Monday Morning Masters: 14 Bites of Blogging Brilliance to Nourish the Blogger’s Soul

If you want to be great at something, it helps to study those who are already great it. I’ve read a lot of informative and inspiring stuff over the past week, and it only makes sense to share some of the it. May it be as inspiring and informative to you as it is to me.

I plan to make this a weekly series, so if you have some bites of brilliance you’d like to contribute, feel feel to leave a comment or hit my contact page.

Brian Clark: You Must Respect My Authority:

“Good blogging creates authority, plain and simple. Writing consistently about your area of expertise makes you an authority figure within your industry and niche. You will enjoy a definitive advantage over competitors who do not blog, and likely even over those who have been blogging for shorter time periods.”

Chris Brogan: How to Create Business From a Blog:

“Content marketing is essentially doing great things with content but with a goal that this work leads back to a sale on top of being useful and interesting. To me, this is where it’s at right now. If I were looking to build even more business, and I might just do so, I’d blend content marketing with a mix of my own products, and perhaps some well-chosen affiliate opportunities, and start from there.”

Darren Rowse: How to Write Great Blog Content:

“Successful bloggers have to keep their heads around many different aspects of the medium – but at it’s core is being able to write compelling and engaging content on a consistent basis over time.”

Yaro Starak: Why Ongoing Education Is The Key Ingredient For Success In Business and Blogging:

“John Childers presented at the World Internet Summit and offered great advice I want to pass on to you if you don’t feel you know enough yet to become an authority in your industry. If you can’t be an authority then you become a reporter and student. In reality, most authorities are reporters and students as well.

“If you are a reporter/student, you study the ideas of other people – the authorities – and digest their ideas, implement them and add to them. You then take your results and convert them into new ideas or present the expert’s ideas using your own voice. By relaying your own experience other people learn from you and you begin to build your own authority. It is through education, then action, filtering and repackaging, that most authorities ply their craft.”

Sonia Simone: How to Give Yourself a First-Class Online Business Education:

“The fact is, real masters of any endeavor get scary good at the fundamentals. Read the biography of any massively successful person you admire, from Michael Jordan to Warren Buffett, and you’ll discover someone who got freakishly good at what the wannabe hot shots look down on as ‘the boring basics.’”

Skelliewag: If You Want to Have Great Ideas, Stop Working:

“The quality of our ideas depends only on what we build them from. What we’ve seen, what we’ve heard, what we’ve felt. To have better ideas, we need richer experiences. But most importantly, like stoking a fire, we must constantly add more fuel to keep the fire vigorous. When we stop, old materials build nothing but old ideas.”

Dave Navarro: The Dark Side of Blogging: When Free Gets Ugly:

“What you’ve got to do is pull in an audience who wants free – but not for freeloading’s sake. You want people who are looking for free so they can “taste the goods” and see if you’re the kind of person who they want to do business with.”

Charley Gilkey: Do You Have the Weirdo Syndrome?:

“You can’t be remarkable and fit in at the same time. The unique value that you bring to the world can only be done by you – and the more you try to fit in, the less remarkable you be. The more you accept and share your gifts, the more you will stand out and be able to connect with people who want to be around you for who you are. (Yes, I know, this is terrifying because that means you’ll be seen, but you’ve tried hiding out – what did that get you?)”

Johnny B. Truant: Johnny’s method for writing about nothing, yet getting paid for something:

“You see me write a lot of guest posts. As long as they’ll let me do it, I’ll keep shooting regular posts to IttyBiz, Copyblogger, Problogger, Project Mojave, and others. I don’t do this for fun, although they’re all run by fun folks and I do like writing for them. I do it because it puts me in front of a hell of a lot of people.”

Chris Guillebeau: Overnight Success, Year Three:

“Make creative work the most important thing you do. Everyone complains about being too busy, but everyone finds a way to do what’s truly important to them. If watching a TV show is important, you’ll find a way to do it. You’ll watch it online, get it through Netflix and catch up on the weekend, whatever. And that’s fine, because we all do what’s important to us—therefore, all you have to do is make your business/blog/project/etc. extremely important.”

James Richmond: I Rank Higher Than ProBloggers, But Make No Money:

“Bottom line, traffic or ranking is irrelevant. If you want to make money, first you have to sell or offer something….. simple.”

Nathan Hagan: Are You Too Scared to Become a Hero?:

“If you really want to become successful in building a digital empire, then you’ll have to embrace your role as emperor. You have to lead a crusade. Yes, I know it’s uncomfortable at first to speak with authority and to put yourself out in front of people. It’s awkward to speak the language of a hero…of a rockstar. But you know why that is? It’s because you haven’t done it often enough. Seth Godin and Gary Vaynerchuk are normal people, just like you and I, but they’ve embraced their inner hero and have created personas that people want to cling to. They’re the lifeboats on the Titanic. They’re the William Wallaces and the Jack Bauers. The only difference between us and them is that they’ve stepped up to the plate and embraced their inner hero.”

Chris Brogan: My Love for Blogging:

“I write all the time. Blogging helps me with this. I wrote about the writing practice not to long ago, and I write about writing often. It’s not that blogging is hard. It’s that blogging is a lot like going to the gym and it requires a constant practice, like playing the horn, like drawing, like dating. Meaning, it’s a verb. The more you do it, the better it can get.”

Seth Godin: Genius is misunderstood as a bolt of lightning:

“Genius is actually the eventual public recognition of dozens (or hundreds) of failed attempts at solving a problem. Sometimes we fail in public, often we fail in private, but people who are doing creative work are constantly failing. When the lizard brain kicks in and the resistance slows you down, the only correct response is to push back again and again and again with one failure after another. Sooner or later, the lizard will get bored and give up.”