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Raj Dash

Writing Inspiration: Blogging the Intersection

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You’ve heard the term “thinking outside the box,” but how do you actually do that? How do you go outside of a niche and produce inspired thinking? Answer: you combine two or more disciplines, like Frans Johansson suggests in his recent book, ‘The Medici Effect.’ Johansson puts forth the idea that the really interesting, innovative and inspired concepts come from the intersection of two or more disciplines. This is true for architecture, music, art, mechanics, and pretty much anything including writing and blogging — something you can learn to apply.

Ever since Johanson’s book came out a couple of years ago, I’ve been more conscious of finding the intersection of niches as a source of writing inspiration. It’s really nothing I haven’t been doing as a writer for years, and coaching other aspiring writers to do, but it took his book to make me really conscious of the possibilities.

His book is named after the Medici banking family, who were the driving force behind the Italian Renaissance. They funded various arts, architecture and finance in and around Florence, Italy, in the 15th century, and the net result was a mingling of disciplines as people in these disciplines made their way to the epicenter of the Renaissance movement. I won’t get into the book here all that much, except by way of providing some examples of how you can combine two or more niches into inspired blogging. But even if you don’t write, Johansson’s book is highly recommended. You can still get the ebook free (link at bottom), or buy a print copy from your favorite bookstore.

Self-Improvement

Some niches just lend themselves to crossovers, and many bloggers already blog at the intersection of disciplines. Seth Godin is one such blogger. Can you guess at the niches he covers? Business is one, marketing is another — but you could say that marketing itself is all about applied psychology and how to stir up the desire to improve our lot in life, ourselves. The desire for self-improvement is a constant target of marketers — though their approach is to tell us we’re “not worthy” if we don’t buy product A. This desire was probably always part of the human psyche, but with two powerful mediums, radio and TV, for leverage, it’s become an even stronger desire in us, whether we know it or not. That means there’s a market for self-improvement blogs which help us find awareness in the non-superficial aspects of life.

The problem is, self-improvement blogs are all over the place, and lot of them dish up the same suggestions self-help books have been saying for decades (having read many dozens of them since the early 1980s, it’s easy for me to say that). If you want to jump into this busy and competive niche (and feel you’re genuinely qualified), there are a number of ways you could go, to stand out. One way is to crossover with celebrity news. If any group of people have their personality flaws and quirks front and center, it’s probably celebrities. They’re popular and successful, or they’re “aspiring”, and they got there “above” us despite all their flaws. It’s easy to pick on them or feel jealousy towards them, but the fact is that they are human and they do have neuroses, image disorders and illnesses. With a little bit of work, you could intersect celebrity news with either self-improvement or health and fitness.

How you do this really depends on your objective. If you want to write pure celebrity news, fine. But if you want to write self-improvement blog posts with a difference, consider some sort of intersection. It does mean more research; however, it could be an approach that makes you stand out. Think it can’t be done? Michael Gray’s SEO blog Wolf-Howl talks about a different kind of improvement: that of websites through search engine optimization. He regularly injects celebrity references into his content, and he does it well. Figure out a way to do the same for personal improvement.

Another direction is the learning niche. Learning is of course a type of self-improvement. On one of my older blogs, I unwittingly combined learning and education with self-improvement topics. While I haven’t put much effort into the site, it is my most-commented blog. It struck a chord with a number of people. If I had more hours in the day, it’d be a site I’d put more effort into, but until I found the inspiration for it, I didn’t want it to be yet another self-improvement blog saying the same old thing.

Personal Finances

Depending on how you define self-improvement, there’s another direction you could go to find a blogging intersection. One of my earliest self-improvement blogs, Rich Man, Poor Man, cast a philosphical eye on personal and societal prosperity. It was an outgrowth of my old PunkMonk “tough love” blog of 2002 — a time when my life and career was in total upheaval and I was trying to “find myself.” While the posts required a lot of emotional energy to write, typos aside, they were amongst my most inspired writing ever. I occasionally re-read those posts simply to see if I can recapture the incredible feeling of inspiration I enjoyed while writing those posts.

