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Danny Brown

Danny Brown

podcaster - author - creator

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Top 10's and Other Lists

The Top 14 Billion People You Should Definitely Do Something With List

Lists

Lists are all the rage.

The Top 100 This. The Best 50 That. The 200 Top Thingymajig Influencers.

Yadda, yadda, yadda.

I get it. Lists can be useful.

They can help newcomers to an industry identify some folks they might want to check out and follow, to gain insight and knowledge from.

Lists can also be genuine labours of love from people, wishing to recognize their peers and those who have inspired their growth.

These are the good lists.

Then you have the ones that are nothing but ego strokes, SEO linkbait and??Will you invite me to your soopah awesome inner circle if I keep listing you???lists.

The trouble with these lists is that they?re so generic, so banal, that any recognition they were meant to give is lost in the choruses of ?Seriously?? questions and snickers at the inclusion of a tech support guy on the ?most amazing business people? list.

You want amazing business people? Look at those that have failed and got back up again and succeeded, because?that?takes serious business balls.

You want lists of the most amazing influencers? Look at people that have truly affected global and cultural mindset, like Gandhi, Steve Jobs, Rosa Parks, Terry Fox.

A list that recognizes the ability of a blithering idiot spending all day being awesome on Twitter to define them as influential should be ignored immediately. Or pinned to the wall as an example of all that?s wrong in the social media echo chamber.

And we wonder why business execs still look at this space with trepidation and lack of enthusiasm.

So by all means, continue to create these kinds of lists, but here?s how to ensure you can avoid yours being taken less seriously than others.

Make it a 14 Billion People You Should? list. With about 7 billion people actually on the planet, that leaves room for two recommendations per person.

And with a 50/50 option like that, the chances are one of the lists will be useful?

image: Great Beyond

Three Non-Business Books for Your Summer Reading

Metrics

The other week, Gini Dietrich?published a blog post sharing her summer reading list. Since Gini normally pinches my ideas (she does!!), I thought it’d be nice to turn the tables and steal one of her ideas instead. 🙂

While I’m a big reader of business books – especially ones that make you think versus those that just repeat the same stuff you could find anywhere – I also love to take time out and really dig into some good fiction / non-fiction, non-business books.

It’s been said that to really develop your business brain, you need to read fiction and understand how its flow and narrative can help improve your business strategy.

So, with that in mind, here are three books I’ve read recently that should really be on your bookshelf, complete with my Amazon reviews to give you an idea of what to expect.

Try Not to Burn by Michael Matula

Try not to burnI gave this book a 5-star rating on Amazon, and quoted it as, “Quentin Tarantino Meets Clive Barker in Hell City”.

Here’s the review.

There are very few books that keep me turning the page the way “Try Not to Burn” did. From the very first scene-setting of violent death to the cliffhanger ending, this is a book that truly delivers in spades.

The reason? Simple – characters you invest in, hugely descriptive set-pieces that place you right in the thick of the action, and a plot that builds nicely into something much bigger than the original premise.

In the Gral, Matula has created adversaries to rival the best of Clive Barker’s “Hellbound” demons, and they’re just the beginning of the troubles facing our three main characters. And it’s the steady growth and unveiling of these three characters, and the strengths and flaws they bring to the table, that adds extra weight to an already excellent novel.

If you like your horror/fantasy tinged with sci-fi and a sliver of a bigger mythology at play, “Try Not to Burn” will NOT disappoint. Highly recommended, and please get to publishing the next book, Mr. Matula!

All I can add to that is, buy this book today. Seriously.

An Eagle’s Heart by Scott Butcher

An Eagle's HeartAnother 5-star rating on Amazon, this book couldn’t be more different from Try Not to Burn. A children’s book for everyone still a child at heart (or who simply loves great storytelling).

Here’s the review.

When I was a child growing up in Scotland, one of my favourite books was Watership Down. I loved the way Richard Adams shared animals (rabbits) in their natural habitats, while still offering a tale through eyes that we (humans) could enjoy. It also educated me in the hierarchy of nature.

