There are countless pieces of advice and recommendations, which could help you improve your blogging this year, but none of them, I bet, follows a tradition that’s hundreds of years old. In fact, it’s the most successful content strategy known to man, with countless success stories dotted through history to prove it.
You might be thinking, “How can an idea so old, be so effective?” Fact is, throughout its evolution, which has followed mankind through the Graphics Revolution, this approach is the most powerful strategy you could ever use.
Most blogging strategies fail because they force you to rely on creating “original” content – at least that’s been the prevailing zeitgeist. The problem with this approach is simple. Not everyone is a trained journalist, so they get discouraged when the obvious becomes less so. They don’t know how to do the things media professionals do to find, flesh out and publish content. Their attention wanes, their efforts dwindle, and the strategy fails.
This has happened to me (not for a fake of content) – and I’m a recovering journalist. Throughout the years of my blogging, ideas have fades, other projects pull my attention away from blogging, my force toward the project shrank – the blog went dark. What to do?
Work Blog Post Writing into Your Daily Routine
If you’re a professional like me, there’s no double reading to keep abreast of developments in an industry is important. When a client asks a question, or you meet a colleague for lunch, or attend a conference, and conversation ensues, it’s important to sound current. So, you read. Journals, magazines, newspapers, websites, blogs — you read.
Reading this content is important, but I find taking notes to summarize the information helps me remember it.
This process of reading and note taking is the first two steps toward working blog post writing into your daily routine. After note taking, in the past, everything sometimes stopped, unless you wrote an editorial or other piece. But have you thought about this? Your clients and other colleagues might appreciate your condensed version of that information.
De Witt Wallace and his wife thought so, and born was the Reader’s Digest.
Why Wallace’s Strategy Was Successful Then
The push behind Reader’s Digest was old. Sine, 1890, literary journals has employed summarizing information. Before that legal professionals used digested information to make law easy to access and use. This practice dates to the Roman Empire. You see, Wallace saw the opportunity to reduce the expanding volumes of magazines and other literature of common interest into a small, easy-to-read format. “His Digest was soon far more popular than any of the magazines it digested,” wrote one scholar.
For comparison, let’s look at the Bible’s distribution in 1959 and the Reader’s Digest circulation. That year alone, the American Bible Society distributed 17.5 million copies. The Digest published 30 editions (including copies from the blind) in 13 languages and circulated 21 million copies a month. In the “ol’ U.S. of A.” it circulated 12 million, almost twice the circulation of the next most popular American magazine, wrote Daniel J. Boorstin.
Wallace and his staff created the most successful magazine in this history of magazine. What does this mean for you?
Make The Reader’s Digest Strategy Your Blogging Strategy
Your most successful bloggers are at the top because they have a plan and, perhaps a few people contributing content. There is no secret that Wallace was successful on his own merit, though his idea hit the market at the right time. I think that’s important to remember.
We are saturated with blog and media content on the web and off – and it’s growing exponentially as technology makes publishing easier. Nielsen monitored over 181,000,000 blogs in 2011, up from just 36 million five years earlier. That’s a lot of information and it’s impossible to read all of it – even in a single niche. This is where the blogosphere is rip for Wallace’s strategy.
Here’s how to start:
- Pick a number of influential blogs and other media outlets and read them regularly.
- Take notes of important information from the content your audience might want to know, and write it down.
- Compile those notes into a shortened, condensed version of the original.
- Link to the original content.
- Add your commentary or thoughts (optional, but recommended).
- Make sure to break up the information so that it’s easy for readers to, yes, digest.
- Employ proper optimization techniques to conform to Google’s rules for indexing content.
- Share liberally through social networks.
This is exactly what Wallace would have done. The Reader’s Digest is online, so studying how it creates content, writes headlines, and other techniques of importance to note. Learn from the best and you may be the best.