Facibus On Blogging

John Chow writes, in If you build it they won’t come:

What separates John Chow dot Com from the no traffic blog isn’t so much the content. There are tons of small blogs that can write better content than me. However, the best content in the world won’t do you any good if you can’t get people to read it. Building it is not enough. You need to learn how to market it.

To be fair, he’s only got it half wrong in his comparison of marketing vs content quality - marketing is important, sure, but without decent pillar content then all the marketing in the world won’t save you, regardless of how evil you are

Where John is totally wrong is this: he is a brilliant content writer. Not because his grammar is perfect - it isn’t - or his spelling. Where he really shines is this one simple thing - he writes to his audience. His audience want lurid tales of big bucks and dubious shortcuts, fast cars and scantily-clad women at trade shows. That is what he delivers.

This is how I defined pillar content:

All this advice is fine as far as it goes. I’d like to simplify this: A pillar post contributes something new that adds value to its niche.

As the definitive make-money-online-any-way-you-can guy, John has contributed a lot of new concepts that have added a lot of value to his niche. I’m not saying that I always agree with him - quite often in the past I have felt the need to criticise John. Indeed, he is the niche. A shark is a perfect predator, having not needed to evolve much in the last several hundred million years. The same could be said for spiders, turtles, and crocodiles - in their own way, they are spectacularly perfect - nobody does it better. John is the same - he is the perfect make-money-online-any-way-you-can guy.

Whether this is a better long-term money making strategy than being 100% ethical like Darren or Yaro is anyone’s guess. I’d like to think that ethics have a place in business, and in blogging. What do you think?

Commentstorming spoke about commenting on a range of blogs - going from one to another via their blogrolls. In a comment on that post, Joseph wrote

Hi Andrew, thanks for the great idea and Leon thanks for mentioning of saying something meaningful. When I leave a comment I feel a supportive comment is appreciated and any insight or inspiration I may have as I read the blog. I will take someone from your blog and read them and leave a message that gives back for what they have given me. Commenting is such a wonderful opportunity for showing appreciation and to fire the fuel of the bloggers creativity.

I’ve previously quoted Dan Saffer on the Art of Successful Blog Commenting - his advice is timeless.

This morning I read two articles on commenting:

• John Chow’s evil ways to increase blog comments, and
• Darren Rowse’ 10 ways to hurt your blog’s brand by commenting on other blogs.

John suggests that you can boost your comment numbers by:

• faking comments, sometimes as someone famous, and
• buying comments.

Darren suggests that the 10 cardinal sins of commenting are:
1. Excessive use of Signatures
2. Excessive Self Linking
3. One or Two word Comments
4. Not Reading Posts Before Commenting
5. Flaming and Personal Attack
6.’Anonymous’ Flaming
7. Always Being First To Comment
8. Dominating Comment Threads
9. Keyword Stuffed Names
10. Not adding value to the Comments

Which article will help you to comment with class?

Here’s an exercise for you - go to a blog you know and read every day. Comment on one of their posts. Then click on a link within their blogroll that you’ve never visited before (or visited rarely). Pick a post, and comment on it. Go to their blogroll, pick a blog that you’ve never visited before, and click through to it. Comment on a post.

You can probably guess what happens next - you keep going until you have to stop.

Do this once a week and you’ll find a heap of new blogs, and read some wonderful articles. And you’ll foster community, and make some new friends, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll get some new readers. Like Cypress Hill said, “What go around come around here” - everyone likes comments, and to be commenting is a sure way to be commented on.

Note: I’ve entered this post in Darren Rowse’s 31 Days group writing project.

How do you measure your success as a blogger?

…is it by personal satisfaction, knowing that your needs are met? That your sense of community has been satisfied?

…is it by Alexa or Technorati rank? Google PageRank? Number of RSS readers?

…is it by the number of comments or the number of pageviews?

…is it by the amount of money you make online?

…is it by your ranking in the Top 100 indexes for the country you live in?

My guess is that it all depends on why you blog. As long as you can match your measurement mechanism to your ‘why’, you will know how you are tracking.

There are qualitative ways (basically, how you feel about your blogging) and qualitative ways (basically, rankings and dollars and things that can be measured in absolute terms) of measuring success.

My advice is this: if you take the quantitative path (and have access to those ‘hard’ figures) don’t stress about numbers too early on in your path as a blogger. Obsessing over numbers will detract from the pleasure that you might gain and may even lead to you stopping altogether. Otherwise brilliant bloggers can be tempted to quit blogging because of low numbers.

Note: I’ve entered this post in Darren Rowse’s 31 Days group writing project.

Yesterday I showed a photo of my Seth Godin inspired blog posting list based on his Free Prize Inside book.

One of the quotes grabbed my attention: “..there’s less reason to build some giant campaign for the future - the competition is building something for right now”. It is a call to action - don’t wait until everything is perfect before doing something remarkable.

Are we competitive as bloggers?
This innovative stuff is of prime importance in business - but what about bloggers?

Some of us blog for money, some for recognition, some for a sense of community - there are a lot of different motivators for blogging. Do we need to worry about competition? I think that we need to at least, well, think about it. Whatever your motivation, chances are you would be pleased to have more readers for your blog. Granted, there are some people who write as a form of therapy (although this is not always healthy) and could care less if more than a handful of people read what they have to say - and don’t let me tell you that this is wrong. If you want to stop reading here, I won’t be offended

What if you do want more readers?
Interesting question. You want more readers. So are you competing with other blogs for them? Do you need to worry about being remarkable rather than just good enough?

I think that it is fair to say that we are all competing with other blogs in our niche. Even if your niche is “bored accountant talking about office life” or “small town book store assistant” then you have competitors - if you aren’t remarkable, then people will only read out of politeness for so long (even friends).

This doesn’t mean that you have to turn into John Chow, or become obsessed with your Technorati rank and RSS reader statistics - but again, I think that it is fair to say the following: if you want more readers, you need to be contributing something above and beyond what everyone else is - you have to be truly remarkable.

How do you become remarkable?
This is the hard part - if I could tell you how to become truly remarkable in your niche, then chances are I would be doing it myself

What I can offer is the following:

• read Maki’s advice on being unique in your niche, and
• learn how to reframe (to be fair: Maki refers to this as well - I go into a bit more detail and while I wrote my reframing post first, I didn’t invent the concept by any stretch - it built on suggestions by Darren Rowse and Yaro Starak that I read earlier in my blogging ‘career’).

And naturally… please let me know how you go