On Blogging Australia

Following on the trail of A is for Akismet and B is for Blogging Platform, here are my thoughts on what I’ve learned over the last 12 months about writing blog Content.

What it all comes down to is this - no matter how cool your theme is, or how great your advertising strategy is, or how many friends you have on Twitter/Plurk/FriendFeed…. without effective and attractive content you are toast.

Generating content ideas within your niche
Maybe you write within a blog niche (or maybe you don’t) - If you don’t, but are interested in finding out more, please read Darren Rowse’ How to choose a niche for your blog and my post on how to Find your logical blog niche - logically.

Adding value to your niche is a good way to make a name for yourself - and it is these value-adding posts that bring in good traffic.

Some suggestions for generating content within your niche:

• Stick within One degree of separation
• Use Meta as a reframer
• Take advantage of serendipitous discovery

Content style: Reporters and Musers
In Disclosure and commitment I discussed Glen Stansberry’s concept of Reporters and Musers.

I wrote:

I think that the commitment type and level depends on your blog. Discussing musers vs reporters, Glen Stansberry wrote:

Musers- Musers like to take information and extrapolate. Or abstract ideas. Or nothing related at all. But that’s ok… their readers know and expect this whimsical style from the writer. (Think Kottke, SvN, Seth Godin.)

Reporters- Information junkies that think structurally. Information is currency, and these bloggers are stinking rich. (With information, that is.) Reporters typically don’t deviate too much from the facts, and like to be the first to spread the word. And boy are they regular. They’re like prune juice of the blogosphere. (Think Techcrunch, Micropersuasion, GigaOM.)

My guess is that readers of reporting blogs want accuracy and currency - that is, they want what they want when they want it. Commitment is shown by the reporter/blogger by providing timely accurate information.

Musers - people who interpret and reframe the world around them - are more likely to have an ongoing two-way conversation with their readers. If this holds, Muser commitment is shown by entering into and maintaining this conversational relationship. Given that most people seek relationships to fulfil a need to belong, I believe that showing commitment is important to Muser-bloggers also.

How does this affect content style as opposed to, say post periodicity and length? Thinking about my favourite muser and reporter blogs:

• Musers (like BARocks‘ Maria Horrigan and Magnetoboldtoo’s Kelley) extrapolate and interpret - they tell a story and start a conversation with us (and all going well, we continue that conversation in comments). They unashamedly take a position and argue a point. Maria and Kelley talk on wildly different topics, yet both are entertaining and educational in their own way - and I read everything that both have to write.
• Reporters (like Daring Fireball’s John Gruber) tend to stick to the facts (or their version of the facts) and get them out there as succinctly and as quickly as possible. John does take a position on some of the things he reports on, but it usually doesn’t get in the way of him publishing a lot of news every day that is of interest to the Mac community.

On periodicity (the length of time between posts), I think that it is fair to say that musers get cut a lot more slack - if they post more than once a day then readers can get a little overloaded with all the opinion. Reporters can (and do) post several times a day because news is like that - it has a shelf-life (and a very short one in web years).

Post length seems to favour the musers (longer even rambling explorations of ideas) over reporters (short, sharp, just the facts). For me, there is no ideal post length - I’ve read and enjoyed 4,000 word novellas from some bloggers, and gagged on 200 words from others that repeat the same thing three times.

My suggestion is that you think about the muser vs reporter choice - it isn’t a strict black and white dichotomy, but do think about which end of the spectrum you are more comfortable with and try to embrace it.

Writing skills
No matter how important the topic, how interesting the subject, how brilliant your position - if no-one can understand you, then you will not keep many readers.

Blogging is about having a conversation between writer and reader - and like all forms of communication, anything that gets in the way of a concept being transferred is a bad thing.

There is a scary flip side: if it doesn’t get in the way of a concept being transferred, then it is not a bad thing - indeed, it is acceptable. If your grammar is a bit off, and you leave the odd typo in, most of your readers aren’t going to mind. This is not to say that you should set out to write poorly, but an honest engaging style will bring you more readers than not ending your sentences with a preposition. Write from the heart and not from the textbook (unless you are one of those poor souls trying to engage with a purely academic audience[1], in which case you have my sympathies).

My advice (especially if you are a muser) is to worry more about getting you into your writing than following a style guide.

Unwritten content - vlogs, podcasting, photoblogging and lolcatting
There are a lot of alternatives to text for content. For myself, I tend to stick to the old-fashioned web standard of “only use images where they add value” - but this is my prejudice, not yours, and you should feel free to use images, videos, audio podcast links and whatever else anywhere you like in your blog

For me personally, broadband connectivity has meant that I am not offended by the thought of watching or downloading a large-ish chunk of content. I’ve enjoyed a few good video restaurant reviews lately and taken to photographing interesting food (see And so this is Christmas… for an example).

I’m using the term lolcatting fairly broadly here - I thank http://icanhascheezburger.com/ for many laughs since it came into my life - there are a lot of clones involving dogs, ferrets, rats, and a bunch of other things involving funny captioned photographs. The thoughtful inspirational quotes with beautiful scenes from nature are good too - different things appeal to different audiences.

Photos do add personality to blog posts, and if they can add value, then all the better. Some are beautiful in and of themselves - I think that the image in TweetWheel: Social Network Analysis for Twitter achieved both, in that it was pretty and a good illustration of the tool itself.

I’m not the guy to write about pod/vodcasting in detail - but there are plenty of places to learn more about these if you are interested - for example, Podcast equipment recommendations records a discussion on podcasting on the Aussie Bloggers Forum.

Creating your Content Development Plan
I’ve written in the past about content plans - and I have to thank Maki for the idea as it applies to blogging (even though I’ve written a lot of content plans for clients over the last 10 years or so in the web consulting game, Maki was able to reframe the idea in a way that made perfect sense to me). In Creating a Content Development Strategy I quote Maki:

1. Decide the most important goal for your blog. For example, you might use blogging as a branding tool or a means to generate direct or indirect revenue.
2. Make a list of content types that will achieve your goals. Create a weekly schedule which includes these content types (e.g. expert interviews, industry roundup, mullet baits or resource lists etc.)
3. Observe the type of content that other blogs in your niche produce. Find an informational need that is poorly fulfilled by others and create content to plug the gap. Experiment with different content types to attract attention.
4. Differentiate your blog by altering the content focus, type and format. Effective differentiation tactics involve creating a authorial persona, writing from experience, sharing your opinions and revealing your personality.

In practice, this is a very helpful technique. I’ve used it to create content plans for several new blogs (including this one). Try it, and if it works, thank Maki

Final thoughts on content
My thoughts on content are:

• Think about what you write - what seems to work for you, and stick to it until you have reason to change.
• Pick a topic/niche that you really love - most blog readers are like children and dogs, they can tell when you don’t really like them Do for the love of it. Be driven.
• Write to please yourself first and your readers a close second.
• Write often - it is a habit that you can get into (and, as I have found, also fall out of).
• Finally, work out what works for you, not me, or any other armchair expert.

Footnotes
[1] and you use a lot of footnotes that look like this