I hear from so many people that they don't have time to blog. We all know the benefits of blogging - building your personal brand, keeping your friends and network up-to-date with what you are doing, attracting new connections. The good news is that with all the web services out there, you can start and continue blogging for a total time investment of 15 minutes or less. Give yourself and hour and you will be prolific blogger.
How? Read on.
Content
For the purpose of this discussion I'll give blogging the broad
definition of 'personal online publishing'. Blogging requires of course
some sort of input or content, but don't make the mistake of thinking that
blogging is restricted to time intensive and formalized paragraphs of text.
Here are a few other sources of information that can easily be turned
into blog material.
Bookmarks (or Favorites): There are many online bookmarking services
(see Onlywire for a good list). If you use on of these services
already great. If not, a little change in your bookmarking behavior
will be required, but some of these services integrate with your
browser, so once you set them up you can continue bookmarking as you
did before and some or all of your bookmarks will be content for your
blog. I recommend using del.icio.us with Firefox integration.
Software You Use: Download Wakoopa and it will feed out information about what software you are using. Perhaps a bit geeky or privacy invasive for some, but think about it. What software you are using can start to paint a picture about you. Are you and Excel or iTunes person?
Web Sites you Visit: Install Cluztr (my profile is here) and it will send out a feed of all the web sites or pages you visit, or you can also get a feed for just the top sites.
So once set up, you don't have to do a single thing differently than you were doing previously and you've got material for your blog. Zero additional time investment. Great leverage. Got any other suggestions for similar services? Let me know.
Publishing
Your information already goes out on all of the above sites - but you'll probably find that most of your friends are not using the same service, so the reach is very limited. You need some more outputs.
Facebook or other SNS services: Many SNS services allow you to import content from other sources or 'RSS feeds'. Don't worry about the technical details. All the above sites create 'RSS feeds'. Just find the feed address, add it into one or more of your favorite SNS sites and you'll instantly be sharing information with your network of friends.
A Blog: Do you want your own real blog? I recommend Tumblr. It's free, very easy to set up, you can import up to 5 information feeds from other places such as those above. If you later want to have your own domain name (i.e. www.myname.com) it's easy to set that up as well.
Twitter: Twitter is very popular micro blogging service (i.e. blog entries are just one line). I didn't list this as an input as you still have to go there and create content. Using Twitterfeed, you can take any of the above 'Inputs' and output them to Twitter. If you use Skype and want to go one step further, you can use Twype which will update your Skype mood using Twitter.
Email: Using Feedblitz you can send out updates by email. The above content sources may send out a lot of information and email is the most intrusive of the publishing options so consider the value this option carefully. A monthly digest of your latest bookmarks could be interesting, but an email every time you visit a new web site certainly won't be.
CONCLUSION
So, how to get started in 15 minutes or less. Simple. Choose one of the inputs, one of the outputs and spend 15 minutes to set them up.
Leave them running for a week or so. You'll be surprised about the amount of information you build up in that time. If you are outputting to an SNS service, I wouldn't be surprised if your friends start commenting within the first week. If you start your own blog you'll have to do a bit of work to promote the address (for example by putting it on your business card). The real magic is, that once you start seeing the content and getting feedback, I can almost guarantee that you'll finally find the motivation to start creating original content for your blog.
There are many other simple ways to leverage and share the content once you are started. If there are any parts of the above process you would like to me to expand on, let me know in the comments.
Enjoy!
