The gist of the article was a that each type of content is different, and therefore should be written by different people. Not exactly groundbreaking. One thing that I said, though, which I guess not everyone agrees with, is that people should blog in their own voice, for themselves.

I got an e-mail from a professional copywriter who said that she often blogs and writes speeches for busy CEOs, and that they often are very happy because she can say things better than they can.

This was my response to her in my e-mail:

I understand your point about busy CEOs and such. My strong belief, though, is that (barring a gross inability to communicate [which is rare among successful leaders]) those busy people, from fortune 500 CEOs to small business owners, should find some of their other work to outsource before they give up expressing their own opinions/ideas/etc on their blogs and Social Media accounts-especially if Thought Leadership is an important goal. These are not press releases I’m talking about, or sales copy. This is not “Here’s how great the company is doing” PR blogging. I’m talking about giving the public a glimpse into the insight and inspiration that is driving the company. If the CEO/Founder/Owner/Director doesn’t have some kind of magic secret sauce unto herself that no one else (even a good writer) can copy, then why is she in charge? And why should the rest of us care?

You could get a lot of different points out of this. Certainly this exchange covers a number of issues, from what leadership should be doing, to the quality all for authentic communication, to the economic benefit of outsourcing.

If you read my blog long enough, you will start to get a sense of what I think about all of those topics.

But the one thing that I want to specifically draw your attention to, is the “secret sauce.”

Thought leadership is not about social media. It is not about blogging. It is not about networking. It is not about using the latest technology, or having an iPhone, or any of that other stuff that the media likes to talk about.

Thought Leadership is about the secret sauce.

Nobody subscribes to your blog or seeks you out at a conference or twitters with you based on your well-written press releases that tell the world about how great your company is, or how innovative you are, or what benefits the new features of your new gizmo will be most beneficial, or any of the other crap that corporate blogs like to talk about. People will not recognize you or your company as a thought leader based on good sales copy, or well-crafted corporate communications material, or any of the other things that you should be hiring professional writers to do for you.

Those things are important. You should have well-crafted press releases, and precise sales copy in your brochures, and carefully worded corporate communications. You need all those things.

But they are not Thought Leadership.

You are a thought leader because of your secret sauce. You’re a thought leader because you have something unique to say, something unique to contribute, something unique that no one else has. It could be your method, it could be your ideas, it could be your source of inspiration, it could be the peculiar way that you string words together. Whatever it is, it’s the thing that makes you qualified to be a CEO or a founder or an entrepreneur or a what ever. It’s the thing that makes you qualified to be a thought leader. If you have that, then you should be writing in your own voice. If you really truly have it, then it should be obvious that a writer, no matter how good they are, cannot simply copy you.

And if you don’t have it, then you are not a thought leader.

Is all this content, since it is all words, approximately equivalent? Should the intern or outsourcer you’ve hired to post links on Twitter be the same person who writes your weekly blog post?

Obviously, the answer is, “of course not.”

In The Social Bootstrap guide to DIY Thought Leadership, I discuss 6 different kinds of text content that a thought leader needs on their website: articles, blog posts, sales copy, information, SEO filler, and hidden text.

So, who should be doing what?

If you are bootstrapping, you’ll probably do all of them yourself. That’s actually a really good thing, because once you are ready to begin outsourcing or hiring, you’ll actually know what needs to be done.

Here is a breakdown of the different hats you’ll wear (if you do it yourself), or the different people you’ll hire (if you can afford it).

Articles

Straightforward informational articles, like “What Is a Living Trust?” or “Notes of the Melodic Minor Blues Scale” can be written by any knowledgeable person. It helps if the writer has subject matter expertise, but with things like Google and Wikipedia, that isn’t really necessary. What helps the most is the ability to explain things simply, and an understanding of online search behavior.

This is the sort of thing entrepreneurs frequently outsource to content mills. That’s understandable, since they don’t expect this to be “thought leader content,” but rather, they often think of this as primarily search engine schlock. That’s not the best way to think about it.

