Archive - June 2014

You probably know that, all other things being equal, it’s easier to get a job when you are employed vs. when you’re unemployed. When you’re employed, you give off a whole different vibe. You walk around and interact with people from the standpoint of “there is currently someone willing to pay for my services.” When you’re unemployed, you often radiate less confidence. You don’t feel as valuable.

Luckily, you can always get a job – if you are willing to work for free. It can be an internship, a volunteer position, or a self-employment gig.

Note: There are legal issues involved in working for free (see below the legal stuff). Read it and decide for yourself if you want to go for it.

How to work for free

Here are a few ideas on how you can start to work for free, either as an unpaid intern or as a volunteer. Most of them apply to the field of marketing:

When you meet professionals and small business owners, offer to prepare a marketing plan for them for free. If they like it, they can hire you to execute the marketing plan. This can be either for free or for pay. The important thing is that after you’ve completed the work, you will have something to show recruiters and potential employers. You can try walking into small mom-and-pop shops and offer them the deal. Often these stores don’t have a professional marketing person; you can do great things for them, especially with digital presence and social media.
Find charities, ideally ones that are close to your heart, and offer to volunteer as their marketing person for free.
Find a political campaign and offer to take care of their online marketing efforts and community outreach. There’s always an election going on: federal, provincial, state, county, or local. Even if elections are two years away, you can be sure that the candidates are already working hard toward it and would appreciate any help!
Startups are always strapped for cash and happy to get free help.

Use your imagination and come up with more options. Just make sure that the job you take gives you at least some of the following:

The opportunity to list it as a legitimate job on your resume and LinkedIn
Contacts
Learning and experience
Deliverables you can talk about and show when engaging with potential employers (e.g., marketing plans, social media accounts, websites, articles you wrote)
The ability to appear employed and talk about your job, so when you go to events you are not perceived as “unemployed.” Consider printing some business cards, even if you have to pay for them. (You can order cheap business cards online easily.)
Flexibility: your employer allows you to take time off to prepare for interviews and go to interviews. They should understand at the outset that you will leave them once you find a satisfactory paying job. But also promise them that if you’re hired while still working on an important project for them, you will complete it on nights and weekends.

That’s it. Now the next time a recruiter or an employer calls you and asks, “Are you currently working?” you will be able to say “yes.”

Unpaid work: the legal stuff

Rest assured that if you take an unpaid internship, the legal implications apply to the employer, not to you. They, not you, can be fined for having an unpaid intern. The purpose of such laws is to prevent exploitation of employees. But in some job markets, educated and skilled people have no other choice. Employers are reluctant to take the risk of employing someone with little experience.

If the work involves public service or charity, you can frame your unpaid work as “volunteering.” Some workplaces will ask you to sign a volunteer service agreement. Read the agreement carefully before signing it. Often, when you do volunteer work, you receive neither wages nor benefits. In America, that means that if you are injured on the job, you may not be entitled to worker’s compensation.

Even though you are volunteering, you can – and should – present yourself to others as employed. Add the unpaid job to your resume and LinkedIn profile. It is nobody’s business whether you are paid for what you do.

Where can you get a volunteer position? Usually, in any organization in which it makes sense to have volunteers. It doesn’t make sense for Microsoft to have people volunteering full-time. But it does make sense for charities, political campaigns, and some small for-profit businesses.

Make sure that the unpaid position will leave you enough time to continue your job search, and constantly try to leverage the work experience you’re getting and your new network of contacts to advance your career.

Should you work in Marketing? 11 simple points to help you decide

Roni

Job search, Marketing

Add comment

In a Marketing Strategy class I took a few years ago, we had to write our personal definition of marketing on a piece of paper. Then we passed it to the person sitting to the right, so each student got a piece of paper with someone else’s definition and wrote her comments on that definition. By the end of the class, each student got back the paper with her definition, plus about 10 comments.

My definition of marketing was: “Marketing is communication with a purpose.” Pretty much everybody criticized it for being too broad.

It’s broad, but…marketing is broad! When a presidential candidate is speaking to an audience, he or she is marketing. When I’m trying to convince you to join me at a party, I am marketing. When you’re looking for a job, you are marketing yourself.

