A Little Something Cool and a Favor

So, I've been working on something that I think is pretty cool, though I'm not ready to share it just yet (there are a few folks in the beta group that get to see some of the behind the scenes stuff, but it is not ready for prime time).

Anyway, as we progress with it, I have a few questions that would help me out among people in marketing and small business owners.

So, since you're here - could you help me out?

If you are a small business owner or marketing professional, I would really appreciate two minutes of your time to fill out the quick survey below. If you don't fit in one of those categories - fill it out anyway - but then send this link via email to ONE friend of yours who runs a small business or works to market a business or service.

Thanks, I appreciate the assistance!


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If the survey doesn't show up - click here!

Thanks again!
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The Theory of Microservices and Your Productivity

How can you tackle the biggest problems that you face? When you or or business are faced with some humongous task that frightens you, how can you address it?

There's a trend in software development (something I come in contact with a little bit in the day job) called microservices.

The idea behind microservice architecture is to break down large software applications into smaller and discrete pieces, each with a specific function.

The concept could spread well beyond software, though, to how you organize your work life. What if you thought about how to break your biggest challenges down into small, manageable pieces that you could master and control?

Determine The BIG Problems

What huge problem do you or your small business face? I remember the old GI Joe PSAs from the 80's that always ended with "...and knowing is half the battle." I'm not sure that knowing your problems constitute half of the battle, but for you to address and fix your issues, you certainly have to identify them.

Take a piece of paper. Write down you big challenges. The more concrete you can make the issues, the easier they are to decompose and address in smaller pieces. Putting the giant and impossible challenges on paper makes them real, instead of giant fictional villains keeping you from your dreams.

Break Them Into Pieces

The key to the microservices movement in technology is to take huge functions (they refer to them as monoliths) and break them into tiny and separate functions required to accomplish the larger task.

Take the same approach here. For each challenge that you have identified, list out all of the different tasks that you have to take in order to solve the problem. Here's a tip - if your tasks seem large, they are still too big. Break it down one more level to a smaller task.

Seek Mastery

Microservices architecture is not just about breaking large and complex functions into smaller parts. Each separate part must also create a niche where it can excel. 

Each small and discrete function that gets created becomes the sole source for that activity. Any application across an organization that requires a particular activity to be created can utilize that service. But the services can't work it partially. They have to conquer it.

So as you approach the list of tasks to accomplish one of the giant goals, look for how you can optimize your approach to each task. What's the most efficient way to get it done? Could you do it better next time?

Reduce Redundancy

If you can master a function but find it repetitive, is there a way to automate it? Can you set it up so that it works the same way every time?

The danger in repetitive tasks hides in the inconsistency of the results. If you have to rediscover the process to complete the function every time, you waste valuable execution cycles. Automation and repetition of process helps remove the variables from the process.

Conclusion

No task is too big
to conquer
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No task is too big to conquer. You tackle the giant by chopping it into tiny pieces. Small tasks that move you towards the large goal provide structure and method to attacking the humongous.

Through prioritization, breaking down the challenge into smaller tasks, optimizing your efficiency at accomplishing tasks, and removing or automating redundant activities, you can tackle huge obstacles.

Stealing best practices from the way that efficient and scalable software is designed, we can hack our lives to maximize our own productivity as if it were a system.

So what monolith will you take down today?

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What to do when nobody's listening


The allure of broadcasting to the world is the audience. The response. Speakers don't speak to talk to themselves on stage. Changing the lives of the audience drives the communication. Bloggers write in the hopes that someone will read what they have written and take it to heart. Authors can only get their message out when someone buys (and reads) the book. Even the voice of the most boisterous politician sounds quieter after a losing vote.

But what if you have a message to get out? What if your book sits unpurchased, on shelves? What if you stand in front of empty halls with no one to speak to? What can you do to make sure your message outlives you?

Listen

Not having anyone to listen to you may concern you, but when did you last listen to your audience? Ask them for feedback. Try to understand what their concerns and needs are.

If your audience doesn't listen to you, you may be out of touch with them. Having something to say does not mean that someone necessarily has to listen. I'll be honest, I find this to be a difficult lesson, because when I'm talking (or writing), I feel like I have some awesome ideas to pump out there. But if you want to engage, you have to understand your audience.

What are their needs?

Reformulate Your Message

Does your message resonate with the audience anymore? Maybe you need to refactor it. Take some time and incorporate the feedback you learned from listening. 

Look for new angles on your existing content and message. Review your existing content or speeches and look for weaknesses and omissions. What content could you produce that would augment and improve what you already have?

You might even consider creating a totally new approach that pivots from your existing course of action. What new perspective could you provide that gives additional insight to your potential audience? Does it align with what feedback they told you that they needed?

Try To Reach One Person

Sometimes content producers try to come up with something valuable to everyone (I certainly do at times), and lose sight of the real audience. 

