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JAY: The first blog post that caught my eye, I believe you actually created a PDF of 25 different types of blog posts. People are always asking me, “How do I get inspiration for blog ideas? Where do you get the ideas to do blog posting as frequently as you need to?” You really need to post 3,4,5 times per week to start getting a lot of credibility for most blogs. So do you want to talk about some of the different types of blogs and how you get inspiration for your great ideas?

ROHIT: Yeah. I think the first thing is my target, which is three posts a week. As you would expect, I did a blog post about this which is How to Find Time to Blog When it’s Not Your Day Job. It’s all about how do I manage to get blog posts out when this is not part of my job. Being in an agency, I fill out time sheets. There’s no time sheet line item for blogging, for me.

JAY: For your personal blog.

ROHIT: Right. So essentially I do a couple of things, one is that I collect ideas in a text file that is always open on my computer. For me it happens to be a text file because that’s the easiest thing. I can cut and paste and not worry about formatting. I throw in ideas and I tend to think, maybe it’s because of my time in advertising, I tend to think in headlines. So a lot of times if I see a site or I see a campaign or I see something out there, just from surfing around and reading something that I think is interesting, I’ll take a stab at what the title for the blog post might be.

JAY: I’m the same as you, I do headlines. I know you know Scott Monty because he recently interviewed you about your book. I head Scott on a podcast saying he does the reverse. He writes the body copy and lets the headline come out of the body copy.

ROHIT: I might change the headline, sometimes, but I tend to find that if I’m making a quick note about something, I tend to think that the headline helps me to jog my memory. Basically because I have this running archive I have all these things that I just kind of keep and sometimes sit on for a while. Like the 25 styles blog post PDF that you mentioned, I probably had been compiling those on and off for three months, until I got to 25. I actually had a couple more but I narrowed it down to 25. The only reason why I turned it, instead of a big blog post, because it was so significant and it would have been this really long blog post nobody would have been able to get through, the reason why I did it as a presentation was actually because I wanted to enter it into a competition for The World’s Best Presentation that SlideShare was running. So it was originally done as a presentation for that competition and then it was turned into a PDF after that.

JAY: That’s right, it was a finalist or one of the award winners.

ROHIT: Yeah, it was an honorable mention. Part of the reason why I wanted to enter that contest was because Guy Kawasaki was judging it. I wanted to get in front of him with some ideas. That was one of the reasons why. That’s one of the tricks I tend to use. The other thing that I do is I have one writing day. I’m not writing the whole day but like on Sunday night I usually write one blog post. I always try to put something up on Monday because that’s usually a big traffic day for me. So I’ll fully write one blog post on Sunday night and I’ll half write two others, which is I’ll sort of start to write it but I won’t finish it and I’ll sort of concept it out from things I’ve found the previous week. And then we were talking earlier about commute, I take the train to work. Usually what I’ll do is I end up writing and finishing the blog post on my train ride, which is about half and hour in the morning. And that’s how I finish the blog post.

JAY: That’s great. The regimen, the routine, a lot of bloggers and podcasters talk about that.

ROHIT: I think the thing to do, if you’re just starting out with blogging and struggling with the content issue, is not to put too much pressure on yourself, to get out posts all the time. Three posts a week, for me, is a good, optimal number. It may not sound like that much but given everything else that goes on, sometimes it’s a struggle to get three out.

JAY: I actually quote you all the time and refer people to the 25 types of blogs. We hand it out all the time at 10 Golden Rules. So talk about some of the different types of blogs because I often coach people, the easiest thing to do is just catch something interesting in your field, a blog post you read, a news story,  comment on it, add a little value, and that’s a really good blog post. But talk about some of the other 25 types of blogging.

ROHIT: The idea was really that there’s so many people saying that you should start a blog and here’s why you should start a blog. At the point when I wrote that there was so much talk about reasons for blogging and how to start a blog and how easy it was. Nobody was really talking about what a blog post should be about. So the idea behind all of these styles was I was looking at the different types of blog posts that I did and I tried to quantify them and say, this type of blog post, for example if you do a List blog post which is a blog post that has a list in it, the potential for people to pick that up and take it and save it and pass it on to others is relatively high because people love lists. Nothing ground-breaking there, we all kind of intuitively might get that. But what I did was call that a blogging style and I rated it in terms of how hard it is to do. So obviously creating a custom list about something and having some insight is more difficult than cutting and pasting something, adding a couple of lines of “Hey isn’t this interesting. Check this out,” which would be another form of blog posting. So the idea was to have a good mix on your blog of stuff that’s relatively easy to post and stuff that takes a little bit more thought, because that is an easier way to get to your three or four or five or whatever your target is, per week.

One other way I put in there is sometimes bloggers are using del.icio.us to tag articles throughout the week. So why not set that up automatically to do a weekly post for you from things that you saved. So there you’ve got a blog post that required no additional work from what you were already doing. So there’s all sorts of tricks like that to help you figure out what you might want to blog about.

