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Archives for February 2006

Beginning Pro Blogging – Advice for getting started

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Something has happened lately, I am not sure what has caused it. There is a change in people I talk to. I have been blogging for years but only recently people have started taking an interest and not only asking questions about my blogging but asking how they can start their own. As I have given the same advice to whoever has asked I will share it here in the hope you might either find it useful for yourself or someone you know, or maybe you can add your own advice in the comments.

Expectations

I’m sure some of this interest has been inspired by the growing “professional blogger” segment. You can fully understand the attraction of course, pro blogging is a great gig if you can work it. This is a good thing, the more the merrier I say. More professional bloggers means more interest from advertisers, more attention from mainstream media and a richer blogosphere for all of us. It’s all good. I do worry though if expectations of “riches” are way too high. Some people seem to anticipate the money being immediate, thinking they can pack their 9-5 jobs in and launch their new career straight away.

Another worry I have is around new bloggers expectations of how much work is involved. They imagine sitting in a warm home office, knocking out a couple of posts before watching day-time television with a hot mug of their favourite brew. I’m sure there are bloggers who have that kind of lifestyle, I am not one of them!

So what does blogging actually involve?

Anyone expecting to make wads of cash right off the bat needs to have a reality check. The people doing very well out of blogging either get paid to do it, have one super-powered A-list hyper trafficked famous blog or have had their blogs (note; multiple) for a couple of years. You need traffic, a well-stuffed archive of great content, well implemented monetization strategy and plenty of time to earn from blogging. These successes do not happen over night, sorry to say. Do not go and tell your boss what you think about them just yet, wait until your earnings from blogging are consistent and enough to live on first.

It’s important to remember that blogging is a particular type of writing. When people ask what I do for a living now I often avoid telling them but if they persist in asking, depending on the audience I sometimes tell them I am a writer. It’s the truth (partly) plus it explains why I am pasty faced, at home all the time, work in my underwear and keep strange hours.

Regardless of my personal habits the most important aspect of the writer element of being a blogger is you have to write. A lot. Every day. To an aspiring blogger that doesn’t seem too hard, they might have tons of ideas what to write about. Give it six months though. What initially was a flood of creativity might dry up to a trickle of mediocrity. How you work through this writers pain barrier is very important to knowing if you can make a long-term go of it.

How to start

Most of the people who have approached me were not actually at the point where they were even ready to begin. “What can I blog about?” is often one of their early questions.

The answer to both “what should I write about” and “can you do it for the long-haul” is to start blogging now. Go get a free wordpress.com and set up a personal blog. Blog about your life, your pets, your thoughts, stories, jokes, anything. The important thing is that you post to your blog every day, multiple times a day if you can manage it, for at least 30 days. The more you post, the more you write, the more often for as long as possible, the more realistic assessment of your own blogging ability you will have. 99% of the people I know socially who started blogs quit after a very short time. Oh they might post a “sorry I haven’t updated in a while” message every couple of months but effectively after the initial excitement has dimmed the whole game is over.

There are two elements to starting out blogging, the writing and the audience. You need to learn how to attract an audience through good writing on  interesting topics. It’s no good going to the time and expense of organising a professional blogging setup if you can’t face up to these basic skills.

What to write about

Everyone has a story to tell. Your own experience is your best source of blogging topics to begin with. Fill your personal blog with stories, tips and insights based on your own work and life. Branch out into commenting on things that interest you, things you hear, read in the news or see on television. There are a million ways you can go and this is why I recommend you do it from the safety of your “anything goes” personal blog. Once you have more of an idea of your style and what you find easiest to blog about, then you can move to choosing a niche for a professional blog.

The money question

Just because this is a personal blog does not mean you can’t make any money from it. Unfortunately you are limited when using hosted blogs as to how much you can change the default templates. On WordPress.com I don’t think you can change them at all. You might have to settle for entering advertising code into your posts or bite the bullet and get a proper blog at this point.

