Curated by: Luigi Canali De Rossi
 


Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Professional Blogging: Bioteams.com Ken Thompson Shares His Pro-Blogger Insight - Video Interview

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How much time does it take for your new blog to become a source of new business and revenues from the time you launch it? What are the key benefits you will get if you start dedicating yourself to professional online publishing?

Ken-Thompson-Professional-blogger.jpg

What are the critical items that can really make or break your online publishing efforts?

Yes, if you are passionate about starting or improving your web publishing skills, you may have heard these questions before, but watching the answers given by someone who has been successful at these can be at times more valuable than reading it from the words of an established expert.

This is a good story about how getting involved with learning how to blog and then how to professionally publish your best content online has truly helped the course of things for my good friend Ken Thompson. Ken is an Irish technology and communication professional with some prestigious work credentials. But what got him excited the most was his personal interest with how work teams could work better and more efficiently. He wanted to know which principles were at work that made a few teams so much more effective and successful than others and set out to become some kind of expert on the subject well after his 45th birthday.

Ken badly wanted to learn enough on this subject, to start writing and making this the very core of his new, emerging independent professional career. Ken wanted badly to do lots of writing on the subject, dreamed constantly of publishing a book, caressed the mental idea of being invited to do major event speaking and visualized himself offering high-profile strategic consulting for big companies that wanted to learn the secrets and practices of his teamwork research.

By learning how to manage and best utilize his own web site, which is more of a very focused magazine than a traditional typical blog, Ken Thompson has been able to first give great visibility to his innovative ideas, something altogether not possible if he didn't have a web site. Secondly, his blog site has given him the opportunity to be contacted by people who wanted to know more, including event organizers and potential book publishers who wanted to invest more in his unique discoveries and understanding.

This is why, a few weeks ago, when Ken decided to pass by Rome for a few days of relax with his lovely wife, I kindly asked him for a video interview in which to learn from him firsthand, how effective and useful blogging had really been in the development of his new career and what were the key discoveries and obstacles he had encountered while learning how to swim in these new waters.

Here a short set of video clips where Ken shares all of his learned lessons about blogging and offers you his advice on making your professional online publishing activities as successful as his.




Professional Blogging - A Video Interview with Ken Thompson of Bioteams.com



My Blogging Experience

"Well I started off the whole bioteams initiative as a blog and working close to with Robin we set up a blog of the bioteams.com and it was called the BumbleBee. And I've been working now on that for probably three years, I tried to publish at least twice a week so there's over 500 original articles now on the blog.

It's been a very profitable experience, the traffic is growing quite significantly, particularly in the last year, and I've had some really interesting visitors who've actually created huge business opportunities for me.

But the other reality is it probably took at least 18 months: sometimes blogging every single day before I got the traffic up to any kind of realistic level, so my advice would be if you're going to be a blogger the commit at least 18 months, you've got to try it for 18 months. I'd also say try and find some original angle and some some original content that differentiate yourself from the other people doing it."




Blogging: Lessons Learned

"People ask me what are the three things you've really learned about blogging.

Well I think the first thing is quality: you have to do good quality articles, be very careful about not introducing a commercial aspect to them cause I think you'll destroy your integrity.

Also people want to know who is blogging: you have to have as much as possible on your site about you that they can read about you, where you went to school, they can read about your favorite football team.

So one would be quality, two then is the have something really good about yourself and number three is consistency.

You must blog regularly, there's no point putting itinerary articles one day and the not blogging for another month. You need to have a discipline of blogging two or three times a week and I would say probably everyday for the first 18 months.

So it's very worthwhile but it's a big investment so don't take it lightly."




Most Popular Content

"Actually the most popular article in the blog is quite an interesting one.

I did research into the beliefs of high performing teams cause one of the things about bioteams, if you think about the lower spaces, they're stimulus-response engines, something they get a stimulus and they respond, and human beings are very different, and what's between stimulus and response is human belief systems and I identified the seven key beliefs of highly successful teams and that's an article that's had I think five to ten thousand people downloading and reading it, so that's by far the most popular article, the seven beliefs of high performing teams."




What I Think Is My Best Content

"The article that I'm personally happiest about, and which hasn't really gained a large audience yet, is the Maturana biological concept of autopoiesis systems, self-organizing systems, and how you can apply the concept of self-organizing system to design any social network and that's an article I put lots and lots of work into.

I remember when I wrote it I took time out from a conference in San Francisco to spend a couple of days writing it, and that one doesn't seem to have got the credit of its juice so this one I think everybody should read would be that one.

Using the theory of living systems to design your social networks."




Key Lesson Learned - Online Relationships

"Yes I've been working for three years in an area that I'm profoundly interested in and I've had some fantastic experience, fantastic learning, one of the main learnings for me is you'll get over the Internet many many people contacting you but in general most people who contact you are not terribly serious, and they're looking to see if they can get something without too much effort so you have to be very careful about people who contact you from the Internet but if you have a process where you engage with people, try them out, see if they're serious then you can find fantastic partners on the Internet but it's a little like looking for a needle in a haystack out there, you need to evaluate carefully and you need to see if they're going to make commitments to you.

So far I found fantastic partners over the Internet, Robin for example, this is the first time Robin and I have met, we've worked together extensively and co-worked for stuff together for the last three years but not all Internet relationships work out like that I'm afraid."




Original video interview by Robin Good for Master New Media first published on July 30th 2008 as "Professional Blogging: Bioteams.com Ken Thompson Shares His Pro-Blogger Insight - Video Interview"

 
 
 
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posted by Nicolo' Canali De Rossi on Wednesday, July 30 2008, updated on Tuesday, May 5 2015


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