Blogger's Secret

Write ahead when you are on a roll

Sometimes it's very easy to write, and the words just flow out. (Coffee helps for me, but you may have your own particular writing tools and environment that are particularly productive). It's important to capture these times as best you can.

Schedule work to post in the future. With good blogging software, you can capture a whole set of individual pieces of writing as separate posts, and then use the software's scheduling system to actually have them go to the public in the near future. If your Sunday night writing session is amazingly productive, instead of wasting all of those words on people the same night, you spread them out so that they are ready over the next few days.

Write things down that aren't ready to go. Writing ahead helps if you know that you need some editing help before the words are fully baked. Type things in as fast as the keys will help you out to get things down, and then save as a draft so that you can do back and fix up things that were only roughed in.

If you have enough of a buffer of half-done pieces queued up, you can always be ready to publish something at a moment's notice, hopeful some of it which actually has some thought to it. That's much harder if you are also trying to be timely or relevant, but hopefully some part of your world is predictable enough that you can work ahead and still be eventually just in time.

Scheduling and timing

Death of the net predicted, film at 11.

With modern blogging tools, your twice daily posts can be planned to happen at particular times of day. Though the Internet dissolves some of the boundaries of space and time, chances are that you also want to attract a set of particular people at some particular time with some particular message.

Determine what times of day you are likely to get the best response from your postings.  If you are writing about materials local to a particular place, you'll want to be aware of time zones there, so that you know consciously that you are writing for a mid-day work audience or an evening at-home audience.  If you are writing around a real-world set of events like sports or entertainment, there are deadlines that reflect when people will start to be interested in something and when your opinion is old news.  

You can also attract an audience a regularly scheduled chat session.  A group gathers on Twitter to do the #FOIAchat discussion about the Freedom of Information Act every Friday, which I synchronize with writing a FOIA Friday column at AnnArbor.com.  One day a week for one hour, what I write about is top of the page for some narrow set of people, and so that slice of the schedule is aimed at that time.

How many weblogs? Topical vs. personal

When I got started blogging, it wasn't clear how many blogs one person could manage to maintain.  I ended up with one main one (Vacuum) and a bunch of tiny little ones on specific subjects that got abandoned when my interest waned.

At one point one of those side interests (libraries from a patron's point of view) got enough traffic and specific readership that I forked a series of posts into their own blog (Superpatron), which now has 4x the subscriber reach of Vacuum but really not much more actual readership traffic.  This didn't start from scratch - there was already a bunch of writing and a bunch of readers to go with it.

One big weblog with everything in it, or lots of little narrow ones?  It depends on what you are trying to do.  If the blog is an outlet for you to get really good at self-expression and writing and capturing what's going on in your surroundings, then by all means do a blog where everything you write is relevant.  That's a very standard format with lots of people doing it and it often provides a personal channel into a life that you can take good advantage of.

But, if you're going to be an expert on a topic - pick a topic, narrow it down, and stay on message for that topic for as long as you can.  If someone is going to refer to a list of experts in an area, they have a lot easier time of linking to you if you are always saying something that's relevant to that one narrowly defined point of view, and where everything else is either not said or said somewhere else.

You might have to start out broad and then fork off a narrower specialty when you think you have enough material and good enough writing habits to go into more depth, or when the regular readers of your broad focus blog would be bored by dozens of postings on a single topic.

Some great examples of each, for contrast:

Expert, on topic, single focus:

Calendar Swamp - Scott Mace on the sad state of electronic calendars
Dave's Landslide Blog - Dr. David Petley covers the worldwide landslide research community
Urban Chickens - All news about raising chickens in the city, all the time

Hard to classify, all topics are relevant, personal narrative

Four Obsessions - Kate's blog on "reading, writing, cooking and crafting"
Hruminations - "Random comments from John I. Hritz"
Robot Wisdom - Jorn Barger's prototypical link blog

One comment I had on Vacuum from a first time reader was "this looks like part of a project, but I don't know what the project is".  If you are going to be an expert (or aspire at least to collect expertise in some field) then make yourself easy to classify.

Plan ahead - share what you're planning to post before you send it out

Part of my Blogger's Secret strategy involves having a bunch of work queued up half finished scheduled to go out at certain times, so that the system pushes something out the door for you and you know what you're going to say.

To help this out, start talking about what you've already worked on before it goes out to the net.  If you're working on a story that takes a while to tell, make it the topic of conversations, and let people know that there will be more to read about when you're done with it.

If you work this right you can get help in writing things (share a draft, and let people comment), and help in telling the world what you're up to (inspire related conversation and writing).  At the very minimum, you have some early reaction to what you have been thinking about that can get incorporated into what you're working on.

(This was inspired by a conversation with Wayne Baker, who told me about his work with Mark Newman on election 2008 cartograms at the grocery store on Sunday morning, before it went out to his weblog on Monday morning - that conversation in the aisle had me ready and looking forward to reading it.)

The Blogger's Calendar: plan ahead for seasonal material

The Blogger's Calendar is a systematic approach to writing that generates ideas and reference material appropriate for the season and relevant to what people are interested in now.  It looks ahead just a little bit in the future to anticipate what the next piece of work that you can put into writing should be and gives you plenty of time to add to and enhance popular posts so that when everyone on the net is looking for the same thing you are right there to answer the question.

The Blogger's Calendar looks to turn repeated activity into predictable activity, and allows the writer to bank ahead of time some materials as they are discovered to that there is always something relevant to say.

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As an example, you're doing a local food blog, and you know that you want to write about blueberry season when it happens.  Prepare some things ahead of time so that you're ready when it comes.

A reasonable schedule for this effort starts to anticipate the season, so that when search traffic starts to arrive what you have written is already there.

4 weeks ahead: post the list of local blueberry farms
3 weeks ahead: look at local ag extension for crop predictions
2 weeks ahead: interview a farmer, get some pictures
1 week ahead: do a recipe roundup from the net
opening week: post daily; recipes, reviews of berry picking, prices, availability
weekly until end of season: recipes, how to preserve or put food by, more pictures

That's easily a dozen blueberry related articles, and you can get started in the off season so that when it's time to post these they are already mostly done.   Repeat across a dozen crops and you have a season's worth of local food blogging.