Your potential clients, whether they show up through a search engine or from a business card, are going to check out your website. They are very likely, if they’re in the mood to buy something, to check out lots of other people’s websites as well. Good informational articles are not primarily about search engines. Good informational articles are about those people who are trying to learn about your service or pop-ups, and who would buy your products or services if they were well-informed enough. Obviously this means that your product or service needs to be good enough that a well-informed buyer would choose you over anybody else. Assuming that your product or service is good enough, actually educating your buyers about estate planning, or piano scales, or what ever, is a huge benefit.

Therefore, informational articles should not just be something that you push deep into your site, hoping search engines will pick it up (they won’t), but rather something that people can find easily from the front page of your site, if they have a mind to be looking for it. And so therefore, good informational articles should be written well by someone who knows how to write well.

That might not be you. But, it should be someone that you hire or oversee. It could be a freelance writer, or an intern, or your husband-but a content e-mail or a bolt article purchasing site is not the way to go.

Blog Posts

You should write blog posts your self. Blog posts are the public face of your company, at least online. Blogs should be written by the person whose voice they are in. That is, employees should write blogs as themselves, not as you. And you should not outsource blog writing if you can at all help it. Blogging, and all social media, is about authenticity and interaction. If you can’t find time to blog, and are thinking about hiring someone else to do it, considering hiring someone else to do all the things you’re doing currently, so that you’ll have time to blog for yourself.

Sales Copy

Words that are directly a part of your sales funnel (“Buy now!” or “Sign up today for a free demo”) should be written by a professional copywriter. Blogs can ramble. Informational articles can be a little bit confusing as long as everything works out in the end. But sales copy needs to be efficient and effective.

Is there a difference between “learn more,” and “try a free demo?” How would you know?
A professional copywriter, along with deliberate use of Google Optimizer, will get results far and above what you will be able to do yourself. If you are selling things online, and you do not have previous verifiable success doing so, a professional copywriter who understands e-commerce and A-B testing should be an early investment.

Info

Basic information, like your address, your phone number, and even your name and occupation, you should be able to write yourself. As I mentioned in my book though, understanding how people structure searches in Google can help you turn basic information into yet another attraction marketing opportunity.

SEO Filler

You should have good basic informational articles that are easily accessible from your home page. Those are not SEO filler. SEO filler is when you have 10 or 15 different articles explaining “The Basics of Prenuptial Agreements.” Nobody who is searching for information on your site needs all the different permutations: Prenuptial Agreements for Beginners, Understanding Prenuptial Agreements, Newly Engaged Person’s Guide to Prenuptial Agreements, What Is a Prenuptial Agreement?, An Introduction to Prenuptial Agreements.

No, no. No human cares that you have 15 different versions of that article on your site. However, assuming they are different enough, Google prefers that sort of thing. You are creating more opportunities for someone to land on your site.

These don’t absolutely have to be as well-written as your primary informational articles. A content mill is an okay way to go (assuming they aren’t duplicating content, and assuming the content is written by native English speakers), but probably not the best way. Bulk article purchasing sites, especially like those that cater to attorneys, are especially not the way to go because you are usually buying a set of articles which they have also sold to 100 other professionals. There is no search engine benefit to duplicate content.

Your best option here is probably to hire freelance writers yourself through something like craigslist.com or elance.com. This takes a little bit more hands-on management than a content mill, but there is no additional profit margin above the writer. This allows you to either save money or spend the same amount of money and get higher quality writing.

Just make sure that before you hire or purchase, you have done good keyword research and understand how search engine optimization works.

Hidden Text

Hidden text is all the stuff on your website that humans never see, or at least never look for. URL structure, metadata, file names, hover text, alt tags, link titles…

If you retain an SEO firm or a web designer, all that should be their job. Otherwise (and even then) you should have an understanding of what all these things are, and you should have the ability to correct them.

The most important thing here is preplanning. You could always add another article later. You can reformat your information. You can try new sales copy. But it’s very difficult (well it can be) to change your URL structure after your website has been running for several months or years. It can be damn near impossible to change your file structure on your server. You will never ever go back and add alt tags to all of your images. The more of this that you can do ahead of time, the better.

