Entries Tagged 'Blogging' ↓

Of course I’ve read it (and you have too) blogging is hard work. Trying to generate quality content day after day can be difficult. You’ve also heard that one of the keys to success with blogging is persistence. Few make much of an impact early on and it may be months or longer before a blogger attracts a following. I’d been going full steam ahead for a while now and hit a bit of a mental roadblock this week. The promotion I’ve been doing has been working somewhat but traffic and regular readers have been slow in coming. Then just now I got a boost. A post I submitted to Blogsvine won in their free ad campaign contest.

If you’re not familiar with Blogsvine you can be excused since they’re pretty new. Blogsvine is essentially a Digg-like social bookmarking site that’s focused on (you guessed it) blogs. You can submit entire blogs (homepage) or specific posts. Unlike Digg you are welcomed to submit your own posts and also unlike Digg bloggers tend to get a friendly reception. Blogsvine has the familiar vote up/vote down/comment on submissions and of course a profile and friend system.

I’m proud to say that my post on capitalizing on accidental traffic not only got 7 up votes and 2 comments on blogsvine (which is pretty decent for stories there), it was also judged a top 10 story by blogsvine and earns me an ad spot. I’ll certainly be giving blogsvine a bit more of my attention and I’ll keep you posted as to any results from the ad spot.

Oddly enough that post (which I do think is a good one) was one that was written fairly quickly and as a reminder to myself to take the very steps I recommended. A site of mine is getting a fair bit of accidental traffic and I can use it but haven’t to this point. Guess what’s tops of my todo list for today?

photo credit: Steve RhodesIf you’re a blogger there’s a good chance you don’t regularly read a newspaper. Bloggers (and actually most people these days) tend to get their news online. However if you’re a blogger, some of the conventions and reader expectations from the newspaper world still apply to what you write whether you know it or not.

Consider the various sections found in your typical newspaper and then think about where your own blog would fit. The expectations of that section still apply to your blog.

News

The key expectation of a the news section is objectivity. A reporter is supposed to report facts without their own biases or opinions. There are a lot of blogs online today that publish primarily news stories and the good ones at least follow the unbiased, objective reporting standard. There’s another expectation about the news section and that is that news be observed or researched. If your blog belongs in the news section then it can’t be based entirely on your own thoughts or feelings. Be sure that your news posts answer the “5 W’s” (who, what, where, when, why) of journalism and retain an objective tone and your readers will be getting what they expect.

Columns

The columnist must be the most coveted job in the newspaper world and it’s no surprise that this is where most bloggers would rightly place themselves. A columnist has a lot more freedom than a news report in the things they cover. The columnist is also expected to inject their own biases and opinions into a piece though the piece must be more than a simple emotional rant. A good columnist, like many good bloggers, specializes in analysis - they present a story or situation and explain its ramifications. A blogger who seeks to be a columnist will need to establish them self as an authority in the field they wish to cover. Be sure that over time and within your posts you cite reasons for why your analysis should be trusted. Famous bloggers don’t need to worry about this but if you’re not an A-lister you’ll want to interject personal experiences that helped you reach you conclusions and establish your authority.

Reviews

photo credit: habitatgirlWhile everyone working as a journalist might want to be a columnist, everyone else in the world wants to be a critic. Whether the movie critic or the restaurant reviewer who wouldn’t want a job where dining out or watching a movie is your work? It’s not coincidence then that a lot of blogs focus heavily on reviews. Reviews, perhaps more than any other type of blogging, rely on the blogger conveying a sense of who they are. People like to read reviews by people who have the same tastes they do. If you’re reviewing the real key is to build a consistent style to your reviews and build a following of people who trust that they will like what you like - or perhaps like what you hate.

Conclusion

You might not read a newspaper and your readers might not read the newspaper but consider how the newspaper conventions and expectations affect what you are writing. While you can mix various types of posts throughout your blog, you should be very careful to avoid switching mid-post and if you primarily write news stories for example be sure to make it evident when a post is breaking out of that mold. By sticking to the conventions your readers expect, you’ll make it easier for them to read your posts and more likely to return to read more.

photo credit: bbaunachHow do you normally write? I’ve always liked to pretty much get the whole idea in my head (or at least the general overview all worked out) and then just sit down and write beginning to end. That’s great if you can write with no distractions but if you have a spouse and kids around you don’t often get a lot of distraction free time.