Prosperity is tied with attitude (self-improvement) but it’s also tied with personal finances. Your finances dictate your entire life, even your style. Marketers would have us believe that we’re not worthy or stylish if we don’t wear certain clothes or drive a certain car. While we may have our car preferences and desires, and while some people may go into debt just to have the car they really want, the more financially practical citizen buys the car they can afford. There may already be a lot of car blogs out there, but one which offers practical tips on saving money on the purchase, care and general ownership of a vehicle potentially has an edge over general car blogs.

Caveats

Now the concepts in ‘The Medici Effect’ is really nothing I haven’t been doing for years. I’ve always coached aspiring writers to learn as much as they can about everything and anything. Unfortunately, that way also lies a lack of focus. Reading books and magazines, watching TV, movies, theater shows is easy. The hard part is focusing on just a handful of niches, and what you pick is dictated by a few factors:

  1. Your current skills.
  2. Your interests.
  3. Niche profitability.

If you can combine all of these factors, fantastic. Writing about current skills gives your writing confidence. If your current skills are something you want to get away from, then your interests are key because writing about them generates passion. Confidence and passion are two key ingredients of the best writing, and what really attracts loyal readers. Profitability really should be secondary; if it’s your focus, you’re more likely to forget the other two ingredients and will thus lose readers.

Of course, writing an “intersected” blog might take more effort, since you have to stay on top of two or more niches. On the other hand, if you combine multiple interests, it will not feel like work. If the effort inspires new ideas or viewpoints on topics that everyone and their proverbial brother are writing about, then it means you’ll stand out, primarily because of the inherent passion it takes to pull off an intersected blog.

Does your blog intersect topics? Tell me about it in the comments.

Notes: The Medici Effect [PDF, 224 pages]
Image: Flickr.

Wear a Mask, Cut Loose Your Inner Blogger

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Don’t or can’t use your real name when you blog? You can still build a personal brand, albeit around a fictitious character. Or maybe that character doesn’t have to be all that fictitious, and can be based on your interests, reveal a facet of you. Thus, it may be worthwhile choosing a Web moniker and building a persona around that.

Why a Web Moniker?

Blogger “Johnny B. Truant” is obviously a real person using a fictitious name. He discusses on Copyblogger today what prompted that choice, and how “Johnny” is just as real as the person behind the name. While in some blogging circles it’s believed that blogging is very personal, one on one, and real names should be used, others believe differently. I’m of the belief that if there’s no moral or legal hitch to using a moniker, then why not — except possibly when a business executive writes on a company blog? If blogging involves telling stories, as so many bloggers have written, then cutting loose a persona based on a moniker might free you up to say what you’d really like to say, without the concerns you might have about being judged by friends, family, or colleagues.

A moniker and Web persona, as Johnny B. suggests, lets you loose to write real copy, and gives you the freedom to stop censoring yourself. The moniker gives you the license to create a persona that you want to be known as, and thus gives you the confidence you need for blogging.

I’ve coached many aspiring writers over the years, and confidence is one of the fundamental roadblocks that stops people from just writing. Cutting loose with a few monikers also lets you explore different writing styles on an ongoing basis, letting you naturally choose one to build a persona around. This is the number one reason I’ve cultivated different monikers since I first started blogging in 2002, though I’ve essentially tried to build only one persona.

Picking a Moniker

Unlike Johnny B. and others — especially the Fake Steve Jobs types — my monikers were not intended to stay secret; nothing stays secret online for long. Rather, when I really started blogging seriously in 2005, with the intent of making it part of my career, I was not sure how widely blogs would be read, nor what topics would be popular. I have always had multiple interests — a fact that sometimes means I have a hard time deciding where to put my efforts. (There’s also a fear that I’ll pick the wrong niche.) As a result I’ve ended up with multiple monikers over time that revealed a different facet of the real me. But as far as a persona goes, I’ve usually tend towards favoring just one, Talespinner — though as of late, that has morphed into the UltraGeek.

In choosing your moniker to build a persona around, brainstorm off of your niche as well as your personal interests. Maybe you have a nickname you’re know by, or an interest you’re known for. Try word games that combine your interests, your nicknames, the names of celebrities, rhyming words and so on.

