Blogger's Secret

June 2011 WordPress Ann Arbor Meetup: "Ten lessons learned from a decade of blogging"

I'll be speaking on the topic of "Ten lessons learned from a decade of blogging" on June 29, 2011 at the WordPress Ann Arbor Meetup, 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. at the Workantile Exchange at 118 S. Main St in Ann Arbor. Please help me look forward to this event!

The comment is better than the story, so quote from the comment

Newspapers have grown to grudgingly embrace commentary, and have spent a lot of time trying to attract people to leave comments on their site. If you are unlucky, the commentary is awful; if you are lucky, one comment in two is worth reading, and perhaps one in twenty is better than the story itself.

The practice of blogging lends itself to well-sourced quotations from other sources. If the comment is better than the story, then lead with your well-linked clip of the comment itself. How much more fun it is to pull the good discussion out of the morass, even if the lede is barely noteworthy.

This inspired by Jordan Miller's plea for more sandwich stories (and fewer pet stories) in one of Ann Arbor's online publications. Since I make or eat perhaps a dozen sandwiches in a week, I'm all for this.

Tiny habits produce great results

One of the side effects of working with BJ Fogg in his three tiny habits program is a renewed pragmatic focus on how I can regularly produce small units of publishable work. Simply knowing that one thing (cleaning the kitchen) has to happen before another thing (blogging) is enough to make it more likely that both get done.

What's the smallest thing that you can do regularly that would have a big impact on your ability to write?

It doesn't matter how many people read this.

I'm not writing this in order to have a million people read it. (That's good, because I'm sure that a million people won't read it.) I'm writing it because it needs to be written down, and published in such a way that I can find it again when I need it.

If your weblog has an internal audience as well as an external audience, you don't have to worry about every single thing that gets published being a massive blockbuster hit. Better to slowly and surely churn your way through building up a body of work, knowing that the time spent cultivating small numbers of important readers is just as important as fleeting fame.

Short electric bursts of writing, captured and tamed

Blogging lends itself to short electric bursts of writing - longer than a typical Twitter message, but still shorter than what typically goes into an extended discourse on a topic. Many of my blog entries are impossibly short, just a few words that hint at a topic and move on.

Every so often it's worthwhile to step back and realize that just because the input box on your screen has room for 140 words doesn't mean you can't drag it a bit larger and make it handle 500 words or more at one go. With practice, you can even start to organize your work and your thinking so that not all of it fits on the single page. After all, the internet doesn't fit on one page any more, and you're used to vacuuming up ideas and connecting them together in unexpected ways. This would be no different.

It's also OK to start writing, fill up a page, and then hack away at the text so that half of it is gone by the time you are done. The "shitty first draft" that Anne Lamott writes about depends crucially on the ability of the writer to suppress their editorial instincts just long enough to get something down that covers the page, without worrying too much that the words are precisely or even approximately useful. Filling the page with ink assures you that at least a few of the words are reusable, that some colorful combination of characters makes for a scrap or snippet usable elsewhere, or just that the brain has been kicked into writing mode long enough to live there for a while and turn off the edit mode that threatens to erase it.

It's OK not to have every bit of writing be a bite-sized gem. For one thing, not every complex subject lends itself to sparkling insights. You may have to slog through dozens of detailed examples to convince the reader that there's something going on which is worth their extended attention, in ways that don't all unfold in neat crystalline format.

 

10 lessons learned from a decade of blogging

This is the title for my talk at the June, 2011 Wordpress Ann Arbor meeting, and the details follow.

0. You have to decide at the outset whether you are trying to make money or you are trying to make sense. Sensemaking leads to open inquiry, small wins, and constructive engagement with the world; moneymaking leads to key performance indicators, conversion rates, and return on investment. (Image:  Boris Artzybasheff painting on a USPS 37c stamp, released in 2004.)

1. Tools matter. Your decision on what software platform to build your weblog sets off a chain reaction of dependencies that lead to characteristic design, structure, and people. Pick carefully, because you will end up working with or against the environment you have built. (Cover from the Whole Earth Catalog.)

2. Keep the project in scope. Is it limited in time or perpetual? Is it limited to one narrow topic, or broad to whatever comes along? Are comments open to the world, or closed off to a small targeted set of contributors? Come to terms with where the weblog starts and where it ends, and stay within whatever bounds you might need to put to make that work. (Photo: Single Serving Levees, via Jason Kottke, from Popular Science; photo credit is Scott Olson/Getty Images)

3. Repetition is the soul of the net. If you are going to cover a topic thoroughly, you will need to repeat some themes over and over again. If you are going to chronicle the world, you need to do it frequently enough to capture it at a reasonable pace. Don't be afraid to say the same thing over and over again if it bears repeating. (Image: Pytessel for tesselation for the Palm Pilot)

4. Work from a calendar. Every narrowly focused weblog revolves around a world that has seasons, whether it be the changes in nature, the events in an industry, or the cycles of growth. Understand that your timing matters, and that there's a one best day each year to write every single article. (Image: the Chrono-Shredder, Susan Hertrich).