JAY: That’s great. I’m sure you’re familiar with the term “link bait” or some people use the term “link magnet”. These are great blog posts or tools on a site, something so really strong, like your 25 styles of blogging, a lot of people are going to link to it. And so you’re getting really good Google juice. You want lots of links to your site or your blog. You want relevant links. You want important links. So link bait is a term, like the bait on a fishhook that catches the fish, link bait catches the kind of links you want. How do you use link bait and what other recommendations can you give companies or individuals who want to get quality link bait?

ROHIT: I think that sometimes people tend to think of it in a little bit of a negative sense, which is you’re “baiting” someone to click on something and maybe it’s not worthwhile. Whereas I think the definition you described is definitely what it should be, which is you create something that is compelling enough that somebody would want to link to it. The idea or the method for doing that, I don’t know that there’s one secret, the point is you want to try to write something that is as compelling and as useful as possible. I think that what I tried to do in the 25 Styles document also was if you imagine there’s these 25 different types of blog posts, from List blog posts to more insightful blog posts to like just Link Roll type blog posts, each one has a different potential to become link bait. What I tried to do was offer each one a rating, not sure what I called it, but like a viral factor or something like that. How likely it is to become something that a lot of people will link and share. If you’re just reposting something that’s kind of interesting, the potential for that will be probably pretty low. Whereas if you’re breaking news about a new beta launch or something that nobody’s ever blog posted before, obviously the potential is much higher.

JAY: Has there been one blog post that has been the most viral for you or was sort of a break through for you? Or do they all contribute?

ROHIT: I think that the breakout one would have to be the Social Media Optimization blog post.

JAY: Yeah, that was next on my list.

ROHIT: That was relatively early on in my blog.

JAY: Social media optimization, you really coined the term, right?

ROHIT: Yeah, that blog post was the first use of the term.

JAY: Will you explain what you meant by social media optimization, we can all take it different ways and how people can try to use it?

ROHIT: Yeah, it was kind of a riff on search engine optimization. Search engine optimization was basically doing things to your website to make it more search-friendly, so that it lists higher on search. The idea behind social media optimization was if you’re going to do this to make it list more highly on search, why not optimize your site and your content so that it is more easily shared by one another. The search engine marketers were the ones who really latched onto that idea and said, if you do that, and if people are sharing it, than obviously you’re going to rise in search rankings. So this is really a search idea. They took it and turned it into a search-based thing. When I originally wrote it, it wasn’t meant to be a search engine strategy, it was more meant to be a content-sharing strategy.

JAY: Tell me about some of the things that happened as it took off.

ROHIT: My original post had five rules. Some other bloggers added rules to that and we made it up to 17 rules I think. Three or four other bloggers added rules to that.

JAY: And people translated it into other languages.

ROHIT: Yeah, and after that we got translated into like 20 different languages. I kind of went open source with it, which is the absolute right thing to do. I didn’t try and keep any sort of ownership over it. I said, this is an idea, if you can do something with it, if you want to build it out than build it out. People translated it into 20 different languages. I got media hits. Now there’s entire social media agencies that say that their main focus is social media optimization. I was actually sitting in a meeting with a guy from another agency  who was talking about their services and one of the things he was talking about that they focus on was social media optimization. I was sitting there amazed at the fact that it’s kind of come full circle.

JAY: What an honor and what a pain in the butt too.  It’s like, “Hey! This is my thing. I started that ball rolling.”

ROHIT: The thing is, when I thought about it, that was 2006 so it’s been probably a year and a half maybe two years now. The best thing that I ever did was not try and own that and make that my thing. I never wanted to be the SMO guy. If I had done that, at that stage, and then I went through the same cycle that I went through now, then this book that I wrote would have had to have been about social media optimization. That’s not what I wanted to own.

JAY: That’s a great segue into the book. I expected to see a Web 2.0 book, a social media book. It’s really a brand, I’ve only read the introduction, it looks like it’s brand/new media, how do brands play in the new media sandbox. I’ll read the title again, PERSONALITY NOT INCLUDED - WHY COMPANIES LOSE THEIR AUTHENTICY AND HOW GREAT BRANDS GET IT BACK. Do you want to talk about why the book is titled that way and why you wrote that book?

ROHIT: Yeah, it’s influenced by social media, but it’s definitely not a blogging book. The way that I’ve usually described it is if you imagine that there’s three big categories of books, there’s blogging and social media books, that’s one category, one end of the triangle. There’s general marketing and business books, that’s the other bottom of the triangle. Then there’s this category of career and self-help type of books at the top. The idea of this book is to sit in between all of those. So what I’m trying to do is offer people lessons that they can use in their career, and help them further their career because personality makes a difference in that. I’m trying to offer businesses a way of branding that lets them connect with their customers. And I’m trying to offer a guide to using social media to make your personality something that happens online and that you can share with your customers. So really what I was trying to do was not focus on one area, but  write a book that was more broadly appealing because when it comes to writing a book, you want to try and take a big idea and a strategic idea and bring that to life rather than focusing on one tactic that might get old in a year.

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