It is though a good idea to learn the ropes of various monetization strategies. You might only make enough for a starbucks a month but by experimenting, tweaking and implementing the basic ideas found in Andys Monetization Makeovers you will be empowered for when you start your real money blog(s).

Just do it

The main thing is to get started, get writing quickly while you have the enthusiasm and get your blog launched. Get a lot of practice, the more you practice the better you get and the more you learn. While you can learn a lot from reading Performancing and Problogger, there is no substitute for actually doing it and also by actually blogging you will discover what you need to read more about and questions you need answering. Remember you can ask any blogging related questions in our forum and the lovely and intelligent Performancing members will be only too pleased to answer!

Over to you

I hope this post has been useful and not diminished your enthusiasm too much, blogging is great it’s just not the easy ride many people think it will be!

Have you any advice for aspiring bloggers? Please add your tips and encouragement in the comments!

Blogging is not a zero-sum game!

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A strange thing sometimes affects some bloggers when they start introducing money into their blogging. Their nature alters ever-so slightly. Other bloggers are eyed with suspicion. Otherwise respectful and friendly relationships become competitive. Similarly themed blog posts are viewed as “rip-offs”, new blog launches “copycat” or “bandwagonism”. Perhaps exaggerated and extreme, but do any of these symptoms seem familiar?


In the beginning of this blogging thing, bloggers were viewed as fellow adventurers. Everyone was in this together and we all have something to contribute. Very warm and fuzzy. Each person had their own motive and goals for their writing a blog, I suspect though most of it was just attention. There are parallels with the early web. It was all make it up as you go along stuff, and a large amount of wide-eyed “going to change the world optimism”. Unfortunately, just like the early web, there was also a big portion of “keep the money out” nonsense. I’m glad that has largely disappeared, heh.

The end of innocence

With the introduction of Google Adsense a viable monetization strategy appeared for many bloggers. These bloggers were probably not very affected by this income stream other than the natural affects of having more money. This income, and the whoops of joy  from the successful bloggers attracted more and more people from other fields to join in the game. As more people join the blogging phenomenon and bloggers go from seeing their income not just as icing on the cake but come to depend on it, I think this is where the cracks have appeared. It’s not “we’re all in this together”, it becomes “they are taking away my money!” “the blogosphere is full, don’t let any more in”.

You can see this when you launch a new blog in a mature niche. First you are eyed with suspicion, then the “they will never last, just wait and see” comments trickle out. After that depends on how you approach it, you either get welcomed or the hate starts flowing. Anyone who remembers when Performancing launched (just a few months ago) might recall the reaction we got, from a great welcome to some weirdness.

The thing that makes me laugh is blogging is not like many other fields. There are no winners and losers in blogging. For you to win I do not need to lose.

Blogging is not a zero-sum game!

I think part of this attitude comes because in other fields perhaps that is how it does work, for example many SEOs aim for the number one spot in Google for their “money term”. There might be another five search phrases that are desirable, and other search engines, but they want that one spot and hate the current site that holds that position. We say repeatedly to not worry about search engine rankings but also blogging is just not like that anyway. When problogger gets a boost in traffic our traffic does not go down and visa versa.

Another blog is not going to eat your lunch!

It’s just common sense, do you only read one blog? Probably not. When you are blogging I expect a lot of your inspiration comes from other blogs, right?

Every blog that enters your niche adds value to it, excluding the copy and paste blogger or scraper that every niche ends up attracting. Each additional blog grows the value of the niche for everyone. New bloggers should be welcomed and assisted because they grow the rewards cake for all bloggers in the niche.

Welcome bloggers one and all

Rather than see your fellow bloggers as competitors that need to be nuked out of existence, see them as potential partners where you can work together for mutual benefit. Network your niche. Link out generously, comment on their blogs, support their initiatives and memes. This is not wide-eyed altruism, trust me, your blog will grow because of it.

Have you ever been given the frosty treatment by other bloggers? How can we encourage participation and co-operation in blogging rather than competition?