Try jotting down the outline of what you’re going to say. It makes it far easier when you do get interrupted and may help you write better focused posts that arrive at the conclusions you want to reach.

If you update your blog on a daily basis (or other regular basis) do you like to write all at one or every day? One of the cool features about most blogging software is that you can schedule a post to appear at a later time and date. You can also simply write ahead and store posts for the day when you just have nothing to say.

All At Once

There are some advantages to doing a week’s worth of blogs all in one day. You can get into “blog mode” and will be able to write your posts faster. If blogging isn’t your main employment you can leave yourself with dedicated chunks of time to focus on your main job. And by writing ahead and storing posts you don’t have to worry about that dreaded writer’s block hitting on a day where you really want to get a new post up.

The all at once approach can also take some pressure off and allow you to refine a post until it’s ready and avoid posting sub-standard work. If you feel you absolutely have to publish today and you don’t have anything good ready you may publish a mediocre article and that could be bad - you don’t want a new visitor showing up to less than your best.

A Little at a Time

Writing and publishing on a daily basis also has some advantages. If you attempt a week or more’s worth of blogs at once you can get burned out while writing on a daily basis may be an easier habit to establish. A week’s worth of blogs can take quite a while to write and you may not get the 4, 5 or 6 hour chunk of time you’d need to do it all at once. If you’re a blogging addict you may also find that even if you write ahead you’ll be yearning to write on a daily basis (though that’s not always a bad thing).

Writing to publish immediately is also critical if you’re going to be writing on timely topics. If you’re reviewing an event it’s best to publish it as close to the event as possible. If you’re covering a news topic then you’ll want to get it out before the news has been covered by everyone else.

Mix It Up

photo credit: rileyroxxPersonally I find a blended approach works best. Since most of what I write is not timely I can write a day or more ahead and relieve some pressure. I can also interject with more timely stuff in addition to my regular posts.

Whatever you chose though I’d suggest you at least try the other approach. If you regularly write ahead you may find that the pressure to put something out now actually makes you write better and more interesting posts. If you’re a daily type you might find that the blogging groove really helps and the more relaxed pace produces better work. At any rate mixing things up can help keep blogging interesting and that’s vital if you’re going to survive as a blogger.

I’ve gone through another round of tweaks to the blog and thought I’d share again.

New Theme

I switched the site to using the excellent CopyBlogger theme that was done by Chris Pearson and generously donated to the world by CopyBlogger. In terms of design I love clean and this is about as clean as it gets. There are advantages and disadvantages to using a free WordPress template for you blog. The advantages are that you get an excellent design and it’s free. The disadvantages are that there will be other sites out there using the same design and you can’t build a unique visual identity.

I can’t imagine that I’ll run the CopyBlogger theme for ever but for now I think it’s a fair compromise. I do hope to make some minor modifications to the design in the short run. I should probably come up with a header image too. Eventually I’m sure I’ll want to go custom here but since I’m not much of a designer I’ll have to hire that out and don’t want to take that step just yet.

ShareThis

I switched from using FeedBurner’s feed flare to using ShareThis at the bottom of each post. ShareThis is super easy to add and provides users the ability to e-mail a post as well as submit it to all the relevant social bookmarking sites. For some reason I’ve become a fan of Mixx rather than Digg (I think I prefer getting into Mixx now while it’s smaller than joining the huge Digg) and so it seems like a good idea to provide readers with a way to submit to Mixx as well as the others.

FeedBurner’s feed flare is still on the RSS feed. Whis is kind of redundant now but I’m not horribly enamored with the way that ShareThis appears on the feed. I’m pretty sure I can change it but need to look into it some more.

By the way, you should take this as a hint that I’d like my readers to submit my posts to social networking sites.

PhotoDropper

Like I said I’m not much of a designer and don’t think enough about the visual appeal of my sites. But a few days ago I was looking at this blog and realized the big mass of unbroken text was rather daunting. Co-incidentally I read about the new PhotoDropper plugin which lets you easily add Flickr photos that are released under Creative Commons license to your posts. Now I’m making an effort to add photos to most posts.

