This past few days have seen me experimenting with a new type of post here at ProBlogger – Speed Posting.
I set myself the challenge to answer 20 or so questions from my Twitter followers in no more than 3 minutes per post. I then handed each post over to readers for them to continue to posts.
The Results? Well I had a lot of fun, got some good feedback from those Twitter followers who asked the questions, and there were a lot of great comments left.
Lastly – I wrote the following 19 posts. I hope you enjoyed them and will stop by those you feel you’ve got something to say on and add your thoughts.
- How Do I Get More Relevant Readers for My Blog?
- Is it Worth Getting Local Domain Names for a Blog?
- How to Build Your Blog’s Readership
- Blog Design – Does it Matter?
- How to Build Community on Your Blog
- How Do I Build Credibility and Presence Online?
- When Self Promotion Tips into Spam
- How to Choose a Niche Topic for Your Blog
- How Many Blogs Do You Write On? How Many Posts Per Day?
- Full or Partial RSS Feeds?
- How Do I Make Money Fast Blogging?
- How to Grow Beyond Blogging
- Hiring Virtual Assistant to Help Administrate Your Blog
- Should I Have a BlogRoll on my Blog
- How to Establish Trust Online
- How to Be More Positive
- 9 Essential Questions to Ask Yourself Before Posting to Your Blog
- How Much Traffic Should a Blog Have Before Running Advertising
- What Time of the Day is Best to Post to Your Blog
Thanks to those on Twitter who asked the questions. Follow me on Twitter for next time I run something like this.
update: The winners of the three ProBlogger Books who win a copy from leaving a comment one one of the posts over the weekend are:
1. Kelvin Kao
2. Zopito DiGiovanni
3. DB Ferguson
I’ll be sending an email out now to each of you to get your mailing details to send you the book.
I loved your speed posting answers. First, because I’m impressed at how much great contents and ideas you can put out in three minutes. Second, because I learned some new things again or got new perspectives.
It’s always a pleasure to read your articles. Thank you.
The speed posting is a good idea, maybe you should set a certain time of day for doing it. People do like to get an answer, and 20 answers in an hours is a pretty good quantity. I did not count how many replies you had, but probably 500 based on what I read.
There is a lot written in article writing about the writing and editing time, and how they can’t be the same time. You write with the flow of your thought, and then you go back and clean up, taking a lot more time on the clean up than the writing (and I exclude the research phase). For Blog posts it seems that doing the flow of thought answers can really work.
Give it another go before you make any final decision.
Wow…there were 19. They flew by quickly. Thoroughly enjoyed the series – thank you.
Darren, did you really write the answer to each question in 3 minutes?
I understand you wrote a provisional rough copy answer in 3 minutes, and then, you edited the post with some more time.
Anyway, speed posting has been a really enjoying initiative, and your answers, as usual, very useful.
Regards.
Darren, I thoroughly enjoyed the series. To date I have replied to 15 out of 19 of the posts, I have four more posts to add my own thoughts to and I’ll be getting around to doing it soon. I also set myself a goal. I told myself that each of my comments should
1) Add more value to the post
2) Share my own insight/personal experience to the post
3) Be more than three paragraphs long for each of them, as long as it is quality not quantity
Guess what? I succeeded in doing this for each of the 15 posts I have commented on so far. I really loved commenting on each one and it certainly broadened my outlook with regard to several aspects of blogging I had never given much thought to.
A fantastic series Darren! Insightful, enjoyable and very enlightening. Congratulations on a fantastic speed posting series :)
I love this strategy, I might even use it one day once my blog gets some more readership and I actually have some questions from people.
I think I will also check out twitter to see how I can use it to market my blog (it appears your are doing it very effectively).
Maybe next time speed posting could be in 5 minute slots instead of 3 minutes because some of the posts were a little short and missed the impact they could have had
thanks all for the feedback.
lonifasiko – they were all written within 3-4 minutes (most under 3 minutes – I know this because I set a timer to go off after 3 minutes). There was only 1 that I can remember coming back to after 4 minutes to add a link to – the rest were as they came out.
What an amazing weekend of learning this was. I’ve loved this Darren and thank you for doing it. There are two main things I like about this.
For starters I liked the shorter posts. While I admire people who can pump out massive explorations of topics I personally find myself losing interest in them after a few paragraphs. These speed posts of yours were so much more to the point, they contained great information, there was little extraneous information and I came away from many of them with concrete things I could implement.
The other thing I liked was the comments. I don’t know whether it was the incentive of the prize or not but the comments seemed to be of a much higher quality than normal!
I hope you do this again.
The series are great! Although I wanted to comment like Fabien did, sometimes I found there were already 20+ comments or so. And I thought no one’s going to read whatever I wrote.
I found the series helpful since you linked a lot to old posts I haven’t discover on your blog. They’re valuable additions to my blogging knowledge and excellent reminders of the real purpose of blogging.
I did it – and got paid for it :)
http://www.AskDrMani.com
Dr.Mani
Great job Darren. Good way of getting feedback and engaging the community!
After you’ve confirmed me all posts were written in more or less 3 minutes, the only word I can say is “Wow!”. You’re a machine Darren….
Hope some day I’m able to write posts so fast.
Great work, i always enjoy reading anything you have to say and all in 3 minutes is speed posting for sure.
I enjoyed how so much info was compacted in size and time, and that you had links that would fill in more details. It was like a speed primer.
I really enjoyed all of these posts. It seemed like a good way of getting feedback from the community.
That was an awesome Idea, I was wondering why it said speed posting at the top of your latest posts
I enjoyed this! The series felt like a “Coffee Talk” kind of thing where you’ve tossed a thought-provoking conversation-starter out to the masses to see what comes of ’em. While some of the readers’ comments have definitely been very insightful, I hope you’ll revisit some of these quickly-visited topics with more of your own thoughts in the coming days or weeks, Darren.
Should you opt to do another of these series, maybe consider trimming it back to an even dozen? There was just so much good stuff and not a lot of time over the weekend to absorb it all!
I finally signed up for Twitter a couple weeks ago and I’m addicted! Not only is it great for promoting your blogs, but it’s a great way to come up with new ideas for content.
And for those of you waiting til you have a bigger following to ask questions like that, don’t! Do it now! Even if you only have a few replies, it’s better than nothing and it could give you some great ideas for new posts.
yes Rob, the only change I’d make in future is to make it less posts in such a short period. The format of posts seemed to work but it was quite overwhelming for a weekend when I usually do 1-2 posts per day :-)
Cassie – I agree on the ‘do it now’ comment. Even with 10 Twitter followers asking questions and asking for them is a rich experience on Twitter and it helps you grow your follower numbers too.
I hope you try doing something like this again, I know I got a lot of good information from it.