For example, I’ve had a long-standing interest in food from a cultural standpoint. It just so happened that in my Toronto days, I went through a long hybrid Rockabilly-Punk phase and thanks to my Elvis Presley hairstyle and the clothes I wore, I used to be known by some friends as the Punk Elvis or Elvis Parsley. The name is a double play on words. First, parsley is a common ingredient in East Indian cooking. Second, Parsley is a play on Elvis Presley’s name. Result: my “Curry Elvis” persona for my cooking blogs, when I was still pursuing the idea that I might launch a Web-based cooking show. (During my computer career hiatus, just before I started seriously blogging, I went to cooking school and worked in a dozen or so restaurants for a few years.) So this persona potentially suited me, but in reality it didn’t suit my ultimate online objectives.

Building a Persona

I never built up the Curry elvis persona, mainly because publishing cooking blogs didn’t seem capable of paying the bills, but also because it gets hard to maintain an Elvis-like persona as you get older — something that might be necessary were I to appear in video. My subsequent monikers were due to my personal interests morphing through different niches, including self-improvement, music, writing, etc. For example, Curry Elvis became Punk Monk.

I don’t want to or need to bore you further with my other monikers and personas. They’re not that hard to find, if you’re interested, but the gist is that you can use a similar approach to choosing a moniker and building your Web persona as I did. Though decide on your online objectives before you pick your moniker.

Once you’ve picked a moniker that you like, you can build a “personal” brand, a persona, around it through blogging, creating new jargon, and promoting the persona through social media — just like you would do for the “real” you. I wouldn’t recommend trying to build more than one persona; it just takes too much effort. Brainstorm a few monikers, even use them for blogging different niches, but ultimately focus on just one persona. Johnny B. suggests that you should actually become your persona, at least online — which is difficult to do if you fragment yourself into too many personas. Fragmentation, as far as I’ve experienced will hold back your blogging success.

Caveats

Now, some niches — such as entertainment, design, photography, writing, music, marketing and anything else creative — are well-suited to having a blogging moniker because they can and do often involve storytelling as well as “personalities.” The choice of a blogging moniker might not suit if you’re blogging for clients, though you never know. It really depends on the client and their niche; just ask your clients.

Image: Flickr.

7 Tips for Writing Effective News-y Posts

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Even if your blog is for a business, there’s still a possibility that it covers the news in your industry. If so, it’s also likely that you don’t get exclusives and therefore are mostly rehashing topics. However, there’s still a purpose for doing that, and you should be armed with a few tips on the most effective ways to write news-y posts for your niche.

  1. Variety. There are tons of generic idea sources: aggregators, portals, microblogs, social media. E.g., Google News, Yahoo News, Technorati, Google Reader, Google Alerts, Alltop, YourVersion, Digg, Stumbleupon, Mixx, Propeller, Reddit, Neatorama, Twitter, Facebook and many more. For tech, there’s Techmeme and Megite. For celebrity, WeSmirch. There are many for business, sports and an increasing number of other niche portals. Choose a site relevant to your niche, and monitor the top news sources for breaking stories, but don’t ignore the smaller sites, which may offer a different perspective. (Hint: big sites often earn advertising revenue and are not always as edgy in their opinions.)
  2. Frequency. If you’re covering news in multiple short posts every day, you probably want to publish at least 3-5 posts. If you’re in a competitive niche, you might need even more. For example, celebrity and political blogs might require 10-15-20 posts per day to really make a dent in market share.
  3. Schedule. Spread out blog post publishing time frame during a given day. If your blogging platform or CMS allows it, you can write all posts at once and then schedule them to publish automatically at intervals (no less than 15-20 minutes). However, writing a day’s quota of posts at once, say every morning, means you miss out on any afternoon or evening news. In some niches, there’s news all day, and if you can work it into your schedule, writing 1-3 posts for each of 2-3 time slots (from morning, afternoon, evening, night) might serve your site and readers better. It really depends on the niche and your readership. The more global your readership, the more valuable it is for readers if you’re posting to multiple slots, provided it’s not all rehashed news from earlier in the day.
  4. Summary. Sometimes you want to cover several tidbits of news that don’t warrant their own post, searching for images, etc. The best way to do this is a roundup post, with a maximum of one per day, unless that your blog covers distinct sub-niches. Don’t forget to put the date in the title. I’ll do something like this on Performancing: “Performancing Blogosphere Roundup — May 20, 2010.” Sometimes I’ll precede such a title with some unique keywords relevant to the news tidbits: “Blogs, Hard Drives, and iPads — Blogosphere Roundup, May 20, 2010.” Brainstorm different titles before picking one; don’t be afraid to get creative, unlike me.
  5. Uniqueness. It’s not enough to rehash the news. If “everyone else” is doing it too, then why would you retain any regular readers? Add your own voice and value to the mix. Inject your relevant opinions, reference 2-3 other sites, say more than what the articles you’re summarizing say, and say it succinctly. Or add visual content such as images, video, web slideshows.
  6. Balance. If you are blogging for a business, one of your objectives is probably to establish expertise and be a thought leader. It’s hard to do this in newsy posts. So balance these by mixing them with regular posts and longer resource lists (e.g., 11 Ways to use the iPad to Run Your Business).
  7. Inspiration. Inspiration for blogging regular posts is a bit different than for newsy posts, but some of the rules still apply.

