Show Your Work is inspiring

by | Oct 11, 2017 | Blog, Content

book cover show your work!

At the advice of my good friend Sergey I decided to read the book Show Your Work by Austin Kleon. I fully realize that I’m about 3 years late to the party and that most of the developed world has read this book but I haven’t (until now) and so I am. To be honest I’m not even finished with it yet but I’m already drinking the Kool Aide.

Some of Kleon’s ideas is to write a journal, describe my process etc. Basically pull back the curtain and show the world how the sausage is made. As I’m reading this I’m thinking YES! YES! I want to do this! I want to share! Then the negative part of my brain starts thinking, NO! NO! NO! There are a mission reasons to say no. We just redesigned the website and we haven’t worked the blog into the site structure or navigation. No one will read it. What if someone does read it and they think I’m stupid because it’s not visible to the world. What if I just do it once and then never did it again? I came up with a million reasons in about 1 second why I shouldn’t write on the blog right now but I’m going to anyway. I like that at some point in the book Kleon writes something that adds to:

“If you don’t contribute then you won’t get either! So I’m going to start off with some basic stuff and maybe over the weeks and months I’ll punch it up. My goal is to add to the structure of these posts on a regular basis so that they grow with me.

Here’s the first thing

  1. Online Reading –
    1. SEO
      1. AdWords rolls out new interface to all advertisers – It looks like it’s saying that there is a new UX, you can still switch back to the classic interface, it’s supposed to be faster and it has some new features such as being able to monitor landing pages.
    2. Content Marketing

      1. The Future of Content and SEO: 5 Trends Every Marketer Needs to Know – Basically they tease out the idea that Content Marketing isn’t working so great right now. They bring in stats to show that online content isn’t being consumed. Then they have some suggestions

        1. Do better with integrating SEO into your work before you publish it (not after
        2. Create Custom Micro Content
        3. Stop making content that no one wants. Look at your stats and other data to figure out what you should be creating.

Other stuff are things like voice search and trying to create a better experience.  I didn’t see anything about local search but I may have missed it.

Rome wasn’t built in a day. Hopefully more tomorrow