In any article providing tips on how to be successful with a blog, you’re likely to see List Posts figuring prominently. Want a bunch of viewers, want to spike those stats? Do a List Post.

It hardly matters what your subject is. You can have equal success with 5 Ways to Use a Screwdriver as with 17 Principles of Advanced Aero-engineering.

You may be a serious blogger, examining issues of global concern complete with scholarly research and heartful connections to the Dalai Lama and thousands of followers, but your “11 Tips for Using Toilets in India” is still your most popular post.

If you’re the blogger, don’t despair. There’s nothing wrong with your intelligence or sensibilities. It’s the reader who’s warping the reality here.

Because, as surely any keen observer will admit, we have no time for reading these days. Or, to be more exact, we read in an entirely different way than we have in the past.

We look for keywords, we think in outlines. We fill in the details later.

I can say this, because I do it myself. A long, involved post or web page has lost me before I start reading. For me, even the best writers/thinkers/companies/institutions merit no more than a bookmark on long posts.

The bytes into which my day is divided just don’t allow for lengthy sessions of pure reading. If your post is more than 700 words, it will definitely be banished to a file. I say banished because, once housed there, it’s about 87% likely to remain unread.

When online, I skim the keywords and links; I can tell from these and the title, the ‘look,’ the style, and the attitude whether or not I want the details.

This means that the writing must be delivered in the same size bytes as I am ready to consume. If it’s not candied and ready-to-swallow; if there are long paragraphs of undistinguished prose; if the syntax doesn’t bother to enthrall me – then honestly, I can’t afford the time.

On the web, if you can’t tell me in 5 seconds, you can’t tell me.

Your content should also contain as much raw personality (i.e., drama) as daily in-person life and dialog may normally involve. It must evoke my respect and deference as if it were a flesh-and-blood person in the room with me. If not, why should it command my attention at all?

Writing online is not writing in any traditional sense; it’s speaking, tagging, and categorizing. It’s sculpting

• a motivating title,
• easily scanned text,
• lots of formatting and graphics,
• and brilliant labeling

into an instantly compelling (while informative) whole.

The written word is no longer a flat object: it has taken on a third dimension. To maximize visibility online, writing has be a living, squirming, wriggling thing; a tuned-in dialectic surfing the convo.

Bookmark to:

So how are your dreams these days?

I’ve often wondered why we don’t more persistently seek the meaning and uses of dreams. Is there any more accurate barometer of health and heart? If you keep a journal of your dreams, they may seem nonsensical when you write them down, but when you read them later you begin to make connections and see the messages that are being shared.

Taking into conscious consideration the value of sleep and dreaming can increase your feeling of balance and well-being. Respecting your need for a full night’s rest – and more, respecting the perceptions that happen during that time – can help you live more holistically, and better interpret your experiences. I liked a report I read the other day that suggested that naps may increase your ability to process and store information, if you dream while napping.

When starting out in the working world, we’re encouraged to follow our dreams, but that reference is to day dreams. Rarely is anyone urged to give value to their night dreams. Of course, if you’re psychotic, or depressed, or otherwise troubled, dreams may be part of a necessary soul search.

But what I’m advocating here is nothing so harrowing. Rather, I’m suggesting using dreams on a daily basis in normal life. Allow your subconscious a place in your awareness. Reflect on its images and use them to understand your waking experiences.

If that’s too ethereal for you, allow me to take a wider perspective. Because the larger point here is that Time Out is not an indulgence: it is essential to success.  It’s the yin of dreaming to the yang of doing. We ignore its importance at our peril.

Taking a break, napping, sleeping, going for a walk, using that good old Time Out is a fundamental best practice, no matter what you’re doing. Entrepreneurs and artists often have trouble controlling their drive. There’s a grim sort of glory in wearing yourself out. But notice that it doesn’t last.

Brilliance so often appears when we’re not looking. Your fierce, stubborn focus, your killer drive to the bitter end is pitiful when compared to the ease and perfection of accomplishment when you apply both your attention and your dreams.

You don’t necessarily dream the answer to your problems, or conjure up some failsafe get-rich scheme; I’m not saying you’ll have a premonition of bad stuff coming down, or dream what stock to purchase for big wins. You will, though, enjoy a new clarity about your involvements, as well as grow your creativity and compassion.

You’ll find that you feel rich, no matter what your bank account says.

Bookmark to:

If you’ve been paying close attention, you will know that in my early background I was involved in the live theater; and later I was employed in the non-profit arts world for many years. It’s natural to me, as a result of all that training, to think more like an artist than a business person.

Though this is mostly to my detriment, it’s also a comfort.

Thinking like an artist is a liability in that vulnerability, that tender essence that makes an artist powerful, is more crippling than anything else in business. So finding a convergence between the heart of art and the steel armor of business is no easy task.

But knowing the artist in me has huge influence over my decisions is also a comfort because it justifies doing things my way, no matter what the critics claim.  An artist answers to a higher power.

