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?

I have a few notes, gathered from anecdotes and people I know:

• Just recently Cameron Moll, a well-known web designer whose blog is Authentic Boredom, quit his job and turned to freelance full-time. He sells posters and job listings on his site and does some freelance work, I believe.
• A basketball buddy of mine explained that, according to Jason Van Orden (who creates the Internet Business Mastery podcast), I should be making $1 per month for every follower I have with my site. Translating that, I should be pulling in more than $2,000 + every month.
• My former brother-in-law taught me that information products about making money online are more profitable than selling regular products. He’s an eBay mogul who earns thousands of dollars teaching people how to drop-ship products on eBay. The business of teaching others how to drop-ship is more profitable than actually drop-shipping.
• About a year ago Jane kept prodding me to sell some ads in my sidebar. I finally did, mostly by contacting companies separately and pitching ads, and it worked. But ad revenue doesn’t scale. I only have about 12 spaces there. (By the way, there’s an empty spot, if you’re interested.)

Lately I have been mostly resigned to the idea that “information wants to be free,” and that the real benefit of having a blog or podcast is the capitalization on the attention economy of my audience, as cool and unprofitable as it sounds.

But the other day I was talking with Sean, my brother-in-law (a different one), who is an interactive programmer and runs his own company, HD Interactive. Sean manages a successful online business, so I asked him what I am missing. What is that missing element that I could adjust so that I would be profitable? Create a premium version of the podcast? An online site with video tutorials for WordPress or other software? Sponsored posts? WordPress blog design projects? T-shirts? Webinars? e-books? A forum?

As I talked with Sean, it became clear to me that no single product would provide an online revenue model of the sort I’m searching for. There is no missing ingredient. Rather, the revenue model of the Internet is the Long Tail. Of course! I should have seen it coming.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Long Tail, it’s a model by Wired Magazine’s Chris Anderson and purports that online stores such as Amazon.com make more from long-term sales of their niche products than they do by selling mainstream products. For example, the Grateful Dead Mug from 1979 that someone purchases from your online store for $5 combines with a thousand other low-selling, inexpensive niche products to surpass the income that you make from selling top-of-the-chart music CDs or other mainstream products.

The neat thing about the Long Tail is that it seems to apply to so many phenomenon online, not just revenue. There’s a long tail of participation. A long tail of travel. There’s even a Long Tail blog, where all of this is discussed. I never thought the Long Tail could apply to my attempts to make money online.

But as I spoke with Sean, I realized that the revenue stream for online activities really is the Long Tail. You won’t make your fortune selling one product or service (even though some have). Instead, it’s the combination of various revenue streams, of selling a variety of products, that combines to create an income to equal your goals.

For example, you sell a premium and paid version of a podcast, and maybe 50 people sign up for the premium version. You sell ads in your sidebar, and maybe a dozen sign up. You create a forum and offer a tiered membership, and some more sign up. You sell T-shirts, mugs, and other paraphernalia, and some more sign up. You sell video tutorials and e-books and print books, and more sign up. You present at conferences and coordinate webinars, and more sign up. You offer one-on-one tutorials and online training, and more sign up. Any of these methods alone would produce income that is weak and unsustainable, but the combination of them all accrues a revenue stream that is substantial.

Now that I think about it, this is also the strategy Jason Van Orden recommends in a podcast with a hobby geneologist (though I didn’t realize it at the time).

The Long Tail may be the model underlying a number of phenomenon on the Internet. It may also be the best answer to the conundrum of making money online from a popular blog or podcast.

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I was speaking at WebWorks on blogging and web 2.0. More than anything else, my blog has branded me as a blogger. This brand has led to numerous speaking invitations at conferences and chapters. The more I speak about blogging, the more I become branded as a blogging expert –- it’s a cycle of branding that perpetuates itself.

At the conference, I learned that although some people have branded themselves online in certain ways, they can be much different in person. For example, online you know Richard Hamilton, founder of XML Press, as an entrepreneurial publisher focusing on the technical communication market. You may also see Richard as an experienced manager through his recent book Managing Writers. And you may gather that Richard is a careful, analytical thinker from his lengthy conference write-up posts. That’s how Richard has branded himself — as a publisher and manager.

But Richard has another side to him as well. He’s a pilot and previously owned his own airplane. He loves reading literature, especially mysteries. For example, he has read Sue Grafton’s mystery series (A is for Alibi, B is for …) series up to G. His whole face lights up when he starts talking about mystery novels with another mystery aficionado.

He boots his computer in Ubuntu and prefers to write everything in DocBook XML. He also seems to enjoy long car drives (for example, he drove from Colorado to Texas and back for the conference). More than anything, Richard is one of the most warm, friendly, and conversational people you will ever meet.

Alan Porter is even more of an interesting figure when it comes to branding. Online you know Alan as the head of WebWorks (or VP of Operations). You read his blog as an expert in the tech comm industry, especially with wikis. His forthcoming book, Wikis: Grown Your Own for Fun and Profit, will only solidify his wiki branding. He also blogs about trends in user behavior, from observing, for example, the way his teenage daughter approaches her homework.

But in person, you’ll find that, like Richard, Alan has another side to him entirely. A cowboy-boot wearing Englishman, Alan is an avid comic artist. Mention conferences like Comicon and Dragicon and his ears perk up. He regularly writes the stories, dialog, and scripts for the comic book CARS.

In addition to his drawing talents, Alan has also written books on James Bond, Batman, Star Trek, and the Beatles. He has strong feelings about the importance of storytelling. In fact, Alan works only 30 hours a week so he can focus on his writing.

