You need to spend most of your time focusing on what’s most important, what keeps your blog growing, what’s already working, and what’s proven to work.
But put some time aside to play, experiment, learn, and be curious. And look for what makes sparks fly and gives you energy when you play with that shiny object.
Put shiny objects in their place.
Quote of the Week: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” – Howard Washington Thurman, author, philosopher, theologian, educator, and civil rights leader.
Links and Resources for Why Shiny Object Syndrome is Sometimes a Good Thing
Further Listening
Examples of Why Shiny Object Syndrome is Sometimes a Good Thing
- The ProBlogger podcast started out as a shiny object.
Courses
Join our Facebook group
Full Transcript Compress to smaller transcript view
Hey there and welcome to episode 245 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, podcast event, job board, series of ebooks, and courses all designed to help you to start an amazing blog, to grow that blog, to monetize that blog and hopefully have a good time while you’re doing it. You can learn more about ProBlogger at problogger.com.
Now, today’s podcast is all about something that I know many of us struggle with in this space, it is shiny object syndrome, that time when you’re working away and suddenly you find yourself doing something completely different to what you had set down to do. You’re being distracted by something; it could be a game on your phone, but it also could be something that is good, a new tool, a medium, a new tactic, a new income string.
Whatever it is, it captivates you in that moment, it looms large, it can distract you right where you’re sitting not only for that moment, but it can end up distracting you if you’re anything like me, for a day, for a week, for a month, or for the rest of the year. It has the power to take you away from your core business and to be really distracted, but, and this is what I want to talk about today, I think it can actually be a good thing too. There’s some positives when it comes to shiny object syndrome. I want to explore that a little bit in today’s show. It will be a short one, but I want to put to you that shiny object syndrome is actually something you can—maybe you should plan for, maybe you should actually build into your week.
Hang with me though, before I get into that, I want to just let you know that this episode is brought to you by this year’s Success Incubator event which I’m running with some good friends this coming September on the 24th and 25th in Orlando, Florida. If you are in the U.S. or you feel like a troop out to the U.S., you could actually tackle this onto another conference that’s happening in the days after theme con, this year, we are doing it again.
This is the second time we’ve done Success Incubator. It is a mastermind style event, you get about half the time teaching, and half the time interacting with other people in an intentional way, talking about your business, your blog, and helping each other to improve what you want to build. If that sounds interesting to you, I highly recommend that you grab a ticket sooner than later because we are limiting the numbers this year quite a bit. problogger.com/success will take you there and give you all the details of that event.
The last thing I want to say is that I’m going to do something a little bit new at the end of today’s podcast. I want to share with you a quote of the week and I was just thinking maybe I’ll do this for a few weeks and see what you think about it. I love quotes, I spend a lot of my time being distracted by quotes which is a little bit ironic because that’s what I’m talking about today. I do want to share a quote with you today that I think relates to blogging—not all of the quotes that I share will relate to blogging but hopefully it’s just a moment in this podcast that will give you a little bit of encouragement as you go about your business. So stay tuned to the end and I will share that quote with you. Lastly, problogger.com/podcast/245 is where you’ll find today’s show notes and a full transcript of the show. Let’s get into it.
Okay, today’s topic was suggested by one of our Facebook group members, JR Caparas I think it is, thank you for your question. “How do you focus and avoid shiny object syndrome in blogging?” JR asks, and then it goes on to talking about the topics, niches, blogging, books, courses, blogging tasks, possible sources of income as examples of those shiny objects. Here’s what I want to say to you, JR, I actually think that shiny object syndrome can be a good thing, and I would encourage you not to avoid it but to put it in its place.
Those of you who have been listening for a while know that I’m a big believer in putting boundaries around what we do, all of the things that we do, to actually put things in their place. Here’s the argument that I want to make for shiny object syndrome, is that sometimes, the shiny objects can actually give us energy, they can spark new ideas, they can help us discover new ways of engaging with our audience and they can actually help us to find white space in our minds and are able to rest a little bit.
The distractions can actually be good things in a variety of ways for us personally, but also for our business and for our blogs. I’ve discovered this many times over the years, that it is sometimes in the distractions that I get my next good idea. Sometimes, it is listening to a podcast that has got nothing to do with blogging that I actually get the best idea for blogging. Sometimes, it is in playing with a new social network that’s just emerging, a shiny object that really isn’t benefiting my blog in the present. Sometimes, I get ideas from that, sometimes I discover something that I can then translate into my business.
What I want to encourage you to do is to think about not avoiding it, not eliminating it, but to actually make time for it and put boundaries around that. The key is not to allow your business, your time, your life to be hijacked by the shiny object.
The problem I see—and I’m sure this is what JR is alluding to—is that many times we get completely sidetracked by the shiny objects, by the new medium, by that new tool, by that new platform, all the topics, all the techniques, all the gears, all the conferences, all the books, all the courses, all the income strength. Sometimes these things actually completely sidetrack us and stop our core business and activities that we need to do to build our blog.
What I want to encourage you to do is to think about your time and your schedule and actually schedule your week out as much as possible. This is something I’ve talked about, I think it was back in episode 40, for the first time and then more recently in episode 163. In both of those episodes, I showed you my weekly template.
This is something I designed for my week. I actually got a calendar—a Google calendar—and I blocked out time for different activities. A lot of those activities were to do with my core business. A lot of them went to creating new content, brainstorming ideas, connecting with my team, doing administrative tasks like replying to emails, moderating comments, interacting in my Facebook group, these are the things that I know are so important. If you’re going to look at my template, you’ll see that probably 95% of my time, maybe 90% of my time, is on these core things that I know I need to do to build my business. That’s particularly between 9:00 and 5:00. But you will also sit down Monday afternoons if you’re going to look at episodes 163. You’ll see on Monday afternoons, I have time for play and that is a time where I have scheduled shiny objects.
That is a time I do not plan what I’m going to do, I simply sit down on a Monday afternoon and I say, what do I want to do now? What have I been putting off this week to play with? What am I curious about? What new tool? Sometimes it’s a tool, sometimes it’s a book that I’ve had sitting next to my bed, sometimes I go and curl up in my bed and have a read. Sometimes it’s an episode on Netflix that I’ve been thinking about, sometimes it’s a podcast, sometimes it’s exercise, sometimes it’s playing with my kids, sometimes it’s a new app on my phone or a game that I want to play with. These shiny objects, I actually acknowledge them and I set aside time to do them and to pay attention to them.
Sometimes, it’s a very productive time and sometimes it’s a completely unproductive time but I’ve put shiny objects in their place. What I’ve discovered is that I actually begin to look forward to Monday afternoons, it’s a time that I relax, it’s a time that I enjoy, a time that I see almost as a reward for the hard work of the rest of my schedule. Put aside best of time for shiny objects.
Now, you might choose to do that on a Monday afternoon, once a week, or you may choose to do that every afternoon at 3:30 just before your kids get home from school or after you’ve written a blog post, you may give yourself a boost of 15 minutes and you may want to schedule it in that way. Put aside time for it, and what you might find is that it will give you energy, it will spark new ideas, it will help you to discover new techniques in what you’re going to do. Some of it will actually then become not just a shiny object but it can actually become the thing that you do, your next big thing in some way. This is again something that I’ve talked about before that your next big thing sometimes will start as a little spark of an idea or something that you experiment with.
I can think about many times where this has happened for me. This podcast really started as a shiny object for me. This podcast was something that I had felt that I wanted to do, something that was making me curious, it was something that I’ve been wondering about for many years and I decided to do. But, I decided to do it with boundaries around it.
I actually started this podcast for a month. I said to myself I’m going to do a month of content. I’m going to do this first series of this podcast. A part of me there was really limiting myself to just that one month because I didn’t want to become distracted for all time by it, I wanted to see whether ego meet energies and whether it was something that I enjoyed, but I also wanted to watch to see what happened as I follow that spark of curiosity.
What I found is that the podcast did give me energy. It was actually something that I enjoyed incredibly but I also realized that in doing it, experimenting with it, was that other people were getting energy with it too.
This is the second thing that I encourage you to do as you think about these times where you allow yourself to be distracted, where you allow yourself to be following your curiosities is to pay attention to whether those things give you energy but also as you experiment particularly with the things and to do with your blog, watch to see what happens as a result of those things.
If the podcast had given me incredible amounts of energy but no one ever listened to it, I would probably have to ask some tough questions about that. Is this something that is going to bring life to my business in the long-term if no one is listening to it? You want to be finding things that allow you to feel like you’ve come alive, but also things that give other people energy as well. That’s my advice for you, JR, yes, you want to limit your shiny object syndrome but actually find a place for it. Find a place for that because you may just find that in those moments where you follow those curiosities, that new things will emerge from those.
I would love to hear your reflections on this podcast and I would particularly love to hear those moments where you have found the shiny object that has distracted you in a good way that has led to something powerful. After they hear people talking about productivity, eliminate distractions. I would love to hear some examples of people who have been distracted by something but have actually found some goodness in those distractions as well. You can let us know what those things are either on the comments of the show notes today at problogger.com/podcast/245, or head on over to our Facebook group, just search for ProBlogger Community on Facebook.
Now onto my quote of the day, and it just so happens I didn’t actually plan it this way but as I’m thinking about the quote that I have selected for today, it actually connects with the topic of today, it was meant to be, I might say. The quote is from a man called Howard Washington Thurman who is an author, philosopher, theologian, educator, civil rights leader—I just read that off Wikipedia. I don’t really know a lot about him, but I love this quote, it’s one that has resonated with me for years now and it came back to my attention today as I was listening to a podcast.
This is what he wrote or spoke, “Don’t ask what the world needs, ask what makes you come alive and go do it because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” I think this does resonate with today’s show. You do sometimes need to be mindful of the things that make you come alive. Sometimes those things start as shiny objects, things that might even be distracting you and if you don’t allow yourself to follow those curiosities, you might not actually discover what it is that is alive within you.
Let me just read that again, “Don’t ask what the world needs, ask what makes you come alive and go do it because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” I guess the last thing I’ll say about this is that it does particularly right to those of you who at the beginning of your journey of blogging have maybe been wondering what should I blog about?
Choosing a niche, I do think it’s important to pay attention to what brings you alive, what gives you energy because you are going to be at this for a long time and you might as well enjoy what you’re doing, you might as well feel alive by what you are doing, but the value of it is that if you come alive with your topic, your readers, the listeners of your podcast, the viewers of your video are going to feel that you are alive with your topic and that’s going to resonate with him on a deeper level, and it’s going to make them feel more alive as well.
What the world needs is people who are alive, and particularly in the times that we live in today, we do live in a time where it’s very easy to feel like it’s a dark time but what the world actually needs is people who will brush on a little light and they do that by being excited or passionate about what they’re on about.
Thanks for listening. I would love to hear any quotes that you’ve got that bring you a bit of life again. Feel free to share them in today’s show notes or over in our Facebook group as well. I might just feature a couple of yours in the future as well.
Thanks for listening, I hope that you have a great week of being a little bit distracted at times, but also paying attention to 90% of that time to your core tasks as well. Don’t go too far with the shiny objects. Thanks for listening, chat with you next week.
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The post 245: Why Shiny Object Syndrome Is Sometimes a Good Thing appeared first on ProBlogger.
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