Lately RSS has been a poison for me, it’s a great way to keep up to date and after picking a decent reader and having more than 60 feeds in it this whole experience has been a blast. That’s one of the reasons for me to go on a media diet, which means that I won’t consume everything that is in this reader, as it’s simply information overload. RSS is the new subscription of your regular magazines, news and gossip. Why do you need design mags when you can putt 10-20 design e-zines into your feed reader? One thing has been obvious though, one becomes very selective fast and scrolling through almost anything in the reader. Reading is done with just a very very small amount of the information you find. In case you are a creative writer and love to share your experience you are in serious trouble.

How do you determine the value of your article in those fast living times?

Your article must face 3. criteria

1. Simply be a great article, be web ready, easy to scan and has to offer something that people want to link to.

2. Make it into the top search engine spots.

3. Be challenging enough so people leave a comment and return to check out if others replied to that comment.

This means, your article has some value in case it survives the test of time. Otherwise it’s just a time filler and will disappear after a short time. You have to make sure that it will end up in the search engines, in case you write for your RSS readers… nice attempt, but your article will be forgotten very fast.
To be honest with you one article has little to no value at all unless you get really lucky. Everything you do should add up to one big picture. No matter if I am writing about building creative capital and maximizing your creative potentials, or Tim Ferriss talks about Lifestyle, the topics may vary widely, but after all it’s all adding together to build a good picture.

What is your goal?

You have to define your goal, otherwise you will swim in mediocre worlds. My goal is to create a valuable website for creative people who want to monetize their works outside the box. Building another stream of income through the internet, ideas on traditional and new value of works & how you can promote yourself. I’d love to have several articles stick out really good, but my first plan is to write about a few regular topics and try to suck up traffic from that niche. The master-plan behind smashill is to build a solid readership & connect with people coming here. This may sound arrogant, but there are millions of worse blogs with far more traffic than smashill. It’s due to the lack of incentive, connection with my readers and promotion. Your articles only have so much value and after that it comes down to “selling” your content to visitors that want to read it.

What do you have to offer?

How do you get people to read? First way is to create good content, that alone will work for some people to propel their business, but most people will have to do some heavy marketing. I have not done enough marketing so far and continue to pump out articles, which is probably the wrong approach. My best going articles have been my textures, and those will have an additional value for people who are going to search for those kind of textures in the future. So instead of writing more and more, which would be a way to go, my next goal is to find people to team up with to move to the next level of traffic.