Alan has written a mystery novel set with NASCAR racing and another novel about Shakespeare pretending to be Christopher Marlowe, which an agent of his was shopping around Hollywood for a possible movie. Alan is also a consultant for Tedopres, a company focused on simplified technical English. He can fly out to your location and train your employees on simplified technical English techniques.

Alan understands the importance of recording presentations. He records all major WebWorks conference sessions, making them available at first on a limited basis and then eventually opens them up to everyone. He’s allergic to gluten, is married to a court reporter, and when you mention his competitor’s products, such as Flare, he breathes a deep sigh.

I’ve gotta say, Alan is one of the most interesting people to meet, because unless you know this other side of Alan, all of this comes as a complete surprise. It’s a surprise mostly because Alan has chosen not to brand himself this way online. In fact, he has a policy that he will not write about either his company’s products or his competitor’s products on his blog.

Blogs provide you with an opportunity to brand yourself with an identity you want to be known by. But you have to be careful what you blog about, because that brand then stays with you. You become known for that brand, and it can be hard to change.

Reinventing yourself with a new identity isn’t impossible. It just requires you to shift your focus, to start writing about a new topic.

I mentioned at the beginning that I’m not so eager to be branded as a blogger (and podcaster and WordPress person). Ideally, I would like to be a screencaster and wiki expert as well. To make that happen, I’ll have to shift the focus of my blog — for about the next 200 posts.

I could make the shift, but I think I prefer to let things happen in a more natural way. It’s more interesting to let water flow in the direction it wants to. And then every once in a while look up to see where you are.

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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.

Finding time to respond to each comment can be hard. I’m often busy writing another post or reading articles or other blogs. Some comments don’t seem to require much response, and responding can require too much energy.

However, it’s good practice to respond to nearly every comment on your site (I know I’m not the best example here, but I am repenting). Responding shows other readers that you are listening and responding, so it encourages them to comment more. And regardless of whether you like responding to comments, I guarantee that all writers love to see comments and pingbacks to their posts. So developing a habit of responding to comments will encourage more comments, which will motivate your writing.

Protecting Your Brand

There’s no need to pre-screen or approve comments before publishing them. The main reason people do this is to protect their brand. You can’t, however, protect your brand by muting the conversation. Requiring approval for comments before publishing them makes it appear that you’re sanitizing comments, selecting only positive feedback to display. Approving comments also diminishes the veracity of any other existing comments on your site.

When you receive negative comments on your blog, Mark Collier recommends taking the following steps:

1 – If someone is leaving negative comments about your company, respond.

2 – Be thankful and polite. Nothing escalates a negative comment into a full-bore flamewar faster than an ‘Oh yeah?!?’ reply from the company.

3 – If commenters are jumping to the wrong conclusion about your company, kindly correct them with the proper information.

4 – Thank them for their feedback, and encourage them to provide more. Leave your email address so they can contact you off the blog, if they choose.

If you are thankful and respectful toward commenters, even those that are attacking your company, the end result will almost always be a positive experience

I’ve received negative comments on a number of posts as well as via email. I’ve found that the tone of your response matters almost more than what you say. If you’re married, you know that when you get in arguments with your spouse, responding in the same tone never eases the emotions around the argument. It only escalates the aggressiveness and embitters both parties. The same phenomenon happens with blog comments.

If people do respond negatively, don’t panic. Negative feedback gives you a chance to respond to opinions that other people probably also have. As you respond, you can demonstrate that you’re listening and taking reader feedback seriously.

Legal Liability

Some companies formulate approval policies based on the possibility of legal liability, but there is no justification for screening or deleting comments to protect yourself legally. If someone writes something defamatory or incorrect in a comment on your blog, your company does not become liable for that comment.

David Ardia, Director of Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard University, explains that there are two kinds of liability: publisher liability and distributer liability. Whereas traditional print publications are liable for letters to the editor, opinions, and other content they publish, bloggers are not responsible for any comments, guest posts, or other user-generated media that they distribute via their blog. Print publishers must answer to publisher liability, but bloggers and other internet publishers are protected by distributer liability.

For an in-depth explanation of legal liability, watch the following 20 minute video:

Ardia explains that because of section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, no matter how defamatory a comment may be, you aren’t legally responsible for it. Section 230 states:

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

Ardia says an “interactive computer service” is any means of communication that involves multiple users accessing a system, such as a forum, listserv, blog and comments, or other interactive online media.

Ardia says that courts take the position that it isn’t feasible for you to know everything you’re making available to the public. You’re merely distributing and facilitating the conversation, not creating it. As a distributor rather than a publisher, you aren’t liable for the comments. If you were, you would have to read every single comment and response and approve it before allowing it to be published. The conversation would be stifled. There would be no way to stay in business.

If you screen or approve the content prior to publication, such as removing foul language or cleaning up aggressive adjectives, you’re still covered under distributer liability (meaning, you’re not liable).

Ardia even says that paid guest posts or other content from third party providers, such as independent contractors, are not something you’re liable for unless you materially change the meaning of their content, or unless you identify the authors as employees of your company.

The only way you become responsible for comments is by materially changing the meaning of the comments. To materially change the meaning, you have to grossly alter the content, such as changing “Jim Jones is not a murderer” to “Jim Jones is a murderer” — not simply changing “Jim Jones is a good-for-nothing murderering animal” to “Jim Jones is a worthless murderer.”