In the book An Eagle’s Heart, Scott Butcher has perhaps written the closest thing to Watership Down while still standing on its own. The tale of two small birds that show strength and loyalty beyond their size, An Eagle’s Heart is a book that is truly for all ages (though some scenes may be a little distressing to younger children).

The way Butcher builds the characters, teases the story out until you realize you’re at the end before you know it (always the sign of a great tale), and how he weaves between the animal story and the human story running alongside makes this a new classic in the vein of the 1972 book from Adams.

On a blog post announcing the book, one commenter mentioned it reminded him of Watership Down, and this seemed an apt comparison for this review.

If you like books that educate in the ways of nature, while telling a gripping story that rewards loyalty, bravery and – above anything else – standing up to help others who need it, then An Eagle’s Heart will probably become one of your new favourite books.

An instant classic – congratulations all round.?

You can buy An Eagle’s Heart in multiple formats (for your preferred eReader) here.

Starting Over / Standing Up by Jaclyn Aurore

Starting OverFirst, a disclaimer – Jaclyn Aurore is my wife. Having said that, these two books surprised me. One, because I never knew Jaclyn could write so well (my bad!), and two, because they’re essentially Young Adult Fiction / chick-lit books. Not my genre at all! But I am so glad I read them.

The first two books in The Starsville Saga, not only do they have strong, believable characters, but I caught myself with goosebumps, a tear in my eye and lump in my throat many times.

Standing UpMy review of the first book.

While I don’t normally read YA, I am a fan of books that deliver characters as much as plot and this book didn’t disappoint.

While I’ve (rightly or wrongly) usually perceived YA as “kids’ books”, I’ve recently delved deeper into the genre, thanks to the likes of The Hunger Games and the Percy Jackson series. This book is a great addition.

It tells the dark history of a troubled girl named Maxine, who has essentially disappeared inside herself from her abusive upbringing. But this isn’t a straightforward girl-with-troubled-past-sees-light type of scenario; there are lots of tests for Maxine to go through, both physical and emotional.

How she gets through them, and how she relates to the people that help her do so, is where this book’s strength comes in, and leaves you on a cliffhanger just when you thought everything was going to end happily ever after.

Whether you normally read this kind of genre or not, if you enjoy books that grab you and truly make you want to keep reading until you’re done, you’ll enjoy both of these books.

You can buy Starting Over here, and Standing Up here.

And there you go – three (okay, four) books that I can’t recommend highly enough if you need some summer reading. I hope you check them out, buy, etc., and if you do, I’d love to hear what you thought of them.

Enjoy!

Support independent authors like Michael Matula, Scott Butcher and Jaclyn Aurore – visit their websites below and find out more about them and their other books.

  • Michael Matula
  • Scott Butcher
  • Jaclyn Aurore

image: Doug Wheller

25 Ways to Use the Web to Find Content for Your Blog

25 ways to find blog content

As a blogger, you know that sometimes the hardest thing to do is come up with content for your blog. Finding ideas for your blog (especially if you want to post regularly) can often lead to you not blogging at all, because you start hitting the wall when it comes to what to blog about.

So I thought it might be useful to offer up 25 ways to use the web to find content for your blog. Here they are.

Blog Comments

1. Using a plug-in like CommentLuv allows your commenter to share their most recent post. I’ve seen blog titles that have intrigued me and clicked through to read, and given me an idea for a post of my own. We use CommentLuv on For Bloggers By Bloggers.

2. If you see a comment that really resonates and offers a great viewpoint, ask the poster if they’d like to guest for you and expand on the original comment.

3. Similar to above, if you see a comment you disagree with, expand your own view into a post and offer reasons why your viewpoint is different.

Other Blogs

4. As #1 points out, CommentLuv is great for sharing the most recent post of a blogger, but not every blog uses it. So click through the URL of someone’s comment and see what they’re writing about, to see if you can gather ideas from there.

5. Blogrolls. While some have called blogrolls out of date, many bloggers still use them to share what they’re reading. Visit the blogs of those your favourite blogger reads, and see what ideas you can get from them.

