7 Steve Jobs Quotes Guaranteed To Make Your Blog Excel
Steve Jobs continues to inspire us, even a year after his death. As bloggers who produce an on-going flow of information for our readers, we’re kindred spirits who feel a connection to Steve Jobs’ creative perspective on life.
Here are seven quotes from Steve Jobs that offer lessons for bloggers. Use them to take your blog to the next level of excellence.
- “I want to put a ding in the universe.” Deep inside each blogger is the need to be part of something that’s bigger than we are. For us the process of creating meaningful content, not just stringing words together, is a real need. This doesn’t mean getting on our blog soapbox but rather taking the time to craft quality content because the process is important to us. Actionable Blogging Tip: Determine your goals for blogging. What do you want to accomplish as a result of your investment in your blog? Once you’ve decided, commit your objective to paper making it as specific and measureable as possible. From these goals flow the specific metrics to track your blog’s success.
- “Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” Since blogging is work, you must have motivation deep within your core to keep you going. It’s this power that keeps your blog alive when blogging is the last thing you want to do. Actionable Blogging Tip: To keep your blog on track, develop some strong posts to keep in reserve for those days when you can’t find anything to blog about. (Here’s how to blog when you don’t know what to write and how to ensure inspiration always strikes.)
- “The hardest thing is, when you think about focusing. You think focusing is about saying “Yes.” No. Focusing is about saying “No.” Take your cue from Jobs. Understand that your blog should be as focused as possible. For bloggers this translates to a tightly defined niche. Actionable Blogging Tip: After defining your blog’s focus, go through the exercise of determining what you’re not going to cover since you need to stick to topics that build your readers’ trust.
- “Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” For a blog this quote applies to your blog design to make it as clean (or Apple-like) as possible (skip anything flashing or hard to read.) Also, it applies to your writing. Take the time to edit your blog posts (more than once if possible.) Actionable Blogging Tip: Pretend you’re Steve Jobs and assess your blog. How can you streamline the design? With regard to your writing, have you removed every excess word so that it’s as to-the-point as possible?
- “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.” Blogs provide a tool for conveying your views to a larger audience. Actionable Blogging Tip: When composing your blog posts think about answering these questions: What insights can you offer your readers and what will make them better off for having read your post?
- “Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.” For bloggers (and other content creators), tape these words above your computer so that you see them everyday. This doesn’t mean that every word passing from your fingers to your screen must be crafted like Shakespeare. Rather, you must practice writing and editing so the beauty of your content emerges from a mass of words. Actionable Blogging Tip: Practice writing everyday. Even more importantly, spend the time it takes to craft your posts to yield the maximum return. Examine a successful blog like Social Media Examiner, that garners thousands of social media shares and lots of comments, and you’ll find that each post is carefully crafted and edited with at least 1,000 words, multiple images and several rounds of editing.
- “I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.” While many bloggers would love to be able to throw up blog posts for a few months and reap the benefit of thousands of readers and social media shares, the reality is that blogging requires hard work and commitment. Unfortunately, many successful bloggers make it look easy and don’t talk about the amount of time that it took them to achieve the level of success where search results yielded returns and they started getting recognition for their blogs. Actionable Blogging Tip: This is the simplest blog advice I’ve ever given: Don’t give up. Write. Edit. Write.
Blogging, regardless of whether it’s B2C, B2B, not-for-profit, solopreneur or personal, is more than words on a computer screen. It’s something you feel; ideas you’re compelled to convey to a broader audience in hopes of helping your readers and yourself.
What are your favorite Steve Jobs quotes and how do they relate to your blog efforts?
Happy marketing,
Heidi Cohen
P.S. If you’re really serious about taking your blog to the next level, download our new FREE e-book entitled, What Every Blogger Needs to Know – 101 Actionable Blogging Tips.
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Photo credit: http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2011/11/creative-commons/?pid=1358
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