Marketing is a huge, broad concept. Broadness is one of the best things marketing has to offer. But let’s take a look at some other pros and cons:

The good stuff

There is always more to learn. Things in marketing change all the time. You will get a chance to experience industries and practices you never knew existed, and your job will be a springboard for personal growth.
There is room for creativity. People often choose a marketing career because it offers opportunities for creativity. Whether it’s devising a strategy for a campaign, composing interesting tweets, or designing the company logo, your creative juices will get a chance to flow.
Marketing is multidisciplinary. It includes a lot of psychology, but also economics; design, but also data. You can employ psychological theories to analyze what drives customers’ purchasing decisions. Alternatively, you can put all the data into equations of supply and demand or compare pricing schemes and price promotions of a competing product.
Marketing can fit any personality type. Are you the analytical type? You’re sure to find marketing jobs in which you plug numbers into an Excel spreadsheet and write formulas to devise a marketing strategy. Are you the artistic type? You can find a company that needs to redesign their website, flyers, business cards, or logo. Are you a “people person?” You can become a community manager, organize events, or mingle at other events where you can be the public face of your company.
You can always find an industry you are interested in. Think of your favorite products, and look for an opportunity to market those products. You can be in consumer electronics, education, politics, nonprofits, cosmetics, and more. That way, you get to spend the entire day dealing with a product you like and mingling with people who share your interests.
Marketing will never die. Remember the milkman? There are no more milkmen in developed countries. But marketers are here to stay, as long as they stay sharp and evolve all the time.
You can influence the world in a good way. This is my favorite aspect of marketing. A lot of marketing out there is admittedly sleazy, but you don’t have to be a part of that. To promote their products, some marketers will try to instill conscious or subconscious fear in potential customers. Some may inflate crime figures to scare potential customers into purchasing a home alarm system. But if you’re brave and willing to take the risk, you can try to influence the marketing campaigns to employ more reputable marketing techniques. You can suggest that the campaign take into account its effect on the population as well as the monetary value of the products it sells. As a marketer, you can provide your audience with information presented in the most digestible and truthful way, without instilling fear or diminishing their dignity or self-esteem.
You can create value. As a marketer, you often get inputs from your customers, either by market research or by listening to their comments and requests. Thus, you can and should try to influence the product department of your company to make products that best fit the customers’ needs.

The bad – potential drawbacks

If you are considering several different paths, make sure to consider the potential drawbacks of each. (Every career/job choice has its own potential drawbacks.) Here are the potential drawbacks of marketing that I can think of.

The job market in some cities is flooded with marketers. I have noticed that many North American cities are flooded with tons of marketing professionals looking for jobs right now. There are no real barriers of entry such as a degree or diploma. Unlike accounting, law, and engineering, no lengthy studies or specific credentials are required to work in marketing. From what I’ve seen, there is no correlation between majoring in marketing in college and being a good marketer. In addition, marketing is shifting more and more toward online and social media. 16-year-old kids with active Twitter accounts may end up being better marketers than an adult with an MBA in marketing. This flood of marketers also tends to lower the wages.
Even if the product isn’t good enough, you’re still responsible for marketing it. The world isn’t impressed by a marketer who claims, “I did a great marketing job! It’s the product that sucks!” It is very hard to move on to the next marketing job after trying and failing to market an inferior product.
It is not always easy to be true to yourself. Sometimes, the problem goes beyond a “not good enough” product and into the realm of ethics. Some people market online gambling, get-rich-quick schemes, “magic” diet pills, etc. The people I know who market these products don’t think of themselves as evil people; it’s just a matter of their values at a particular point in time. Sometimes in life, your strongest value is to get ahead; at other times, bringing positive value to others becomes your main concern. If you are at the stage of your life at which you are more concerned with bringing something positive into the world, you might have to reject some marketing jobs.

Well these are some points I can think of. It might seem skewed towards the positive since there are more points supporting the “for” vs the “against. I do think that marketing can be a great job choice for you, as long as you are true to yourself and don’t compromise your values.

Getting a job in marketing: position yourself as a content creator

Roni

Job search

1 Comment

Today, in the “content era,” many companies are aware of the need to create valuable content for their customers. If you have a track record of creating a lot of high-quality content, you will get a bonus point for any marketing job you apply to. If creating content appeals to you, start creating videos, articles, podcasts, etc. It is okay to leverage the same content across a few different media. You can write an article on a topic, then shoot a video about it, then record a podcast on it.

