expert authority

How to Become a Trusted Authority

In the nascent stages of my first business, I attended a business conference here in Denver, led by a woman who would eventually become my de facto business coach (I say that because, while I’ve never participated in her high-end mastermind program, I go to all her conferences, and have used several of her infoproducts).

One of the keynote speakers was her accountability partner, a beautiful woman with a Southern drawl who spoke a bit like a revival preacher—probably because she is a business coach to spiritual leaders; in other words, she teaches …

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Be the Change You Want to See (In Your Readers) With a Character Arc

What do Star Wars and blogging have in common?  A lot, actually!

In fiction and screenwriting, there’s an important storytelling concept called the character arc.

Think back to any great book you’ve read or movie you’ve seen and ask yourself this: How did the main character change from the beginning of the story to the end?

Sometimes the change is subtle, sometimes it’s groundbreaking.

Think about Luke Skywalker.  He starts out a whiney, spoiled kid and three movies later is an older-and-wiser Jedi master.  Major character change happening there.  Han Solo changes, too, from …

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5 Unintended Consequences of a Bad Blog Post

It’s 4pm. Your blog post was supposed to go live at 9am.

But you forgot.  Or procrastinated. Or didn’t know what to write about.

Whatever.

It all amounts to the same thing: that at 4pm, you’re frantically scrambling around trying to get something—anything—written so that you don’t have to post a day late or (blog forbid) miss a week of posting. (I may be speaking from experience here.)

Your mouse hovers over the “Publish” button.  A little voice in the back of your head is screaming, “Don’t do it!” But, your schedule…

You publish and …

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What to Do When Your Blog Attracts the Wrong Readers

When I struck out on my own, free from the 60+ hour workweeks of the full-time journalism rat race, I decided to start a blog. I was an award-winning local food writer, so a local food blog seemed like a perfect fit. I knew people made money from blogging (though I didn’t know how) and it seemed like something I’d enjoy.

As I talked about in my post about Marie Forleo’s BSchool, that first idea was a flop, and when I …

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