Duck, Duck, Blog: The Art, Business, and Technology of Doing The Blog

For those of us not attending BlogHer, I thought I’d compile everything I know about blogging. This is sort of like the (unfair to teachers) maxim: “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” The list will make up in candor what it lacks in exhaustiveness. Go on, ask me how much I make on my BlogHer Ads. (I have no idea. Still missing my password, but my headline circle editor is on the job).

You can tell a lot about a person and their blog based on which aspect of blogging: Art (Writing or Photography or Quilling), Business (making money or expanding an IRL enterprise); or Technology (coding or design or web development), inspires their posts. A great blog will usually be artistically rich, income-generating, and technologically sophisticated, though there are many exceptions, and a great blog for me may simply be one that minimizes my angst.

Whatever your goal(s) for your blog, it’s good to explore the other aspects, if only so that if and when your interests or goals change, your blog will be set up to shift/expand more smoothly.

Art of the Blog

The most important thing is not how great your writing is. If fantastic writing were the only requirement for blogging greatness, I’d be on the beach with my new iMac right now. Instead, it’s important to have a hook. Skimpy clothes, great assets, loose morals. NO! Hook! You might be the rancher’s wife or the depressive ex-Mormon or the Southern “Can I get an Amen?” or the Alaskan Family Fun. Hook is closely related to voice: are you Sarcastic, Hip, Queenly, Fussy?

Provide a Service

Second most important is providing a service. That might be plain old entertainment, but honey, you better be dang entertaining if you’re not also offering tips, recipes, advice on baby naming, live blogging of American Idol, or wrong opinions to rail against. Even Dooce, who has never posted a recipe (that I can see) updates her Daily Photo, Chuck and Style sections about four times a week, encouraging people to spend more disposable income on funky knickknacks.

Rocks in My Dryer had a recent post that I cannot find right now. (Note: Get thee a search box on thy blog) about posts. Short is good. Frequent paragraph breaks is good. Focusing each post on one topic is good. Again, lots of exceptions, but overall good advice.

Business of the Blog

Two things here: traffic and subscribers. To give you a basis for comparison, The Pioneer Woman gets about 5.9 million pageviews a month; the lowliest Federated Media parenting author gets 30,000. Page views are generally 2-4 times higher than unique visitors and are what advertisers mostly track, though they might also want to know your subscriber numbers, as that indicates loyalty and signals quality, ongoing content. Sign up for Google Analytics to see how close you are to becoming famous being able to make 5 dollars a month from advertising.

Traffic unrelated to subscribers is determined by your Google (or other search engine) page rank, which is determined by your SEO (search engine optimization), of which incoming links are the most important aspect. For a great primer on SEO for mom bloggers in particular, check out WebMarketCentral. Incoming links are like gold. As one person said, you can shout that your name is Jane @ What About Mom as loudly and often as you like, but Google only cares when others start shouting that you are Jane @ What About Mom.

One non-intuitive thing I’ve learned from my friend Laura is that, when it comes to pay-per-click advertising (where you only get paid if a visitor actually clicks on the ad, like with Google Adsense), you make money when someone comes to your site and DOESN’T FIND what they are looking for, but clicks away on a promising-looking ad.

So which should you focus on? Traffic or subscribers? Both, of course. Ideally they’ll feed each other, though often a post that appeals to your regular readers won’t hook in new ones or random Google searchers and vice versa. Again, it’s a matter of what your priorities are and what kind (if any) ads you run.

Building Traffic

Once you’ve nailed SEO, it’s about getting subscribers to be traffickers too. Get your subscribers to click over to the actual site by hosting a carnival, writing great content they have to comment on, hosting giveaways, contests, or polls; posting something special that can only be seen on the blog, and compiling helpful lists for readers to check back regularly too, esp. if you have a cute button for it.

You can also try the social news aggregators like Digg, Kirtsy, etc. Go to Share This to get an easy plugin for all the main sites. Ideally your readers will submit your stories, but, hey, there’s no law against tooting your own horn. I submitted my own Dooce post (I know, uber-tacky), but it worked!

Also, give Twitter (or Plurk, if you must) and Facebook (or Myspace or blahblah). I’m getting too tired to create hyperlinks. Just type .com after any non-hypered nouns from now on, okay? Also, if this all seems too weird/insane in a really bad way, go read Memarie Lane on the bloggy optimization madness.