Remember that shooting a video or recording a podcast isn’t just about reading your article aloud. Even if you write in a conversational tone, the language you use in a podcast or video will be different.

Also remember that video is visual. If all you’re planning to do is record yourself talking, skip the video. Unless you are extremely charismatic or good-looking, people expect to see more in a video than just your face. Include interesting screenshots or images of what you’re talking about, or make a video tutorial that records what you’re doing.

Getting your articles published

Part of positioning yourself as a content creator is publishing articles in reputable publications, such as leading magazines and blogs. It’s not easy to do. But if you can get an article published in a major publication, your position as an expert will take a quantum leap, and you can expect a significant increase in your perceived value as a potential employee.

The way to do this is to identify a relevant publication and get a sense of what they write about and how: the length of the articles, formats, and tone (conversational or formal). You can pitch an idea to the editors before you’ve written about it. However, it’s easier to pitch a finished article for online media.

Note: A relevant publication is not necessarily one that’s your favorite, but one that your potential employers read. This could be a publication related to marketing, to a particular industry, to management and business, or to lifestyles and hobbies.

Here are a few lists of trade magazines you can try to get an article into.

Some tips on how to write for trade magazines (and get paid for it!) may be found here.

What to write about

Writing about marketing is obviously great if you’re trying to get a job in marketing. As I mentioned, if you’re looking to work in a specific industry, try to publish in a magazine that is read by executives in that industry. For example, say you want to move to find a job in the natural resources industry in Canada. You could try to publish an article in a trade magazine about energy, such as Oilweek: Canada’s Oil and Gas Authority. (I just found this now using Google. I trust that if this is the industry you’re aiming at, you will do a better search.)

If you do decide to write about marketing, here are some topics you can write about. Make sure you are specific and to the point, bringing something new to the table.

Analytics
B2B marketing strategy
B2C marketing strategy
Branding
Competitive analysis
Copywriting
E-commerce
Email campaigns
Event planning
Facebook (or Google, or other) advertising
Marketing an app
Marketing automation
Positioning
Product naming
Sales funnel optimization
Social media strategies
Trade shows
Upselling and cross-selling

How to create a blog to support your job search

Roni

Job search

2 Comments

A blog / personals site /portfolio can be a great way to showcase who you are and what you can do. When a job applicant sends me a link to his or her personal blog or website, that is always the first thing I look at. It is a key factor in my decision whether to grant that person an interview. A blog works great for marketing professionals; a portfolio is a must for creative and design professionals; and a gitHub repository with code is important for developers.

We’ll focus on blogs in this article. If you want your blog to speak for you during your job search, it has to be good. Here’s how to make it good:

Choose a platform that will make it easy for you to publish regularly. I recommend WordPress; it has a bit of a learning curve, but it’s a great platform. Blogger is also nice, and these days Medium has become very popular, especially for the high tech industry.
Invest in graphics. If you think you’re good with graphic design, you can try to do it yourself, but make sure you show it to at least two critical people who will give you their honest opinion. Otherwise, here are some low-cost options for professional design:
1. Go to fiverr.com. Under Graphics & Design, select Web Design & UI. You will see offers from freelancers willing to design your site for as little as five dollars. You can also use the search box to search for “WordPress,” “blog,” and so on.
2. When you communicate with people on fiverr.com, you need to be prepared to specify exactly what you want, so have your WordPress site all set (even if it looks ugly) before you approach them.
3. Don’t expect the best quality for these prices. If you have a design budget, you can find designers who will do an awesome job for about $80 and up on sites such as elance.com and odesk.com. As with fiverr.com, you are outsourcing, so clear communication is super important. Not all contractors on those sites have strong communication skills (particularly in English), but you can explicitly request a designer with native English skills. It might be worth investing $200 on one of these sites to work with someone whom you can communicate well with.
4. You can get beautiful WordPress themes for free and some advanced themes for $35 and up. These will give you a great basic design that you can then play with and tailor to your needs.
Buy your own domain name and hosting plan. A custom domain looks more professional than a free domain. Check out com/job-resources/ for links to domain registrars and hosting plans.
Once you have the design of your website in place, fill it with content. Write a few blog posts. Don’t send a link to recruiters or include it in your resume or LinkedIn profile until there are at least ten blog posts.
The blog has to appear active. It doesn’t look good if the last post is six months old. If this is the case, customize your blog to not display any dates.
Blog about something you’re passionate about and have a lot to say about. For example, if you’re looking for a job in marketing and want to position yourself as a marketing expert, blogging about marketing is a great option, but it’s not necessary. An employer will judge your site by the quality of the writing, the design, and your brand, rather than by the actual content. It is always easier to present a great brand if you write about something that you’re passionate about, rather than trying to force yourself to write about what you think he should be writing about. What you want the interviewers to feel when they look at your blog or personal website is, “Wow, can she do this for me?”
Not a must, but sure looks good – try to get comments on your blog and start a lively conversation around your posts. You can get help from your friends to initiate the conversation, as long as it doesn’t look fake.
Have a great About page. Take as much time as necessary to make it great. A potential employer will definitely look at your website if you provide a link, and you can be sure he or she will go to the About page at some point. In fact, I will personally read a job applicant’s entire About page, no matter how long it is. When used wisely, the About page can give you a great advantage. It gives you a chance to share content that does not fit in a resume or cover letter: personal stuff, images of you volunteering, the names of your favorite books and blogs, and more. The hiring manager is hiring a person, not just a set of skills and qualifications, so the About page is a great opportunity.
Spend some time on SEO. If your site ranks high on certain keywords, you might get surprising opportunities from traffic arriving through search engines.