Threaded comments

It’s clear that corporate bloggers should be more concerned about enabling the conversation rather than protecting themselves from lawsuits. One way to enable the conversation technically, besides making it easy to comment, is to enable threaded comments.

Threaded comments is an available feature with WordPress (I’m not sure about other platforms). Threaded comments allows commenters to reply to specific comments and have their replies appear directly after the comment they replied to rather than at the end of the list of comments. The following image shows an example of threaded comments

Fragmented Conversations

When commenters respond in Facebook or reply in Twitter or send you email with their response, the conversation becomes fragmented. It’s no longer on your blog.

Of course it’s preferable to keep the conversation in your blog’s comments section so other readers can see the comments and so you benefit from the search-engine-visibility those comments add to the post.

With WordPress, one way to bring the Twitter conversation together is through the Tweetmeme button plugin.

When users click the Tweetmeme button, they can read the conversation on Twitter around your post. (Often, though, the chatter on Twitter involves only retweets of the post.)

When readers respond with lengthy comments through email, I usually ask if they wouldn’t mind adding their response to the post’s comments area.

Conclusion

One final tip about comments: include a way for the reader to contact you outside of the comments. Sometimes readers have a general question or comment that doesn’t relate to any of the posts, such as in the example below.

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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.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.com compares blogging to reaching down and grabbing a handful of sand. The sand slowly slips through your fingers. You have to reach down and grab another handful of sand, and another, and another. In the metaphor, your readers are the sand; your reaching and scooping — those are the new posts. Perhaps if the content were more findable, you wouldn’t have to do so much reaching.

How can you enable readers to naturally find the content in your archives? How can you make the hundreds of posts you write more visible and prominent, especially if readers are looking for it? This is partly what the field of findability is all about.

Peter Morville, author of Ambient Findability, wants to move toward a world “in which we can find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime.” He admits we might never achieve it, but it’s the direction we’re moving. To start, Morville says to ask three questions of your content:

1. Can people find your website?
2. Can they find their way around your website?
3. Can they find your content, products and services despite your website?

Aggregation Techniques

You can implement several easy aggregation techniques to increase the findability of your content. You can add tags and categories to your posts, and readers can navigate your content this way.

Tags function similarly to categories. You usually add tags as you would index keywords, including as many as you want to describe your content. Categories, on the other hand, are more like folders. You usually have only about a dozen categories on your site.

You can display your categories in a list on your sidebar, which could be helpful except that hardly anyone reads this way. And you can aggregate your tags into one of those jumbled masses of words called tag clouds. But like the list of categories, tag clouds don’t seem that useful to readers. At least I never use them. They’re merely a visual novelty.

Another way to increase the findability of your content is to add a string of related posts below each post. A variety of WordPress plugins do this for you (for example, the Contextual Related Posts plugin). Their matching algorithms vary a bit — some match by tag, others by keyword, others by custom keywords. Mostly, I think lists of related posts help searchers who land on your site from search engine results. These searchers are usually looking for information and sometimes prefer to drill into additional content on the same topic.

You can also aggregate your content through plugins that compile your most popular posts, such as the Popularity Contest plugin. Popularity is defined by hits, links, and comments. Your most popular posts may not be the posts you want to showcase, though. This is why I chose not to implement the Popularity Contest. My most popular posts are apparently posts on grasshoppers that look like aliens, a WordPress image gallery plugin, and notes from a keynote on WordPress 2.7.

You can also manually pull together your best posts. I recommend using the links feature in WordPress to manage your lists. You can also use the Section Widget (a tabbed widget) to show various lists in a compact way. Note that the tabbed section widget slows down your site’s loading time a little (I was intrigued by it earlier, but I removed it). It also seems to consume a lot of memory on the backend.

SEO

Let’s recognize a basic fact about websites. The majority of your readers — anywhere from 50 to 85 percent of visitors — find you through search engines. The web is mainly used for research, so these stats make sense.

But if visitors mainly find you through search engines, shouldn’t your content be optimized to rank high in search engine results? Search engine optimization (or SEO) should be a key influence in the way you write your posts, right?

Jakob Nielsen agrees. He says,

Web users are growing ever-more search dominant. Search is how people discover new websites and find individual pages within websites and intranets. Unless you’re listed on the first search engine results page (SERP), you might as well not exist. So, the first duty of writing for the Web is to write to be found.

Yes, you must write to be found. To do this, to make your posts SEO rich, you have to integrate the right keywords into your title, first paragraphs, headings, image alt tags, and other places (without going overboard).

However, in Google’s search engine results algorithm, links pointing to your content from other sites matter more than anything you can do alone. So more than anything, write compelling content. Compelling content invites links back to your site.

One trick that allows you to get the best of both worlds is the All in One SEO plugin (if you have a WordPress blog). This plugin allows you to make two titles: a title that Google sees and a titles that readers see.

For me, I sometimes don’t bother with SEO because I’m not sure my content would rank for a specific topic. I’m not necessarily writing just to attract more hits. Maybe with some posts, sure. With other posts, not so much.

Formats

Another technique for increasing findability is to push your content across as many formats as possible. Recognize that readers have a variety of preferences. Some like Facebook, others Twitter, others email, others RSS readers.

You can automate all of this so that when you publish a post, notification of the new post is syndicated across each of the formats. The RSS feed is automatically pushed out (if you’re using any standard blog platform). Twitterfeed allows you to hook up your RSS feed with a Twitter account. Facebook allows you to pull in a Twitter feed. And Feedburner allows you to create email subscriptions for RSS feeds.