Ads Are The Cost of Doing Business Online

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Warning: rant ahead. Nick talks about conversational advertising, one of the alternatives to regular advertising that some bloggers are trying out. The one thing that we constantly have to remind ourselves is that there really is no such thing as free anything. Advertising has to appear in some form. Everything costs something, somehow, sometime, somewhen. You may not pay for something directly or even in cash, but you will pay in some way. Sometimes it’s in cash, sometimes in reciprocal activity.

So let’s ask ourselves, what do advertisers want? Our cash, yes, but first they want our eyeballs (and ears for radio), and they’ll pay to get it. It’s always been that way. Early on in the history of TV, not every business person believed TV ads were worth it. But eventually, they realized the hypnotic power of TV, and the influence in purchasing decisions. TV is still the most expensive medium out there (but feel free to correct me if I’m wrong), because of the immense cost of doing business.

Of course, the Internet has had a similar effect, but which is still in its infancy. The right form of advertising online doesn’t exist, in my opinion. There are always some people who won’t like advertising, but it’s a cost associated with the distribution of any kind of information or entertainment. Even public TV broadcasting caved in North America, and to survive, allowed a few minutes of commercial advertising per hour.

While shows like Firefly or others just may be able to swing the production costs of an entire season just by pre-selling a future DVD collection, not everyone is going to manage this. When I was publishing my book/ film/ music review magazine, someone in the publishing industry once told me that some of the “best” books ever written would probably never see print (i.e., distribution). He’d taken upon himself to set up his own imprint and publish one or two quality literary hardcovers per year, when he could afford it, and whether or not he’d make a profit. (He would at least break even, but he had to maintain a high-paying job to manage this act of altruism.)

I did the same thing with demo tapes of select young bands that came to me and asked for a helping hand. This was after my print magazine folded, simply because I just didn’t have time to go sell ads, and couldn’t trust any of my ad people to do anything other than spend my money on lunch and parking. I struggled through 2 years of booking bands, putting on shows, paying for demo tapes, posters, stickers, and so on. Ultimately, the market didn’t support it, because during a time of recession, young people would rather pay $10 to listen to a half-assed, snotty DJ play tunes they’re familiar with than go see a new, talented but raw band for $5. That’s life, and you have to work around that, be innovative, or find something else to do.

So what’s the problem on the Internet and with everyone who thinks that blogs and websites and RSS feeds, and what have you, shouldn’t have advertising? Arguably, it’s the current generation raised from a very young age on the Internet who have been able to get so much for free, whether by hook or by crook, and believe that everything should be free and that they shouldn’t have to do anything in return. You know who you are. Nothing free can be sustained for long.

Sorry, but this just isn’t possible, and if you think otherwise, you’re delusional. That includes everyone who says that RSS feeds should be full-text. The bandwidth costs are too prohibitive for most small publishers, especially those whose sites or feeds aren’t yet earning what their content warrants. And in the case of full-text RSS feeds, far too many subscribers update their feed folders multiple times per day when it’s unnecessary. I won’t do the cost breakdown, but it’ll be prohibitive for most publishers.

It’s all very easy to say that if their content is any good, they’ll eventually earn money. The fact is, it’s easy to forget that money is simply a symbol, not the entity we’ve made it out to be. It’s representative of a transaction that’s happened or about to happen. That means that for my offering you a service, you must reciprocate in some way, whether it’s to buy something from me, or from someone else who in turn buys something from me, or by simply lending my sponsors your eyes (or ears). There really isn’t any other way around this.

I’d love to be able to offer you all of my blogging at no cost, but for the service I offer you (those that read my blogs), I have to somehow earn compensation, or throw in the towel. Unfortunately, online advertising has a ways to go before it reaches a maturity level and form that’s acceptable to the majority. But how exactly does that happen with a billion people online? That’s the question that has to be answered, obviously.

