Another year comes…another year goes! It’s amazing how time flies. So many people came and so many went. It’s seems like yesterday when Incito Mentis was born. It is now three years old! Learnt some new lessons along the way and forgot some old ones I thought I had learnt well. What am I talking about? My content strategy for Incito Mentis. But first…
The big downers!
Lost all my posts once! Everything. All of it. Back-ups were too old to really help. Don’t know how I
managed to find cached copies from all over the web and piece it back together! Really painful! But kudos to Google and their caching of the entire web…managed to copy/paste my way back to just the way it was! Thank you so much to whoever came up with that feature. It saved my life…literally!
Related downer. Lost my Technorati ranking in the process. I had gotten in the 70’s when it came to Business Authority. It’s back to 1 and not able to get it back up. Perhaps with time…
Another downer. Got hit by a virus on my host server. Facebook blocked me for malicious content (The reason why there is no Facebook share button anywhere on my site!). Although the problem has been long resolved Facebook simply won’t let me back in. I have tried everything. Searched everywhere to solve this problem. Even got in touch with Facebook Security staff on LinkedIn through premium “In” mail. No luck whatsoever! In other words, I have been blocked from marketing myself on the largest social media platform in the world. It sucks. I know!
The big ups! (or the lessons learnt over the years)
Really enjoyed writing. Wrote some big posts that continue to be key drivers of traffic to the blog to date especially this one about “Why is it an insult to tip waiters in Iceland!” It’s my all time number one post by far! But it wasn’t enough! I needed to get better…
Then somewhere along the road I learnt about balancing between stock and flow content!
Stock content is the real deal. The type of content that is truly original. Signature stuff that makes you stand out for who you are. The problem. It takes a long, long time to develop. It requires a lot of hard work to understand a topic deeply enough to contribute something original. In the beginning I was doing very little of this so the frequency of posts was much higher. 2-3 posts per month was quite possible although that is still not frequent enough. Now I just do stock posts. Highly rewarding and satisfying but I am barely managing to post once a month!
On the other hand, there is flow content. This is all about curation than creation. The quick stuff that allows for a higher frequency of posting. It drives engagement and traffic. People need to see as you an authority on certain topics. The go-to-guy when it comes to something. Here it’s all about speed. Be the first to know then share with your network faster than anyone else. It can be fun but one can get carried away and not make enough time for stock content! I don’t want to fall in that trap again!
The big challenge for the year ahead – Truly balance between stock and flow!