Remember: creating a great blog takes time, it’s an investment. But so is sending a lot of resumes. A great blog can definitely take your career/job search one step forward. So get to work on your blog and feel free to put links to your blogs in the comments below!

Can terror attacks make people “wake up”?

Roni

Uncategorized

Add comment

Hint: no.

Research shows that when confronted with a new piece of information, a person will use the information to support previously held beliefs rather than as an opportunity to open his or her mind.

How does this relate to last night’s events?

When people are faced with a horrifying reality such as last night’s attacks in Paris, they go through two processes: alienation and justification.

If they are right-wing and against immigration, the attacks will strengthen their beliefs that immigration from Muslim countries is dangerous and sets the grounds for such attacks (even though most of the refugees are running away from the exact same terrorist groups).

But what if they are left-wing? Are they going to change what they think about Islam in Europe, and about the challenges Israel is facing when dealing with terrorism on a daily basis?

Let’s look through the lens of alienation and justification.

Alienation comes out of fear, out of the needs to believe that “this couldn’t have happened to me.” The alienation instinct exists in all of us, sometimes we are open about it and sometimes we keep the thoughts to ourselves.

Sometimes, it will be as innocuous as saying “well, I don’t go to public places often” (… so this can’t happen to me). But it can also promote racism towards the victims. I remember about 14 years ago, there was a suicide bombing in a club in Tel Aviv. 21 teenagers were killed, 120 injured. It was a party attended mostly by Russian immigrants. I remember for us, as teens, it created some alienation towards the Russian immigrants – we desperately wanted to feel that the horrible attack wasn’t against us, that it didn’t happen to us, it happened to them.

A few months ago when terrorists took hostages in a kosher mart in Paris, the thoughts about the alienation effect came to me. I felt like any action against Jews in Europe could only increase anti-Semitism, and for sure not decrease it.

Justification

The second process I mentioned is justification. As humans, we strive to find sense in the world around us. We try to find cause-and-effect. When something horrible like last night’s terror attacks takes place, the world doesn’t make sense anymore. We unconsciously need to justify to ourselves why it happened.

With an event like the kosher mart attack, some people can (consciously or subconsciously) rationalize, “well, the Jews shouldn’t be surprised that they are targeted by terrorists in France when Israel is doing so and so.” Thus, in people’s minds, there is a reason, so the world makes a bit more sense. This justification also helps with the alienation process; the targets for these attacks are Jewish people, not “me”.

Last night, I’m sure some people had thoughts along the lines of “well we had it coming since we interfered in things we shouldn’t have been involved with.” Or, “well, what can we expect, when we oppress those populations, there is no reason why they wouldn’t raise their children to kill us.”

But all this rationalization is flawed. Why? Because at the end of the day we’re all monkeys, and the differences between us are pretty random. And because terrorist attacks have no justification. Never.

