Earlier this week I had the opportunity to attend a local mini-conference (or summit, or meetup, or something)  where 3 online business rockstars spoke. In Utah this is a pretty big deal. I was able to hear from Mitch Joel, Julien Smith and Chris Brogan. It was really, really good – the Women Tech Council did a great job putting on the event. You should buy their books and read their blogs and all that stuff. There is a reason they are rockstars.

But that’s not really my point in bringing it up. My point is that I am constantly amazed by the continual quality of work and content that these guys produce online. I mean it really baffles me. They were actually asked how they do it during the summit, and their answers boiled down to two things:

• They make it a priority
• They make sacrifices

These are not uncommon answers for the “how do you find time to blog” question. In fact, they are both things I have heard before. I have been giving it a lot of thought lately though, because my own writing and content creation has been seriously neglected over the last… forever, and it’s about time it stopped. Or started. You know what I mean.

As I said, I have been giving it a lot of thought. So as of about 6 minutes ago, I am instituting a “blog for at least 15 minutes a day” policy in my life. Why? How? Let me break it down for you…

“I don’t have the time” and other such nonsense

A common hurdle to get over when to writing is the “I just don’t have the time to devote to writing” problem. Well I’m solving that one first. I’ll tell you right now, I don’t have the time. I have a full-time job I spend an unholy amount of hours working at, I have a family (including a new born), a house, and a number of side projects that take up all my waking hours, and some of my sleeping ones. But I also know that creating content is important, and it’s a skill I want to improve.

So instead of doing the whole “1000 words”, ”a post a day” or “3 posts a week” or whatever, I am blogging for 15 minutes a day. Now whether I can get something posted in that time frame is not what’s important. What is important is that 15 minutes is something I can plan for, schedule in, and accomplish without being pulled away to something else. You can’t really say “I don’t have the time to do X for 15 minutes every day” because then you are saying that you don’t have 15 minutes free. Which is a lie.

Why it’s not “Write for 15 minutes a day”

If you have ever blogged, you will know that it’s a lot more than writing. There is coming up with ideas, outlining and organizing them, writing, editing, revising, looking for fancy images, creating links, posting, tagging, promoting, etc. If I limited this 15 minutes to just writing, I would still never get anything posted. I would have volumes of unpostable drivel.

Now there will of course be some days that I will want to spend more time than just 15 minutes. For example, I hit the 15 minute mark about 42 seconds ago, but I’m still going. But according to my self-inflicted rules, I don’t have to. I could stop right here (.) and pick it up tomorrow, and post it then. But I happen to find myself with a little extra time tonight, so I will keep at it a bit longer.

I’m hoping that this system I have devised is going to do the trick. What’s the trick you ask? What’s the outcome I am hoping for?

The Endgame

The point of all this is to build the habit. Classical conditioning at work here. Very Pavlovian. I want to create content easier, blog more often, develop my thoughts better, share them with my peers and followers, have conversations and build relationships. All in 15 minutes a day!

I’m joking around a lot, but I am really serious. I am putting in the time. I’m getting out the laptop (not the phone or iPad or netbook or whatever – the workhorse), turning off the distractions that off buttons (Phone, Twitter, Facebook, IM, iPod, Pandora, Hulu, TV, etc.), hiding from the ones that don’t (the wife, the babies, the mom looking for tech support) and putting in 15 solid minutes of straight blogging every day.

So what do you think? I have a few questions I would love for you to answer in the comments:

• How do you find the time to blog? What have you found that works for you?
• Do you think my plan will work? Why or why not?
• Do you want to join me?

If you do want to join me in the 15-a-day plan, let me know. We’ll start an awesome club or something.

Update: State of Utah CTO Dave Fletcher reached out and let me know that they removed the document, revised and properly credited the original source, and the process has been reviewed with the staff.

On September 29th, the State of Utah (where I reside) issued a document setting forth their guidelines for appropriate use of Social Media by the various government agencies. An article on GovTech.com entitled Utah Creates Social Media Guidelines for Employees Who Blog, Tweet, Etc. broke the story to the general masses, and so far there has been a fairly positive response. Why wouldn’t there be? What a progressive thing for a government agency to do, right?

The document entitled State of Utah Social Media Guidelines (pdf) was issued by the Department of Technology Services, and contains information for public officials on when to engage in social media and good advice on how to do so.  And it really is good information.. sections on Transparency and Judicious behavior, as well as being knowledgeable and how to handle mistakes show that the DTS really did their homework.

I’m sure glad Intel posted almost the exact same thing in May of this year. Read the rest of this entry »

There have been tons of articles about it over the past few years – Multitasking is not as efficient as we would all like to believe. We have reached a time where it is not only common to be doing 4 or 5 tasks at once, but it’s pretty much expected. Job descriptions list it as a required skill! We are encouraged with “open door” policies to stop by our coworkers’ desks. We have opened ourselves up to phone calls, email, IM, text messages, tweets, pokes, & about a billion other ways to be distracted, and that’s even before we start working on a bunch of things at once. Read the rest of this entry »

For almost the last year, I’ve been working for a company that is based in Seattle, although I still live in Utah. Telecommuting brings some interesting challenges and opportunities, and one of them is the ability (and necessity) to work wherever I am. Whether I’m in my home office, a restaurant, an airport, or the main office in Seattle, I have to have everything I need with me wherever I am. Such is the life of a Digital Nomad.

