Real, Authentic, and Sustainable with Jim Raffel

For my next iAM Tip of the week I decided to interview Jim Raffel who is an authentic business owner, public speaker, and active blogger. His recent video capturing AJ Bombers use of foursquare to invite large check ins is a case study even cited by Guy Kawasaki (those of you who don't know who that is, just take it to mean that's very cool). The reason I chose to interview Jim, however, is because of his authentic and engaging style on his Blog and tweets.

You can watch the interview below.

The main theme for my conversation with Jim Raffel was how can we be real, authentic, and sustainable (R.A.S.)? To get the background on what this means please read the real, authentic, and sustainable post by Jim.

More specifically, we spoke to three questions:

1) What is the mindset involved in being R.A.S.?

2) Specific challenges in living that philosophy

3) What specific tools have helped you be R.A.S.?

 The Mindset and Challenges

I found Jim’s response to the first question very profound. His response, “The first two questions are intertwined…the challenges I faced are what brought me to living in a real, authentic, and sustainable way. We are defined more by the challenges we face and how we face them and come the other side rather than our successes. Successes are a function of challenges we have overcome. I looked at my life and asked if the things I am doing are R.A.S. and if they fail one of the tests I now try to engage in activities that meet all three of the tests. When I reach a challenge I ask is it R.A.S.” 

What does R.A.S mean? 

An interesting example Jim gives for what is not authentic is Las Vegas – Las Vegas is trying to recreate different parts of the world. According to his model if we invalidate any one of the three criteria, the venture is not sustainable in the long run.

Jim provides an example from his business. The situation involves a customer who is real and authentic but the requirements imposed on Jim’s business are not sustainable. Jim emphasizes that it’s important to be flexible but at the same time you want to ensure that flexibility does not come at the cost of sustainability.

This is a really important point. As a small business, you can speak from a place of integrity and strength when you are in touch with your authentic self. We may risk our long term sustainability for short term customers, so it is important to always ask ourselves in challenging situations – Is this Real, Authentic, and Sustainable?

Separate Personal Blog and Business Blog

I choose to keep my iAM business and personal journey blogging on my website because I would like my customers to know me as a multi-dimensional person and it has worked for me. I was curious why Jim chose to keep his personal blog separate from his business.

Jim started blogging for his business at the time websites were static. So the Blog was naturally on a platform other than the business website and as he started to write more about his personal journey, he felt that the “message was garbled” because his business customers would go there looking for color stuff and find personal stuff. It was cleaner to separate the two so the business customers can find the business posts on the website and his personal posts on his personal site.

The other consideration is that the business content belongs to business and should be on the business website and separate from his personal content which belongs to him. By moving the business blog to the website, the traffic for the website has gone up by more than 50%.

 The last point he made is that a business blog need not be updated as frequently as his personal blog, which he likes to update daily.

 Which brings us to the next question, how does he manage to be on twitter, blog daily, and find time for his “hawtwife.”

Finding Time To Post Regularly

Jim now spends about 6 hours in a week to get 7 posts out. Here is how he does it:

 Commitment: Jim committed to 31 posts in 31 days in March 2010 and he did it. In April when he backed off traffic dropped. Soon after he re-committed to posting every day.

Learn from & connecting with other Bloggers: At the time he committed to daily posts he started having an exchange with another blogger, Randy Murray, about the different blogging styles. They decided to exchange posts on their two different styles to inform their readers. In the process, Jim himself moved away from daily posts to writing ahead of time and lets see why.

Scheduling posts ahead versus writing daily: Jim’s interactions with Randy moved him away from daily posts to writing ahead and here are the reasons for doing that:

•  Writing 2 posts at one time. Once you are thinking and with the mindset to write, writing 2 posts doesn’t take much longer than writing one.

•  More relaxed. When the posts are written ahead of time, there is no pressuer to complete a post, so you can write in a more relaxed way.

•  

  Focus on idea spotting and idea curation. When you are ahead of schedule you can focus more on idea spotting and idea curation (like the term idea curation).  Which brings us to the next question, how does get ideas to post daily.

Generating Ideas for Regular Blogging

Always noticing and observing. Whether it is the radio or his interactions at the super market, Jim is always noticing anything that is out of the ordinary. He says, “the more you write the more your powers of observation get better. You need ideas, the subconscious is always going, what do I write about next. More you write the more you observe.” It may be circular, the more you write the more you observe; the more you observe the more you have to write.

 Note your ideas. Jim used to use a notebook to record his ideas but now he notes them on his Android phone using text editor. He captures his thoughts in 3 or 4 words and working titles.

 Offline blog editor to organize the ideas. He uses Ecto, an off line blog editor to which he transfers his ideas from his Android. It is easy to write when you have many ideas organized.

More to come…

1)  

Once you have regular good posts, how do you get people to comment and engage with your comments?

2)  

How do you make money out of all this social media activity

3)  

Some specific tools Jim uses to be more effective…

Real, Authentic, and Sustainable with Jim Raffel from shalini bahl on Vimeo.