Blogger's Secret

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.

Dealing with comments and comment spam

The first weblogs did not have comments. You wrote something in HTML, put a date on it, and saved it to your server. If someone wanted to give you feedback, they emailed you or wrote on their own weblog. It was a long time ago in net years, and the lack of comments forced everyone who wanted to participate in blogs to run their own blog.

As blogging software got more complicated, it started to be possible to host comments on your own site. People were funny, or clever, or nice, or they were spammers. The spammers are the worst, worse even than people who don't agree with you.

If you have to protect against anything in thinking about how you are going to blog, it's that you want to make sure that comments that are spam don't stay on your site very long if at all. This you can do either by eternal vigilance to delete spam as it comes in, good filters to prevent it from being posted, or moderation of comments before they actually get published on the site.

I'm a big fan of pre-moderation of comments. That lets you be selective about what you publish, and it slows down the spammer to the point where they get frustrated and move on.

In the modern world of 2012 comments on the weblog are less important than they ever were. A lot of the feedback you might get is going to come from the various social media sites that you post to, whether it be letting your friends know of a new post on Facebook, or sending a quick headline off to Twitter. That's not something that lives on your blog, but it is commentary, and you should embrace it and treat it with loving care as though it had been shared directly on your site.

Blogging vs social media: yes, and!

If you are writing blog-sized posts regularly, there will be a natural temptation to use other media to also share the same messages and to collect similar people who share your interests. Depending on your world, these people might be on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Pinterest, or heaven knows what other social network is out there in the world today or a year from today. You'll have to make some decisions about how and where to share your content across systems, and how much of a blog post gets picked out to share to the right place.

The tremendous advantage of writing for your weblog first and then adding your link to some (or many) social media streams is that you retain control over your writing. It's hard to find an old Facebook post, no matter how popular it was at the time, but it's relatively easy to go back through most blog archives and track down what you did before. You can rewrite it, update it, edit it, or take it off line - none of which are easy when you are publishing first on some other platform.

That doesn't mean you should ignore any network where there are people who might be friends or fans of your work. The key is to find the attractive piece of your writing and use that as the lead that draws people directly to your site. In Twitter it's a compelling headline; on Facebook, it's probably a good picture. In any case, keep the original copy of your writing on your blog, and circulate the link to it to bring people to read it.

Most of my blogging writing runs from 300 to 500 words long. That's way too long for Twitter, and stretching the attention span of a Facebook reader who's not used to having a wall of text in their feed full of faces and pictures. Depending on the rest of your design, you'll need to think carefully about which part of any given blog post that you share on some other system and which part of it you have to go to the blog to read. Write a lead paragraph which can be taken out and dropped somewhere else to summarize your message, and a lead sentence that sums it all up in a few words.

Don't worry how many people will read this post

If you're writing regularly, you'll find yourself writing things that aren't earth-shattering. These posts won't be passed around virally from one person to another, and they might not even get your regular readers to look at them very closely. Yet you persist, in part because you've set yourself some goals, and in part because you're trying to be consistent in getting something publishable out there just so that there isn't a blank space in the stream.

Popularity is not the only measure of a weblog. You can be writing for a very narrow audience, that one person who you want to make an impression on this time, and if no one else reads what you have to say that's all OK.

I'm thinking of some of the writing I've done for my FOIA Coordinator weblog, which has a fraction of the readership of my old FOIA Friday column at AnnArbor.com. My goal for that blog is to produce something every single Friday, even if it's short, so that there's something to say when the weekly #FOIAchat session happens on Twitter. Some of the most fascinating news I run into is bitter battles about hair-splittingly small differences between what how expects their government to be run and how it's actually run. The accumulation of small details is the goal, so that there's a rich set of examples to search back through when it's time to make a point.

 

Planning ahead as far as you can: brainstorm story ideas

No matter what pace you try to keep up with your writing efforts, there will be times when you will be dry. Nothing will come to mind and it will be difficult to get words on the page, let alone publishable words.

One tactic I've used with great success to stave off these dry spells is to use a paper notebook to brainstorm ideas for things I wish I had already written. Practicing writing solid titles, and maybe a solid lead paragraph if you know the gist of what you are trying to say, can be a way to exercise your thinking on paper. You don't have to commit to finishing each and every post that you start on paper, and some of them will turn out to be better left unsaid.

Why paper instead of computers for this brainstorming session? For me, it's in part because I have a long history of using paper as part of my thinking routine. For you, I can only suggest that it exercises different muscles than keyboard muscles and may give you some kind of a rest when your fingers are weary.

Edit someone else's work at a coworking session

From microcoworking.com:

microCoworking is independent workers and freelancers working side by side and collaborating in a coffee shop instead of a formal coworking space. It’s a great way to try coworking without making a long-term commitment.

One of the ways to get another pair of eyes on your work is to go to a coworking session at your favorite coffee shop. Recruit some friends who are also working on projects that need an editor's eye, and show them your work. The simplest way to get edits done is to sit down at someone else's laptop, and they sit down at your laptop, and you both go through the texts until you're convinced that the work has been improved by you sitting there.

Patti Smith and I sat down upstairs at Zingerman's Next Door for a microcoworking session recently. She edited a resume, and I edited her next beer column. We both used a light touch on the keyboard so as not to make drastic changes, but the final work was better in both cases and it was much easier to look at someone else's words than to see my own over and over again.