Audio and Text

One challenge that still remains with formats is the interchangeability of audio and text. I regularly publish podcasts, and people who don’t listen to podcasts often request transcripts of the podcasts. It can take hours, however, to record and produce a podcast, and 5+ hours to render a transcript of the audio. It’s a tall order to fill just to make the content more accessible.

I believe Adobe Sound Booth will transcribe audio (though this is application isn’t free). You can also outsource transcription for about $1 a minute (and a two-week turnaround). A direct transcription of the audio, however, often sounds incoherent and unreadable.

Going from text to audio is much easier. Services like Odiogo will automatically read your post. For an example, see Todd O’Neill’s Doing Media blog. The problem with these text-to-audio services is that they’re read by a machine, so it sounds like robot. Additionally, people who are blind probably already have screen readers that perform with similar functionality. Odiogo is really designed for people who want to listen to your content on the go, while they run or drive or work in the yard.

Nevertheless, if you want to make your blog perceivable, a conversion to other formats is what Glenda Watson Hyatt recommends. In her book How POUR Is Your Blog, she writes,

Content must be perceivable through sight, hearing or touch. Since not everyone has the same abilities or equal use of the same senses, one of the main keys to accessibility is ensuring that content is transformable from one format into another, enabling your blog readers to perceive it in multiple ways. (p.6)

(POUR stands for perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.)

Apart from making your content findable for the disabled, rendering your content into text and audio increases your reach. An hour long podcast transcribed into text theoretically gives you rich SEO keywords that will bring in many more search results from Google. (Of course, the extra time you spend transcribing the content means less time to produce new content, so perhaps it balances out.)

Mobile Platforms

Finally, as you design for different formats, make sure your content is visible on mobile platforms. Mobile browsers are getting to the point that they can display many websites well regardless of whether you have a mobile stylesheet, but it’s still a good idea to add a mobile plugin.

Hyatt recommends going to http://ready.mobi to test how your blog displays in a mobile browser. If you receive a poor rating from MobiReady, try installing Alex King’s WordPress Mobile Edition plugin and rerun the test.

MobiReady also has several emulators that show you how your blog looks on various phones.

Other Findability Tips

To wrap up findability, I suggest adding a few more simple, commonsense practices.

1. Let your URL match your blog title. This helps readers remember how to get to your site without having to google it each time.
2. Include an About page. Your About page is one of the most visited pages on a blog because people want to see information about the person whose opinions and advice they’re reading.
3. Use Feedburner to route your RSS feed. If you ever change platforms (for example, from Expression Engine to WordPress), you can update your RSS feed on your new site so you don’t lose all your readers who subscribed to your old RSS feed.

To conclude, remember that the goal of findability is to help your audience connect with your content. On A List Apart, Aarron Walter writes,

The fundamental goal of findability is to persistently connect your audience with the stuff you write, design, and build. When you create relevant and valuable content, present it in a machine readable format, and provide tools that facilitate content exchange and portability, you’ll help ensure that the folks you’re trying to reach get your message. A website that ignores findability is whispering into the wind, hoping that someone passing by might catch a hint of its message. (A List Apart)

Don’t whisper to the wind. Don’t let your content blow around aimlessly. Make it findable. When it’s findable, you get to keep it forever. When it’s not, it disappears into the wind.

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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.

In a recent book review of Anne Gentle’s Community and Conversation, Sarah O’Keefe is careful to add the following:

[Disclosure: I reviewed an early draft of this book. I have met Anne in person a few times and we have ongoing email and blog correspondence.]

When I first read her disclosure, I was surprised. It didn’t seem that necessary to me. Nevertheless, I appreciated it. In my book review, I probably didn’t disclose as much as I should have. I did mention the fact that I received a free copy of the book, but I could have also added that I’ve met Anne several times at conferences, that we interact on the Intercom article advisory board, and that links to her book in my post point to my Amazon affiliate page.

Approval

A while ago Penelope Trunk wrote a post revealing some intimate information that seemed to cross boundaries of what was appropriate. She followed up with a post on How to blog about a co-worker or someone close to you. In her follow-up post, she explains the predicament:

What you know the most about is what you can offer the most insight about. And you probably know that telling stories is  always more compelling than talking in generalities. But if you tell stories, you need people to be in the stories. So if you want to write insightfully, then using stories about people close to you makes sense.

Writing about a co-worker is similar to writing about a sex partner: you know a lot about the person, both good and bad. So you could ruin your relationship by writing about them. So you have to get good at writing about co-workers without pissing them off.

Penelope hits the issue right on target: you need to include story to avoid boring your readers, but sometimes including all the details of the story violates your relationships with your “characters,” who are real people with independent lives.

As bloggers we sometimes want to write posts that share frustrating or juicy experiences that happen at work, but we have to refrain, make the details more general, because we don’t want to jeopardize our relationships at our jobs. As Penelope says, omitting these details often means omitting the story. Sure enough, when I do this, my posts are more boring.

Penelope’s compromise is to show your posts to people before clicking the publish button. I had no idea she gave her characters veto rights, but she does:

I explain to them that they will always have veto rights, so they don’t have to worry about what they do or say with me. They are always surprised, and they are always relieved.

Her advice works well to keep you from stepping over the line. If you would feel uncomfortable showing the post to your characters, you may want to rethink the post.

