Photo by ^riza^.

I had one of those days today where a few things coalesce to make you think about a particular topic. First was listening to John Gruber (DaringFireball.net) and Merlin Mann’s (43folders) SxSW talk on blogging. There are a lot of good tips buried in the talk if you don’t mind the two personalities, particularly on focusing on an obsession, adding value and differentiating your content. Most interestingly for me, they discussed the concept of an ‘ideal reader’ (which I’ve previously talked about as a ‘target audience’, but I like their term better!) This ideal reader is the person you would most want to enjoy your work. It could be another blogger you highly respect and admire, a friend, or another version of yourself. The key is that you’re crafting your work based around who you would most like to read it.

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Photo by Athena’s Pix.

I read an interesting piece by Steve Rubel, a voice in social media that I admire and respect very much, called ‘Why Text Remains King of the Web‘. He argues that, as much as video is booming, text is the stronger medium. Text brings search traffic, videos don’t do this so well. Text is scannable, video is not. You can get away with browsing text at work, but it’s much harder to get away with watching video. Text plays nice with mobile devices, video does not… and so on. All very good points.

Although I’m not a video blogger, I do see video as the next frontier of web content. I also think Steve’s depiction of video is a little one-dimensional. Text certainly has a few things over video, but video has a few things over text as well. These things are not inconsiderable.

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Photo by makelessnoise.

Here’s the most inspiring blog post I’ve read in a really long time: Merlin Mann reflecting on 4 years of 43folders. It really is worth reading all of it, but if you’re too busy now, the general gist is that the productivity niche has largely sold-out, and so have bloggers in many other niches. The general malaise: bloggers writing what they think people want to read in order to get traffic and cash in on it, resulting in a whole lot of unoriginal and shallow content, and even more wasted talent.

When something good happens as the result of an action, we’re inclined to repeat that action. We write a list of ‘50 Firefox Extensions to Help You Do ________’ and get a burst of traffic from StumbleUpon. We assume that kind of content is working for us and that we should bring that formula to our blogs/websites in other ways.

Think about this for a second though: if you use any kind of social media, have you ever voted for content without fully reading it because it seemed like something ‘other people with more time would enjoy’, or ’something that would do well on social media’, or something that you ‘appreciated the idea of’ but didn’t make the time to fully read, watch, or listen to? My next question is: do you think you’re the only one? You’re bringing traffic to the blog and probably revenue, but you’re not bringing it your full attention and understanding. Thousands of other people are doing exactly the same thing.

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One of my new favorite voices in blogging and social media is Gary Vaynerchuk. If you’ve never seen any of his videos, here are three that every blogger should watch (1, 2, 3). Interestingly enough, he’s a passionate speaker who consistently restates something both very true and very obvious, yet very ignored: success with blogging, social media and online entrepreneurship is all about ‘hustle’, in other words, hard work, persistence and most importantly, sacrifice.

The point that inspired this post was made at 12mins 15secs in Gary’s recent Web 2.0 Keynote in NYC, where he suggested that an online entrepreneur who wanted to be successful should be prepared to work on their business from 7pm to 2am every night. The audience laughed as if he’d made a joke, but Gary’s face was a picture of seriousness. “It’s not going to happen if you do it any other way!” he said emphatically. Of course, the hours between 6pm and 7pm could be designated ‘family time’ in this fictional schedule. But that’s still 1 hour family time, 7 hours work time (15 if you count the day-job). That’s also five hours sleep every night if you have to get up at 7, and assuming you don’t need any wind-down time before stumbling from the computer to bed. I know whenever I tried this I had emails dancing before my eyes.

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Bloggers are very privileged to be able to share our creative output with so many people, and in some cases, to profit from that creative output. We’re able to do this because we’re not living in poverty. We can afford to run computers, electricity, pay internet bills, purchase domain names and hosting–something that many people can’t do, and will never do.

Blog Action Day 2008 presents an excellent opportunity to remember this, and to avoid taking the privileges we have for granted. That’s why I’m glad to take part this year, with this post.

Here’s a challenge: today, do at least ten things to help in the battle against poverty. Don’t worry–I’ve made it kind of easy for you. Below are 30 things you can do. Some take a few hours, others a few minutes, others only a few seconds. Some you’ll only able to begin today, others you’ll be able to begin and end. Best of all, (almost) none of them require you to leave the chair you’re sitting in right now.

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Photo by bestfor.

I’ve been thinking about some of the important lessons I learned in the very early days of my engagement with the web, back when only an obscure few knew what blogging was, and before blogs like ProBlogger existed. There were no websites (at least none that I found) to tell you how to build popular sites, or how to make money online. Those who had done it probably weren’t sure exactly how they’d done it, but were pleasantly surprised and pleased none-the-less.

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Photo by wannes deprez / ony one.

The idea of blogging as a source of passive income has always seemed a little off to me (and others). In fact, I’d suggest that most bloggers earning significant money from blogging devote as much time to it as a part-time or full-time job. That’s not as close as we can get, though: passive income should be just that, passive, meaning income for no hands-on work, or income that is hugely disproportionate to the hands-on work required.

If you’re writing blog posts each week, moderating comments, answering email and trying to propel your content forward on social media, you’re not earning passive income. You’re still exchanging time for money.

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Photo by Freeparking.

Posts based on the Number + Adjective + Contents headline formula are probably the most popular form of web content we’ve ever seen. For every one person who loathes them there are one-hundred people who are enchanted by them. For reasons that others have previously explored, this kind of content pushes all the right psychological buttons.

The formula isn’t a secret weapon known only to an elite set of maverick writers. Anyone who reads blogs or uses social media gets it: that the formula is very much in fashion. Blogs that have never used it before are now tapping into spikes of social media traffic with its help. Writers who can stick to the formula are highly sought-after and increasingly well-paid. Blogs that use the formula well are growing at a rapid rate (and so are some that don’t, but I’ll get to that later). The formula works.

But for how long? Trends reach a saturation point and then begin a decline. If the formula hasn’t reached saturation point yet, it must be heading towards it. In this post, I want to talk about what comes after the death of this trend.

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Photo by Oskay.

One question every blog about blogging covers at one point or another is: how much should you post? I’ve yet to see anyone come to a firm conclusion about this, so I’d like to try.

In truth, some post frequencies are wasteful and others are efficient. This depends on two factors: the size of your readership and the frequency of your posts.

If your blog is receiving a few hundred visitors a day, it can be wasteful to post too much. For a post to gain traction on social media and start to spread through word of mouth it requires a certain amount of exposure.

By posting too frequently you may be taking the post out of the limelight and replacing it with another before the necessary amount of exposure can be reached.

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Photo by Freeparking.

It was a little painful to read Darren Rowse’s series of posts on letting your blog go. It hit a nerve with me for reasons that are probably self-evident: in the last four months there have only been eight new posts at Skelliewag. In this post I want to explain some of the important lessons I learned by letting my blog go, and how these lessons will help me approach the future.

Reflecting on that time I’ve realized that there are always deeper reasons for letting a blog go than ‘I don’t have the time’. I’ve learned that the way you use your time reveals your true priorities, even if they aren’t the priorities you acknowledge.

This article is, surprisingly, a positive one. It doesn’t benefit anyone for me to make excuses for my own personal situation, but I’m sure some of you are going through a similar phase and struggling to keep your blog regularly updated. Maybe you’ll see yourself in some of the lessons I learned.

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