As I prepare to head to Seattle tomorrow to spend the week in the office and swing by SMX Advanced, I thought it would be fun to show how I pack for a trip such as this. So in the spirit of the recent “What’s in our Bags” series from Lifehacker.com, here is how I am preparing for the week… Read the rest of this entry »

Let me tell you what this post is not. This is not a post about building your follower count, or using Twitter to drive clicks to your website, or fancy ways to monetize your profile. There’s plenty of that garbage out there already. This is also not a list of best practices from professional bloggers and twitterers. For that I recommend heading over to Twitip.

What this post is, is an illustration of how I have been using Twitter since I started in about July ‘08. I am not trying to tell you how you should use it. That would be like me telling you how to use the telephone properly. Twitter is a communication tool, and everyone will use communication tools (email, blogs, phones, txt, their mouths…) differently for different situations.

How I have used the platform to date has really worked well for me, and since people ask me about this all the time, I thought it prudent to get it down on paper. Well… you know what I mean. Oh – if you would like to follow, here’s me: @rickgalan. Read the rest of this entry »

With all the coverage on basically every marketing or SEO blog, you are likely aware of Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and even Ask’s announcement a few weeks ago of support of the Canonical URL Tag. It was big news (well.. big news if you are an online marketer.. if you are a normal person it’s actually pretty unexciting). Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz even referred to it as the “biggest change to SEO best practices since the emergence of Sitemaps“.

Now that all the freaking out about change has died down (Holy crap! Google changed the color of their wallpaper! Quick, let’s all write 300,000 blog posts about it!), I wanted to share my thoughts on this development (go 300,001). Read the rest of this entry »

At significant risk of sounding like a really nerdy James Bond movie, the title of this post is actually something that came to mind a few weeks ago when brainstorming a new project. I’ve let the idea simmer a bit, but after being present for a great Affiliate Summit session called “Managing Your Brand” I find that I can no longer contain myself. :) In that session, Andy Beal, Lee Odden,  Rob Key & Fionn Downhill gave great advice on online reputation management as well as managing your brand (not just monitoring it but actually managing it). If you did not attend that session but have access to  the videos from Affiliate Summit West 2009, I highly recommend giving it a peek.

It’s very likely that you already know this,  but the web is becoming an increasingly fragmented space. Gone are the days of “browsing” the web – it’s “searching” the web at this point. When is the last time you used a web directory like DMOZ for anything other than building links? There is simply too much out there.

Read the rest of this entry »

So in a fun little twist of fate, I ended up winning a free Gold Pass to Affiliate Summit West from CopyBlogger. I will be in Vegas Monday and Tuesday and would love to meet up! Ping me via Twitter, LinkedIn, email (rickgalan at gmail dot com), or leave a comment and we’ll set something up. Or if you can’t make it, I would love a suggestion for who you know that will be there that I should meet.  Should be a good time!

Incidentally, I have been on a roll lately with winning contests online. I won a sweet little Netbook from Andy Beal and Trackur, and now a ticket to Affiliate Summit. If you know of any other contest to enter, let me know. I’m a sure thing!

Hope to see you out at the Summit!

When I initially started playing with Google Insights, I had a few thoughts about the service:

The Name is Weird

The name is really odd – “Google Insights for Search” seems to indicate to me that there will be “Google Insights for …” Video? Blogging? Pictures? News? Shopping? I’m not sure. It just seems like Google is positioning the service to be one of many. Even the URL (http://www.google.com/insights/search/) seems to indicate there will be more coming. Should be interesting to see what happens.

So.. Google Trends?

What exactly is the difference between Google Insights and Google Trends? As far as I can tell, the interface was improved in insights, and that’s about it. I thought maybe that Insights was replacing Trends, but the Google Labs page still doesn’t even list Insights, so I guess that’s not true.

Meh.

The last thought I had was simply meh. Neat tool, useful for targeted SEO keyword research (does chiropractor or chiropractic get more search volume?) but there are significantly better tools out there for that. It’s interesting to see the news results and how that ties into search results, but it’s just interesting, not all that exciting or useful.

Man was I wrong. Read the rest of this entry »

I would like to pose a question. When exactly did the world start accepting mediocrity as more than just the norm – when did mediocrity become the positive exception to the rule?

I was thinking about this as I was asked how a recent flight was. I told them the flight was great – but what I really meant was that my flight was entirely uneventful. I got to the airport with plenty of time, did not have to wait very long to check my luggage, and was able to make it through security without having to be strip-searched or anything. I went right to my gate, got on my plane, and everything happened exactly the way it’s supposed to. Plane goes up, peanuts, diet coke, plane goes down.

So the question I started asking myself is what part of that experience was great? Read the rest of this entry »