Learn More, Teach More

You can learn more about text content for Thought Leadership in my book, The Social Bootstrap guide to DIY Thought Leadership, which you can purchase at Amazon or read free online. (See Chapter 5: Words, Words, Words)

Or, even better than learning more from me, is teaching me and other people what you already know. If you have a little bit to say, leave a comment. If you have a lot to say, write your own blog post and a link to it in the comments, so the rest of us can find it.

Trying to follow Chris Brogan’s advice to Grow Bigger Ears and engage with people and all that, I have a series of Google Alerts set up so on keywords that interest me. So I followed one of them to a post about self-publishing by a writer on Live Journal. I felt I had something to contribute, so I wrote a comment.

That’s when life started sucking for me. There are only three options for identifying yourself as a commenter:

• Anonymous
• Open ID
• Live Journal User (Become a member!)

I hate being anonymous- might as well not post. Open ID…. well, apparently I’m not a geek, since I don’t know how that works or whether I have it (going to the Open ID website DID NOT clear things up). Only option left was “Become a member!”

I should have stopped at this point, but I had already invested some time and thought into my comment. So I forged ahead. I clicked on the link. Filled out TWO PAGES of forms (they apparently want to know what kind of music I listen to). When that was over, I was not returned to my comment- the login process deadended. I had to use the back button on my browser to find my comment. Which I submitted, finally.

Except, wait, no- I haven’t verified my email account yet, so I can’t publish my comment. So I go back over to my email, click on the verification link. The page loads slowly. Why so slowly? OH! You want me to watch a video ad for Best Buy? Classy. And I can’t X out of it for 3…2…1 I CLOSE YOU NOW!

I finally am able to post my comment. I’m so proud of myself, I could just spit.

If you are a blogger, writer, marketer, company, etc:
Do NOT put your primary presence somewhere it is hard to get to. LiveJournal, and places like it, are supposed to be obsolete in 2009. Why do you think they shut down GeoCities? No one wants to look at poorly designed websites cluttered with ads. And no one wants to go through hell just to post a comment. I would have abandoned ship early on, but I decided to see how far this would go (so I could write a blog post about it). Most of your visitors do not have my motivation.

If you are building a community, platform, service, etc:
Remove friction. Do not annoy me. Interruptive ads are not the best way to monetize.

If you are an advertiser:
NO ONE likes pop up ads. No one likes noise to suddenly start blasting out of their speakers. Stop it. Please stop it.

Here’s where it’s coming from:

Commenting on Blogs

By far, the most traffic has come from commenting on other blogs. In particular, one comment I made on a Smashing Magazine post, with a link to a related post I wrote, sent a few hundred people to my site. Since I saw that happen, I’ve been making a more concerted effort to comment on other blogs, and it’s paying off. If you only have time to do one thing to drive traffic, I recommend you comment on other blogs.

Participating in Forums

I’m active in a few WordPress support forums, particularly the Atahualpa theme support forum. Basically, I try to be helpful, answer questions when I can, and ask a few things from time to time.

Unique Content / Long Tail Search

I don’t really rank on Google for anything special except my own company name. But I get tons of single-serve keywords, mostly for people looking for information about the Atahualpa theme, which I blogged about a while ago.

Networking and Personal Promotion

The rest of my traffic comes from handing out my business card, speaking at events, and running a meetup.com group.

What hasn’t worked…

So far, I haven’t gotten much traffic from twitter, which is completely my own shortcoming. I just always have better things to do than be on twitter all day, and I can’t work with it running in the background.

What about you?

How do you drive traffic?
And how did you get here?
Leave a comment, let us know…

This post is part of the Brogan 100.
Learn more here and here.

I skim headlines. If something jumps out as interesting, I read it.
Most things don’t jump out.

If it’s really cool, has a bunch of useful links, or is a tutorial for something I might want to accomplish in the future, I tag it. I also tag if I plan to write a blog post about it in the future.