Try this instead: focus your content on a single person. If you have to reach out to them individually via email or talk to someone before a speech that you know will be in the audience, do it. Ask for feedback, work on what would engage that one person. 

If you are so lucky as to have more than one true fan, try to engage them, or engage them in bunches. Once you have started building a group that listens, make sure you continue to engage with them as you build larger and larger audiences.

Stay The Course

I have heard of people speaking to near-empty conference halls, marching forward as if it were filled to the brim. I'm not sure that's the type of staying the course that is valuable. However, using that opportunity to pull the few people that did show up to attend into a smaller, more personal and interactive discussion as opposed to unidirectional speech would add value and truly engage that smaller audience.

But you cannot let yourself get discouraged. If your message has merit, and you can verify that with test audiences or small groups, then producing content with that message creates value to people. Those people are your audience. You just need to keep producing and try to find them.

Conclusion

Talking (or writing) to no one can be discouraging, especially if you believe in the message that you want to get out to the world. But you need to make sure that message has someone interested in listening. Sometimes, that means you need to take some time to listen to your audience and understand their needs, reformulate or refactor some of the work that you are doing to make sure it aligns to those needs. From there, it's an effort to truly focus on engaging your customers or potential customers and then stay the course to keep creating meaningful and useful content.
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Happy Belated Birthday, Blog (and What I've Learned About My Piles of Content)

If you happened to have been born on March 23 (or any day from then until now), then a belated happy birthday to you! Otherwise, I'm celebrating the fact that this blog has stuck around for just over a full 365 days. I thought about writing some April Fool's related article, but realized I was over a week late in getting this one out instead.

I've already done a Year In Review post, and going forward, I will likely stick to the calendar year for my report card on what got done in a given year, but I thought it worthwhile to talk about the blog itself and some strategic (and tactical) (and just happenstance) changes I've made over the last twelve months.

The Noble Goal

The original goal here was to write every day. Well, every business day at least. Actually, to be more honest, my original goal was posting every day. I fully intended from the beginning to pre-write and schedule out posts.

See, in my head, I envisioned a world where I had created all of this brilliant content that went out on auto-pilot for months in advance, while I sat back and watched clicks and shares and the like fly up through the roof, blowing the top off of my Google Analytics trackers.

As it turned out, to get content out every day meant I had to produce content at an even faster than daily rate, and after some time, that became untenable for me. So, I started spacing the content out until I landed on one post a week as a happy medium.

I think most of the subscribers preferred that frequency as well, so I did not flood their inbox with multiple emails a week. If you're not a subscriber, you should be - you can sign up here.

Cleaning The Content

One side effect of my attempts at being prolific with the prose was that I created a bunch of articles that were relatively thin content.

Some parts of series or subtopics that I wrote honestly just need to be rewritten or packaged up in a bigger article. Some could be reformulated to read a little better. Some could be beefed up with a few more links and resources.

And then a few holiday and other non-posts hide in there that I could honestly just delete, since they are not really adding value as content to the site.

I (as always) have grand plans of scrubbing this content. We will see how much of that happens. But I am no longer concerned with a race to create 250 articles or whatever. Instead, I want to make sure that I am adding good content.

Even meta articles like this may end up getting scrapped in a future review.

Standardization

As I browsed the last year's worth of content, a lack of consistency in formatting stood out among several posts before I got to a somewhat standard set of headlines, fonts and the like.

Along with the text, links to tweet content and share have been a bit inconsistent as well. Standardizing these create a unified experience and a feeling of "I know how this works, I have seen it here before" across the content.

Republishing and Broadcasting

As I go about cleaning up content, an opportunity presents itself to republish that out. The danger in that strategy lies in boring people who read the original content. So, I've put a little thought into the strategy for it.

If you are subscribed to the email list, I'd love to say that you will only get new articles. This should be the case most of the time. However, if I end up rewriting something so substantially that it basically warrants a new post, then I will likely post it here as a new article, so you might get a tiny bit of rehash, but it will hopefully have enough new content that you won't notice.

For the most part, though, my intent is to clean up those evergreen posts from way back when and distribute two additional ways. First, through Medium, which I am experimenting with a bit as a republishing platform for getting writing out there. And then there's Twitter, where I occasionally share older articles as "From the Archives" or something like that. I will likely note these differently as "Updated" in some fashion, though I haven't figured out my exact verbiage yet.

Takeaways for You

So if you are still reading, you may think to yourself, "Thanks for the updates on your blog, Cameron, but what does this have to do with me?" 

You can take what I am doing (yup, straight up steal these ideas) and go apply them to your own content marketing. Scrub your old articles, repurpose stale content, and find new channels to share your brand with new audiences.

Thanks for sticking with me so far, I'll try to keep it coming.

If you want more articles from me, subscribe to the email list and you'll get them delivered straight to your inbox (and you can reply right back to me). I'd love to continue the conversations with you (and take your suggestions as well).
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