The Blogger's Secret: How to be an expert on anything in six months

seven things I want to remember to tell you about blogging

For a presentation today for my new position at annarbor.com, here's a short list of topics to cover, with some pithy quotes and links to other things I've written (or need to write).

Seven things I want to remember to tell you about blogging, mostly things that people have told me along the way.   The first thing (thing 0) is very easy, the Blogger's Secret: write about something twice a day for six months, and you will be an expert on it.  But that's easier said than done.  

1.  Find a voice.  This is the hardest part of writing; you want to sound like a human being, not a press release and not wire service copy and not marketing copy.   Be who you are; things that are standardized are boring, boring, boring.   Less is more, sometimes - if you can put something in 50 words, it might just be enough.  On the other hand, if you can credibly post an incredibly detailed 7000 to 10000 word monster, go for it.

2.  Spelling matters.  Find some way to spell check your posts; there's lots.  Find someone to read your posts after they go up and tell you if something doesn't look right or sound right.  Newspapers are regularly ridiculed for even a single typo; you are not writing for print, but expect the same level of criticism from ex-journalists who love to proofread.  

3.  Brainstorm a bunch of headlines.  One of the best things I've ever done when starting a new blog on a new topic is to spend some time with pen and paper making a long list of titles that sound like they would make good entries, even if I didn't know at the time what I wanted to say or the details that I'd fill in.  As a blogger, you get a special grace period that journalists don't often get to ask questions that you don't know the answers to.

4.  Pointless numbered lists.  If you can't write a big, long, 7000 word all-inclusive essay about something, don't worry.  One very reasonable format that can be overused but is often handy is the numbered list where you bounce around from one idea to another idea without needing to deal with telling a single story.  Readers will pick out the piece that's relevant and note that, and if the list is too long it still works for later reference or search.

5.  Cherish your comments.  People will comment on your posts, if you are lucky.  And even if you are not lucky, you can make some luck for yourself by commenting on your own posts, adding in the pieces that you found later or that changed after the original post.  It always helps to tell people what you wrote, e.g. by sending a link via email or twitter, so that you can capture some of the reaction.

6.  Be interested.  Don't force yourself to write about something that doesn't interest you, just in the interests of filling up space.  If you don't have any new ideas on a topic, a perfectly good perspective on the world is to find some people who do and to quote from them (and link to them) to give you some material to work from.   Done well, even a simple list of interesting things that crossed your path will be worth sharing.

7.  Every blog should have its reader.  You are writing words for people to react to, and it may be easiest if this is new to you to fix one person in your mind who you are writing to or for, and write to them.

More reading, from people who have been through this before:

Missy Caulk on writing for real estate blogs.

Muphry's Law: if you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written.

Cory Doctorow's sage blogging advice for newbies, via Sarah Granger.

On metrics and pointless numbered bullshit.

Much more on comments.

Be an expert by finding the experts

One way to be the expert is to find the experts.

You may not know everything about that new field you just got a job in.  The interview could very well have been bluffing your way through the tough questions making the hiring manager assume that of course you had that experience because of your background.  And yet then you start and need to know what you should know.

If you are fortunate enough to be inside an organization big enough to have its own intranet, and big enough to have to a world of people as co-workers bigger than what fits in a room comfortably, then there is probably some expert inside that group who can answer any plausible question to fit your knowledge gaps.  And if you are fortunate enough to be in an organization small enough where everyone fits in a room, there is bound to be someone outside the confines of that room who knows more than you do on some key aspect of the world that matters to both of you.

Building networks of expertise is key to professional growth and development, and regular, practiced, measured blogging is a part of that effort.  Have a place where you can write intelligently about the work you do without necessarily sharing trade secrets or company inside information.  This might be contributions to a standards body, a professional journal, or a trade association's publication, and increasingly these bodies are going to be online as opposed to completely offline.

Writing for a public that is solely made of interested professionals is a way to attract more professional input.  By sharing your insight and knowledge into some field, you can unearth others who contribute email or comments that are relevant.  Quoting from other experts can cause them to show up unexpectedly as their names appear in clipping services, and at times you'll find them being extremely helpful as you spin up a set of interests. 