While it’s sometimes quite a bit of work I find it’s also quite a bit of fun. Since many of my posts deal more with abstract thoughts it’s often hard to find appropriate images that relate to the text some some images are just loosely related and some I chose just for the emotional response they evoke. I really think it adds a lot to the blog and if you blog I’d suggest giving the plugin (or at least the technique) a try.

Ooops

I had accidentally set WordPress to require registration to leave comments. I’ve changed that so you should feel free to comment away.

If you’re wondering why I decided to start this blog now there are several reason. Probably none are enough on their own to undertake the amount of work that a blog entails but together they’re a pretty compelling motivation. And it’s kinda fun.

An Interesting Story

I think I have a pretty interesting story. There are many people out there who have made millions on the Internet but I’m not sure how many there are that have made it the way I did. Some people got some great stock options early in the lives of companies like AOL or Google. Fewer people were part of a founding team of a company that sold for a nice price or made it big. But you don’t hear too many stories of people who actually built a site on their own, never took financing and were smart and lucky enough to build it into something pretty big (and then sell it for a nice price).

photo credit: julianrod (PBUH)

 Plenty of Opinions

When I was a kid my parents threatened to get me a T-shirt that said “Everyone has a right to MY opinion”. I’ve always been one to enjoy explaining my point of view and a blog is a natural place to do so. I’ve been around the Internet since before the world wide web even existed and I’ve worked on Internet based projects for at least the last 10 years so I think I bring some experience and perspective to the topic I like to cover.

Self Accountability

Initially one of my main reasons for wanting to start this blog was to ensure that I was actually working on things instead of just goofing off. When you’re solo there is no external accountability so you need to make sure that you keep yourself productive. Especially when you don’t necessarily need an income to live a comfortable life. Of course so far I’ve spent more time on the actual blog than working on projects I could blog about but I still hope to use the blog and the (self imposed) pressure to write about interesting projects I’m undertaking to motivate myself to work on such projects.

Self Promotion

Blogs have some inherent self promotional aspects (pinging for one) and are beloved by search engines (who adore frequently updated content). There are also some good promotional opportunities for bloggers that aren’t necessarily available to other webmasters. This means that it’s somewhat easier to drive traffic to a blog than to other types of sites. And of course if you can drive traffic to a blog you can also send some of that traffic off to other projects you launch.

I Really Enjoy Writing

photo credit: MayrFor the longest time I’ve enjoyed writing of various forms. In high school it was creative writing. With my “big successful site” I had the opportunity to do some reviewing and interviews. It was never the main part of my job and I hadn’t done much of it (aside from the frequently overlong forum post) in quite a while. I actually toyed briefly with the ideal of studying to be a journalist but I’m not sure that’s a growth industry or the type of life I want to lead right now. Blogging gives me a great chance to exercise that muscle without becoming a job.

Money Making Possibilities

I actually never really thought a blog had a lot of money earning potential until I started getting into blogs a bit more and reading about guys like John Chow. I’m not sure I’ll ever build an audience like John and even if I do I’m not sure I can monetize my blog as effectively as John does but there is certainly a chance that this blog will someday bring in a few dollars.

So there you have it. For me at least the reasons I blog. If you write a blog consider what your reasons are. And if you’re thinking about writing a blog know that blogging is much harder than it looks and you’ll likely need more than one reason to keep you going.

There’s an amazing new way for WordPress bloggers to easily add publicly available Flickr photos to their blog. The PhotoDropper Plugin is an amazing time saver.

photo credit: bingbingOne comment that you’ll see on that page though is that people are having trouble wrapping text around the images. It’s normally easy to do that in WordPress because you can just set the alignment on the image and the paragraph will wrap around it. The problem here is that the plugin adds a caption to the image that include the attribution link that is required for the image’s use.

Unfortunately there’s no simple way that I’ve found to achieve the alignment and flow that you want using the visual WordPress editor. But if you drop into the code editor temporarily you can quickly and relatively easily get the look you’re going for.