As a blogger, sometimes the people I talk with are cautious about what they say to me (and rightly so). For example, at last year’s STC Summit, I had lunch with Alan Houser, chair of the conference. I was asking him some details about sessions that were canceled, and he was careful to let me know what I could and couldn’t say on my blog. As he spoke, I sometimes felt a bit like a journalist, even though I wasn’t even considering a post at the time. To put people at ease, let them know they will have veto rights before you publish anything.

Representation

Because I’m a full-time employee rather than an independent consultant, I’m aware of the way I’m representing my organization. I’ve deliberated about whether I should even include my organization’s name in my About page, but I did. I’m in a peculiar situation — I work for the IT department of the LDS Church, aka the Mormons.

Because of my position, I’m careful to avoid any views on my blog that might be at odds with my organization. Fortunately, I don’t write about political, religious, or even cultural topics — the focus of my blog is “safe.” I don’t have any views that would be at odds with my employer anyway. But the way I represent myself on my blog is something that’s on my mind before I publish anything.

The story of Chez Pazienza is a good one to consider in a discussion about representation. Chez was a CNN producer fired because of the views he expressed on his blog. When I first heard about Chez, I assumed he’d been writing crazy, off-the-wall posts or posting rumors and gossip about colleagues or revealing confidential company information (like the Twitter messages here).

But really, Chez is an intelligent, polished writer who felt that mainstream media was losing its fire, succumbing to shareholder-encouraged stories and shying away from the real stories. He found blogging to be an outlet to pursue real issues and to express his voice (Say What You Will: Requiem for a News Career). However, the liberal bent on his blog conflicted with the more conservative, unbiased reporter role he needed to maintain at CNN, so they let him go.

Chez’s story made me realize that it’s not so much the irresponsible rants against your boss or the inappropriate revealing of co-worker details that gets you into trouble. It’s the expression of an improper point of view, however eloquently expressed. If your position is at odds with your company’s point of view, it can make your employer think twice about keeping you around.

Sensationalism

The final consideration in responsible blogging is to avoid sensationalism. Often times it’s tempting to push an extreme position to get attention. This can be a strategy for raising awareness of an issue. But if you’re constantly rocking the boat just to get attention, to attract controversy and comments, that’s irresponsible blogging.

For example, last year I posted a survey on my site about whether other technical writers felt the profession of technical writing was “a sellout or fallback career.” I didn’t think much of my poll. These were terms a colleague who teaches literature at a university told me his students used to describe technical writing. I was preparing a presentation for the students, so I wanted to have raw data to refute their preconceptions.

Maybe tech writers were bored that day, but the Techwr-l listserv went wild with my poll. They thought I was purposely being controversial just to attract attention from their listserv. Here are a few of their comments:

I declined to vote because I suspect the author might have phrased it carefully to evoke just this sort of “discussion” and, to me, it seems a pointless question otherwise. (Geoff)

Here’s an ironic twist to the conspiracy theory that the writer of the question wrote the question in a way to start a discussion. A web search of the question will point to this list and techwr-l tends to get the higher search rankings, so its results appear first and will be ahead of the page with the poll. If the poll question was written to draw traffic, then the discussion may have a less than desirable effect for driving traffic. (Lauren)

Did you read the actual poll? It was a discussion troll. Hey, I’m a poet, and I don’t even know it! (Bill)

Although I didn’t purposely intend to be sensational, purposes are often made irrelevant by perceptions. This bit of sensationalism got me into hot water, even if it did attract attention to my blog.

Conclusion

As you blog, remember that you have a relationship with your readers — a relationship that requires you to disclose any important information, especially monetary, that might bias your views. Don’t ruin relationships with those around you by revealing private details of their lives without approval. Ensure you don’t represent your company in a negative light. And choose balanced, honest posts rather than sensationalism.

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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.

What Is Boring?

To better understand what defines boring, let’s look at a random article from the Technical Communication Journal – a journal that is known for being a bit on the dry side. As an academic journal, the authors perhaps feel constrained by scholarly conventions. These conventions involve omitting personal experiences, avoiding the use of “I,” backpedaling from straightforward speech, and taking as long as possible to get to the point. Here’s a passage in the August 2009 issue from an article about mentoring:

In our survey, we asked participants to explain any “risks” (Society for Technical Communication 2002), “constraints,” or “difficulties” they may have encountered in their mentoring relationships; however, we allowed respondents to interpret these terms as they wished. Their responses, which were lengthy and covered multiple issues, indicated that they defined these terms in a broad sense. Three readers (two of the authors of this paper and a graduate student) analyzed the responses independently and parsed each response to the questions into individual comments—the length of which was determined by topic rather than by grammatical unit. To ensure the reliability of these divisions, all three readers had to agree on the length of the resulting comments. As a result of the divisions, there were 267 comments.

Realizing we may have biased the responses with our example (“a student who asks her mentor for a letter of recommendation when she has performed poorly in the eyes of the mentor”), we tagged any comment that related to that example as a “metacomment” and excluded these responses from our analysis. We also tagged participants’ comments that were unrelated to the issue (such as comments about mentoring in general or comments about the questionnaire) as metacomments. That left us with 208 comments to categorize.

The readers then tried to categorize the comments using an existing taxonomy, Eby and Allen’s (2002) multilevel taxonomy of protégé’s’ negative mentoring experiences (see Appendix B), that we had revised to reflect a mentor’s perspective. For example, we took Eby’s category, Lack of Mentor Expertise, and changed it to Lack of Protege Expertise. We felt the taxonomy might be a valuable tool for organizing the results. We soon discovered, however, that the majority of the comments from our survey did not correspond to Eby and Allen’s taxonomy.