If nothing else, your extended writing effort should seek to collect people as you go.  No doubt you'll be doing more in your life than writing, so some colleagues will appear from meetings or conferences, but you might expect that to get the broadest reach you'll want to have an intended audience that might be very small yet still very relevant for any given post you put together.  If you write for an audience of as few as just one other person who you want to read what you just wrote, you can collect over time each of those audiences of one into a body of expertise that can find out anything you might need or want to know on the subject.

Note that the person entering a new field has some leeway and slack that old-timers don't ever get and that people in mid-career have had burnt out of them too often.  As a new entrant into a new world you aren't expected to know the landscape, and the networks that form around you outside of the job are yours to define and defend.  If you bring to the field a perspective that is unusual - a comparative literature perspective on architecture, or an art historian's perspective on medical records standards - the inferences you draw will not be the same as everyone else. 

By spending time finding experts and expertise, reaching out to them and bringing them into your web, you fill some key role - it's a role that bloggers can play perhaps better than anyone else by virtue of the links and quotes that fill their writing.

Establishing an identity as a blogger: differences in writing style and substance

What does it mean to be a blogger, as opposed to being a journalist, a twitterer, a writer, or an author?

Bloggers publish frequently, more frequently at the extreme that any journalist would ever get newspaper ink for, and with more freedom to publish directly without editorial interference.  You can be a blogger at once a month or once every few months if time and circumstances demand, but you can also post twice a day and still not overwhelm the medium.  A challenge is to keep up whatever pace you pick; no editor will demand prose, and no editor will cut your flowery words.

Bloggers can write paragraphs, while twitterers are left to only write sentence fragements.

Bloggers post more first drafts and spend less time in the edit and rewrite and fixup phase.  A blogger can take an event in as it happens, produce some credible real time first draft impressionistic transcript, typoes and all, and move on to the next thing.  There is less room for elaborate wording and craftsmanship and more value on the ability to deal with and capture the now.

Bloggers can be biased, and that's part of their earthy charm.  They don't take up the "fair and balanced" cloak of journalism, and don't often have a funding source and corporate oversight to give them credentials and resources the way journalism traditionally protects its own.  The blogger is more of a loosely affiliated opinion writer, often challenged to their right to be in the meeting.  The better bloggers will acknowledge their biases and conflicts of interest, but you can't even count on that with everyone who self-publishes, in print or online.

Several authors are bloggers on the side, but it's madness to think that you can blog and then cut and paste and edit and put what you have into a book.  The blog as format lends itself to tinier fragments of insight and understanding than book-length chapters, and if you are really writing something that's bookish you'll at the very least have to rethink some structure and edit for style before you go to publication.  Many authors (who?) of non-fiction note that the blog as daily chronicle of their active engagement with their readership inform their work, but you don't expect to see Chapter 6 published as a series of posts.

Bloggers hit the publish button as soon as time is up.

on building links and weaving a network of trust and reference

One of the key roles of the blogger is to build links to other sources that are relevant.  Sometimes that other relevant source is you under a different name; be prepared to lead people to that indirectly.

Leave room in the reader's imagination to ask and then fill in the answer to the question for themselves.  Prompt them as need be to look up the answer where you have hidden it.  Don't rely on spoonfeeding them; instead, give clues and hints that you know will lead to you.  By doing so you can build links and references and ultimately a web of trust where you can see the paths form and guide people toward you as they come in.

If you cause someone to find your other work by virtue of search or browsing, they will believe in its trustworthiness a lot more than if you had simply sent them there directly.  The incomplete image of the right answer, then fulfilled by your existing work in the place they looked for it, speaks volumes about how you stack up with everyone else in the network who has the same interest.  Identify every possible opportunity to link via a preset search term which you control and monitor for quality.

Properly done this lends itself to multiple chains all intersecting - some people's search will lead them one way, others will go a different way, bonus to you if you can make entire loops of self-referential materials that all stand up to individual inquiry.

For best results use strong existing networks as starting and ending points for reference searches.  The wikipedia entry that refers to you is a good target to point people at, especially if it in turn points to something else that points to you.  Smaller wikis can be ideal for reference loops especially if you can identify the narrow niche where people have reason to trust what you say because it is indeed trustworthy.

Avoid the spammy random link.  You are not helped by randomness in this quest; it's better to link with a purpose.  Where you find that there are a lot of people linking through you to somewhere exceptionally good, include that reference in your forward links, just for the kindness of saving someone a step.

