Sunday Afternoon. I started the day with the firm intention to write first. This is my goal for 2015 and I want to ramp up in my practice of sharing what I know.
17:00 Still nothing written 🙂 What happened ?
While I don’t lack topics or ideas for posts I’m mostly blocked by the objective (disguised as a need) to be productive. Productive is mostly about producing contents which is not overlapping existing posts (first constraint) and fits in the contents strategy (third constraint).
1h: So I started by reading. I usually read with my last cup of coffee. You can’t type and drink says my keyboard. I keep the windows open and comment after, or curate if I find something interesting.
1h: Go back into my site to see what has already been covered. Noticed a few glitches on some posts, took note of them. Problem such notes may very well being lost in the huge quantity I have already. I need a #TODO: folder for editorial comments.
Stays in my mind, at this stage, that I had some ideas of posts to publish at strategic times (beginning of year, next week). So my content of today must fits into that (third constraint). Problem is that I don’t have a content calendar. I always postponed and discounted it because I thought I was anyway already behind schedule and have few connections with the seasons. I saw this feature again yesterday on hubspot.com, cute, made me wish I had one. Now suddenly I realize I’m wrong. A calendar would have helped me place the very few posts I recognized as strategic instead of mobilizing a few extra neurons as well as keeping track of when I posted last and the topic. Let’s #TODO: adopt a content calendar.
Now I must choose a topic. To be smart I should avoid to repeat myself. Big fan of DRY here. My memory is not enough, reading the titles is not enough either because it depends on current mindset to map to topics.
#TODO: fix a stable list of reference topics. This avoids to variates slighlty in topics, sub topics, variants causing jugement of distinctions unstable overtime.
#TODO: set such topics on the post or page. Now it’s different from taxonomy or topics whch are aimed at SEO or readers. Topics can be coded names. However those topics makes perfect sense in Kneaver.
I have contents in various places:
– In published posts. Most obvious one.
– In draft posts. Written but not yet published for various reasons. OK WP can show all the posts in one page.
– In pages. Now we get a problem: WP will not show both pages and posts.
– I’m using child posts as well but very few. let’s ignore that.
– In Kneaver, never shared.
– On my personal blog winck.org, shouldn’t matter but does because in some cases I use it (opinions, French language).
– On medium
– On guests posts (not yet but may happen)
– On comments. I tend to comment a lot and at length. This constitutes my solution for curation.
– On social media like FB or LI where posts can be long.
Solution: Create a type of posts on WP to keep track of what is outside kneaver.com, establish links via such posts using a redirect (302) like URLshorteners are doing, more or less a DIY scoop.it, curation solution. Extra work for each comment but some benefits. One major benefit is to preserve the contents, the links and keep some SEO juice out of it. #TODO Add this to wp-kneaver the free WP plugin I maintain.
Next I need a map. I have one on my wall with some topics but it’s not maintained as I do changes. It’s my in plans to copy it inside Kneaver. Great let’s plan this as a feature of Kneaver 🙂 #TODO
18:15 Here I am, did a post: it’s about “Contents Planning” and you just read it.
I’m not finished, I just added a few line more in my TODO list. Some are habits to take, some are easy and can be done on the spot, others will be kept as suggestions.
Best practice:
Reading often our list of posts help maintaining an intuition on what could be written next. I should be my first reader.
Note for self:
All this would be way easier if I was just maintaining one single blog and build around it on a single idea. The timeline would be an obvious Ariane Thread on my trail of thoughts. My challenge is that I need to cover several topics PKM, Kneaver, customization, changes, #PKMChat . The same precise topic may appear from different point of view. Take “Twitter chats” will be a feature of Kneaver, a feature of Kneaver for chat hosting, mentionned for Recaps, a fundamental of #PKMChat but also a chat topic.
Update: I started a 30 days writing challenge! This is going to be an occasion to make progress on this front.