Blogger's Secret

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.

500 words a day by 10:30 a.m. is part of this blogger's secret

My secret blogging routine is to get up, get the kids to school, get a cup of coffee and start typing. 500 words later, I have something that can go to an editor, with a 10:30 a.m. deadline. It's generally published by 11:30 a.m. That, plus email, takes care of the morning. Things that take time to write or a lot of telephone calls or research or records searches or anything clever get done in the afternoon.

Identifying a workable routine and then sticking to it is part of the secret. If you get one thing written about a subject every morning, then you have the whole rest of the day to write something else on topic. All else is commentary.

I measure my success by my word count (at least 500 words, but not too many) and by my ability to meet a deadline. The ideal story is posted precisely at 10:30 a.m., is completely edited with no need to change or omit words, and has a nice photo or video and a solid first paragraph when it's excerpted to Facebook and a solid title when it goes to Twitter. But mostly, it's done and out of the way.

Be careful what you measure

The conventional wisdom about blogs is that it's all about popularity - more page views, more hits, more subscribers, more more more.   With that comes a manifest obligation to measure all of the inputs and outputs of the system and to construct pages that attract the maximum number of viewers.  The entire population of inexpert "pro bloggers", with their teaser headlines and pointless numbered lists pulled straight from Cosmopolitan, live in this world of ever-declining ad revenues measured in pennies per thousand pages.

If you are an expert, however, you are not after explanations that cater to the masses, and you are not after a style or a structure that generates the maximum number of eyeballs looking at your stuff.  Most of those eyeballs are irrelevant.   Your readers have names, not numbers; you know them; they know you; and you rely on them not as abstract millions of minions but as individuals with whom you are telling and discovering a story.  The Blogger's Secret strategy values one good conversation more than a thousand anonymous page views.

Advertisers on the net who don't live in the pennies-per-thousand world live in the "cost per conversion" world, where success is measured by the number of very qualified people who pass through a very narrow funnel into the next stage of a process.  If you are a real estate blogger, you value the person who has given you a name and phone number and email address and permission to contact you, and a thousand random visitors are not as good as one real person.  If you are an expert in landslides, then a  moment by moment translation of an accounts of an imminent mudslide chronicled on Chinese television is far and above more relevant to your work than a thousand miscellaneous hits from Stumbleupon.

If you build systems to regularly measure things, be aware that you will try to improve them.  Be careful what you measure.  It may be better to not measure anything until you are certain what your goals are, and only then start to keep track of some aspect of them.  There is a quality without a number which resists homogenization and standardization and should be kept in mind if not in a spreadsheet.

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Some questions posed by this to answer in the future.

How do you measure and collect people who know and support what you are doing?

What ways can you identify specific people who will add their expertise to your efforts?

How do you use expert finding systems such as LinkedIn to improve your work?

When you do turn on analytics tools, what should you track and measure, and how do you do it?

Something about "pointless numbered bullshit" (credit Brian Kerr for that phrase) and the "quality without a number" (also Brian Kerr, via Chris Alexander)