Although some of the comments fit into some of the categories (29%), most of the comments (71%) did not fit into any of the five categories in the Eby-Allen taxonomy of negative mentoring experiences. Therefore, the readers took the remaining comments and grouped them by topic and created a new taxonomy (as described in our Results section) to better reflect the academic mentor’s perspective. (p.250).

Are you bored yet? What exactly is it about this article that makes it boring? The authors do focus a lot on the process instead of the point. This may be a required academic convention for journal articles, but if so, perhaps it could be moved to some footnotes or an appendix. It’s the equivalent of describing the writing process. Can you imagine a post that contains the following?

First I made a series of notes on a piece of paper. The paper was 8.5 x 11 and purchased at Staples at a discount. The fact that the paper was purchased at a discount did not bias the way we used the paper. We made our notes in a dual column format, with pros in one column and cons in the other column. In my notes, pros is synonymous with advantages, while cons aligns itself with disadvantages, though it also included negative connotations. As I began to make notes, I also compiled a brief bibliography on the topic. Readings included both websites, blogs, and articles. STC publications were given priority as well as articles submitted to tc.eserver.org. With each reading, I added notes on index cards, which I then taxonomized into a hierarchical structure sorted first by author and then by date. The index cards were lined and initially encased in thin plastic.

It’s dreadful writing like this that partly discouraged me from academia. In addition to emphasizing seemingly unnecessary details, the writing omits any personal experiences.

I suppose I expose my biases here, but good writing mixes the personal and professional. In other words, good essays have a balance of personal experiences and ideas. You may only be a “narrative presence,” as Ted Conover explains, but don’t completely omit the personal if you want your ideas to come alive. The experiences you bring to the topic not only give the essay a engaging spin, personal experiences also usually bring in story, which is essential.

Story

Your writing will ultimately bore readers unless you can hook them with story. Story is the sine qua non of writing — without it, chances are what you’re writing will be lifeless.

When I refer to story, I’m not talking about Cinderella or Huck Finn narratives. Any time someone or something struggles to overcome a problem, that’s a story. The problem could be purely conceptual, such as a philosophical idea you struggle against. Better stories have characters (perhaps the character is you) that experience a change to overcome the problem, but that change isn’t always necessary. A bare bones story simply needs conflict. However you tackle it, when you approach your posts from the perspective of story, the writing gains propulsion and keeps the reader engaged.

A while ago, I read a chapter in a book — Ivan Tors’ 1979 memoir, My Life in the Wild — that provides somewhat of an example with the power of story. Tors is probably an author no one has ever heard of. And rightly so — his prose is pretty bad and unenlightening. I bought the novel at a thrift store looking for some cheap adventure nonfiction. However, in his chapter “In Cold Sweat,” he nails the story technique.

Ivan is an animal expert accompanying a video documentary team in Kenya. On an outing to observe migrations of animals from the dry Serengeti to Lake Victoria, his jeep’s water pump gives way, stranding him miles from camp. As he starts walking back to camp, he realizes something is following him. He writes,

As soon as I began my long walk, I heard the yellow grass rustling behind me. I turned and looked. There was an enormous female lion following me, just sauntering behind me. I knew that I must not run or I might provoke an attack. When a 500-pound body pounces on a human back, something is bound to give. I knew what I had to do. I must disregard her and do nothing that would excite her, but I could not help thinking about my friend who was killed by a lion, and this did not do much for my morale.

At this point, Tors has our attention. The conflict is clear: he is stranded in a hot desert with a lion surreptitiously following him. Because the reader is somewhat hooked, Tors can move us in whatever direction he wants now. He can launch into exposition about the behavioral patterns of lions, and we will still remain attentive because of the story. And this is exactly what he does. Tors explains,

Lions have formed the habit, during the many millions of years of successful existence, of surprising their prey. This means stalking them from behind against the wind and jumping on their backs when an attack is least suspected — usually breaking the back of the prey. Antelopes, for their part, have learned that frontal attack is unlikely and that spotting al ion and not running is the safest tactic. If an antelope herd sees a lion, they usually turn toward the lion and stare him down. The lion, thus discovered, becomes confused, and then disappears to try his luck on another herd of antelopes that perhaps will remain unaware of his presence.

Were it not for the story, this exposition about the behavior of lions would quickly tire us out. Likewise, if we were only fed details about the experience, without the information of the lion’s behavior, the story wouldn’t be as engaging. It’s the combination of personal experiences and ideas narrated against a conflict that makes writing interesting. (I scanned the “In Cold Sweat” chapter and converted it to PDF format here if you want to read it.)

You may object that I’m comparing apples to oranges with my examples. Clearly the Technical Communication Journal’s articles follow one style, and Tors’ literary memoir another. However, regardless of genre, if you follow the story, mixing personal with professional, you can usually keep the reader’s attention page after page.

For example, an article on mentoring could perhaps begin with an anecdote about a mentoring relationship that went sour, which then prompted the author to survey other academic mentors as to whether their mentoring relationships were also strained and why. A 17 page article on mentoring could be peppered throughout with personal experiences and reflections from different mentors about the root causes that destroyed their mentoring relationships.

I recognize that this is not the academic way, that injecting the personal element presents the possibility of bias and of conclusions drawn from anecdotes rather than empirical research. While I recognize this, I think you can’t omit the personal without suffering the consequences: with few exceptions, the reader will get bored. The personal element plays an especially critical role with blogs, since many readers value the honesty and transparency that comes from personal exposure.