If I’ve written a related post, or have a strong opinion on the post, I go comment.

If I think other people would be interested, I tweet it. (Twitter tip: Make a habit of opening Twitter before your RSS reader).

If I don’t have time to read, I don’t open the Reader. I do not want to have to come back to read blogs. I only tag stuff for reference, not for later reading.

That’s it.

Oh- also:
I think the people who write posts about how RSS is dead, because they use Twitter to read blogs instead, are full of crap. Real-time is less efficient than batching, and some of us still have an attention span. Please stop acting like everything a few years old is medieval and obsolete. It does not endear you to regular people.

This post is part of the Brogan 100.
Learn more here and here.

• Blog regularly
• Read a lot of blogs (using Google reader)

Things I need to change/adjust/improve on:

• Twitter – I tweet very sporadically
• LinkedIn – I do not use LinkedIn effectively at all
• Podcasting – Right now I don’t
• Video – Don’t do this either
• I don’t seek out new sources through Google Alerts or Blog Search
• I only comment on other blogs sporadically (although I’ve been doing better recently)
• I don’t really get enthusiastic about every new tool – I am not an “early adopter”

I’m sure there are other things I’m either forgetting right now, or am simply unaware of.

I would really appreciate comments, tweets, emails, or links that might suggest ways to improve, especially concerning how to work some of these items into a work flow efficiently.

This post is part of the Brogan 100.
Learn more here and here.

I have already written this post.

But more importantly…

What WordPress plugins do YOU use?

Other times I don’t post anything for a week or more, because I just don’t have a lot to say.

But then I found this old post from Chris Brogan. Chris is one of my few New Media heroes.

Over two years ago, Chris published a list of 100 Blog topics he hopes I write. I don’t know how he knew two years ago that he would want me to write these blog posts, but apparently he did.

SO…

This post, the first in this series, is #9 on the BROGAN 100.

I’ll be taking the list out of order (because that makes more sense). Some posts will be long, most will be fairly short. My plan is to write them in large batches and bleed them out as timed posts over the next 100 business days (20 weeks, that’ll take us into February 2010, I think). I will continue to write my longer, more thoughtful posts about as often as I have been.

Good. Let’s get started.

How I find Blogging Ideas – BROGAN 100 – #9

• Read Chris Brogan’s 100 Posts he hopes I write.
• Subscribe to, and read, over a hundred blogs in a variety of fields.
• Read “real” books constantly. I buy some, I ask for books as gifts for all occasions, I go the library a lot, I spend time at the bookstore mooching free reads.
• I read, with some irregularity, magazines like Inc., Fast Company, Entrepreneur, and a few others. For all you Bootstrappers out there- I read these at the bookstore, the library, and the gym. Free.
• While I generally avoid newspapers and TV news, I do listen to NPR whenever I happen to be in the car.
• I go networking. A lot. I try to get out to at least three events a week, and I’ve been known to go to as many as ten. Whenever possible, I go to educational events, rather than “salespeople pitching each other” events.
• Whenever anything weird or unusual happens in my life, I think, “Well- now I know what I’ll be blogging about tomorrow morning.”

Then I take all the input and do one or more of the following:

• Report information.
• Copy an idea (here’s MY top ten whatevers)
• Respond in agreement or disagreement to an opinion
• Rant a little at how stupid the (fad/trend/opinion/format) is
• Draw an analogy to some area of my business
• Gush about how much I liked it
• Attempt to offer advice based on it
• Intend to write a post and then completely forget. Oh well.

Hope that helps.

How do YOU find Blogging ideas?
Please let us know below.

• The weight of all the really big animals put together isn’t as much as all the weight of all the small animals put together.
• The sales totals of the few blockbusters is not as huge as the combined sales of all the movies that only one person a month wants to watch.
• The money made by the Fortune 100 isn’t as much money as moves through the millions of small businesses all over the world.

There, now you hardly need to read the book.

(Just kidding, you should read it.)

