Until I saw Karen Rubin’s Rock Your Business Blog at Wordcamp Boston

We know that blogging is the most effective way to add valuable content to websites.  Great, it takes a lot of time.  We post on this blog everyday.  We put up two video blogs on GymsmartsCommunity every week.  At times it feels like all we are doing is writing blog posts.  Does this sound familiar?  Is this why you don’t blog?  If you are working or running a nonprofit organization, how much time to you have?

Karen Rubin is the star of Hubspot TV, and gave a great presentation on business blogging at Wordcamp Boston.  It gave me a clear thought process to save a ton of time writing posts.  First she reminded everyone that we need to write for our readers persona’s – or content that our readers want to learn about – not about our products.  (If you are a nonprofit organization you should write about your mission and how it benefits the community, not just fundraisers and please give us money.) Then she talked about creating a mix of posts.  This is how you can save time.  Yes some of your post should be long and detailed, but not all of them.  Here is how Karen described different posts.

1. Raisin Bran – These are basic every day posts. They include How to Posts, are rich in keywords, you need to get good at whipping them out, and make sure they are useful
2. Spinach – These are healthy thoughtful posts. They establish you as a thought leader, put a lot of time into and you don’t do a lot of them.
3. Roasts – Big Blog Projects.  These are a lot of work, contain many links, should create a lot of discussion and attention, and you should pick them well
4. Tobasco – Posts that start Fires. These make bold statements, be prepared to defend yourself, should create lots of comments, and if you do to many of them you could lose trust.
5. Chocolate Cake – The Sweet Stuff.  These make your blog fun, gives you a chance to make fun of yourself, can create a lot of traffic, and often have images and video.

Just thinking about posting this way should make blogging easier.  Not every post needs to be a complete dissertation.  Some can just be simple and easy as long as you are writing about what your readers want to read about.

Your can watch Karen’s presentation here, or watch it on slideshare.

Want to learn more about Blogging? Join us at our next non-profit mini-conference.

By Tom Beach

As videographers we get asked all the time how hard is to do video podcasts and what are the best tools to use.  Here is a video that we took at Podcamp Boston 2009 from a presentation with Steve Garfield (stevegarfield.com), Karen Rubin and Mike Volpe (Hubspot) where they talk about all the various tools and setups they use for video podcasting.  Their advice is simple, start with what you have and see how that works first.  The important thing is to just start.  Notes from the presentation are below the video.

This is a presentation at Podcamp Boston 2009 by Steve Garfield, Karen Rubin and Mike Volpe on tools used for video podcasting. Mike and Karen from Hubspot show their set up that they use for their weekly live video podcast. Steve explains why they need two completely independent systems for the show. Look for video cameras that have a jack for an external microphone.

Lighting is important and you can get inexpensive lights from stores like Home Depo or Target. Steve talks about using natural lighting and Karen gives a few tips for positioning the camera and the subject for the best results. Qik.com is also mentioned for streaming video live over the web.

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