Last week I listened to David Peralty give feedback to Jeff Chandler about his WordPress Weekly and WPTavern.com projects (see episode 75). David praised the community and visibility that Jeff had created through his weekly podcast and forum, in addition to his WPTavern.com site, but noted that he was aware Jeff hadn’t reached the monetization goals he hoped to achieve.

In other words, Jeff has done a tremendous job at creating a community and audience for his site and podcast, but he hasn’t found a way to make real money off his activities. If you monetize your online activities, you can then justify and devote more time to the activities to establish and grow your community.

But if you can’t make any money, it’s hard to justify spending so much time online. And if you can’t spend the necessary time online to build your community, your site or podcast won’t take off.

Although David was critiquing Jeff, I felt like he could have been equally speaking to me. I listened carefully, waiting for the key ingredient Jeff was missing. What was he not doing? What was he not seeing? How does one move from a hobby site/podcast that has a growing enthusiasm to one that makes enough money to sustain you full time?
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The other week, while I was at the WebWorks Roundup conference in Texas, where I was one of the featured industry speakers, I was sitting next to Anne Gentle during one of the panel sessions, and I asked her about branding. It seems like once you become branded through your blog, it’s hard to reinvent yourself.
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The seventh and final sin in my ongoing Seven Deadly Sins of Blogging series is being inattentive. (Other sins include being fake, irrelevant boring, unreadable, irresponsible, and unfindable.) One appealing aspect of blogs over print media is the ability to comment and respond to comments. It’s the appeal of a conversation instead a lecture.

Make Commenting Easy

In the Blog Herald, Valorie Maltoni says,

In this age of conversational marketing, responding to comments helps you show your readers that you are listening and participating. That’s important especially if you are in the service business. The action of referring to the content readers share with you and addressing any further questions will set you apart. It shows your commitment.

By having open comments and responding to those comments, you demonstrate that you’re listening to your readers. To facilitate the conversation, make it easy for readers to comment. Don’t require login or difficult captchas if you can avoid it. (One reason I dislike Blogger is that commenting can be tedious, requiring you to enter Google credentials and identify difficult captcha letters.)

In addition to making commenting easy, provide users with a Subscribe to Comments option so they can be notified when you respond to their comment.

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The sixth sin in my ongoing series on the Seven Deadly Sins of Blogging is being unfindable. (The other sins include being fake, irrelevant, boring, unreadable, irresponsible, and inattentive). Admittedly, lack of findability seems more a sin of omission than commission. Being unfindable seems like a sin bloggers commit against themselves.

I’ve written more than 1,000 posts on my blog, but usually the posts on my home page are the only posts people read. In this sense, blogs are like the news. A newspaper that’s several days old lines bird cages. Reading blog archives is like reading yesterday’s news — there’s no appeal.

And yet, many times archive posts have more substance that news commentary. The posts incorporate research and get into issues in depth. They don’t deserve to go into the garbage can once they slide off the home page. Read the rest of this entry »

Being irresponsible is the fifth sin in my ongoing series on the Seven Deadly Sins of Blogging (other sins include being fake, irrelevant, boring, unreadable, unfindable, and inattentive). Blogging responsibly includes awareness of proper disclosure, approvals, and representation, as well as avoiding sensationalism in the posts you write.

Disclosure

Recently the FTC updated the rules about proper disclosure when receiving compensation for promoting a product or service in a blog post. Fines for failure to properly disclose compensation could be up to $11,000. The FTC states:

While decisions will be reached on a case-by-case basis, the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.

The need to disclose material compensation seems easy enough, right? Readers feel cheated when proper disclosures aren’t given. Still, it can be hard to do. Read the rest of this entry »

Being boring is sin #3 in my list of the seven deadly sins (other sins include being fake, irrelevant, unreadable, irresponsible, unfindable, and inattentive). Perhaps a more tactful way of saying something is boring is to say the writer neglects to “keep the audience’s attention.” I’m always hearing about the short attention spans of online audiences, that readers only skim your content and spend a minute per page. Because of this short attention span, you’re encouraged to keep your posts short.

