Mark McGuinness has a new fan.
I read this post on Creativity in business and it rocked my socks.
It’s the price of doing business that you have to wade through thigh high rivers of steaming….. before you get something that resonates, something that connects. Something that makes you blog and inspires you to write and freely give a bit of link love, which is of course is the essence of what linkbaiting is about.
There are two quotes in the blog post that underpins the article for me.
the less your media content looks like advertising, the more effective it will be as advertising.
How cool and zen like is that and how counter intuitive the way most marketing and business people think. Now I am not naive, the blog post that Mark wrote is 100% marketing, I am sure intention was to have people talk about it, link to it, pass it around.
It’s internal and external link structure follows best practice of bigging up your mates and business collegues without breaking the narrative flow, and providing sweeter than sweet anchor text.
It is a joy to experience such a well put together blog post and the fact that I found it connected on an emotional level is testament to the quality of the writing.
The second quote is,
If you really want to succeed online, it will take a lot of time. Let?s face it, if you want to succeed at anything worthwhile, it?s going to take a lot of time.
I realised a long time ago, if I practiced the guitar and hour a day for a year I would be OK. Which I did, but if I practiced it for an hour a day over ten years I would be excellent.
99 out of 100 are good.
But only 1 out of 100 are excellent.
Excellence cost 9 years.
These figures are illustrative of one element of becoming successful. The problem you may have is not one of giving up and failing, but one of getting bored, distracted and trying to do a million other things a the same time.
Don’t believe me? How many windows does your browser have open right now? I have two browsers open and over 30 windows open. Unnnngggg.
What I take from Mark’s blog post is to revisit the ass-achingly simple truths that must be burnt into the brain with a hot branding iron at regular intervals of the journey.
All this of course raises more questions than it answers, but that is what good teaching does.
Cheers Mark, I’m going to check out your Workshop for creative people, looks very interesting.