6. A lot of bloggers have category lists for Top 10 Tips and popular posts in their navigation menu. Have a look and see what’s there, and use them to build your own content from.

7. Speaking of popular posts, if a blogger has their most popular posts on display in their sidebar, click on a couple to read and see what made them popular. Then see how you can take inspiration from them.

Social Bookmarks

8. Delicious is a great resource for finding blog content. Just type your topic into the Delicious search bar and you’ll find a ton of results from people that have saved articles or blog posts about your chosen topic.

9. Stumbleupon is a cool browser add-on that lets you browse websites at random. You can land on some great content that will give you your own ideas for your blog.

10. While not as popular as it used to be, Digg still has some great shared posts and news on its site. Look at the most popular and see what take you can offer.

11. BizSugar is becoming more popular, as it concentrates on small business news. If your blog is in this niche, you can get some great ideas from here.

12. A mix of social bookmarking and community, Blog Engage is similar to Digg and BizSugar with its voting system, but it focuses a lot on just bloggers and is a great starting point for ideas.

Blog Resources

13. One of my favourite blog communities is Scribnia. You can find authors and bloggers based on niches, and this can really help you target content to get inspiration from.

14. Alltop offers a great collection of blogs in a veritable feast of topics – if you can’t find something to write about there, then I’m stuck!

15. Still viewed by many as the Blogger’s Bible, Technorati has more than 133 million blogs registered with them. Use the categories or top topics to find content you can get ideas from.

16. Google Blog Search offers up a huge resource of blogs on every topic under the sun. Much like Alltop and Technorati, use the topic search to find your interests.

17. Another resource from Google is their Trends platform. If you’re quick off the mark, you can write a blog post about a trending topic, optimize it for SEO, and (hopefully) be found by those looking at the trends for that moment.

18. Junta 42 offers some great tips on content marketing – check out their articles for ways to get ideas for your own blog.

Social Networks

19. If you’re on Twitter, one of the best ways to find content for your blog is to jump into the weekly #blogchat discussion. Great bloggers, great topics – what more do you need?

20. Sticking with Twitter, have a look at what’s trending at any time on that platform then see if you can get a post out about it (just don’t go all spammy with your hashtags when your post is ready). Trendsmap is a great resource for global trends.

21. And yet again with Twitter, Twitter Search is great for finding out what people are saying regarding the stuff you blog about – type in a keyword, and see if any conversations inspire you to expand on them in a blog post.

22. On Facebook there’s a great app called Networked Blogs, that shares content from Facebook users with blogs, and the Networked Blogs directory. You can get a widget with different blogs in it, and use this to build some ideas for your own content.

23. LinkedIn Groups are perfect for finding blog content. Look at the questions being asked on there and write a blog post as your answer.

24. Seen by many as a place for file and document sharing, Slideshare has great presentations that are just chock full of ideas for you to take away and build several blog posts from.

25. YouTube is more than just a video upload site – think about grabbing a tips video, for example, embedding it into a blog post and then riffing on what else could have been added to the video to make it a better resource.

Your Turn

As you can see, there are a ton of ideas that you can get from places you’re already using, but may not have thought of. These are just 25 – but there’s bound to be a ton more.

So how about you – what are some of the ways you find content for your blog? Share your tips in the comments!

image: hugovk

317 Ways to Succeed in Social Media

317 ways to succeed in social media

The great thing about social media (and blogs that talk about social media and how it can be used for personal, business, blogging, marketing and more) is that there’s a ton of information available on how it can benefit you.

Hopefully, over the space of the last two years or so, this blog has offered you some tips, advice, strategy, call it what you will, that has helped you understand this cool toolset we call social media.

Just in case you missed any of these posts, here are some specific ones collected into one quick bookmarking option. I hope you find them useful.

Note: Each link opens in a new window, so you probably don’t want to open all at once.

