Ahmed Bilal

The default approach bloggers use when ‘reporting news’ is to follow the same pattern as journalists do in their newspaper columns.

Sara Christensen, from Pajama Professional, puts it best:

Breaking news on your blog is great, but that doesn’t mean your posts have to sound like news. If readers want news, they will head to CNN.com. They are at your blog because they want your original viewpoint. The fastest way to lose readers is to start regurgitating news content in a really boring fashion.

For my news blog, I often get contributions from writers who try extremely hard to copy the style of reporting shown on BBC / Times / Guardian. That’s not why readers are coming to my blog, and chances are, that’s not why readers are going towards blogs in the first place.

If you want your readers to stick around, to become a part of the community, and most of all, if you want your blog to stand out and actually build a fan base, you need to infuse your blog (and blogging) with:

• An original viewpoint (no regurgitated news, ever)
• A personality

More from Sara’s article:

The thing to remember is, popular blogs become popular because of the blogger. A good blogger shows personality even when he/she is writing about an impersonal topic. Regular readers start to feel like they know the blogger personally. Once this happens, readers form attachments and loyalties that are achievable only in a venue like blogging that highlights a writer’s personality.

Don’t make the same mistake that 99% of the other ‘news’ bloggers are making. If you’re hiring people to write for your news blog, make sure they read Sara’s article and learn that the success of the blog depends on your writing style and content – if you’re going to go down the ’safe’ (bland) route of traditional reporting, you’ll miss out on creating a community and on building a strong, loyal readership.

This article was originally written on 12 Oct 2007 for Performancing.com.

Serve your readers.

Or so goes the popular blogging mantra. In theory, you should always keep the reader first in your mind, because just like the consumer is always right, your blog is nothing if it doesn’t serve the desires of your much-valued readers.

In practice, there’s such a thing as bending over backwards too far to accommodate your readers at the expense of compromising the objectives of your blog – which, in case you haven’t taking Blogging 101, is a big NO-NO.

For example, let’s take the case of Hugh Macleod’s excellent blog, Gaping Void. I, like many others, hit that blog up only for his artwork. Not to be rude, but I’m not interested in the projects Hugh is working on, or what’s going on in his personal life (I would if we were friends, but that hasn’t happened yet).

Now if a lot of readers were to ask Hugh to setup a category / tag / special feed for just his comic posts, would that be a bad idea from a “be user-friendly” perspective? I mean, if there is a significant portion of your readers who are coming only for the comics and emailing you (like I’ve emailed Hugh 3-4 times before I realised why it would be bad for his blog) to setup something separate, wouldn’t it make sense to serve their needs better?

The thing is, Gaping Void is not just about comics drawn on the back of business cards, despite the tag-line. Over the years it has morphed into something more – if I were to venture an uninformed guess, it’s a public forum for Hugh to discuss his views on a variety of issues, most of them tied together with the common thread of marketing / the Internet. You might not care about what Hugh thinks, but that’s what his blog is for.

Who should compromise here? In my view it’s the readers who should bite the bullet and learn to skim the blog for cartoons (it’s surprisingly easy to skim over text and look just for the pictures) – for Hugh, a lot of these readers will also end up reading what he writes, and this way his views and his projects get more eyeballs than they would if he siphoned the comic-only readers off to a special feed / section of the site.

Serve your readers, but not at the expense of sabotaging the reason why you blog in the first place.

This article was originally written on 11 Oct 2007 for Performancing.com.

If you want to be known as an expert in your niche, one of the best ways to build your credibility is to get published in popular media – whether that’s offline or online.

It is credibility through association – books and newspapers are generally associated with expertise, authority, research and knowledge, so if you end up writing a book or a column in a newspaper, you can establish your own credibility by virtue of association (this applies to industry-leading blogs too, by the way – why do you think guest blogging is so hot?)

Today I want you to look at it from a different angle – how getting published in a major newspaper or leading website / blog in your niche is NO guarantee that you’re any good at what you do.

These days self-publishing is easier than ever. Anyone can put together 50 pages and call it a book – slap it next to your profile on your blog, spin some hype and you’re on your way to being an expert.