I somewhat disagree. When readers complain that writing is too long, what they’re really saying is that they’re getting bored. The length isn’t so much the problem as the content. They want to click elsewhere because they’re bored. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the second post in my 7 Deadly Sins of Blogging series. My version of the seven deadly sins of blogging are as follows: being fake, irrelevant, boring, unreadable, irresponsible, unfindable, and inattentive.

A few years ago, I was talking with a guy named Clyde about blogging. He wasn’t sure what topic he wanted to write about, and I encouraged him to pick a topic he was passionate about and stick with that focus. Clyde was interested in two things: music and tech comm. So he actually started two blogs, one for each topic. He also planned to start a podcast and so ordered a podcasting kit. Read the rest of this entry »

As you know, the sessions at the STC Summit in Atlanta last year were recorded. My blogging presentation, Introduction to Blogging: A New Technical Communicator Role, is the only recorded session you can listen to for free.  It’s labeled as the “Featured session – free of charge.”

I didn’t even realize this until someone tweeted it this afternoon. I figure it means one of two things — either my presentation was so lame they couldn’t fathom actually charging for it. Or it was so cool they decided to use it to try to get people to buy the entire recorded Summit package. Either way, it’s a good hour and a half discussion of blogging. I talk about how “writing a product blog can help you connect and communicate with your users while simultaneously helping them move up to a more advanced level of product knowledge.” Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve decided to write a series of posts about what I consider to be the Seven Deadly Sins of Blogging (because sins always seem more interesting than virtues). Basically, I’m preparing for some presentations on blogging, and I’m hoping to get some scrutiny and feedback on these ideas. I plan to cover each one of the sins in depth with separate posts over the course of the next two weeks. My version of the seven deadly sins of blogging are as follows: being fake, irrelevant, boring, unreadable, irresponsible, unfindable, and inattentive.

Fake Hurts the Currency of the Blogosphere

If there’s one advantage blogs have over other media, such as television, magazines, and even newspapers, it’s trust, because bloggers aren’t supposed to be fake. Bloggers are usually independent voices, without financial motives or agendas.  The blogger is somewhat of a free-roaming analyst, at liberty to write about any topic, from any perspective, without any obligation to corporate requirements. With such freedom, the independent blogger automatically has a certain degree of reader trust.

This sense of trust is key to the blog’s appeal. In a guest post on Problogger, Tony Hung says trust is “the only real currency in the blogosophere.” Hung explains,

At the end of the day, trust is the only real currency in the blogosphere, and people who read blogs have the expectation that they’re getting at the truth — in whatever form the truth is to them. And because there is the presumption of truth, readers will often react in an intense fashion to being manipulated, hoodwinked, and otherwise bamboozled.

In other words, the strong card that bloggers hold is a sense of trust with readers, which comes from their display of candid honesty. Readers react strongly when they find out a blogger is bamboozling them. For example, a few years ago, Edelman PR created a blog for Wal-Mart called Wal-Marting Across America that consisted of a couple supposedly traveling across America in an RV checking out all the Wal-Marts along the way and writing about their experiences. When someone discovered that Wal-Mart was paying their expenses and sponsoring the trip, readers were furious because the blog was fake. Read the rest of this entry »

Although many people put blogs and wikis in the same social media category, blogs and wikis are actually quite different. Blogs are individually authored mini-magazines or journals where one author (or sometimes a small authoring group) crank out article after article (or entry after entry) usually with a common theme. After each article is published, the article is considered done and the author moves on to newer pastures, always hunting for the next story, formulating the next insight, thinking about the next post. Readers can comment and subscribe by RSS.

Wikis, on the other hand, are a platform for groups to collaborate on an information project, such as documentation, technical specs, or other reference material (e.g., Wikipedia). One author isn’t just cranking out all the information. Multiple authors are contributing chunks and pieces, linking from one page to another, making edits on each other’s content, diving deeper where necessary, and moving toward the idea of a more complete information product. Wikis are rarely ever done. They are successful only as much as they tap into the collective intelligence of a group. Read the rest of this entry »