Things you don’t learn in high school

Roni

Uncategorized

Add comment

Things we learn in high school	Things we don’t learn in high school
Math: Derivatives and integral	How to handle your finances, what is an interest rate
Astronomy, geography	Recycling, minimalism, caring about the planet.
Physics, mechanics	Repairing simple appliances
History	Conflict resolution
Biology of the human body	First Aid
Grammar	Effective writing. Letters, resume, etc
Logics	Critical thinking
Pillars of democracy, the political system	Respecting others’ opinions, being a considerate member of society
Bible studies, religion	Spiritual concepts of presence, oneness and more
The logic of constructing an argument	How to be a big person and see the bigger picture in an argument

Of ice trays, blankets, public restrooms and Toblerone chocolate

Roni

Uncategorized

Add comment

Everybody is so obsessed with user experience these days.

Developers, designers, and UI/UX experts spend countless hours optimizing interfaces for mobile applications, web forms, desktop software, and other tech stuff.

I hear people complaining about the nitty-gritties of online user experience, but rarely do I hear people discussing improvements to the concrete stuff around them, such as the building’s trash bin or their cooking utensils. In a world that lives on the hype of digital innovation, the experience of the good old physical products is lurking behind.

Thus, I collected a short list of five physical products many of us use and have a sub-par user experience. Note: I’m not writing this list to complain about the products; rather to show the contrast between the great user experience we demand from the digital world versus the low user experience we have come to accept in the “concrete world”.

Toblerone chocolate

Toblerone is a Swiss brand of chocolate (purchased by Kraft Foods in 1990) that stands for quality. While we can argue about the quality of the chocolate, let’s focus for second on the quality of the foil wrapping it. Toblerone is wrapped with thin foil that doesn’t peel off in one piece, rather shreds into a million pieces as you touch it. You run the risk of accidentally eating foil. This shredding effect makes it hard to peel a bit of foil and seal back to keep the rest of the chocolate fresh.

Moreover, the chocolate itself has pieces of toffee/honey that stick to your teeth. These pieces of carbs remain stuck in your molars to feed the bacteria and cause cavities. When you eat regular chocolate without toffee, your saliva melts away the remains of the chocolate and it doesn’t stay in your molars. The toffee doesn’t melt.

User experience score from 1 to 10: 4.

Improvement suggestions: use thicker foil, soften or replace the toffee.

Ice trays

If you consume ice and don’t have an ice machine, you have to deal with ice trays.

You’re probably familiar with the following scenario: you get the ice tray out of the freezer with the hope of putting ice cubes into your drink. Then, as you flip the ice tray facing down to drop a few cubes into your cup, you find that the ice cubes have a life of their own: they start falling out of the tray, spreading everywhere (including but not limited to your cup).

If you’re experienced, you try to work around these challenges by first releasing the ice cubes onto a plate and later manually placing them in your drink. Yet, the ice tray experience remains un-streamlined.

When you’re done with the ice, you have to fill the ice tray with water and put it back in the freezer. In an attempt to avoid spilling the water on the way to the freezer you hold the ice tray with both hands. Wait, how am I supposed to open the freezer now?

User experience score from 1 to 10: 3.

Improvement suggestion: include a cover that helps you control the ice cubes coming out + prevents the water spill.

Bedding #1: blankets tucked in

Unless you want to work on your feet flexibility and sleep in a ballet dancer position, why would you want your blanket tucked in?

If you’re staying at a hotel, you un-tuck the blanket on the first night, only to find out on the next night that housekeeping tucked it back. Your only way to avoid this phenomenon is to leave the “do not disturb” sign on the door so you don’t get a visit from housekeeping at all.

User experience score from 1 to 10: 0.

Improvement suggestion: get your local legislator to ban blanket tucking.

Bedding #2: duvets and covers

Did you ever put a duvet in a cover to later find out that you put it the wrong way (i.e. length of duvet went into width of cover)? Often you just leave it as is, hoping to get it right next time, since putting a duvet in a cover can be quite an annoying task.

Duvets and their covers exist mainly in the form of rectangles which are almost square. Can’t the makers put an arrow to help us tell length from width?

User experience score from 1 to 10: 2.

Improvement suggestion: include a small arrow on both duvets and covers that indicates which side is the “length”.