Building Subscriber Loyalty

People love it when their comments are acknowledged, almost as much as bloggers like to get comments. You can respond in the comments section or by email. Which do people prefer? I should do a poll. Click on over to vote (Kidding. Maybe later). Some techy-type needs to write a plugin that automatically asks people if they’d prefer a response by email or in the comments section. Of course, we all (you know you do, admit it) dream of the day that the number of comments is just TOO overwhelming to even think of responding to each one. Yeah, any day now.

Also, once your readers trust you, maintain that trust by writing the sort of post they expect from you, rather than obvious link-bait or search-bait or unbelievably-glowing (not one of my weaknesses) product reviews.

Getting Incoming Links

This is very similar to Building Traffic. Carnivals, contests, indispensable lists, etc, anything you can use to motivate people to link to your site. Sometimes it’s hard to get the attention of established, successful bloggers (however you measure success).

If you’re like me (and if you’re way cooler, come on, you remember thinking this), every time you hit Publish, you think this post will be the one, the one that everyone will see and link to and five minutes later you’ll be Because I Said So. I live in hope of being part of Rocks in My Dryer’s or Musings of a Housewife’s weekend linkie love fests. I did get on to Fussy’s once. How? By accidentally doing something that now strikes me as a super-good strategy. I asked her permission to use one of her photos. That’s right: write about a blogger you admire, and you just might be surprised.

One final note. Blogging isn’t so different from life. The Golden Rule applies, but be even nicer. Try linking to other bloggers, but if they don’t reciprocate, no harm, because you would have linked to them anyway, because they’re just that cool and helped you illustrate a point, right? For a funny (and probably comprehensive) list of people’s pet peeves about blogggers/blogging, check out the comments section on Shannon’s post.

Advertising

One of the best things about blogs is the transparency of the web, and one of my favoritely transparent bloggers is Scribbit in Alaska. Now, I confess that a few of her posts, the recipes and crafts and giveaways, are not super-appealing to me, plus I am jealous that she is so popular. So I have some angst. But Scribbit is incredibly helpful, candid, and transparent. You can learn about advertising, making money from your blog, and how to split your blogging time to maximum effect on her site. Here me shout: Michelle is Scribbit, Google! Hear me?

Branding

The power of good branding cannot be overstated. I wrote before about my new friend Kelly King Anderson and how she came up with Startup Princess. Catchy, right? Check her out for other general entrepreneurial issues, including work-life balance. (To Dick: What!?! I’m COMING to bed).

Technology of the Blog

Again, exceptions abound, but in general, a grown-up blog has it’s own domain, preferably a .com. If you’ve still got blogspot or wordpress or typepad in your url, maybe rethink that. Of course, if you’ve already got all your incoming links (see above) and page rank established on the hosted site, maybe a move isn’t worth it, because those things aren’t transferable. When registering your domain, think branding and hook (see above).

Blogging Platform

You can use the Blogger or Wordpress or Typepad software that you’re familiar with on your own site. If you’re ready to host your own site (and register a domain) but have no idea where to start, check out BlueHost. They’re 6.95/month and have 24/7 online chat support, not that you’ll ever need that. I’m most familiar with Wordpress, and it’s a great, “robust,” blogging software thingie. They have lots of free themes (layouts), though if you’re really serious (which I am only moderately serious so far), you can buy a premium theme for around $70. Dick wrote a Quick Start Guide on the Wordpress codex. It doesn’t make any sense to me, but I think it would to your average third-grader.

Help!

A great resource for blogging in general (though I use it mostly for technology questions) is Melanie’s and Shannon’s BloggingBasics101. They’ve got a great Google-based search tool, so type in anything. Go ahead. I bet, if it has to do with blogging, they’ve got something, or know who does, on it.

Down with Photoshop!

The only other tool (besides Wordpress) that I use regularly is Snagit. Snagit is like Photoshop, only easier and without that layers crap. You can write on photos, take screenshots, uh, do other cool things. I am not a designer/artiste (surprise!), but I like how handy SnagIt is. They don’t even pay me to say that . . . YET. Hey, SnagIt, love me as much as I love you, okay?

The Wrap-Up

I hope this is not too basic, not too advanced (not much fear of that, eh?). I know I’m exhausted, so even if this list isn’t exactly complete, it’s done (unless you help!). I’d love to hear what you think about the art, business, and technology of blogging. Do you think comments or emails are better as replies? Is Typepad nicer than Wordpress? Why do you blog? How much money do you make? I remember when we taught conversational English in Japan and one thing we worked on was appropriate questions to ask of strangers. I never quite mastered that.

If you have any questions for me, please ask, and I’ll get Dick to research and answer right away.

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Oh, and this is what works-for-me. That Shannon! What she doesn’t know about making me a trafficker!