And you’d be surprised at how much journalists usually know compared to the general population – usually it’s a lot of spin coupled with access to more news / gossip / rumours than the ordinary man on the street. Once you mash together opinion with half-truths, hype and metaphors you have the makings of a genius column.

As indicators of expertise, publishing a book and writing a newspaper (or blog) column are superficial signs – highly effective at manipulating mass perception on a subtle and subconscious level but not enough on their own to demonstrate expertise.

Earlier this week I got an article submission from an unknown blogger. It was an average article, and while we’ve published ‘average’ and sometimes below average pieces on that blog before, I chose to turn this one down because I wanted to stick to quality. In my reply, I told the author that the article was not ‘good enough’ to go up on the site. Perhaps a bit harsh, but that was the truth at the time.

The next day I get an angry email from an acquaintance, another blogger in the same niche and a friend of the first author. I was summarily presented with the original author’s ‘accomplishments’ and their status as an expert (thanks to them being a regular columnist for a leading news site).

The incident struck a chord with me because sometimes people – good writers – get to a point where they are too full of themselves to consider that their work is crap. I’ve been there, and I know how angry one feels at being ‘turned down’, but the reality is that if you’re not delivering what your audience wants and if you keep relying on your reputation rather than the quality of your work, you’re going nowhere, fast.

When it comes to trusting a blogger and estimating their expertise, don’t use their reputation or the fact that they wrote at so and so blog as a definitive criteria (although it does help to weed out the trash) – make sure that you read what they write without any bias and then decide if they are any good.

This article was written on 11 Oct 2007 for Performancing.com.

The idea is simple – do not open your email, visit forums, hit your blog’s comments, open your rss reader, visit your favourite websites…in other words, do not ANY type of ‘input’ in your working hours until you have the time allocated to ‘ACT’ on that input.

For example, it’s common practice for bloggers to open up their email inbox several times a day to ’scan’ for important emails. Depending on the amount of emails one gets, this can mean a few quick responses and then leaving those emails that require a longer response lying in wait till late night. At night, you might not have the time / energy to write long responses and those emails get left on next day.

Or, when we hit up our RSS reader without scheduling time to blog about any news item we find interesting. What happens if we come across something worth blogging about? It goes in the bookmarks, and those bookmarks keep adding up until you have to do some spring cleaning or the load becomes so overwhelming that you have to dump them and start afresh.

Or…when we hit forums where we network frequently only to browse and not to comment / reply on threads.

All such activities take up time – valuable time – from our daily routine. Instead of checking your email 5 times in 4 minute segments, you could easily check it once a day in 20 minutes, and in that time you will respond to more emails and get more things done than in the 5 short breaks during the day. The same goes for blogging (you’ve already read an article once, and if you leave it for later, you’ll have to read it again. It maybe only a few minutes of time but once you add that time up you can build an amazing debt of time.

I get distracted easily, so it’s a continuous battle to avoid such time wasters, especially when I’m not going to ‘do anything about them’.

If you really need a 5-10 minute break, get off your butt and excercise – if you’re a blogger, you probably need it more than a quick trip to your inbox to check your mail for the 3rd time in the day.

This article was originally written on 9 Oct 2007 for Performancing.com.

If you’ve ever hired a blogger (or 20), you’ll know that it’s not an easy task to get the type of blogging work that you want out of your new people. This is especially the case when you’re an experienced blogger yourself – the urge to micro-manage may be too great to allow you to train your blogger(s) properly.

So what methods / strategies do you use to train bloggers?

Currently I’m using a combination of strategies to bring bloggers up to speed. The first step is to help them find their blogging voice, their personality. To be blunt, it’s just like real life – if you’re an interesting person (a good story-teller), people will enjoy listening to what you have to say. On the other hand, if you’re boring, people will nod their heads politely.

As a blogger, the anonymity offered by the Internet allows our nasty sides to come out and people are far less charitable online when you’re boring (or anything other than a rock star). The key to be successful as a blogger is to develop a unique voice and style – and to polish and keep improving it.

The second step is to build consistency. Quite often you’ll bloggers who either have trouble coming up with stuff to write about day after day, get bored with blogging after a while or whatever reason, tend to take their foot off the pedal. I tend to give writers a lot of room here, because everyone’s blogging rhythm is different.

It’s best to start slow and then build things up, but only to a point where you think you can comfortably sustain it in the long run. I have a tendency of blogging in cycles – 10 posts per day for 2-3 days and 1-2 posts for the rest of the week. Encouraging the habit to a) write regularly and b) spread out your articles is an absolute must if you want someone to take over blogging for you.

The third step is to get bloggers to understand the marketing / promotional side of blogging – what is, what linkbait is, how to encourage conversations on your blog, how to write great headlines, how and when to focus on quality over quantity (and vice versa), how to use social media sites, why you should link back to your old articles, etc etc. There’s a lot of ground to cover here and this is perhaps a lifelong education.

The fourth step is to help them learn the technical aspect of things. At the start, all they’ll need to know is the basics – comment moderation, how to write / edit posts, using categories, future posting, uploading images, adding links / images into posts, etc. But as time goes on and when you want your bloggers to take over more aspects of your blog, it would also pay to get them interested in theme editing and plugin usage – so that theoretically speaking you can go off for a month-long break and you wouldn’t need to worry about your blog as your hired gun would be able to take care of any problems that pop up.

Why would someone stay if they learn all this? Because not everyone is driven enough to start a new business from scratch – to most people, if you give them excellent terms + plus profit sharing and the freedom to do what they want on the blog (within certain limits, of course), then they will stick with you for life. Bloggers, just like people, need room to grow, so you have to continuously train them and give them more space at the same time.

So, once again… what methods do you use to train your bloggers? Any specific strategies that you’d be interested in sharing?

Also Read:
10 Articles Every Blogger Should Read At Least Once
6 Ways Blogging Differs From Other Types Of Writing

These two articles (list of articles in one case) are a must-read for all my bloggers. Can you add anything to this list?

This article was originally written on 9 Oct 2007 for Performancing.com.

Bloggers Everywhere: If you can do one thing today, please do NOT write a ’short’ and ‘to the point’ post.

Just don’t. You’re probably doing it wrong (there’s nothing unique / interesting / useful / powerful / likeable / discussable about your post) and not only is it adding to the noise, it’s also turning potential readers away from your blog once they find you talking about the same thing you’re reading elsewhere.

In other cases, there’s no meat on the bones – instead of raising a question and leaving it fashionably open-ended to allow for interesting conversation, the blogger leaves the slate blank with only a few scribblings that pique interest but leave the reader disappointed and feeling empty.

Exceptions

In some situations, short posts work. If you’re a leading news blog, then short posts work wonders because you are the news breakers, not the ones regurgitating it. However, to reach this level requires a certain level of audience, which you’re not going to build by regurgitating news from other sources (who do you hit first in the day for your sports news – ESPN or a blogger you’ve never read before?).

Build Your Audience Through Quality

Quality does not mean quantity, so don’t think that I’m advocating 2400-word blog posts (those work, for sure, but there are less painful ways too).

Instead, quality means two things:

One, sending your readers away with something to remember and talk about later in the day (and if you’re lucky, tomorrow). In the sea of noise you must stand out and stick in the reader’s mind – your job’s a bit easier because they’re already reading what you’re writing, but you will be forgotten if you cannot produce something that they will remember.

Two, consistently pushing yourself to improve. Let’s face it, we’re not the best bloggers in the world, you and I. But we have the opportunity to observe those around us who ARE ‘great’, and push ourselves not only to match them but eventually to be better than them. It’s not a question of whether it’s possible or not (you can’t actually be Steve Pavlina) but it’s definitely a question of how much you want it and how hard (and smart) you’re willing to work on it.

So, please – if you’re going to blog today, don’t do the usual short post. Think of how you can best serve your readers, and give them something to remember for the weekend.

This article was originally written on 6 Oct 2007 for Performancing.com.