Dedication to my way is no easy slide, though. Though you’re determined to be independent, you are by no means excused from discipline. For that matter, the demands on your continual education are enormous, compared to anyone who is simply ‘working for the man.’ If the lone wolf  is not wiley, he’ll never survive.

The main distinction in having an artist’s perspective in business is that the process is far more important than the product.

Now certainly, any merchant worth his cash drawer knows the product is what counts. Who cares what it took to get there? If I’m making the sale, I’ve hit a home run.

But if you suffer from artist’s syndrome, you see the sale as just one part of a larger experience, and it’s the larger experience that you value above all.

Oh my, is this starting to sound like all the preaching you see everywhere about social media customs and protocols? About how the sales process is continual, how life is one launch after another?  Are you hearing John Lennon: “Life is what happens while you’re busy doing something else…”

Could it be that the ‘new marketing’ and the marketing theories based on relationships, on marketing/communications, result from the intermarriage of business and art?

You could put it that way. I ask, study, listen, analyze, network, publish, measure: and then I use mind and body to discover and describe my gifts, or offerings, to others. I synthesize business organization with personal skills and predilections. It’s an unending mind-body balancing act.

Nonetheless, I have never felt more productive – despite all the focus on process!

Bookmark to:

One reason why entrepreneurs sometimes balk at working with a virtual assistant is that working with anyone requires a certain amount of organization, a modicum of people and time management, and an ability and willingness to communicate.

While this may not seem much to expect from a professional, the fact is that many a business person lacks one or more of these skills.

To work with a virtual assistant, you do need to be able to tell him/her what you want to be done. I’m not trying to be funny here. I regularly meet business owners and managers who talk incessantly but can’t make a decision or issue a simple directive.

To work with anyone, you need to be able to be pleasant or at least civil on a regular basis, to keep appointments, and to foster the trust of your co-workers. Think of all the people you know who take their moods out on others, or arrive perennially late for appointments, or who seem like they’d backstab you without a wince.

Communication is something everyone alive does on some level, but people participating in business relationships are required to maintain a high degree of the activity. It may be said that business is about nothing but communications. But don’t you know people who are just terrible communicators; who either dislike it, or don’t know how to do it, or who use it to manipulate and control?

Working with a VA is most successful when both the VA and the client possess a high level of all these skills. At the very least, there must be an indulgent (and lasting) tolerance for the other’s ineptitudes, if they exist.

A VA-client relationship can’t be sustained if there are high-contrast values in organization, management, and communications.

People seriously challenged in any of these areas can still be successful in business, though they generally wind up working entirely alone.  If you’re contemplating a partnership with a VA, it may be wise to do a quick inventory of your readiness:

• Do you know what you want?
• Are you willing to stay in close touch with the VA?
• Are you comfortable with sharing yourself and your information with your VA?

If the answer’s not a hearty Yes to each of these, proceed with caution.

Bookmark to:

Been having fun with the comments and all the uproar over at Chris Brogan’s blog, centered on the value of logo design. Precipitated by Brogan’s decision to work with 99Designs.com, a sort of designer sweatshop where graphic artists work for free until someone actually chooses their design, the discussion is all about the worth of things artful.

The Nike swoop, for example. When you understand the value that simple mark contains, the controversy is clear. Who can state unequivocally its worth?

A business doesn’t pay for the work it took to produce a logo; it pays for the years of practice it took the logo creator to be accepted as an artist. Just like we don’t pay for the sweat and muscle of a doctor or lawyer, but for their accumulated worth, their years of experience.

Funny thing, though. Every business needs a logo because every business must market itself and be quickly recognizable in the morass of commercial messages. So logos are a vestige of art that is firmly wedged into the fabric of practical concerns. And as Brogan’s post shows, we are extremely confused about how to live with it.

A solution such as that offered by 99Designs is brilliant on many levels. Nonetheless, it offends the professional designers who have worked so hard to achieve the recognition of decent pay for their labors. Art and expediency are mutually exclusive, as a rule.

To rail against the cheap alternative is a waste of breath, though. Whims of the market are no concern of the artist’s. The worth of artwork is entirely in the eye of the beholder; but that’s the case with the value we place on anything. In business, it’s always a question of what the market will pay, what the traffic will bear.

One commenter on Brogan’s blog made the comparison with job sites where writing is offered for a pittance, remarking that writers deal with this same cheapening of their skill that the logo designers deplore. But again, the purchaser sets the standard. As a writer, I don’t feel threatened by the $3 per article third world writers. I know there are enough discriminating buyers who prefer my brand of quality over the cheap imitation.

Perhaps your service or products will be rendered obsolete because the market for your excellence disappears. But when it comes to corporate logos and professional writing, there are still plenty of discerning customers. Will the lowest common denominator eventually prevail? My guess is no, simply because of our basic ambitious nature. Amongst the human race, there will always be those who seek distinction through excellence.

Bookmark to: