Blogger's Secret

Research

I'm currently working on a short term project that requires me to do a bunch of research so that I can get to the point where I understand an industry and a marketplace well enough to present a solution to common challenges. It's a challenging writing task, longer than a blog post (and longer than I'm used to) and one where the end result needs a level of crispness and polish that's beyond the usual.

My favorite tool for research these days is to search the web and bookmark everything that I find that might be useful. I'm using Pinboard for bookmarking, in large part because in addition to supporting public bookmarks for sharing and being social, it also has a well-thought-out set of tools for keeping your private bookmarks private. Clipping my way through the net and storing things away has made it possible to get to a level of confidence that I know something about the topic, enough to tell a condensed story of how it works and to simplify where it's possible to simplify without adding confusion.

The other favorite tool for research is the phone call. I'm surprised in this case just how many people I know who know details about the field, and how easy it is to get them to talk at length about what they know and about issues that aren't typically written down. Whenever you look at a completely new field there will be some substantial gap between what's been committed to publication and what people who are experts know from hallway conversations at conferences, and it's been good to tap into that.

The actual writing is a process of slowly and thoroughly cranking out a shitty first draft of what I think I want to say, printing it out, carving it up and editing on paper, and then going back to sort through what I did to make it better. I'm hoping I can get to a proper second or even third draft before the project is due, and not change my conclusions too much before I'm done.

Form is as important as style in your writing; a structure for news blogging

When you sit down to write, you'll be faced with a set of parallel problems: what to say and how to say it. This post looks to explore a useful structure that you can use to put together a newsworthy piece that's longer than a few paragraphs yet is still readable quickly by someone who is looking to skim the whole article for good ideas or to determine whether they should dig into the whole thing.

There are a lot of words on the Internet, and not enough time to read them all. If you plan to catch someone's attention and hold it, you'll need to not only have an argument that's well thought through and interesting, but also a structure for your words that lets someone quickly get to the gist of what you are trying to accomplish. 

Formal structure does not need to be elaborate - there are no sonnets to be written here. In most cases, the reader won't really know that you have consciously chosen a way to keep your words together, because the resulting document will flow neatly if it's being read from start to finish, and it will still make sense if you skim it quickly. What structure gives you is a place to work from as you plan out your course of action, and a deliberate pace that allows you to repeat key themes at various points along the way to make a point that's well understood.

The structure of your writing extends to the graphics that you attach to it, the categories and themes that you work into it, and any links that are provided to bring the reader to related materials or to send them off to the far reaches of the network for more information. Each of these elements serve to either draw the reader in for more detail or to invite them to explore further, and it's worthwhile to be deliberate in how your writing is put together to support that.

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The format which I love to use for newsy writing starts with a strong lead paragraph, summarizing all of the conclusions that are supported by the words that follow. A reader who only sees the very top of the page or a few words from a Facebook summary needs to have a strong hook to bring them into the story, and if you bury that lead paragraph deep in the text they will never get to it. It's worthwhile to go back to the top of your post when you're done with it and re-edit those first few words until they are descriptive and compelling enough to draw you back in for the whole thing.

If you're blogging about a news event, you should always look for multiple sources to quote from in order to bring the story forward and not simply copy from something already written. The blogger's secret is to obtain the right mix of original work, commentary, and clippings from other sources that help round out the story, gather background materials that the original author of the news story didn't find time to write, or to dig deeper into public records that help explain at a level of technical detail more that's going on than what's typically explained by public relations people to news reporters. As a rule of thumb, when you take from one person it's stealing, but when you incorporate works from enough people it's research.

Finally, it's important to not leave the story without a conclusion. There's nothing more disconcerting than following what looks like a line of reasoning expressed through selective editing of news clips, but no tidy paragraph at the bottom wrapping up any loose ends and giving some direction for the reader to grasp onto. Imagine the reader looking at the very top of the page and the very bottom of the page to see what's in the middle, and use your conclusion to draw together any loose threads and summarize.

One of the problems with blogging as a news structure is that there's a temptation to simply cut and paste from someone's hard work and pass it off as your own under the color of "aggregation". Aggregation is just an aggrivation to anyone who has spent hard work writing something just to find it taken out from under them and reused. By insisting on multiple quotations for any story that you piece together, you make certain that you're moving the story forward and not simply repeating someone else's words.

An advantage to this structure of lead paragraph, quotes with commentary, and conclusion is that it's infinitely extensible to handle the rapid fire demands of breaking news as well as the slow accretion of deep background on a complicated story. To add to the piece, all you need to do is slide in a new paragraph at an appropriate part of the narrative in the middle, and then update the introduction and conclusions as needed.

When news is traveling at breakneck speed, bloggers and news organizations alike switch to a "live blog" format, where the new news is at the top of the page and the quotes from each source are limited to just a few words. This structure still depends on a compelling lead paragraph, explaining why you are going to all this trouble; the conclusions that you bring together out of the mass of rapid fire updates are welcomed for readers just catching up.

Remember that not all of the information that you are collecting needs to be blocks of words. One very effective method of storytelling I like to use is to collect maps of a situation, as in the post I put together for tsunami maps for the March 2011 Honshu earthquake. This is a pretty good example of the style described here, with a brief summary at the top and then a collection from more than a dozen sources to follow. Similarly, this piece on the Peanut Corporation of America plant in an old sausage factory that was associated with peanut recalls in 2009 worked well to explain some of the back story behind that event, weaving together old newspaper clippings to tell a piece of the story that the wire services were not reporting.

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The structure of a lead paragraph, followed by a series of brief quotations with commentary and ending with a concluding paragraph, fits a news-telling blog quite well. It allows for rapid updates when news is moving quickly, and it also accomodates the deep digging you need when an interesting story is incomplete. Make sure that your conclusion at the end is snappy, since if the post is long enough to be worth reading you can convey that with a concise summary.

Using Google search to remember what you wrote

Once you have been at the writing process for a while, you'll have collected more words than you remember in detail. From time to time it's helpful to go back to them. Here's a few suggestions for Google search queries that will unearth your old gems.

1. If your name or nickname is sufficiently distinctive, and if you've been using it routinely to sign your work, then you can simply search for your name plus search terms to get what you want.  For instance

vielmetti foia

unearths a sample of writings I've done on the Freedom of Inforamtion Act. Now, as it turns out, this is not a perfect search because I have a cousin Bruce Vielmetti who writes for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and will from time to time come up with a related article from him.

2. To reduce your search to a single web site which you've been writing for, search as follows

site:vielmetti.typepad.com blueberries

This will return all of the pages on a single site related to the search terms in question.

3. Most people have forgotted about it, but Google has a special search engine for weblogs, Google Blog Search. If you look for your own stuff here using the similar techniques as above, you'll also find people who have quoted you in their blogs, or even the occasional case of a rogue site that has scraped all of your words and put them on their site.

It's important to be able to retrieve your old words once you have flung them out into the void. You may want to refer back to when you had a really good idea, or there may be something that was published once that was not your best work that you want to find again and repair or remove. Make sure you have some grasp of the powerful tools at hand for remembering what you once knew enough about to write down.

My favorite Google Analytics reports

Once you've accumulated some posts, you'll be wondering who is reading them and how they found them. Here are some of my favorite ways of using Google Analytics to slice up details.

1. Home > Real time > Overview. Get a picture of what's going on right now using Google's relatively new "real time" reporting. This snapshot is from Arborwiki, showing 11 active visitors, 3 of which are looking at the popular "Birthday Deals" page.

2. Content > Site Content > All Pages. This example, again from Arborwiki, shows the top viewed pages over a user specified interval. If you've been at your blogging for a while, you may be surprised which old posts turn up on the top of the list.

3. Traffic sources > Search Engine Optimization > Queries. This report shows which search terms are being used to reach your site, and how frequently someone clicks through for the terms presented. It requires that Webmaster Tools be configured. Data from the Vacuum weblog; note the dramatic difference in click through rates, ranging from 0.04% to 9.00%, for the top query terms.

4. Content > Site Search > Search Terms. If you've properly configured your blog's on-site search engine to report details, you'll get a list of terms that people are looking for more information about. Again this data is from Arborwiki. I've used the "compare to site average" bar to look at search exits, and one page pops out from this: "Apartments" behaves much worse than the rest of the site. That's worth exploring.

Google Analytics has a near-infinite number of reports that could be constructed, and when combined with the filters in the system you can zero in on a lot of detail. That's unlikely to be as useful at the start at getting some overview of what's going on overall on your site.

The long, slow business of accumulating content

One of the weblogs that I run, Vacuum, has been going for more than 10 years. The last 8 years or so of it are online on Typepad. That's a lot of typing, more than 2000 posts in all.

When I look at the statistics for that weblog, there are a few things that jump out at me. One is simple: a very small handful of posts from the past, where I spent a lot of work to put something together, generate a lot of traffic. In particular, the 50 state power outage maps posting gets search traffic (and links from utility company intranets) and lights up when the lights go dark.

I could not have promised you when I started writing that this would have been the one bit of work that appeals to the world more than anything else I've done to date. It didn't start out as an ambitious plan; rather, it was the end result of watching storms wreck utility infrastructure and wondering how on earth to find a power outage map for some arbitrary city without knowing in advance what utility company serviced that area. The edits that I have accumulated over time - and am still likely to do when there's widespread severe storms or electrical disruptions - have slowly made the piece noteworthy, much more noteworthy than the first draft.

If you are writing and one of your targets is search traffic, be prepared to edit and go back to good posts that get a lot of traffic and use the search keywords that do find the page to make the page better. This is particularly the case if you are writing something that's a big long list. You can notice after the fact that you missed something, and update the list to reflect the new information.

Of course, you don't always have to chase search engine traffic, and optimizing your writing for humans is always better than playing to fickle search algoriths. It may take a while for one piece from the word-hoard you are accumulating to stick out as worthy of further attention and love. Once something sticks out as noteworthy, find the time to polish it up and keep improving it.

Writing on a short deadline: get a good lead paragraph

Sometimes you will find yourself with only a few minutes to write something up. Here's a tip: write only one paragraph, make it sing, and publish that. The first paragraph should sum up everything that the whole article will hold, and a reader who is pressed for time will be able to read just that and move on. The details, the embellishments, and all of the hard work of getting all of the detail right in subsequent paragraphs can come later; if you have a solid lead paragraph, it sets the stage for the whole thing.

The practice of putting all of the good stuff in the lead comes from wire service copy, where breaking news will be transmitted in bursts as the story unfolds. If you subscribe directly to a wire service, you might get more than a dozen versions of the same story - first just the headline, then the first full sentence, then the first paragraph, and subsequently a series of additional versions that arrive apparently as quickly as the editor hits "save and send".

There's always more to write - you can always run another search, quote from another source, and make another phone call. The short deadline can extend to a longer one when there's time to flesh out the story with details. No matter - it's never good to "bury the lede", as newsroom editors will say, where the whole point of the story is half way down the page.

Building a consistent voice by repeated practice

The voice that you use when writing for your weblog is something that comes of practice. The work that you do keeps you at your writing and reviews matters of your expertise.

A practice of repeatedly addressing a question, whether it be something that you are personally interested in or a professional responsibility, has the net result of not only showing what you are habitually comfortable writing about but also gives people a sense for what sort of words you use and the tone that you take when you approach the questions that come up.

Your writing voice can be elaborate, with flowery and fiery words sprinkled throughout. If that's what you sound like, and if you can keep up this tone on a sustained level, more power to you. Whatever voice that comes out when you start to write can be improved by your own editing to make the writing better. My biggest recommendation is really a simplest one - the consistent habit of writing a lot will give you a chance to make the process that much easier and will keep your finger muscles going in sync with your thinking muscles to strengthen your writing voice.

Human being optimization, not search engine optimization

The history of writing weblogs includes a time when the search engines absolutely loved content provided in blog format, far more than than those words ever deserved to be considered authoritative or relevant for the topic at hand. A scrap of tech news would appear, and then a legion of tech bloggers would each rewrite that morsel into their own words and link among themselves with bits of quickly formed commentary filling out the bulk. The practice of aggregation - lifting most of someone else's work and publishing it under your name, poorly credited - only added to the excitement.

Search engines change over time, and my sense is that blogs don't get anywhere near the primary attraction from search than they once did. If you are working on building up a body of work, it's better to optimize your writing for human beings than it is to write strictly for search. While you are still going to use tools that make it straightforward for search engines to find you, it's much more likely that you'll get loyal readership from people who will find what you are writing through networks of people.

My experience with looking at the analytics of traffic coming from search on several blogs that I run is that people who appear from search rarely stick around very long and often don't come back. If you want to get regular readership, write for the readers, not for the search engines.

Guest bloggers, both real and fake

I received the most curious three email messages in quick succession, from three different "people". I use the term advisedly because the messages were all the same. Each on started "An idea for a blog post", and continued on with language like this:

I came across your blog post http://vielmetti.typepad.com/vacuum/2007/05/ann_arbor_spark.html while conducting research for a resource about the state of web-based graduate programs. I've found through my research that one of the biggest topics students are interested in is how to best prepare for graduate school. For example, how important are entrance exam scores compared to professor recommendations?

Not that I don't like attention, but this is a post that I wrote 5 years ago that has nothing to do with graduate school! So the request to publish a "guest post" on my blog smells like spam, especially since it came in a batch with two other identically structured mails sent in the wee hours of the morning.

There are lots of opportunities to get your writing published on other people's weblogs, and you should be receptive to the "guest post" every once in a while on your own blog just to liven things up. You'll play the role of editor, and it'll be up to you to make your guest's writing just a little bit better. But beware of the fake guest, a curious problem to have.

Write with the seasons - Halloween edition

As of this writing, there are a few weeks until the beginning of school. Stores are already beginning to carry Halloween candy, and my friends who work on paid search campaigns for the holidays are measuring the days until Christmas.

If you're writing things that are at all popular, it's worthwhile when you're preparing in advance for what to say to have enough of a sense for the future that you can write about it well before it happens. The ability to conjure up a late October chilly evening while it's still August hot is a technique that can be practiced. This is especially true if your blog is old enough to have gone through a year or two, and if you have some kind of analytical tool that can tell you what time of year people start finding your old writing from last year about a subject for this year.

This graph from Google Trends shows search traffic for Halloween, showing it starting to grow in mid August through mid October, peaking in mid October, and then zeroing out again November 1 as we start to get ready for the next season. If you're writing about Halloween anything, this tells you that you can't get started at the very end of the season - and, if anything, if you wanted to start a Halloween weblog, you'd start it at the beginning of August for the season so that you'd have a good three month's worth of content ready for the peak time.

Every seasonal topic has a yearly ebb and flow, and if you're writing to that topic you can tell in advance when you need to pay attention. Google Trends will tell you that poison ivy's peak season is just before blueberry season, and that lots of people look for information about wine between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day. And I can tell you from past experience in writing about Hallloween that people really want to know trick or treating hours as soon as they can find them, which might be a few weeks before the big night.