Top Ten Reasons To Create a Guide
So, why should even bother creating a guide for others to use?
- Support your customers. Help your customers stay informed about what you can do for them. Build a list of topics that affect their business and monitor industry “buzz” or trends that affect their business.
- Promote your own expertise. Whether you are a knowledge worker, the owner of a wine store, or building a law practice, creating a BlogBridge Expert Guide is a great way to share and show what you and encourage others to turn to you for advice. If you write a blog yourself, be sure to include it.
- Educate your team.Do you need to educate a team or board on a specific topic? Why not develop a guide that makes it easy for them to access good ideas or important opinions? By sharing your guide you can begin to build common knowledge among a key group—knowledge that can fuel productivity and creativity.
- Prime the pump. Maybe you are running a grassroots campaign, developing policy, or starting a new business. Collect your best feeds to create common ground, common knowledge, and a shared vocabulary. An Expert Guide is a great way to bring team members up to speed quickly, and can help create consensus or change opinions on important topics.
- Teach a class. Add your expert guide to a syllabus or reference list. Your guide will help your students can keep abreast of the latest developments in your field.
- Share your passions, knowledge, and interests. Be a mensch and share what you know about volcanoes, antiques, German bloggers, product packaging trends, alternative fuels, or dyslexia. Your guide can help make the world a better place in small—and large—ways. Share your guide and find others who care about the same things you do. Instant karma!
- Inspire your donors. If you are a not-for-profit organization, help your donors stay on top of the issues that matter by creating and sharing an expert guide—the result is a more informed donor case, more aware of reasons to support your organization’s work.
- Be prepared. Planning a wedding, buying a house, having a baby? Create an expert guide that pulls together your favorite feeds around life’s milestones. Share your guide with others and get feedback and suggestions. Compare experiences, learn from others, and skip the potholes.
- Make new friends. Think of your expert guide as an something akin to your ideal dinner party. Create the perfect collection of interesting conversations and share it with your friends.
- Be a tastemaker. New kinds of blogs and feeds such as vlogs and photoblogs, or literary blogs give you the chance to be a tastemaker. Think of your expert guide as a literary magazine —and you are the editor.
Whenever you create a guide you have the option to share them with others. You can make a guide 100% public or you can restrict your guide to certain users. You can also create guides anonymously. Tag your guide (??) so that when you change it, others can find out about it. When you search BlogBridge’s guide library (??), check out other guides with the same tags (??).
Let the world comment or make suggestions about your guide, too. Comments can be public or private, and if you want—subscribe to your guide’s comment feed so you can see comments as soon as they are posted.
BlogBridge’s own ratings system lets people know how good your guide is. Guides are awarded stars based on the quality of the blogs selected, the number of subscribers to your guide, and the number of positive comments we receive about your guide. Read more about our rating system here.
Let people know you are an expert. Place this symbol in an email or on your blog and let your friends, colleagues, and constituencies know about your guide. When someone clicks on this symbol, they will be able to download your guide in BlogBridge, or really any other reader that supports OPML (most do!)