Oh, and while I’m ranting, for Robert Scoble and all of you who want full-text feeds at no cost, in subscriber fees or advertising, I say to you, learn how to use a feed reader properly. All it takes is one damn click extra to see the rest of an excerpted story. Are you that lazy? And to all of you online publishers b*tch*ng about your blogs or feeds not getting click-through to your permalink pages, write better titles and opening paragraphs ;>

Just installed a Wiki … a DokuWiki

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I have just installed a DokuWiki. Wow, that was easy doing. After ten minutes I had the first article with my freshly uploaded self portrait online. After 20 minutes the site had changed to a nice ready-made template with a sidebar and some little CSS changes. Looks like a professional website now and no wikipedia style at all. Now I only have to work out some content structure and some user group rights to shelter internal content before both gets to messy. Looks very easy … the admin section only has two points 🙂

I just want to have it for some shameless self promotion and for getting hold of my online documentation which is always way behind. It’s definitely not worth comparing it to a CMS but it is so fast to publish and to set it up. And the whole style of Wiki versioning (a nicely colored diff view) is a great feature. Plus a lot more …

Maybe it will grow to a three level communication tool: promotion site, group project documentation and a kind of private personal just-throw-things-at-it.

The easy creation of namespaces (= categories with optional user rights management) and according links is really ‘wiki wiki’ magic … write down the new internal link [[newproject:activity]] in your to-do list, publish and click on it and a new page in the new category newproject is created. It’s a little bit like mind mapping the wiki style.

I wanted to install Trac (Wiki with subversion support) but I ended up
with DokuWiki. I wasn’t willing to fight with subversion … a typical
lazy KISS decision.

A new toy … I am happy 🙂

Categories / Keywords / Technorati Tags: Wiki, DokuWiki, tool, tools, publishing, webdev, promotion, happiness 🙂

Supplement Your Blogging Income With E-Reports

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Andy talks about RFIDNews.org and their paid archive subscription model. This is an excellent idea and a carryover from niche newsletters. I remember the newsletter craze of the early 1990s. Business, entrepreneurship, health, law, and financial newsletters commanded $97-1,000/yr per subscription, but had to be spot on with their articles. Just a few dozen subscriptions could sustain a business, and because such costs qualify as “professional fees”, subscribers can often use them as a tax writeoff.

If you have extensive experience in a niche industry, you could utilize your special knowledge by producing something equivalent to a newsletter.  For example, I’m working  on a hush-hush project with someone to produce a large series of free and paid e-reports (in PDF format). We’ll be launching a blog as well, which will excerpt/showcase the topics of the reports, in order to generate SE traffic. The paid reports will provide case studies, but the free material will cover most of the concepts. So there’s value in both.

This method, if you pick a suitable topic, could sustain a writing/ blogging career, without you having to beg for donations, or hope that someone clicks on your contextual ads. Now while we are not producing monthly reports per se, if you think that you can regularly produce ultra-high quality content weekly, biweekly, or monthly, you may want to look into offering subscription e-reports (PDF format). This is slightly different than the paid archives Andy discusses, and requires an extra time commitment. But the returns can be very sweet.

You will need free blog content and free teaser reports, and both will have to show that you know what you are writing about. If you have contacts with experts in your field, you may able to get some guest articles – although they’ll cost you dearly. But since you can typically charge $97 – $147 – $197 – $247 – $297/yr, it may be worthwhile, and a strong selling point. And industry professionals are likely to subscribe if you produce quality reports.

A series of one-off reports could also be lucrative, and would not require the same kind of commitment. If you plan a loose schedule of, say, 10 reports per year, and do not assign dates to them, a 50- to 100-page report could go for $27-47-97 or more, depending on the topics and how much of a niche you’re filling. You may not make a large amount of money in the first year on each report, but for 4 weekends of work, you may be able to supplement your blogging.

So if you sell 50 copies per e-report in the first year, at $27+ each, that’s 10 x $1350/yr = $13,500 minus advertising/ promotional costs. That’s not a lot, certainly not a lot to live on. But the long-tail phenomenon suggests that the sales per report will be exponentially decreasing over time, and that you may sell more copies in total in the “tail” of the life of a report than in just the first year.