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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.

After a while, his music blog faded (before he even wrote 10 posts, I think). And his interest about tech comm also faded, leaving him looking for a new direction. Gradually he moved toward the psychology of well-being, which I believe is learning to feel good about life, yourself, and those around you. He stayed with that focus for quite a while before blog-fading entirely.

Clyde’s story is typical. We often think about our interests and passions, and they have little to do with technical writing (or whatever our day job is). So we start writing about those side interests (for example, one of my side interests is basketball). But we soon realize a couple of problems: first, to write well about a topic, you have to be immersed in knowledge about the topic, both reading about it and having personal experiences (coupled together, these two make a strong combination). If we don’t have any new knowledge we’re constantly acquiring or daily experiences we’re having about the topic, we lose substance in our writing. So in the end, regardless of the topic we choose, we gravitate toward writing about what we know or what we’re experiencing.

When new bloggers ask me for advice about what to blog about, I tell them not to worry about their focus for the first month. Just crank out a couple of dozen posts. Then, after you’ve done some writing, analyze your trends. What topics are you naturally moving towards? What topics do you keep coming back to again and again? Okay, now brand your site with that focus.

Sometimes people who lock themselves into a focus feel trapped. One person told me that if he narrowed his blog’s focus to tech comm., he would only have 28 posts to write (he could think of no more). It’s okay to move outside your natural path at times. Like a hiker, you can take side trails to go look at a scenic vista or lake, but you always return to the main trail, the trail that takes you toward your destination.

Your blog's focus is like a trail you follow — a few offshoots are allowed

One of the paradoxes of having a focus is that, rather than limiting the topics you can write about, it actually opens you up to more ideas. Your focus gives rise to more creativity because you start looking at life through the lens of your blog’s focus. For example, let’s say you’re playing basketball and you want to blog about defense somehow but it’s not your blog’s focus so you don’t want to write about it. When you look at defense from the perspective of tech comm., ideas start to flow. For example, defense is partly about knowing where to look. You don’t look at the person you’re guarding or the person with the ball — you look in the middle of the two, so that you can follow them both with your peripheral vision. Having this vision of the larger picture, being able to see the other players and the direction of their movements, helps you see motivations, agendas, and how different groups interact. You can’t make good decisions until you can see the larger picture and leverage different motives.

That’s not really much of a post, but it’s moving in the direction of a post. You can see how having a focus gives you a lens through which to look at the world around you, and that lens helps you see the world in a new light?

After you decide on a focus, brand your site with it. Your URL and blog title (it’s best to have them match) should communicate your focus, as well as the tagline. Your About page should also describe your blog’s focus in greater depth.

No matter how granular of a focus you choose (for example, a blog about Hello Kitty), because of the global landscape, you will find others in the same niche. This is the concept of the Long Tail. The Long Tail asserts that niche products sold online to a global audience have more potential for revenue than the small core group of mainstream products. Your blog can be powerful within a niche. In fact, your focus on a niche rather than a mainstream topic is what gives social media its power. But regardless of the topic, stick with that general focus.

Oct 9 Update

I have to add an update to this post after reading Penelope Trunk’s post, Blogs without topics are a waste of time. Our points are about the same, but the approaches are different. One idea in her post that made sense to me was the idea of a contract with the reader. She writes,

In the history of writing, everything has a focus. It’s a contract you have with the reader. You stay within the bounds of the reader’s expectations, and if you do that, you can write surprises that seem to stray from your topic, and the reader stays with you. Because surprises are fun. But if there’s no contract because there is no focus, then there are no surprises. Every great piece of writing works this way.

Think about it: Canterbury Tales. The topic is getting to the end of the trip. Or Moby Dick. Melville can write about everything—God, the American dream, fishing boats, marriage, mental illness—and he gets away with it because his topic is totally solid: Nailing the whale.

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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.”

To view the audio synced with PowerPoint, click the View button at the link above. To download the MP3, click the drop-down arrow in the upper-left and choose Downloads. To include this in my iTunes podcast feed, I also included the MP3 file here.

My blogging presentation at STC Atlanta

By the way, I’ve been listening to other recorded Summit sessions. There’s a ton of informative content available. Of course recorded presentations aren’t always as engaging as a podcast recording, especially when someone is clicking through 200+ slides and answering audience questions (that you can’t hear), but still, by and large the content is highly worthwhile. If it’s available to you, definitely listen to it. I’ve already listened to about 7-8 sessions. Just 80 more to go.

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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.

Sharing and Trust

Not being fake is the first step in getting currency with your blog. To move in the opposite direction of fake, though, you have to share of yourself. It almost seems that the more open and sharing you are, the more powerful your posts become. For example, Stephen Fry, a writer, actor, and film director in the UK, recently wrote a semi-confessional post in which he explains how he loathes seeing some of his quotes on book jackets. Apparently one line of praise from Fry on Twitter alone can dramatically boost book sales, putting the book near the top of Amazon’s charts.  When Fry tweets, he writes “completely from the heart,” one journalist explains.

