Do You Know Your Blog’s BIG IDEA?

What’s Your Goal?

Blogging is like paper and pencil, like an answering machine, like an email or text message to the world. It’s meant to carry information from a writer to a reader. It’s more than Twitter. It allows for a longer thought and a deeper conversation. And well, … the url sets up a certain expectation with readers and search engines that you might add more to it that will be useful and valuable at a future date.

A blog can be text, audio, video or the format can be mixed. Most important is that add value, reaches out, connects, and offers some sort of expertise, especially now that the social web is providing us with so many places to gather and discuss.

It takes a strategy for fitting a blog into all of this.

and it takes an idea …

What’s Your Big Idea

Whether we’re writing a single blog post, planning a calendar for a week or a month, or setting out to start a new blog, we have to know what we’re planning to communicate and the direction we want that communication to go.

Knowing your BIG IDEA makes every other decision about your blog easier.

Decide these two elements:

• know your goal and message — what your blog is all about in 25 words or less. Filter that down to less than 6 or so words and you have a tagline.
• name your audience of readers you want to reach — who wants to hear what you have to say?

Determine how to address both of the above with a great mind.

• What quality content and questions can you bring?
• What great thinking and value can you add to that?
• What other quality thinkers and content producers can you preselect and promote?

Figure out how to weave your values in.

• What passion drives you talk about this?
• How will you let your humanity come through?
• How will you celebrate and honor people who do good things in the areas you care about?

Your message, your audience, and how you’ll blend great thinking with great humanity together they add up to your BIG IDEA. The BIG IDEA shows itself in your blog’s design, your writing style, your frequency of updating, even the words you use to name parts of your blog. When a choice confronts you; just hold it up to your BIG IDEA to see if it belongs.

The blogger who fully thinks through a BIG Idea enjoys success, readership, and a community filled with engaging, relevant conversation.

Whether your blog is new or five years old, do you know your blog’s BIG Idea? Can you write it in just a few words?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!