Since the book came out, a new phrase has emerged in the internet marketing and search engine optimization world: long tail search.

The idea being that for all the “perfect” keywords that get used by thousands of people each day, there a tons of “long tail” searches- long strings of unusual words that only get used once because somebody is looking for something specific.

Deb Ng, over at The Freelance Writing Jobs Network, just published a list of some of the weirder long-tail searches that have gotten people to her site. For each of these strings, she was #1 on Google at the time. Here’s a few examples:

• “Working on coffeeshop tax deductible”
• “Write dirty stories for Playboy.”
• “Meatball sub”

The list, along with Deb’s funny commentary, are worth reading.

I, too, have had a few interesting Long Tail arrivals, most notably:

• how to get a graph of entrepreneur
• risk and reward of entrepreneurship
• thesis vs atahualpa
• wp plugins that keep people on my site

This brings up a few points…

More Content

The Long Tail is awesome, but it’s impossible to plan for. You can’t know what random string of weird words someone might search for in the future. The only way to “optimize” for the long tail is to have a lot of content. The more words you have, the more combinations of words you have, the more likely that you’ll have that one odd phrase or word-string that someone is looking for.

For those of you still “thinking about it,” it’s time to realize that blogging is the easiest way to get lots of good long tail (and tall head) content.

Real Content

The cheapo boilerplate content that some companies pedal for SEO purposes wipes out any longtail usefulness. It doesn’t matter if someone reaches your sight after searching for “wp plugins that keep people on my sight” if the page they land on is schlocky seo fodder.

Blogging, especially thoughtful blogging over time, provides useful landing pages for all those weird, long tail searches.

Make sure that your blog theme (or template) is set up so that every page is a worthwhile landing page.

Focused Content

While more blogging is better than less blogging, it’s a good idea to focus your blogging on topics related to your business. This seems kind of obvious, and yet lots of business owners think that posting about their cats is a worthwhile use of time. (It isn’t.)

The more you blog about your business and your industry, the more those long tail searches will be potential customers or subscribers, because those searchers will find that they’ve arrived at a blog that they actually care about.

Big SEO opportunity

Clearly, there are no sandwich shops that have bothered to optimize for “meatball sub.” This seems like a huge opportunity, since there are over 8,000 searches each month for “meatball sub.” I’d be happy to work with any sandwich shops on this matter.

I get that question a lot.

The best answer is, “That depends on what you’re trying to accomplish.”

However- when it comes to Thought Leadership marketing, and the kinds of things I try to accomplish for my clients over and over, I’ve developed what I consider the “base install.” That is- we set these things up automatically unless we have some big reason not to.

So here goes my overly long list of WP Plugins I use (Almost) every time:

Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/Email Button

Help readers share, save, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service.

You can fill up your posts with little icons from everywhere, or you can be judicious and only include a few. OR you can put in one small button that allows people to pick which Social Networks they want to share/save to. They claim that they move the sites the viewer uses to the top, which sounds awesome.

All in One SEO Pack

Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog.

Easiest way I know to add meta-data to every page and post. I know that stuff doesn’t affect Google as much as it used to, but it’s still good practice to include it.

Contact Form 7

Just another contact form plugin. Simple but flexible.

This is, by far, the best Contact and Feedback form I have ever used. It is easy, flexible, and just works. Also- you can have multiple forms in different places on your site. You can use it for way more than just a Contact Form.

Events Manager

Manage events specifying precise spatial data (Location, Town, Province, etc).

A key component of Thought Leadership is public speaking and networking. This tool allows you to easily keep an event calendar, push invites, manage RSVPs, and all the great things you need for running events. It even integrates with Google Maps.
One question: Has anybody integrated it with PayPal (or whatever) to charge for events? I’d like to know.

Flexi Pages Widget

A highly configurable WordPress sidebar widget to list pages and sub-pages. User friendly widget control comes with various options.

I’m not a fan of the Pages widget that comes with WP. This allows you to set up specific versions of sidebar page menus. It was one of the first plugins I started using, and I really like it.
I’ve been thinking about switching to the Simple Section Navigation Widget plugin, so if anyone has experience with that, please let me know.