Conference Tags

Have you attended conferences that had a schedule in a mobile app, live Twitter hashtags displaying on the screen, smart bar code scanning and other techy features, yet the conference tag kept turning the wrong way?

User experience score from 1 to 10: 4.

Improvement suggestion: print on both sides, if using stickers, apply them to both sides (can’t believe I am actually writing this).

Public restrooms

“Public restroom” is a generic name for any restroom that is not at home. Specifically, any restroom in which you wish to minimize contact with items around you for hygiene reasons.

Often, it seems like the public restroom is designed to enable you to share and receive as many germs as possible. Decisions like placement of the trash bin and the type of door handle are either completely arbitrary or made to increase dissemination of diseases.

For example, take the office restroom of a (super innovative) company I know, a company that puts a lot of thought into the user experience of its digital products. This company, however, exhibits lack of thought when it comes to its restroom.

As people finish doing their thing, they wash their hands; there is no automated faucet so they have to touch everything with their bare hands.

As they get ready to leave the restroom, they encounter this knob:

Rather than a regular handle one can lean on /push with elbow, here you have to grab the knob and turn it.

That way you get to find out if the person before you dried his hands are not. Sometimes you grab the knob and it’s completely wet. Not fun. Essentially, it’s like you’re shaking hands with every single person that visited the restroom that day.

User experience from 1 to 10: 0.

Improvement suggestions: design a restroom that is as “hands-free” as possible.

To sum up, I hope one day some decision-makers that deal with chocolate, ice trays, blankets and restrooms will read my article and put more thought into the design of our everyday, concrete environment. You as an end-user also have power – write a letter to the company that makes the product you would like to improve; talk to the building management at your office about making some changes to the restrooms, etc.

And, I welcome you to leave your ideas for additional product experience improvements in the comments section below

Berlin

Roni

Gallery

2 Comments

Berlin, a city of contrast. Heatwave. Bizarre AirBNB experience. Philosophical talks about human nature, good and bad, liberalism. Duality. Hedonism and its after-math. Happiness and sadness. Fetish clubs. Random encounters. Capitalism and communism. Short romance with a pathological lier. Blurriness and clarity.

How to prioritize different writing projects?

Roni

How to

Add comment

If you are like me, you have tons of ideas for pieces you want to write and not enough time or energy to actually write them.

The result is often paralysis – you have unfinished blog posts, book outlines, and book chunks lying around in piles or on your hard disk, thousands of words that might never see the light of day. I feel your pain… perhaps 5% of what I write I publish. In fact, as I am writing these lines, I really hope that they will “find their way” into my blog.

But no more. I decided to increase the productivity of my writing. Move from 5% publishing rate to 20% at the first stage, and one day cross the 50% barrier. So I came up with a system to help me determine which writing projects I should focus on. Here it is:

How to prioritize your precious time and become more productive with your writing?

I created a table to compare my different writing projects. It contains important parameters such as time to completion, potential rewards, risk, etc. Below are a few examples of projects I am currently working on.

Project	Time to completion	Long term reward	Short term Leverage	Risk
Rewriting my “failing” book	3 months	A new book out really fast!	No leverage	Perhaps no re-write can make this book good.
Just blogging whatever comes to mind	NA	Possibly high volume of content	NA	No long term goal..?
Blog about specific topic, e.g travelling	NA	Can be turned into non-fiction book later	NA	Not exciting enough
A novel about depression – I have about 30% written	5 months to first draft	Niche book which could be successful on long tail	Release chunks of the book on my blog, weekly	Writing a book about depression is like coming out of the closet in many ways

This is the system I came up with; which of the projects above would you choose? how do you manage your content? Would love some more ideas…

How to write a great blog post in 12 easy steps

Roni

How to

Add comment

When people think of starting a blog, they are often concerned that they will not be able to create enough high-quality content.

The good news: writing a blog post can be way easier than you think. Follow the steps below, and soon enough you will start creating and publishing high-quality content.

Step # 1 – get a blog post idea

The first step is to think of an idea you have for a post. It can be a topic, a problem, a statement, an advice you want to give. It doesn’t have to be a super smart or profound topic; if you follow the steps below you will see that everything can be turned into an interesting blog post. I keep a list of “blog post ideas” for future use, and tap into them when I have time + energy to write. Personally, I have excess of ideas and absence of “quiet time” to write.