Image: Flickr.

5+7 Tips to Spark Blogging Inspiration

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If you’ve written or blogged for at least a few months, you know that inspiration comes and goes. It’s not always lack of ideas that stop you from getting that next blog post out — often it’s having too many ideas and having doubts about what to write. Here are a few tips to spark some blogging inspiration, that have worked for me in the past.

Scanning For Ideas

The first step is scan for sources of ideas. Yeah, I know that I said you might have too many ideas, but we’ll take care of that in the next section.

  1. Scan the blogosphere. The first thing I usually do to start a blogging day is check my favorite aggregators and portals. I like to use Techmeme, Alltop, YourVersion, Google Reader. Depending on the niche that I’m blogging, I might check other similar tools or have my own custom aggregators that I’ve built in WordPress.
  2. Look at your archives. Ok, maybe it’s a slow news day. Don’t forget to look at your archives. Maybe you wrote about something before that needs correcting, updating, or some sort of followup. This is also an opportunity for you to deep link to your own content, to help build your site’s search engine profile.
  3. Write for yourself. If you’re trying to establish expertise, you need to cover topics relevant to your niche. Ultimately, you’re probably a rich source of ideas, and writing about what interests you is what gives you motivation and focus in blogging. Unless you’re doing it to pay the bills, why bother blogging about something in which you’re not interested? Look within yourself for ideas. It’s okay to get ideas from readers, but if you’re always wondering what your readers want, you’re asking for trouble. Blog readers are fickle as well as transient as a whole, and unless you’ve been posting a lot of cornerstone content and following a regular publishing schedule, your readership on any given day will change. That’s especially true for a new blog whose bulk of Web traffic comes from search engines. So it’s more important to decide what you want to write about, then promote your content to attract interested readers. They’re out there; you just have to attract them.
  4. Mine your web metrics. Now while you do still want to write for yourself, as your readership grows, the value of your site’s keyword searches grows. Your site metrics will show search terms used to visit your site from search engines. If you see any trends, they might be worth exploring, provided they’re related to your blog’s niche.
  5. Mine your comments. You don’t have to have a high-traffic site to enjoy regular commenters and loyal readers. If you’ve been promoting your blog content through your Twitter or Facebook networks, you might find you have regular readers sooner than if you didn’t use social media. Comments can be a rich source of ideas for future blog posts, either because of a direct query or some idea that gets triggered by a comment.

Filtering Suggestions

Now that you’ve bombarded yourself above with lots of ideas, what’s the next step? Filtering, to narrow your interest to one or two topics. Inspiration strikes when you’re focused. Believe me on that. I’ve been using inspirational writing and productivity techniques for a couple of decades, and whenever I’m distracted by too many ideas and thoughts, my writing isn’t my best. It’s also far tougher to write at the pace that most blogging requires, compared to non-blog writing. So filtering ideas for focus is a crucial step to getting inspired. The key is to use some sort of mechanism to, real or mental, to narrow down your topic choices.