Link building is an art of sorts, not a beautiful art but one that requires painstaking attention to detail and that pays care and tending and good analytics and management.  When you build references you increase the value not only of your own work but of the good works of others.  Do reward that directly where you can, and call out opportunities to make what you do an ever better path towards sources that can be trusted.  Links are the warp and weft of the net, weave them with care.

For more see a search for network weaving and follow where it takes you.

Repeat yourself with the seasons

Write about what you wrote about last year at this time. To everything there is a season, and long lived blogs should take advantage of all of the traffic and all of the insightful comments that came about from last year's interesting and timely post.  By posting about morel season when it actually is morel season, you synchronize yourself with a world of other bloggers who come up like mushrooms regularly once a year and then fade back until next season.

That probably needs an edit to remove hyperbole before it goes out, but it's true; my mushroom posts get hits every single year, and every single year I learn a bit more from the search traffic and analytics.  And  it's why I believe in fungal growth, not viral growth, as the biggest blogging strategy if you are in it for the long haul.

Reading your search logs to sharpen your sense of relevance

Here's a couple of short paragraphs on why reading your search logs makes sense to do every once in a while.

If you have been blogging long enough, you'll have content that is relevant every year.  (For me, it tends to be the articles about blueberries and morels).  A careful look at your log files will tell you when the early searches are starting to happen for this season's efforts, so you can start writing the article that will be popular in 60 to 90 days.  People with monthly magazines know this as the "editorial calendar", and by reading log files you can get a heads up on how this cycle behaves within a year or two of effort.

If you already are an expert at some level, reading the referrer logs for your posts will help you figure out where people are linking to and referring to you.  Pay careful note to the traffic from wikis; these will signal places where there is a link to you that you are in a spot to improve by editing it yourself. 

Every once in a while (and this is the most fun) someone will search for something and you will have no idea why they landed on your pages for that interesting query.  Whatever word salad you have on your pages is near the top for that search, and you have an opportunity to learn from that happy accident.  I ended up with a whole interesting series on "Michigan spiders" from that accidental set of searches that turned into an opportunity to find all of the amateur entomologists with blogs in the state.

The level of log analysis you want for this is casual, not detailed - just go in every so often at take a look at a sample of recent traffic.  You don't need to use it for anything more than ideas and tips for new blog topics or a sense for how old blog topics can be improved.

I'm not sure you can be an expert on anything in six months

That's not that it's impossible to spin up quickly on some things, but the people who are really experts have many years of experience.  So perhaps the title of this blog is completely bogus.

On the other hand, blogging twice a day narrowly on some topic gets you 365 posts in six months.  If each of those was the first draft of one page of a book, you'd have a first draft of a book.  (A crappy book.)

It does seem plausible, though, that you could collect a representative sample of experts on any field within six months, and that by persistent blogging you would look like you belonged to that group.  You'd want to play the role that grad students seem to play when they are starting out - there's a big survey article that needs to be written, and a lot of research ground to cover to make sure that you haven't missed anything on the way to the next discovery.  Having six months worth of diligence (and all it would be was diligence, not brilliance) would be a good start.

Before you turn on comments, turn on spam filtering on comments

The saddest sight of all on any weblog is a thoughtful, well written post, with a half dozen spam comments at the bottom of it.  It's sad, and it doesn't need to happen.

Every worthwhile blogging software has tools for filtering spam in comments.  Akismet is a very good tool if you're in the Wordpress world, and people like me who run Typepad have their Typepad Antispam service at their disposal.  If your blogging software does not have a way to automatically reject spam comments, then you're simply running the wrong software.

Even with automated filtering there are bound to be clever bots (or ill-paid individuals) who sneak commercial messages into comments.  As time has gone on these techniques mutate, to the point where at some gray area level you can't tell whether the comment is genuinely useful but commercial, or a real human being positive about a product. 

Your comment review process should look at every single comment that comes in and be prepared to unpublish or edit it if it does not reflect your editorial judgement of what you want to publish on your site.  You can only start to have an editorial process if some system flushes out all of the easy dumb spam.  Turn comment filtering for spam on before your first comment goes live.

Aristotle on repetition

"We are what we repeatedly do."

Malcolm Gladwell on being an expert

Gladwell's latest book asserts that it takes 10000 hours of effort to be an expert. You are not going to get that many hours in yourself over six months, but just perhaps the collected time spent by you and the community you build around the work you see doing, reflected in comments and conversations, will add up to that total.