5. Writing is hard work. Make it easier by writing headlines first - draft a whole series of titles for stories and posts you wish you had written. Don't launch until you can see far enough out to be able to refill any category you want to credibly provide strong coverage of. Make the first version coherent and accurate and don't be afraid to fix an error. (Photo: Dewey Defeats Truman, AP via Wikipedia)

6. Write for a reader, and make sure that reader sees what you write. This means not just constructing entries in the hopes that Google or someone random will find it, but really having a person in mind for each of your efforts who can review it when it goes out. Engage friends and colleagues to copy edit, review, and proofread your work, and respond promptly to improvements. (Cover art: Anne Lamott's Bird By Bird).

7. Set long term and short term goals, and be prepared to measure success on each of those goals. Traffic is one goal; conversion goals like "make a comment" or "sign up for a newsletter" are other goals; at some point, if you are writing with a direct commercial interest, there's a money value with each. Understand where you are looking for people to fit on some gradient of engagement or spectrum of common interest. 

 

8. Measure success where you have succeeded, and build upon that success. Collect evidence that reinforces your best sense of where you are heading with this project, and be quick to claim credit for having achieved major milestones. No one has to know what the goal of your weblog is until you have succeeded.

9. Leave room, if your style allows it, for questions. When you write, you don't have to know everything, and asking good questions can be at least as good as giving all of the answers. 

10. Know when to bring a project to a close. Not every weblog needs to be updated perpetually; sometimes you just have to create a body of work, assess how it turned out, and take it offline when it has outlived its purpose. (Photo: Edward Vielmetti, "Road Ends")

How to write about anything

The original conceit for Blogger's Secret was that it was possible to become an expert on any topic by sheer diligence and frequent public writing on a narrow topic. Sometimes, though, you find yourself needing to write about something you aren't yet an expert on, and that topic could be anything - including something you know little or nothing about.

How can you write about anything and everything? It's surprisingly straightforward. Use your first set of writing efforts toward identifying your own personal ignorance about a topic, and begin by identifying questions that you and anyone would need to be able to answer in order to dig in further. A properly framed set of questions will signal your curiousity, attention, and interest in a topic, without requiring you to know all of the answers immediately.

Writing for the net gives you a special opportunity to create a work which is a series of questions, and where the answers to those questions get worked out over time as you and the people who read what you are writing identify the gaps. Frequently asked questions, with or without answers, are always a good start at addressing a topic. Fill in the gaps until the number of question marks on the page is less than the number of periods.

Thanks to Roger Rayle for the prompt to address this question. Chris Locke gets credit for the "question mark node" phrase in an old post to the Vacuum mailing list. Thanks to everyone who contributed to Usenet era Frequently Asked Questions, as good a technique (and sorely missed) for collecting ignorance in advance of collecting wisdom, especially Mark Moraes who helped produce my "What is Usenet? A second opinion" FAQ for many years.

 

Reorganizing your thoughts

If you write for long enough, you may find that your collection of words no longer matches your collection of categories. It's good practice to rebalance your categories with your writing periodically, creating and destroying categories so that they reflect the current view of what you are trying to discover or say.

Know when a project comes to an end

Crain's Chicago has a piece on bloggers quitting (January 17, 2011) with all of the stories of people deciding to give up on blogging because it didn't generate as much business as phone calls, and people giving up blogging because they got a new job or had a kid. Good reasons all; the one I see the most around Ann Arbor is giving up blogging when you are done with graduate school.

The good example that I see from it is the account of Aleen Bayard, who gave up on blogging about New Zealand (New Zealeens) because she moved back to Chicago.

Not every blog has to be a permanent effort. If you write about something, and then no longer need to write about something because the world has changed and you with it, that's fine.“I wrote one post when I got home and realized that I had something unique to say in New Zealand but not as much as a Chicagoan back in Chicago,” she is quoted in Crain's as saying.

If you're done with a project, you're done - no harm in that. There's a useful structure of writing for a finite amount of time (e.g. a year) on a single topic, but if that doesn't do it for you, then simply don't be shy about putting a project to bed. Find the time to write one last post, call out the highlights from the effort, wrap up some conclusions and put together a tombstone that says "I'm done". A well-ended effort is that much more satisfying to read than something that seems to end in mid-thought.

Top 5 reasons to make a list

How many ways do I love making lists in weblogs? Let me count the ways.

1. Lists are easy to write. Each part of the list is as long or as short as it needs to be, and you don't need to pretend to tell a single, coherent story. If you run out of time, you can cut the post short.

2. People like being listed on a top N list of anything, so you get the benefit of people linking to you when you make a list that they are on.

3. It's a very old technique, going back all the way to the Catalog of Ships in Homer's Iliad. (Book 2.)

4. People love pointless numbered bullshit every once in a while.

5. There's a seasonal news trope of doing a "top n" list for the year at the end of the year. If you time your list-making correctly, you can get into the annual list of lists list, guaranteeing you some small manner of recognition.

Categories as a source of inspiration

If your blogging software supports categories, you should be using it to help you track what you are writing about. Divide up the world into some number of roughly equal sized buckets, and go back to each one periodically to refill it.

It's easy to get too many categories, and equally easy to have too few. The best way to manage categories is not to get too worked up about whether something is precisely in the right place; there's no way to be perfectionist about categorization and also write enough. 

My preference is to create too many categories, and then to use them as memory jogging devices so that I know some large set of things that I might want to write down, even if I don't care to keep each one of them updated frequently. If you know that you are capable of publishing something useful on each of a bunch of subtopics in a weblog, then you never need be completely stumped when it's time to write. Work your way down the list until either you see something you'd like to expand upon, or until you note that something is missing that you have an idea about how to fill it.