  1. Topic themes. Some bloggers have a different weekly or monthly theme for posts, which helps to focus. Usually that’s something you can plan for in an editorial calendar.
  2. Editorial calendars. Create an editorial calendar ahead of time and use it. Of course, newsy topics aren’t always something you can plan for, but you can for evergreen content that’ll be relevant long-term on your blog. How-to tutorials, guides, and resource lists are often good candidates for editorial calendars.
  3. Random choices. If you’re fortunate enough to be blogging in a niche that allows you a lot of different sub-topics, then sometimes picking something at random suffices. This works for newsy sites where you’re publishing lots of short content daily. E.g., news, celebrity, politics. That doesn’t mean what you write will improve your site, only that you’ll have something to write about, to help get the creative juices flowing.
  4. Trending topics. If you’re uncomfortable with randomness and want maximizing your blogging efforts, check for trending topics. For example, the Twitter trending list that you’ll see on your profile page, right hand sidebar, might give you some ideas of what the Twittersphere is microblogging. There’s also Google Trends, which gives you a longer-term historical view and a plotted graph to boot.
  5. Visual input. While I’ve long ago realized that unless I’m live blogging a TV show, watching TV while while blogging is a major distraction. My productivity is sometimes zero DURING watching TV. However, a short break to watch something relevant to your niche, or to view some video, or even just browse some totally unrelated photos at Flickr might spark a post idea to help you focus.
  6. Change your environment. If working at your desk is not working for you at the moment, trying moving into another room. Some people like to take their blogging outdoors. A netbook works well for that, if you don’t want to lug around a laptop. If that’s not viable, sometimes moving to another room works. I like to lounge for a while on the couch and use my iPad for some planning and notetaking. I find it’s easier to focus on an iPad.
  7. Sleep on it. If the blogging inspiration you’re seeking is for publication the next day and you can’t come up with anything, there’s no harm done in literally sleeping on some ideas for the next day. Your brain needs some “alone time” to sort through and parse other ideas that you may have accumulated. I often find that if I’ve prepped suitably, I wake with a couple of clear ideas or possibly even a full post in my head. Alternately, a nap or just a short break away from your computer can make all the difference. (Take a notebook, netbook or iPad with you, but don’t use it unless an idea sparks while you’re on break.) A long break can paradoxically increase your productivity. For example, in the past, I’ve gone off to watch an afternoon movie then come back home and productively written material for novellas or a book. This works for blogging as well, but I usually try to finish any daily client blogging obligations before I take long breaks.

Controlling the Flow of Ideas

If you use the above tips regularly, you might find days where you get over-inspired. Ideas start flitting through your head; blog posts start writing themselves for you, waiting for you to type them up. Because I’ve enjoyed this sort of idea flow for many years, I’ve long used mind mapping as my tool of choice for capturing ideas and breaking them down as far as I can go without writing posts right there and then within a mind mapping application. The problem is, you still end up with too many ideas, thus hampering inspiration for writing a post right here, right now. You still need to filter, as discussed above. (Note: mind mapping is more suited to developing longer content, not short newsy pieces.)

More on finding blogging inspiration, in the near future. Stay tuned.

Disclosure: I have share options in YourVersion and am an unpaid tech evangelist for this real-time discovery engine.

Image: Flickr.

3 Quick Tips for Improving Your Writing Skills

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One of the best ways to improve your writing, at least in terms of succinctness, is to write reviews. While I’ve been doing technical writing for a couple of decades and writing fiction, poetry and song lyrics for even longer, I cut my teeth on non-fiction by writing articles, interviews and reviews for weekly local and college papers in the 90s. The latter efforts, especially review writing, proved most beneficial to my blogging skills. If you’re looking for ways to improve your writing, I’d highly recommend writing reviews.