If your topics are timeless, over 3-10 years you may earn some nice returns for 10-20 hours of work per month. So in the second year, you’ll have sales of new reports and older reports. In a couple of years, you could very well commit full-time and not have to rely on contextual advertising.

Why Micropayments and Donation Biz Models SUCK

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The news that Kottke ditched the donations biz model he started a year ago comes as little surprise. At the time, I posted that I hoped he had a better plan than that and was none too kind about the whole ludicrous idea of expecting readers to support a blogger for just blogging. I don’t take any great delight in seeing Jason fail, I don’t know him, but Im certainly glad to be able to point to a great example of the models failure. Maybe now we can drop that silly line of reasoning once and for all.

We have talked about models where one would pay to get into the archives of a particularly useful blogs content, and indeed it seems to work well for some, but that’s a very different model to simply holding out your hand and hoping enough pennies come your way to feed the family.

Maybe it’s just me, though i suspect not, that finds the idea of the donation button repulsive?

Productivity: Content Recycling

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As Chris pointed out in “Do Something Different – Mix it up” there are moments when you are stuck in routine and enthusiasm is going down.

Are you always more willing to create new projects instead of hanging with the old ones?
But how to get the new content?

My tip: Use valuable content you have already published and renovate it.

I am going to mix the two subjects ‘motivate yourself’ and ‘recycle content’. I’d say that you can reach these two goals with one action. Start a new platform and use the ‘old’ content to speed up your new project. A speed booster factor of two or three should be normal compared to creating all content new from scratch. The result still can be doubled by taking care of two publishing platforms – the old one and the new one.

Side note – ‘meta articles’: If your content is ‘news’ or ‘product’ … no big problem with ‘content recycling’ … it’s a question of the mix and your editorial capabilities … old news make wonderful keyword rich ‘overview’ lists. Just use your archive (= old content) as the research source for new articles. Create ‘meta’ articles like ‘what did I get for 500 bucks two years ago compared to today’. Do heavy linking to the old articles! Don’t forget the title tags and the bookmarking and tagging!

The editorial and technical trick is ‘content enrichment’. Let’s say you still have an old PHPNuke platform hanging around with nice content but the site itself is not state of the art anymore. You are seriously motivated to switch to a new platform because YOU would like to use all that geeky new stuff (active sidebars, RSS feeds, Javascript includes, …).  Well, I’d say so do your readers! Don’t try to tune your old platform to be fit for all that geeky stuff. You could do so but I promise you will not reach that ‘motivate yourself’ goal. It’s just work. Instead of tuning the old platform just open a new system and enrich old content with new features on the NEW platform. The fresh design and the new features will attract old and new readers (like switching from PHPNuke to a more modern blogging platform).

Now you are playing around with your new system. That’s a lot of fun. But how to get the ‘content issue’ solved? If you follow your statistics and see that you have many new readers then renovating the old content (on both systems!) is still a good and valuable editorial ‘trick’ (newspapers do it by publishing their archives to the web). Take content from the ‘old’ page and do some renovation. Let’s say you have a photo blog … the pictures itself don’t get ‘bad’ just by hanging around in the archives of the other site. Just publish them again on a new article on your new site. You must find your own way of ‘refreshing’ the content!

BTW, if your articles on the ‘old’ site are in the archive for like six months think about to bring them back to the front page in a renovated new version and attach advertising for your new site (trap!: don’t just change the article date, please see “Managing Titles and Paths For Traffic”). Call it ‘refreshment’, ‘update’, ‘follow-up’ or whatever … the goal is to get changing content on your front page and to draw readers to both sites. The old page can pretty comfortably hang around online for as long as you want it. Nobody forces you to switch or migrate from one day to another.

Talk to your readers about the new site. Ask for comments. If you do it right and polite you will gain new readers on both platforms. That is a third goal which comes in handy through the back door.