Social Media

  • From Stats to Strats – Free Social Media Ebook
  • 10 Things Your Parents Told You That Still Apply to Social Media
  • Social Media Roadmaps
  • 3 Simple Ways to be Cleverly Quiet in Social Media
  • How to Use Blog Lists for Your Social Media Strategy
  • 52 Cool Facts About Social Media
  • How to Measure Metrics in Social Media
  • The HEART of Social Media
  • How to Build a Social Media Map
  • The Six Directions of Social Media
  • The Social Media Goes Gonzo Blog Carnival
  • Sonic the Hedgehog and Adventures in Social Media
  • Social Media in Plain English

Blogging

  • Two Quick Ways to Promote Your Blog
  • Introducing For Bloggers By Bloggers
  • Two Blog Posts You Should Read Today
  • Building Business Blocks from your Homebase
  • The Five Unwritten Rules of Guest Posting on Blogs
  • 17 WordPress Plug-Ins to Help Improve Your Blogging Experience
  • Six Steps to Running a Successful Blogger Outreach
  • 10 Bloggers to Watch in 2010
  • 10 Ways to Use Your Blog as a Marketing Tool
  • Why Mediocre Blogging Can Still be Great
  • 68 Ways to Make Your Blog Work for You
  • How PR and Bloggers Can Help Each Other
  • 10 Ways to Boost Your Blogging

Twitter

  • 10 Fun Twitter Apps You May Not Have Heard Of
  • How to Sell Social Media to Your Boss – Twitter
  • 10 PR People to Follow on Twitter
  • 5 Ways to Ruin a Perfectly Good Twitter Relationship
  • Monitor Your Twitter Niche with Monitter

Facebook

  • An Experiment in Platform-Exclusive Content – The Metrics
  • 7 Ways to Market Your Business on Facebook – Free Ebook

Online Goodness

  • 15 Reasons Your Business Sucks
  • 50 Ways to Make Limoncello When You’ve Been Laid Off
  • Define Your Digital Footprint – Lacing the Shoes
  • Make a Living With Your Tribe (Without Scaring Them Off)
  • Harness the Power of Stumbleupon with a Social Media Group

And as an added bonus, here’s a chat I had with the awesome David Siteman Garland yesterday over at his Rise to the Top show, where we talk about (amongst other things) social media “success”.

Enjoy!

(For more resources like these as they’re published, why don’t you subscribe to the blog? Choose your preferred method – email or RSS – from the options at the top of the sidebar to the right.)

This post contains a video If you can’t see it properly in your feed, you can view it directly here.

image: Leo Reynolds

10 Things Your Parents Told You That Still Apply to Social Media

Iggy Pintado

Iggy Pintado

This is a guest post by my friend Iggy Pintado. Iggy is the Director of Marketing, Sustainability & Innovation at UXC Connect . He is also a professional speaker and author of the book,?Connection Generation. You can find Iggy on Twitter at @IggyPintado. This blog post was inspired by a conversation between Iggy and his daughter Rachel on a recent road trip.

1.?How would you like it if someone did that to you?

The old adage of “do-to-others-as-you-would-have-done-to-you” is as much a religious commandment as it is social media principle numero uno.

2. Are you going out looking like that?

Make sure your profile – posts, photos, videos, etc. – reflect who you are and how you want to be perceived online.

3. If you can’t say anything good about someone, don’t say it all.

Be nice to people and try to be positive. That’s all.

4. Don’t play with fire.

If you know someone or something isn’t good, don’t engage – you’ll just get burned.

5. If you go cross-eyed and the wind changes, it’ll be permanent.

Unlike this advice, whatever you DO post online, stays online. You may think it doesn’t but the truth is – it does.

6. Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?

Keep it clean. Don?t use words your mother finds offensive. Watch the words you use – people are listening and judging.

7. Everything in moderation.

Careful with over-sharing and potential spamming. Also, watch that you don’t spend too much time online that it consumes you.

8. Think before you speak.

Watch what you say. If angry, count to ten first before responding. If really angry, sleep on it and answer after a good night’s rest.

9.?Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

You may want to try more than one social media platform. Don’t just blog, Facebook and Tweet. Use Linkedin for business connections.

10. Go clean your room!

Make sure your social media presences are updated. It’s worth posting regularly on your blog and updating your Facebook profile.

Which one’s your favorite? Can you think of any more? All comments welcome!

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