Here are some review writing tips:

  1. 150-250 words is a perfect review length. Start by reviewing something without a word limit. Then edit down, to 1000 words, 500 words, 250 words, etc. Write enough reviews and you’ll eventually find your writing to be more succinct — often a necessary skill for effective blogging. The shorter your review, the more effort it actually takes to write well.
  2. Learn to be your own editor. Copyediting seems to be a foreign concept in blogging, partly because of the crazy pace we bloggers sometimes have to maintain, no matter how well-intentioned we are. My own frequency of typos increased drastically when I started blogging. However, you still need to edit for meaning. Here’s a simple rule of thumb, to learn how to be succinct: When you’re editing down, cut out every other word, and if you lose the meaning, put some words back. I’ve forgotten the source of this advice, though I think it was from William Zinsser‘s classic On Writing Well book, but was a paraphrasing of a tip from an American novelist.
  3. Keep publication off the objectives list. If one of your review “exercises” is of high quality, you could spin it off into a blog post for publication, but that is not the objective. You’re writing these reviews to hone your skills. Think of them as analogous to the pencil sketches that an artist might do before a detailed illustration or painting. Leonardo da Vinci was a master painter because of the many thousands of sketches he did in his lifetime, which helped him understand structures and give his painter’s hand confidence. You can give your writer’s hand confidence in a similar manner.

Don’t stick to one type of review. When I published my monthly print magazine back in the early to mid-90s, I was reviewing everything out of necessity: music, movies, books, comics, restaurants. Those were pre-Web and Mobile Web days. Nowadays you can also review mobile apps, web games such as those that you find on Facebook, and Web-based services, websites, smartphones and much more. Some types of reviews are going to be harder to keep short, such as books and movies, but that’s fine. The objective is really to learn to be as succinct as possible, not to always write in the 150-250 word range.

What tricks have you employed to refine your writing skills? Feel free to share in the comments.

Image: Flickr.

Performancing Blogosphere Roundup – May 18, 2010

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You might already know that social news and voting site Digg is undergoing some changes that’ll be rolled out in the near future. But if you want a glimpse of what the changes might be, TechCrunch has an annotated version of a picture that Digg CEO Kevin Rose tweeted over the weekend, with a bit of an analysis. The picture is of Rose’s MacBook Pro screen, though the sun’s glare makes it a bit difficult to see much. (An updated picture, albeit smaller, shows the screen more clearly.) From TechCrunch has gleaned, it appears that the new Digg will be even more social, with user avatars showing more prominently, embedded status updates related to story items and more. [Image courtesy of X64bit.]

Do you do a lot of downloading, screen captures, podcasting, video blogging or screencasting? Well then Seagate has a monster hard drive for growing data storage needs. Thinq is reporting that Seagate has confirmed an upcoming 3TB drive for later this year. That’s TeraBytes, as in 1,000 times a GigaByte. My MacBook Pro’s 500GB drive is filling up awfully fast, but that’s due to photo and video work I’m doing with my wife, a filmmaker. I have a few internal drives in my blogging setup, though one is for backups and the other requires two USB ports and gets whiny sometimes and simply doesn’t function. While a 3TB drive does sound tempting, from a purely mechanical point of view, I’d much rather have three 1TB drives or six 500GB drives. This would allow you to assign drives for different purposes, and if one fails, you don’t lose all your data.

Postrank is reporting that traditional hosted blog platforms such as Blogspot, WordPress and Typepad are still way ahead of supposedly popular microblogging services such as Tumblr and Posterous. ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick provides a bit of an analysis of the Postrank report, showing that Blogger is the king of comments. But while hosted blog services serve their purpose, if you’re trying to build a brand, you want to host your own blog, using WordPress, Drupal, Moveable Type, Joomla, Expression Engine, etc.

The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) has published a report (PDF, 19 pages) on their findings of a experiment to study browser signatures. It appears that even if you have cookies turned off, 8 in 10 browsers still leave a unique, trackable signature, like a fingerprint, that could be used to track your surfing — especially if you have Adobe Flash or Java plugins installed. That doesn’t necessarily mean the government is watching you, but rather that it would be a boon to marketers. Of course, there’s an inherent violation of privacy if your browser is ratting you out. On a related note, even the speed and rhythm with which you type in a site’s password could give you away.

Do You Disclose Relevant Info in Your Blog Posts?

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If you’re an American blogger, the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) might be watching you, to see if you’re disclosing any information in your blog posts that suggest you received some benefit, whenever you mention some product, service or company. That’s due to their blogging and new media disclosure guidelines that went into effect last year. Yes, it’s more work for a fast-paced workflow, but it simple once you get into the habit. The basic rule of thumb: don’t keep secrets if you’re trying to influence readers.

