100 Ways to Become a Successful in Media and Content

In many ways, media and content have replaced bricks and mortar in terms of importance of building a business ... a bricks and mortar facility confirms your physical existence, but the key to having an successful business is less and less about a physical presence and more and more about CONTENT.  Bricks and mortar might are still important -- but bricks and mortar are only important to customers to the extent that your content depends upon the customer interacting with your bricks and mortar physical presence as the content of where there mind is at.

Some things, like hard work and persistence, will always matter but the keys to success in starting and growing businesses has been changing over the last decade or two.  Frankly, it seems like the pace of change is accelerating; people seem to be becoming more engaged in the world of their smartphones and the relationships and content that those smartphones afford.  As a result, I thought it would be a worthwhile exercise to attempt curating this list.

1. Start with the basics -- look at what successful probloggers like Darren Rowse does on his own blog, ProBlogger.NET; look at the recommended resources from ProBlogger.net.  Make those ideas your own ... re-imagine ideas ... move beyond just re-cycling and re-using, but imitate and understand concepts first.  Be diligent.  Keep at it.  Pick up at least one new idea each day. Build upon your set of ideas.  When you run out of ideas to improve, go back to basics ... don't be afraid to go back an look at old material or the foundations of what you learned when you were getting started; the good stuff that worked well a couple years ago will always work but those ideas might need to be freshened or re-tuned a little.  Always work on your OWN set of tools to "re-sharpen your own saw" ...  a good way to re-furbish and refresh your "tool-sharpening toolkit for blogging" is to work your way through something Darren's list of 98 blog tips for a lazy Sunday.
2. It is good to read material on writing good copy or using web words that work, but it's even more important to develop your own voice through daily practice.   Aim to produce genuine, always useful, always helpful content that will be useful in the future.  Describe reality as you see it, as it really is, in your terms.  Explore the details of your business, your genre, your niche and write articles that supply basic definitions, describe processes and show the history and rationale behind why things are the way they are.  This is the kind of content that attracts visitors from search engines and others who will come back.  The content will still be valuable one, two or five years from now. It provides the foundation from which the rest of your content is built as you audience grows. 
3. Help others. In order to understand any topic, it is necessary to work at becoming an expert ... this is the same in the world of media ... it's particularly true in your special unique niche in the giant world of media.  You don't necessarily have to understand the world of fashion or automotive photography or on-demand horror video ... unless you choose to be an expert in one of those niches ... if your business is alive and has very many customers at all, it is now a media business ... you need to be an expert in your media.  That media might revolve around booths at trade shows or it might involve live events/auctions or it might be entirely digital.
4. Write out strategic plan for your content strategy, but feel free to modify and adapt that plan. Every post should be part of a larger series of instructional articles, and each fits into the overall strategies he teaches on his site.  Develop pages or photos or videos or vines that gather and summarize and reflect upon the series of posting [and the comments received].  Focus instruction to provide a landing place to send visitors looking for background on subjects. 
5. Become a power Twitter user ... follow hashtags like #MediaChat.   Understand what becoming a power Twitter user fully entails in terms engaging user input in content creation process.  Power Twitter user are influential because they usually are the creators of the best content online, tweeting reinforces and tightens their connection with their audience and the tight connection with their audience makes power Twitter users that much more influential.  The most influential power Twitter users: a) Use third-person writing; b) Eschew personal opinions and pithy comments, half-witty inside jokes; c) stick to the basics of the AP Stylebook; d) Always include the key info, e.g. who, when, where, what, why, how; e) Provide attribution/sources; f) conduct interviews with photos participant and organizer; g) Include captions for photos.  Working at tweeting better generally produces a virtuous circle in all of your content. 
6. Cultivate community. Search for ways in which you can foster interaction ... above and beyond becoming a power Twitter user.  Make an honest commitment to continuing to help readers at the point where they are at.  Make the time and go to the effort to answer comments.    Tutor them.  Build an email list, use Facebook and reach out in other ways to bring people to the blog ... bring along subscribers, go to them, reach out to them in the inbox that they use.  Invite readers to follow along in a series as you learn your way in a new field. 
7. Add guest bloggers, or better yet, look for ways to partner with another blogger. Appear as a guest author on other blogs.  Comment on other blogs.  Respond to tweets [with short URLs linking back to RELEVANT content from your blog.]  Build a blog roll.  Then build another one.  Then another.  Find ways to interact with people.   Do NOT argue for the sake of arguing.  Do NOT pick fights with idiots who are looking for fights. There are more than enough ways to interact with people who are legitimately interested in an intelligent discussion. 
8. Provide practical down-to-earth help to people AND seek the same for yourself.  As you build expertise, go back and work on the basics.  Routinely go back and review practical, nuts-and-bolts basics for blogging.   Use those examples as you explain the what, the why, and the how of everything that you do in your business in your blogs, to help your blog's subscribers.
9. You might want to pay some attention to what the large Advertising Age Media 100 companies are doing.  In the big companies, it might be more interesting to look at major trends in an annual year-in-review report ... but, for small business angle, it's probably best to pay attention to what is working [and why] in the top 100 media companies of the Inc 5000 
10. Stop wasting time with distractions and kidding yourself that flying by the seat of your pants is the best strategy.  Get serious about measuring your traction in social media!  Nothing is manageable until you measure it.  Until you are working at becoming measurably better at engaging people in social media, you are just fooling around.  If you want to improve your production in anything, you really need to measure progress, set goals and then find even better ways to measure and track progress in ways that are meaningful to your business.  That means that you need to work at developing a mastery of the 100 ways to measure social media as those ways apply to how you can use social media to develop leads, convert leads into sales and satisfy the customers of your business.
11. Drupal ... web application framework
12. Move beyond blogging to content curation ... Blekko slashtags
13. Participate in reputation-ranked forums like StackExchange / Stackoverflow
14. Pay attention to where the crowd is going ... follow Alexa traffic rankings  ... it is worthwhile investigating the changes in Alexa rankings [particularly for sites ranked #1500 to #500] to understand what is working ... if you are investing time in Blekko slashtags, be sure to follow Alexa's blekko.com traffic stats