Do it on Fridays - cherry pick a mega list post

[A Clear Blogging Tip.]

Today's Clear Blogging Friday Tip: Want to improve your blog? Cherry pick a mega list post.
We've all seen them - these gargantuan list posts of resources, tips, techniques that someone has taken the time to carefully compile. These mega lists make for good linkbait, but overwhelming is not the word for them.

If you innocently thought to yourself, "Wow, that's a great list, I should do all those things", it would be like signing yourself up to be one those weird people who try to eat 600 hot dog as fast as they can at some podunk state fair. The problem is, even thinking that you will "somehow" do a megalist chokes your mind's task tracking mechanism instantly. Bad, bad idea.

Mega lists should be approached cautiously - you're blog would die a multi-elemented death before you got half way through adding the first 100 bells and whistles.

So here's the steps to your Friday Clear Blogging Tip:

1. Find a mega list - there's the one above for WordPress, here's one (a blog really) for TypePad, a squidoo.com page of TypePad Hacks here and here's a good general blog writing list from Seth Godin.
2. Are you sure? Consider closely the list as a whole. Is it too simple or too advanced for where you are today? Does the author describe what each item on their megalist does in a clear way? If not, find another list.
3. Read the first 10% of the list (for the WordPress God list above, that's the first 30, and only thirty. Are you seeing tips or tools in that 10% you can see will actually help you? If yes, continue, if not, find a new list.
4. You're now ready to Own this list. Do so by clicking somewhere in it that's not a link, doing a Select All, Copy and dump that into your word processor of choice. Or if you prefer, save the page offline and open it in your word processor of choice. Save this document with a nice long explicit name - it will be on your desktop for several Fridays to come. Do not worry that it looks like crap - all you care about it that the list is still readable and clickable.
5. You now Own this list. You are going to shoot the weaklings in the herd, ignore the vast majority and cherry pick the few - about 5% - that give you the most bang for the buck. Do this by scanning the list several times. On the first scan, edit the text with a big fat X in front of anything that looks good. On the second scan, just pay a little more attention to just the items that have X's and give the best of those another X.
6. Repeat the step above until you've ranked your list. Find the item that got the most X's, click it's link if it has one, and go take a closer look. If this tool, tip, resource, online service or trick is the right one for you?
7. Schedule time to implement this tip, with a clear idea of what you will get out of it, when you will recheck that it's working out for you, and what your first actual physical action will be to do the work.
8. Do it.
9. Next week, repeat these last steps and do another thing good for your blog.

Mega lists can be powerful medicine for your blog; but like any powerful prescription, you want to carefully administer the correct dosage, not chug down the bottle!

Comments

[Erin]

Great idea for those days when nothing comes in mind to do, you're right that it's a good idea to have backup posts to beat writers block