Now by disclosure, I don’t mean things like, “I had sauerkraut on a hot dog today. With lots of French’s Dijon mustard. And liked it.” Well, actually, if your blog is about food, for example, and you regularly mention a particular brand, the FCC maybe analyzing what you write. Presumably they’re wondering, “Is French’s giving this blogger freebies?” If you only mention a brand in passing here and there, no sweat — unless all the brands are from one company. But if you do a full on review of a brand, or write about them so often that you raise a red flag, they might want to talk to you. Then, if they find out you indeed received a lifetime shipment of free mustard in return for occasionally or regularly blogging about their product, you had better have disclosed this information to readers at some point.

How to Disclose Relevant Info in Blog Posts

Disclosure can be awkward, but you do have a few fairly simple choices. Now the following tips are only suggestions, based on my common sense, and what I’d want other bloggers to disclose to me on their blog. I haven’t read the reportedly ambiguous FTC disclosure rules that have been in effect for bloggers since Dec 1, 2009.

1. Disclose relevant info.

Disclose only what is relevant to the post in question. If you own shares in multiple companies but only mention one, what does it matter? If you received free products from different companies, no one cares unless you’re mentioning the products in a blog post.

2. Disclose information when necessary.

Disclose even if it means repeating yourself from post-to-post. If you’re always writing about a company, product or service in every single post and have received some benefit in consideration, then find a better way to disclose such info, such as prominently in a sidebar. Or you could create a Disclosures page for your blog and link to it either from your sidebar or from relevant posts.

Keep it simple.

Try to summarize your benefits, not go into great detail. For example, I spent a few months being lead blogger and inbound marketing manager at YourVersion, a real-time Web discovery engine that I think is a great tool for bloggers trying to find the latest references for one or more topics. My work with YourVersion was unpaid but I’m entitled to some share options, though I don’t get any extra benefits in continuing to promote the company — unless of course the company goes public in a few years and I’ve exercised my share options. If I do additional work for the company, outside of tech evangelizing, I could be eligible for additional share options.

Sounds pretty complicated, right? Since it’s awkward to disclose the exact details of this info without rambling, I usually just say, “Disclosure: I’m an unpaid tech evangelist for YourVersion and have share options.” (While we’re on the topic of shares, I should note that PF — aka Personal Finance — bloggers have the tendency to disclose most often. If they talk about a stock, they’ll mention ownership of shares. Some even mention lack of ownership in companies mentioned, just to be above board.)

Separate disclosure text.

For one-off disclosures (even if they’re a repeat), you have a couple of options:

  1. Place the disclosure in brackets, close after the mention of a product, service or company.
  2. Place the disclosure at the bottom of your post.

Disclose on your personal blog.

Sometimes clients don’t want disclosures of other products, or at least not on a repeated basis. What I’ve done in the past is published a disclosure within a review on my own blog, which I use to write about my clients and topics relevant to the Web and Mobile blogging and consulting work I do.

For example, I bought a copy of Mindjet‘s MindManager 6 mind mapping software back around early 2007. Mindjet loved the fact that I loved MindManager and wrote about the software extensively. In spring 2007 and late 2008, they gave me free copies of V7 and V8, respectively. I disclosed this in two reviews of MindManager published on my personal site, and on select client blog posts where I was reviewing the produt positively. If I simply mention Mindjet or MindManager in passing, I don’t disclose the freebies.

Note: I will be writing an upcoming Performancing post on using mind mapping for writing, but will only disclose the freebies if I’m overly favoring MindManager.

Where and When Should You Disclose

Yes, disclosure can be a PITA, but even if wasn’t an FTC requirement, doing so builds trust with your readers. Now, sometimes it’s pretty obvious when you’re getting freebies. Back in the early to mid-90s, when I was publishing a printed monthly entertainment review magazine in and around Toronto, we were getting as many as 30 music CDs a week and all were freebies. There was no issue about disclosure in those days, and thank goodness because we’d have run out of print space.