Google Analyticator

Adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google’s Analytics. After enabling this plugin visit the settings page and enter your Google Analytics’ UID and enable logging.

I know people who like to add this code by hand, but I don’t touch code unless I have to. It is much easier and faster to let other minds do my work. Also, I just want my clients to have something that works, not something they have to understand.

Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO.

Sitemaps are very important for indexing by Google et al. Turn this on and DO NOTHING- just let it do it’s thing.

Link Library

Functions to generate link library page with a list of links.

I use this for outbound links pages, and other “Resources” sections. The functionality is great, and I can run multiple Library pages on a site. I’ve found it a little difficult to explain to clients, so if I can find something that works almost as well, but is easier to understand, I’d switch.

My Link Order

My Link Order allows you to set the order in which links and link categories will appear in the sidebar. Uses a drag and drop interface for ordering. Adds a widget with additional options for easy installation on widgetized themes.

The Link Library plugin can use your My Link Order info to keep your links in the order you want them in. Helpful.

My Page Order

My Page Order allows you to set the order of pages through a drag and drop interface. The default method of setting the order page by page is extremely clumsy, especially with a large number of pages.

WordPress’ native page ordering capability is “janky.” This corrects that problem. Most useful in context of the Page Menu Navigation Bar

Page Links To

Allows you to point WordPress pages or posts to a URL of your choosing. Good for setting up navigational links to non-WP sections of your site or to off-site resources.

Want to set up a redirect page? Want one of your NavBar buttons to go offsite? There are other ways to do it, but none so easy as this plugin.

Page Menu Editor

Allows you to customise the title attribute and menu label of each page link in wp_list_pages.

Navigation menus are important, and this givs you one more level of control over what gets displayed.

Profile Pic

Allows authors to add a picture to their profile and automates the process of displaying profiles. Highly configurable via plugin and widget settings.

If you want people who visit your site to know who you are, use this plugin. I kept thinking there must be a way to add a photo… I assumed it was native. Maybe there is one, deep in there. But this plugin made it fast and easy- for me, and my clients.

TS Custom Widgets

This plugin enables you to select which widgets appear on specific posts, pages, categories,author’s posts and tag pages. By default, all widgets appear wherever the sidebar is loaded within your theme. With this plugin, you can configure where widgets are displayed on a per post or per WP Template(Using conditional Tags) basis.

I HATE the default “display on every page” nature of Widgets. That almost okay for a pure blog, but if you’re using WP as CMS, then you need this plugin.

WordPress Google Analytics Reports

This plugin helps to get Google Analytics reports overview to your dashboard using Google Analytics Data API.

I just don’t feel like logging into Google Analytics every morning. And I know my clients are not going to wade through the data over there. This plugin displays a basic report telling most people what they are looking for: How may people visit my site? How long do they stay? Where do they come from?

WP to Twitter

Updates Twitter when you create a new blog post or add to your blogroll using Cli.gs. With a Cli.gs API key, creates a clig in your Cli.gs account with the name of your post as the title.

How do I automatically update Twitter when I post a blog? This is how. Runs on autopilot, or you can send custom Tweets with a post. Every option you would be looking for in a Tweet-when-I-post app, including analytics integration.

[GWA] AutoResponder

A plugin to add a powerful Double Opt-In Mail List Builder and AutoResponder to your WordPress Weblog.

All my clients want an email newsletter subscription function. Here it is. I’ve had a few problems with it, and it isn’t all that user-friendly- but it’s the best I can find (for free). Any replacement suggestions?

That’s my list. Every single one of those is installed and activated before I even begin design or content work on a site. Sometimes it feels like a bit too many, but we (my clients and I) really use all those functionalities. And so far, I haven’t had any weird interference problems.

I’d appreciate comments regarding alternatives (especially to the ones I mentioned I’ve had trouble with), as well as questions, ideas, and other “must-have” plugins.