Regarding the better productivity … it should be obvious that you can’t use old content 100% but you can have a ratio up to 90% old content to 10% new content. Your primary self motivation is the fun to create the new platform. Instead of solving the content issues with ‘lorem ipsum’ text you do some heavy copy and pasting plus the very important ‘content enrichment’. I’d say that only costs you the amount of 20% to 30% of the work you would have to invest for newly created content.

Reading this article I must admit that it is a pretty rough ride ‘concept wise’ … not as clear and straight forward as I would like it to be. But I just wanted to paint a rough picture … pretty ‘bloggish’ isn’t it 🙂 Let me know what you think? Did you do ‘content recycling’ yourself before? How was the success?

Copyright © Markus Merz 2006 – All rights reserved

Categories / Keywords / Technorati Tags: Markus Merz, 2006, blogging, content, management, recycling, productivity, writing, publishing, archive, editorial

Do Something Different – Mix it up

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Have you found your enthusiasm is waning? Are your traffic stats plateauing or even showing a downward trend? When you get comments are they from the usual suspects? Feel like you are living in an echo chamber with no new ideas or perspectives?

When blogging becomes routine it is very easy to get stuck in a rut. You read the same old blogs, talk to the same people, write the same  posts and stories about the same or similar topics. If you do what you have always done you will always get the same results. It’s time to mix it up a bit.

Decide to be different

In some cases it only takes the thought that you would like to make a change that causes the change. It’s a little bit quantum, heh. Just intending to do things differently could make all the difference.

There definitely is a comfort zone to blogging. In the early days of a new blog everything is new. Each post could feel like you are breaking new personal ground. After a while though things become familiar and that is when there is a danger of the familiar turning into the stale. Repeating themes can be a good thing, when you start sounding like a broken record it is time to take action.

New reading

First the easy stuff. Remember when you started your blog you went out and found the best sources of information? Do that again, find fresh new sources. Go to technorati, digg, del.icio.us, et al. New websites launch every day, if you have not been consciously looking they might have passed you by. In many niches it is so easy to only notice the a-listers when actually a lot of the original thinking is not in those echelons.

Use different search terms and decide to look for websites that deviate from your normal viewing habits also. This is not an exercise in more-the-merrier, you are trying to change the flavour not just improve or increase it. If you really struggle here is a radical idea; ditch your OPML and start from scratch. You might be surprised at how markedly different it turns out.

Go to the library or book store and browse the isles, and not just your favourites. You might be inspired by new topics or find a great brand new book for your existing ones with a new perspective.

Different blogs, different strokes

One of the good things about having multiple blogs is you are forced to be exposed to different themes, topics, social groups, etc. On my personal blog one of my favourite topics is all things related to Canada. Because of my “canadian connections” I also see news items that relate to my other blogging topics. For example I spotted a story about a photographer being stopped by police for photographing the Calgary LRT, this was a perfect story for my DSLR photography blog. These are things others in my niches are less likely to see, especially if they are only ever focussed on their particular niche for inspiration. Perhaps starting a new blog could freshen up your old one?

80/20

As Nick says, it doesn’t hurt to drift off-topic once in a while. When you do though, for best results make an effort to relate it somehow to your niche. Also make sure you tag your post very effectively. This will cast your net to not just a wider audience but a whole new audience where you ordinarily would not be on the radar. Try and think what different, but related, audiences would like to see. Put yourself in their shoes.

Change of viewpoint

It might be all it takes is to think with a different point of view. What would your niche look like in a different geography, or up-market or down-market. How would your topic be perceived by someone with less experience or more experience? Are there biases in your niche that could be explored from the other side of an argument? In some cases there might be dogma that can be investigated for their validity.

If all else fails you could consider bringing in fresh blood. Another brain and another voice might be just what your blog needs to keep fresh. New people have different ways of looking at things and their own ideas for what to write about and how things should be done. You don’t need to agree on everything, in fact it could be an advantage if you don’t.

You?

Those are my ideas for how you can keep your blog fresh, how do you keep your blog feeling original, fresh and new?