You might think that a critic with such literary power would feel nothing but satisfaction and pleasure at helping promote the books he loves. And to a certain extent Fry does. But in this post, Fry also shares another side of his feelings. He jokes with his literary agent that he will make a public confession that he hasn’t read any of the books for which he supplied quotes:

The plan, as I told my agent, was to make this confession as a way of getting publishers off my back. It may sound ungracious, but I get asked so many times a week to read book and supply quotes for them that I’m getting a bit fed up. Not because I don’t like reading, nor because I don’t like being sent books, though mostly of course, I am sent proof copies rather than the finished article. No, what I’m fed up with (and it is my contention that I am SO not alone in this) is seeing my name on the fronts, backs and flaps of books saying things like “a beautifully paced, unforgettable thriller”, “a magnificent feat of imagination”, “a delicately realised and vividly felt journey through memory and desire”, etc etc. Yuckety, yuckety, yuck. Pukety, pukety puke. (“Don’t Quote Me“)

The more you’re open, transparent, and sharing on your blog, like in this post from Fry, where he shares his real thoughts, which may be a little surprising or startling to some, the more trust you engender with your readers. We love Fry even more because of this post (and consequently, I’m guessing he’ll be in even more demand for book quotes).

For another example of a post that shares personal information with influence, read this mind-blowing post from the always fascinating Penelope Trunk: How to Decide How Much to Reveal About Yourself. She shares so much it nearly crosses boundaries, but the effect? Nearly 350 comments on the post from engaged readers.

Insurmountable Challenges from Corporate Bloggers

Independent bloggers may find that trust and personal sharing come easy. But corporate bloggers who write about their company’s products or services have nearly insurmountable challenges when it comes to trust. A corporate blogger struggles against the “used car salesman situation”: no matter what the salesman says, you really don’t trust him. If he praises a car on his lot and recommends that you buy it because it’s a great deal, uhm, yeah, you don’t believe that because the salesman’s agenda is obvious — he wants to sell you a car. There’s no trust.

Corporate bloggers have the same problem. As a reader, you may not believe the blogger because of the obvious agenda. But it’s a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation. If corporate bloggers praise their company’s products or services, we don’t believe the blogger. If corporate bloggers disparage the products or services, we perhaps believe the blogger, but this may be damaging to the company’s product or service. And most likely the CEO won’t allow negativity posts. However you look at it, trust is an issue that permeates corporate blogs.

According to research from Forrester on corporate blogging, Josh Bernoff says that “only 16% of online consumers who read corporate blogs say they trust them.” And those same 16% pretty much trust everything. Because of this distrust with corporate bloggers, Josh concludes:

If you blog, your goal should be to create a blog about which people say “I like that – I don’t think of it as a company blog.” For the most part, that’s a hurdle you need to jump to gain their trust. I don’t mean to hide who is writing the blog. I mean it has to be more about your customers than it is about you. Blogs exclusively about companies and products are what I think generate these low trust ratings. So don’t do a blog like that.

Kathy Sierra also recommends a similar strategy: “With a few exceptions, the worst mistake a ‘business blog’ can make is to blog about the business.”

Essentially, the strategy of the corporate blogger, then, should not be to focus on promoting his or her own company’s products or services so much, because the blogger has no trust with these topics. The agenda is too obvious, and the blogger lacks currency. But neither should the blogger completely dismiss the topics either, because then the blog ceases to be relevant to readers (sin #2).

Instead, according to Bernoff, the corporate blogger should focus on the company’s customers, their problems, their successes, their questions, and perspectives. As corporate bloggers shift focus away from a marketing mindset, they will begin to develop relationships with their readers, and those readers may start to feel trust.

Bernoff says Rubbermaid’s blog does a good example of focusing on the customer more than Rubbermaid. However, I’m not really into Rubbermaid, as adventurous as organization can be. A more relevant example in tech comm is Techsmith’s Visual Lounge blog. Once a week, they showcase videos created by people who use Camtasia Studio. By focusing on user videos, they aren’t so much shining the spotlight on themselves as much as their customers. Not all the posts have this focus, though. That’s okay, because although user problems and solutions are intriguing, a blog can also succeed by establishing relevance with readers.

Palimpsest from Sarah O’Keefe and The Content Pool from Alan Porter are also written by “corporate bloggers.” But with each of these blogs, I don’t think of them as company blogs. I think of them as blogs written by industry experts. This is partly because their posts rarely promote their company’s products and services.

In the spirit of transparency, you should know that TechSmith, O’Keefe, and Porter all advertise in the sidebar of my blog. And I’m presenting at a conference sponsored by WebWorks. Does that conflict of interest perhaps remove some of the currency of my recommendations? In a way, yes — even though what I’ve said is perfectly true.

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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.

How exactly do these two formats fit together? In  Conversation and Community, Anne Gentle says that the blog can often be a conversation starter, the medium that opens up communication among people. Your blog can attract outsiders and draw them in to participate on a wiki or other involvement.

Seeing how these two formats and activities fit together provided an Aha! type of moment for me last week. We have a community projects wiki where a lot of developers, QA engineers, and others interact on a technical level, either compiling requirements, designs, or other details about the projects they’re building. The site also has a blog component, but the blog doesn’t always address the existing projects. In fact, the blog mainly consists of random IT topics written by people in our department.

I realized (not that it’s really much of an insight) that in this situation, the blog should act as a companion to the wiki. While the wiki has project details and other specs, it’s not the motivational piece. It doesn’t build trust, inspire people to join the community, or even communicate that much to those outside of the layers of its structure. Just as a charter or project requirements documents rarely inspires anyone to volunteer for the project, the same might be said of wikis. But that’s not the wiki’s job. It’s the blog’s job. The blog serves as the human-focused news stream for sharing announcements, insights, developments, stories, and other details about the projects going on in the wiki. They’re a perfect fit, and one fuels the other.

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