1. Write your post as normal (using the visual editor if that’s the way you work).
2. Put your cursor where you want the image to appear and using the PhotoDropper plugin to find and insert your image.
3. Now switch temporarily to the code editor and locate the code you just inserted. The trick is to wrap that code (the image and caption) with <span> </span> tags and apply the styling to the span.
4. At the very beginning of the inserted code add <span style=”float: right”> (or float left as you desire)
5. At the end of the inserted code (after the attribution link) add simply </span>

That’s it! Pretty simple after all. You can apply additional styling to the span if you want to alter the padding or whatever.

For the advanced reader. If you want to make things even easier (and you generally want to put your images in the same place) you can go ahead and make this wrapping with <span> tags and floating the default by doing a simple modification to the plugin.

Go to the plugin directory (wp-content/plugins/photo_dropper) and edit the file flickr-js.php. Around line 123 (in the version of the plugin that I’m using) you’ll see the code for adding the HTML for the image to your post. Edit that code to include the <span> tags and your desired floatiness.

imgHTML = ‘<span style=”float: right”><a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/’ + owner + “/” + id + ‘/” title=”‘ + imagealt + ‘”‘ + ‘ target=”_blank”>’;
imgHTML = imgHTML + ‘<img src=”‘ + imagesrc + ‘” alt=”‘ + imagealt + ‘” border=”0″ /></a>’;
imgHTML = imgHTML + licenceHTML + ‘</span>’;

Note however that if you do that modification it will be wiped out the next time the plugin is updated. If you want use both left and right floating you can still do this mod and make it a bit easier on yourself to edit in the code view.

Hope this helps and happy dropping photos into your blog.

There is a near 100% chance that you will be interrupted (by a phone call, kids, spouse or someone at your door) in those few seconds between when you get a thought and you’re able to get that thought into your next post.

When you’re your own boss one of the interesting things that happens is that you get to decide what is “work” and what is “goofing off”. When someone else is giving you tasks to accomplish this is largely determined for you but unless you work for the pointy haired boss if you’re in the tech industry you likely have some degree of freedom in how you spend the passing moments while your at your job.

The question then becomes - especially for the self-employed - how do you classify blogging time - and by that I mean time spent both reading and writing blogs.

Certainly if your blog is your primary work product then time spent writing blog entries has to be considered working. But really very few of us - even those who seek to monetize their blogs - have a blog as their primary work product. By that I mean that guys like John Chow and Shoemoney - while they do make good money from their blogs really make most of the income from running other sites.

And what of time spent reading blogs? The blogging world is highly inbred and bloggers spend a lot of time talking about what other bloggers are saying. Bloggers will get ideas about things to discuss and important happenings from reading other blogs.

For me, I spend a lot of my time wonder what it is I want to do next. After being tied up in one particular site and niche for years I’ve largely lost my feel for what the state of the Internet is and the state of the Internet has changed drastically since 2000. For me I view reading blogs and writing here as absolutely “doing work”. I admit that not all the blogs I read are work related and I certainly enjoy both the reading and the writing but to me at least it is still part of my job.

It’s good to enjoy your job.

6 months or 9 months or a year ago when I started thinking more about what it was I wanted to do next one thing that immediately sprung to mind is that I wanted something to do with blogging. Blogging is a huge part of what’s new and exciting about the Internet these days. While Facebook and MySpace get all the media attention I personally think they’ll either have to change substantially or die off (though that’s a topic for another day).

When I first heard of blogging years back it was mostly of the “Dear Diary” type. I didn’t much get it. I had no desire to either share daily details of my life or read daily details of other people’s lives. Over time the very nature of blogging changed (or perhaps I didn’t understand it at the time). Blogging became simply a mechanism for publishing on a wide variety of topics many of which had nothing to do with what the blogger ate for lunch or where they were going on vacation. Bloggers became in many ways the new journalists - sharing news and opinions that just a few years ago only those employed in news industries would be able to share.

So while the who blogscape excited me and I knew I wanted to do something in that sphere I wasn’t sure exactly what and to a large extent I still didn’t get what it was all about. I dove into reading a wide variety of blogs and immediately some ideas sprung to mind about how to better server blog readers. As I started doing more blogging myself I started thinking about ways to serve the blog authors.

It goes along with the advice to start a site about a topic that you’re passionate about but jumping into the world that you hope to serve is absolutely essential to the modern day independent entreprenuer.