Bringing a project to an end (no, not this project, not yet)

There's quite a few successful blogging projects that have reached the end of their run. Hopefully, you'll just be getting started now - but if you do decide to finish things up and leave a partly done blog online, here's some ways that you might do that with grace and ease.

One reasonable approach, especially if things go completely awry on the first try, is to unpublish the entire weblog. This is harder to do if you have people who have made links to it or a lot of comments that are there, but if a project you're doing gets a start and no traction you can back out if your software supports it. I did this for my brief "Note to Self" weblog, which really didn't belong as a published work in the first place. (Really. What was I thinking?)

A second plan is to write a last post, or a featured post, that describes what happened to the project and how it is that it's on hiatus. You may use this to direct people to the next thing you're working on, or just leave people to review the archives. This is much preferable to just leaving someone hanging in mid-thought with a post that promises more soon, a soon that never comes.

A nice example of the latter is on my friend Kate's "Four Obsessions" weblog. She writes this nice last post for now:

This blog has gone dormant for the time being. Who knows, maybe it'll wake up some day. Or maybe it'll pretend to be a princess and sleep for 100 years...knowing our household allergy to princesses it probably won't be the latter. But for now it's going to enjoy its snooze.

If you really, really miss me (ha!) I'm still updating the Picky Eater Chronicles (as I make progress which, I tell you, is sloooooow) and my books read list (since I have no memory, I have to use it pretty frequently to check and see if I've already read a book.)

This Blogger's Secret weblog was in a similar dormant state for a long time; I had started it in 2008, and posted a few times in 2010, but mostly it was a project defined but just waiting to get the energy to happen. The stored energy in your dormant blog can be a springboard at a later time to restart, or it can be a nice bit of closure to a project well done.

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Wordpress uses the terminology "Make this post sticky" to put it on the top of your layout. Typepad says "Feature this post". I don't see a one-step way to do this in Blogger, but you can simply make the most recent post be your last.

Thanks and credits for a first week's worth of work

I've had the good fortune to get positive reactions from a number of people for the restart of the Blogger's Secret weblog. Here's a list, sure to be incomplete, of people who've provided encouragement and ideas at the very start. I'll put it in alphabetical order by first name just to keep it simple.

• Alan Benard
• Anna Francis F S
• Bill Seitz
• Chris Lovie-Tyler
• Cory Knabel
• Elise Ann Ralph
• John Weise
• Jorie O'Brien
• Kathy Peters
• Kim Kachadoorian
• Laura Fisher
• Linda Diane Feldt
• Lucy Ann Lance
• Mark O'Brien
• Patti Smith
• Peggy Page
• Richard Steinnon
• Ronald Ahrens
• Stefanie Murray
• Terry Williams
• Vickie Elmer

Apologies to anyone I missed!

Do your categories still make sense?

Categories that were designed with the best of intentions at the beginning of a project can go horribly askew. Do yours still make sense for what you are doing? You should be able to figure this out after the first month or so of continuous effort, and go back and re-edit to put things where they belong.

Take the approach that each category needs to be thorough enough to capture everything that you have written on a broad topic, but not so comprehensive that every narrow topic gets its own category.

How many categories do you need? As a rule of thumb, plan to have at least one post per month for each category that is in season. A cooking weblog with a "Juneberries" category can be excused to only have three annual posts - one planning the season, one describing what happened, and one in January remarking on eating something preserved for the year; but you might instead consolidate it with your "Blueberries" category to make a "Berries" category that has more heft, and a longer season, and more reason to write every month.

If everything you write fits into only one category, maybe it's time to start a new blog that focuses on that topic.  That's what I did when a few posts about library systems turned into my Superpatron weblog, which in time led to some travel and speaking engagements. Some of the topics that I brought up that would never have attracted any attention as part of my general weblog, but were consistently on-target for a specific audience that appreciated the attention and the thoughfulness focused on a single topic. When you set boundaries, you get the freedom to explore within those boundaries and ignore what's out of scope.

Book cover: George Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind.

Thanks to Chris Lovie-Tyler for the discussion of boundary-setting.

Who are you? Writing yourself into existence

When you're producing a steady stream of writing, people who know you only via the networks will start to think of you first by what you write. This is an opportunity for you to be someone who you want to be rather than looking back on things that you used to be.

The confident writer who is blogging without an editor has to exercise their own editorial judgment about what to cover, how to approach it, and how many words to devote to that subject. When everything is working as it should be, your personal voice will come through. Practicing that voice regularly is part of the Blogger's Secret approach - your ten writing assignments a week don't all have to be done at once, but they do have to come out as some organic whole that gives someone who is following along a well-rounded perspective on who you are and what you are interested in.

I am interested in writing, mostly writing to a specfic deadline, and mostly writing short pieces rather than long ones. I'm tired of writing for search engines, where most of the people who read what I wrote don't know me; one of the unstated goals of this project is to accumulate regular readers and not just transient ones. Mostly I'm looking to explore things I've learned from over a decade of blogging routinely, and a way to capture notes to myself in a format that looks like confident suggestions to friends rather than hoary pronounciations of truth from on high.

So who are you, and what do you do? I'm a blogger, and I publish Blogger's Secret, a twice daily weblog dedicated to the idea that you can be an expert on anything in six months by blogging about it twice a day. I'll be collecting not only my own recommendations on how to pull of this kind of pace of writing but also examples from other frequent bloggers on how they structure their days to make this happen.