Anthony and I just finished lunch with Tim Walker. Check out his back-of-the-napkin sketch for a blog concept.
Back of Napkin Sketch
Tim rejected my line that I don’t have time to write blog posts. His concept for a company blog seems obvious in retrospect—a three pronged approach focused on
- our products,
- entrepreneurship and
- social media.
His 5 minute idea: repurpose emails. Take 5 minutes to repurpose 1 email into a blog post each day.
Add a 1 minute tweet about the blog post, and you’ve got a 6 minute prescription for social media. I’ll commit to investing 6 minutes a day (M-F) into blogging and twittering for the next 30 days and report the results at the end of August.
Tim blogs at http://www.hooversbiz.com/ or you can follow Tim on Twitter. Also, follow me on Twitter.
If you enjoyed this blog post, you should check out Cubit--my web application that helps you get cut-and-paste ready planning data in seconds for your projects.
Glad to see you took action so quickly — appropriate for an entrepreneur.
(And I’m glad you thought the idea was useful!)
I think repurposing an e-mail might not be the best idea. The whole idea is to generate new content and a blog has a lot more legs than an e-mail, when it comes to prospecting.
It might work for you, but I think you are better off writing the blog first and then shaping that into an e-mail. I know it doesn’t sound very different, but that will allow you to be more free in your blog posting and write about what you feel like instead of just a shell of what your e-mail was about.
This will also make your e-mail more focused and depending on your schedule, the ability to add relevant comments that users left on your blog post into your e-mail campaign.
Tim — Thanks again! I look forward to reporting back to you on how the 6 minute a day campaign works.
Brian — That is an interesting thought. So maybe I should use emails from our users to figure out what short blog posts to write? I’ll try it both ways; that is,
1. repurposing an email as a blog post, or
2. use a question presented in an email to inspire a blog post and then, refer to that blog post when I get asked the same question in the future. Right now, the majority of the questions that we get are either “Who are you?” or “How to do you make money?”