Never let the perfect get in the way of the good. Blog and post, blog and post.
Write all your site content quick and dirty then publish it immediately.
If you’re reading this before or around noon Eastern or 9AM Pacific on September 12, 2017, then you’re probably reading the first draft of this article.
Your 1st-Wave Friends Deserve You Raw
If you’re not convinced, don’t worry. The benefit of your friends and fans being your first readers is that you’ll get swift feedback if your premise is confusing or your metaphors are mixed.
I guarantee you that your fans will always appreciate the rawness of your first-draft thoughts and advice. They’re the first round of readers and just want access to your brain and to you. Your friends are forgiving and more interested in what you have to say than how you say it.
The first wave recedes over seventy-two hours. Rarely do your first draft words reach outside your sphere of influence. What’s more, we’re in marketing and advertising. Let’s be real, most of us aren’t know for our Proustian prose. So, your first draft is always going to be 80% there.
Blogging Began as a Forum for Unadulterated Thought
Blogging has always been unfiltered. In its purest form, bloggers write and publish with the casualness of facebooking, tweeting, and tumbling. That’s what I did back in 1999 and that’s what Advertising Age had be do when I wrote for them as Berlin correspondent.
Writing for AdAge wasn’t as simple as blogging-as-automatic writing, but they would allow me to submit my posts once I was done–my first draft–and they would quickly publish the article as-is. Then, over the course of a couple days, an AdAge editor would make it to my post and do some deep revision. Finally, if that editor had notes for me, or the article was the kind of unclear that he couldn’t unwind himself, I would get an email with a list of questions, notes, and suggested revisions.
In addition to AdAge, I publish first onto Biznology and Socialmedia.biz as well. Then, like silver-tonged Angels, Eileen Cosenza and Madeline Moran edit my posts on Biznology. The famous digirati journalist, JD Lasica, has my back on Socialmedia.biz. Sometimes it’s immediate, other times it could take a couple hours or a couple days, depending.
Use the First-Draft Strategy on Your Website
Get your words–who you are, what you think, what you do, and what your company does, your products and services–out there right now if only to let Google Search and Bing Search know. Your blog posts and site content have a much longer lifespan than the rest of your online social media content.
Friends 1st, then Google, Prospects, and Prosperity
There’s always plenty of time to go back to your past posts and package them for prosperity.
You can always hire a literati to go through your blog posts and website content with a fine-tooth comb in order to better orchestrate all the pieces of beautiful music that you’ve writing, over time, into your notebook, your blog.
You’ll want to bring that content into an album. But until then, better to drop each song as quickly as it’s recorded than to leave a decade between releases.
(See, this is where my editors will benefit me if they really feel like all of my mixed metaphors aren’t doing anyone any favors).
(Don’t worry Chris, I got you. –M)
Leave Your Immortality, Prosperity, and Legacy to Others
While you’re wondering what you’re going to say at the Oscars, in Stockholm to the Nobel Committee, or even at the Webby Awards, a journey of a thousand miles begins with one completes and published blog post.
The moment you publish one, then the spiders and bots that discover, scrape, and collect mass quantities of content off of the visible web for Google Search can start working, providing words, phrases, and copy to the Sacred, Arcane, and Unknowable Google Search Algorithm (actually algorithms).
Initially, Google Needs Chum Not a Kobe Steak Dinner
The sooner you chum the waters, the quicker you’ll attract all the sharks! The sharks don’t need beautifully-plated Kobe steak, they just need your blood and guts. In the time it takes to attract a gam, herd, frenzy, school or shiver of sharks in enough quantity to matter, you will surely have plenty of time to turn your first draft blog posts and your sturdy framework of site content into a high-quality meal.
Feel free to own the yacht but hire a crew if you’re not yet seaworthy. If you get my drift and want to adopt the yachting lifestyle yourself but either don’t have the mad sailing skills yourself, don’t yet posses a world-class crew, and don’t know yet where to go, then you should give me a call or reach out me by email — so I can help you pilot your vessel now, in the tranquil blue-green shallows of the Caribbean, as well as in the roughest seas and into — as well as out of — the storm.
If you’d like to chat more, call me at +1 (202) 869-3210 Ext 0001 email me, or feel free to self-schedule a 15-minute call, a 30-minute call, or a 60-minute call with me.
