Dia Media

End of Year Lists

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Next year my lists will be all hand-lettered.

 

The Winter Solstice is here and with it Mercury Retrograde. Although the latter comes with a little more woo woo (then again thinking about Stonehenge, perhaps they are equally wooish), they both offer the opportunity for reflection and planning. In what is now an annual tradition, here’s my end of the year business list for 2016.

Annual Digital Business Goals

1. Blog more often and on a consistent basis.

You, me, everyone with a stake in this interwebs game. My personal goal is 27 posts in 2017. I’m getting that number counting 2 posts per month , with an extra three thrown in for good measure/luck as the year ends in a 7:)

I reckon it takes me a week to think up a topic, and begin a rough draft (outline format) and then another week to flesh it all out with pretty pictures. Given my profession, I tend to overdue the images bit – i.e.: they’re definitely not just grabbed from the internet and stuck in there. Even when they are plucked out of the ethernet, they are always altered. In short, can take some time for the image aspect of the post, this post proving the exception to the rule.

Whatever your current blogging schedule / post count is, why don’t you try setting a goal to ramp up output in 2017? Mine is a four-fold ambitious increase, but 20% is good too. There’s a lot of debate about long post vs short posts, that’s a topic for another post (!), but the importance of consistency cannot be overstressed. Google definitely favours new content.

2. Review All Social Media Accounts.

Keep, exterminate or even, gasp, add more? This year I blogged for 153 days in a row as part of a public art project (A fictional blog set in 1938, I don’t count it towards business blogging) where I focused solely on twitter as an outreach platform. Yet, I noticed way more likes on the instagram end of things even though I didn’t post anything there (my account is dormant — it was all other folks sharing). Last Saturday, I took a delightful calligraphy workshop  at Fox and Flourish.  The owner Christina had a hashtag, but noted she mainly uses instagram.  Both of these got me wondering if I should (despite loathing this word) reboot the account.The value of said likes etc is also up for debate, and that too is a topic for another post.

3. Start a Newsletter / Develop A Mailing List

This is the year we too, will offer one of those annoying pop-ups to subscribe to the newsletter full of unicorns and other magical wisdom.

4.Plan to unplug

Every year I attempt to conquer my inbox and get down to the mythical state of “inbox zero” (coined by Merlin Mann). I do, and then a few days later the breeding begins. This year, I will plan to conquer the inbox every quarter at a minimum. Also to unsubscribe from e-mail lists that no longer align with my personal or business goals. Sometimes the newsletters are great, and yet they can represent a pressure to perform, to be, to buy into something….after a while you realize it ain’t gonna happen.

Creativity comes from boredom and doing nothing. It’s been proven. I can’t find the source quote, but intuitively you already know this.

5. Nap more.

Ok, this one’s not digital, at least not yet.

Cheers, and Happy 2017!

If I Could Save Time in A Bottle…

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One of the biggest obstacles I face with blogging is wrestling with time. Perhaps quantum physicists or master yogis have figured out that time is an illusion, and even have wonderful equations or quotes to relay this concept, but for the rest of us mere mortals, time pretty much goes by the clock, and lately, it seems like it zips by at the speed of light.

Getting around to blogging, as important as everyone knows it is – to growing your website presence, conveying your expertise and values…:) – can be tough in that it’s hard to carve out the time.

Scene from X-Men Time

In X-Men Days of Future Past, in arguably the best scene of the film, Quicksilver is shown running through the kitchen of the Pentagon in uber slow-mo motion. Jim Croce’s “If I Could Save Time in Bottle” song plays at normal speed as Quicksilver dashes about. It was brilliant, funny and sad at the same time.

It inspired me to re-consider time and some techniques for putting it in a bottle.

  1. Relax. Take Some Time. Have Fun.

    Even though the heat is on, bullets are firing, Quicksilver is taking time to do kooky, goofy things, like taste a spoon of sauce.Instead of thinking of blogging as a must-do, high-pressure, homework kind of task, start re-framing it as time to brainstorm a few ideas, be a little goofy, have a little fun.

  2. Put on the Big Girl Goggles.

    Peter (Quicksilver) wears (swimming?) goggles as he prances around the kitchen to protect his eyes from debris. I like the the gesture. Donning these goggles signfies he’s about to take action. Lesson – put on the goggles, keep yourself protected from distractions and get going.

  3. Once in the rhythm, pay attention to the details.

    The details are important – Peter makes sure to cross the arms of the security guards in just the right way so that the bullets fall away harmlessly.

  4. Set a Time Limit.

    I agree and must write for 30/45/60minutes, or 3 minutes, if you’re Quicksilver and can get the job done—micro-blogging anyone?  Then I can go do all that other “important stuff.”

Scene from X-Men

5. Publish or Perish and Don’t Forget to Smile.

​I love  the last bit is him picking the bullets out of the air and moving them methodically to the right or left,  and then he grins.
This task is blogging, I’m sitting in a chair (oh – Terra standing desk, wherefore art thou?), my feet planted on the ground, I’m not in a high-adrenaline, sci-fi scene, so if Peter can smile, I can smile too.

 

OTHER

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​Anchor

​I was feeling the (self-imposed) pressure to blog and rather than choose from a list of “7 Tips for ……” subjects, I thought about what had recently left an impression on me. Netflix (Canada’s) release of the X-Men film and that scene had done just that. I decided to use that scene to frame or anchor this post.

What inspires you?

Set goals and deadlines

Be ambitious but realistic.
eg: 2 x / month  – not 2 x week. My last post was in March 2015, so twice a month is already double the volume. Once every 2 weeks is a stretch goal. Once I get there, I can revisit the goal.

Bullet Points

Begin with draft posts that lay out ideas in bullet points. This is less overwhelming than having to flush out a full idea in whole sentences and long paragraphs.

Comment Spamorama 4 Newbies

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I was reading an acquaintance’s freshly pressed blog the other day, and noticed they had lots of comments on their posts – even though there were only a few posts and the blog hadn’t been going that long.

My first thought – “Way to go! See this blogging thing really pays off”
and then I actually read the comments.

Along the lines of

“Hello ! this is a very great website here and I just wanted to comment & say that you’ve done an wonderful job here!”

“Excellent read, I just passed this onto a colleague who was doing a little research on that. And he just bought me lunch as I found it for him smile So let me rephrase that: Thanks for lunch!”

Of course, most would immediately recognize these comments as spam, especially if you take a second to notice the links of the author  (pharmaceuticals and their ilk).  However, I was quite surprised to see that this blogger was oblivious to their origins and was quaintly replying back things like “Thanks so much…etc”.

I’m not trying to make fun of this newbie. It opened my eyes to the fact these types of deceptions are insidious, and can be less obvious to the newbie.

The bottom line,  if you are brand new to the “blogosphere” is check the links, install a good anti-spam plug-in (Aksimet etc), and, of course, as elsewhere, if it seems to good to be true…

N.B. Of course this blog is quite freshly pressed too!  If I had a dime for every abandoned blog I started….

 

Create your own visual style... let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others. —Orson Welles

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