If a music reviewer bought a CD, they might say something like, “I love this band so much, I ran out and bought their new CD.” On the other hand, we never received movie passes; that came out of the operating budget, and as result we covered less of them. My film writers were hardcore film fanatics and just reviewed films for me because they wanted the experience, and to share.

Of course, when it comes to blogs, display space isn’t as much of an issue as for print. You’ll have to decide on your own if and when you should disclose some benefit you’ve received. (Or maybe read the FTC guidelines; BuzzMachine has a post on how the FTC is regulating our speech, and has a bit.ly link to the 81-page PDF document.) By the way, the rules also apply to new media, so you’ll want to disclose relevant benefits in podcasts and video blogs. Ultimately, use your common sense and be on the up and up about any benefits you’ve received from a person or company, if it’s relevant to a blog post.

Disclosure: I like long walks on the beach, with the sand squishing beneath my feet. And French’s has never given me free mustard, let alone contacted me about any of my cooking blogs.

Image: Flickr.

Blogging Effort vs Return on Investment

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Problogger’s Darren Rowse has a great article [link below] on the “unsexy truths” of monetizing your blogging. A lot of the truths that he mentions apply whether you’re monetizing directly or indirectly, whether you’re running advertising or selling products or services. Overall, I think that purpose and persistence are two of the fundamental keys of blogging success.

Why or For Whom Are You Blogging?

What Darren says, in a nutshell, is that persistence offers the potential (not the guarantee) of success online, but this often is the hardest aspect of blogging: that the return doesn’t come fast enough (item #2). This could be either because a blogging niche is difficult to monetize, or because not enough effort is made to promote, or several other reasons, including really sloppy or poor content. When you couple lack of ROI in a desirable timeframe with the loneliness (item #7) of blogging from home — which I’m guessing most bloggers do — and the challenge of long hours (sometimes, not always) and the lack of human contact together often mean one thing: giving up fairly quickly, if you’re blogging for yourself.

On the other hand, if you’re blogging for clients, then you suffer the “feast or famine” phenomenon, where you sometimes have too much work and at other times you have none. Too bad you didn’t budget for that. Now it’s time to find “a real job” to pay the bills.

If you blog for a business, as part of your job or for your own business, you might have it the easiest of all bloggers, in general. You’re more likely to have a steady salary, and you might even work in an office, which means human contact. Then again, you might be an entrepreneur blogging because you have to, but you still have a stronger “purpose” in blogging than if you’re blogging for yourself to “earn a living.”

Persistence and Purpose are Fundamental

I’m not sure what I can tell you in regards to persistence, because it really does depend on your personality and discipline as well as your situation. The fact is, if you quit, you won’t succeed at blogging. But if you persist, there’s still no guarantee (item #4) you’ll succeed in any fashion.

Blogging suits me because not only am I a long-time writer but my programming career was in transition and I actually had very little choice for the past 4-5 years. I had to persist, and I’m still persisting, but now use blogging as a means to an end, integrated with my mobile apps startup and other types of client work. The irony is that now that I’m also blogging for business reasons, there’s all the more need to persist. My non-client mobile blogs, for example, are eventually to be a marketing vehicle for my mobile apps and those of my clients. However, blogging is no longer my only hope for a career and it doesn’t feel as much of a chore as it sometimes has in the past.

Ultimately, then, you have to find your own purpose for persisting in blogging. If you don’t know why you’re blogging, or you have no unique reason for it, you’ll probably find persistence fleeting. Here are a few tips to consider:

  1. Define your purpose for blogging. If you’re just blogging for yourself and have no other expertise to promote, it’ll be a difficult road, but not necessarily an unfruitful one. You can build your expertise as you go.
  2. Have a plan. Depending on your objectives, a blog business plan may come in handy. Include an editorial calendar in the mix. A plan just serves to remind you of where you want to be headed and actually helps you to focus as well as find it easier to filter distractions and find inspiration.
  3. Get to it. Planning is easy, persisting much harder. You’ll want to regularly monitor your site metrics, leverage your time, and revise your plan and purpose if necessary. Bootstrap your site success if you have to.

Good luck!

Notes: Problogger. Image: Flickr.