Step # 2 -brainstorm on paper

Got an idea? Great. Now it’s time to take a few pieces of paper (I recommend scrap paper. All those A4 you accidentally printed, the one-sided meeting agenda prints you don’t need any more, etc.). Once you have some paper, you are ready to start brainstorming. You can try one of these two methods:

Mind map – jot down ideas relating to the topic you chose, surround them with circles or boxes or any other geometrical shapes you like. Create lines connecting between them. Each semi-topic is surrounded with a shape and branches out to other mini- topics. Soon you will have an entire page covered with content.

Create a list – this works great especially when your final output is a list or you want to write about a sequential process. This post, for example started as a list on paper.

If you want to write a guide for “cool things to do when it rains,” start by writing ideas on paper and continue until you have at least 15 different ideas. Don’t censor yourself throughout the process; even if you write down an idea that you think is stupid, this idea can spark another idea that can end up being pretty good. Don’t worry – by the time you publish the post, you will screen out all the “bad ideas.”

Step # 3 – open a word processor and start typing

At first, you want to get everything you have on paper to the computer. As you start typing, things will become more ordered and of course you can always add new ideas that come to mind while at it. At this stage you are still enforcing zero judgment – your goal here is to get everything into a document as fast as possible, so grammar, wording, order and coherence do not play a role at all. You still want to be connected to your creative energy rather than your analytical energy.

If your paper notes are disorganized (as is often the case with mind mapping), cross over sections you finish typing, so you don’t accidently type them twice.

Step #4 – eliminate

Go over what you now have on the screen and delete everything that’s boring or doesn’t support the overall context of the post you want to write. Often at this point you will find that you steered away from your original topic and now most of your content is about something else. Accept it, and “pivot” your post topic to the new stuff – what you have the most interesting volume of content for.

Step #5 – order

So at this point you already have your “top content” in the document; it is time to order things in a sequence that makes sense, create paragraphs out of sentences, and add connectors between these paragraphs. Each paragraph should feel like it’s right where it should be.

sometimes even the airport becomes my office

Step #6 – add an opening and a closing to the post

Not much to say here. Write an opening paragraph and a closing paragraph. Keep them brief. People want to get straight to the point and often even skip the opening paragraph.

Still, opening and closing are important, for two reasons: visitors to the post who do read the opening paragraph, would use it to judge whether to read the rest of the post or not; regarding the closing paragraph, you want to leave your readers with a closure, some sort of wrap-up of everything they just read. Perhaps you also want to include a call to action –suggest that they read another post you wrote for example. I am not good in closing paragraphs (see below).

Step #7 – polish

Now is the time for grammar and style. I won’t get into details here. Simply go over the entire post at least two times for styling.

Step #8 – optional – do some SEO

Read my post about finding keyword ideas. See if you can replace some of the words in your finished post with some keywords you found. Don’t force it. If it doesn’t feel natural on the text, drop it. I hardly ever do keyword replacement in my posts, good content is way more important in the long run.

Step #9 – get an image

Choose an appealing image – you can look for free images online (remember to give the photographer credits), you can buy stock photos, you can take a picture. Pictures are always a great addition to the blog post. By the way, you can take any of the images on my blog and use them as long as you link back to my blog. You can simply copy and paste this – photo credit: Roni Krakover

Step #10 -think of a catchy title

But don’t exaggerate. I hate click traps such as: “this man thought he was walking into his house. What happened next will amaze you”, “10 things that women can’t do no matter how hard they try”, “seeing what this monkey does is guaranteed to change your life forever”, “the 7 secrets of people who have a lot of sex”, etc. I never click them, and neither should you. More often than not you will find yourself reading a boring piece designed to solely get advertising exposure. But more than that on another post.

Step #11 – upload

Upload to your blogging platform, choose the right category and tag. Add the image. At this point you also want to make sure that any links you included in the article work and lead to the right page.

Step #12 – share

Let the world know about your post. Use all social media outlets you have to announce the news.

Step #13 – go to sleep

You worked hard. Your brain must be super tired right now. I know mine is. I’m going to take a nap. Talk soon.

*Note: every post worth reading takes time to write.

*Photo credit – Ryan McGuire