Entries from May 2008 ↓

I made a point the other day that linking to other blogs is an integral part of being useful to your readers.  Specifically, I mentioned this in the context of the link post, and how we tend to put up link posts on low-traffic days.  While this isn’t true for everyone (John at PoeWar has link posts every day, for example) many of us follow that convention.

At any rate, an interesting discussion broke out in the comments of that post.  Here are a couple of the reactions:

I link out a lot - just about every post I think, but I don’t write that many “links posts”, mainly because I find them dull as a reader.

I often skip over them unless they’re well written (tempting me to explore) Anything with more than 5 links makes me think there’s no way I’ve got time to explore them. So I skip to something else. - Joanna Young

I love to link to other bloggers simply because I LOVE a good blog. I get almost as excited about finding a great new (to me) blog, as I do about a really good book, and I just can’t resist the desire to share it. - Lisa Wilder

Now, I think the value in linking to other bloggers within the text of a regular article is without dispute. Linking to another blog and then adding your own thoughts and commentary helps to carry on the big conversation.  But, what about Link posts?

There are several characteristics that can make link posts useful:

Useful link posts provide context.

Link posts are most useful when there is some context to those articles.  Offering your reader a link with a headline probably gives them little more than what they already have from their feed reader.  If the headline wasn’t interesting enough when they scanned their feeds, odds are it isn’t going to be interesting enough in your links post. By providing context, even if that’s just a few sentences, you describe the value the reader gets from clicking the link.

Useful link posts have useful links.

It’s not enough to describe what’s on the other end of the link. You’ve got to make sure that the page you’re describing is indeed interesting and useful to your reader.  This means that, no matter how close you and I might be as colleagues or friends, if I don’t write anything decent in a given week you need to leave me out of your link post.  Obligation links don’t serve anyone.  If you link to a weak post of mine, the odds that the reader will click through next week decrease.

Useful link posts center around a theme.

In many cases, simply keeping the links related to your niche is enough.  However, the most useful links posts will hit on several articles that touch a related topic or question. This puts the meta-talk in context and allows your reader to get the big picture and carry on the conversation.  In some cases, a themed link post may become the new hub of discussion for the particular topic.

 Useful link posts consider length.

A useful link post might be as small as four or five links, or it may contain several hundred.  Each of those two extremes has its place.  A post with four links and a paragraph or two about each is not that different from a regular blog article. This sort of link post relies on you to add value to the links, giving them context and telling the reader what you think about the links in depth. Short link posts are likely to create more conversation.

On the other hand, you might create a master link list of every post you can on blog traffic or grammar rules.  Those link posts become enduring posts, rarely read in their entirety but often referenced.  In some cases a post like my 178 Ways to Improve Your Internet Writing, while not intended as a links post, can fall into this category as well.

———-

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that other forms of link posts or that link posts that don’t follow these rules can’t work.  What I am saying is this: making your link posts more useful increases your value to your readers.  It also increases the likelihood that more readers will click through those links, positioning you as a potentially significant source of traffic to the blogs you’re linking.

The more I read about blog promotion, the more I begin to think that some folks are missing the point altogether.

Heck, even I miss it, from time to time, and yet it is one of the main themes of this blog.

What is it we miss?  Usefulness.  Blogs are supposed to be useful to their readers.  That’s one of the big things that differentiates them from simple static SEO websites.  We’re all about building loyal readers, customers and clients by providing something of value to our readers, right?  At least, that’s what we say we’re about.

But sometimes, we get off track.  Feed stats and page views take precedence over providing true value.

Instead of helping other Internet writers to achieve their dreams, I focus a little bit too much on achieving my own dreams.  In doing so, I work against my readers and, paradoxically, my dreams as well.

Take, for example, the idea of the links post.  Everyone knows that it’s a good thing to link to other blogs.  Not only that, there are almost always a large number of posts out there that our readers would find useful, maybe even more useful than our regular posts.

So, we collect a week or two worth of useful links and put them up on… Tuesday, right? 

Nope.  Links posts never go up on Tuesday through Thursday - those are typically our highest traffic days.  No, we offer links when our traffic is at it’s slowest, preferably on a Sunday afternoon.

Why is this a problem?

photo credit: stee

In our quest to promote our blogs, we wind up being useful, but not too useful when it comes to pointing out other great resources.  We also make the conversation on our blog that much more narrow and secluded by not engaging with other bloggers in our niche.

OK, so you move your links post to Wednesdays.  Good form.  Promote the pack and, in turn, the pack will promote you.  Some of your readers will even remember who gave them all of those awesome links.  That’s the first way to increase your blog’s usefulness:

Make links to other blogs a top priority.

What else, though?  What can you do to make your blog more useful?

James Chartrand from Men with Pens asked recently, on Twitter, if bloggers ought to be allowed a posting vacation.  I’ll leave it to James to gather and analyze the results of his little poll, but it got me thinking:

How often do you I post something truly useful on my blog?  Let’s face it: sometimes, you post for the sake of posting, especially if you missed a day or three.  Your forced content winds up being, in many cases, less than useful.

There are ways around this, of course.  You can do like I did on Friday and count on your readers to make the post useful.  (Which you all did, and for which I’m grateful.)  You can’t do this all the time, though, or your readers might just catch on and take the conversation elsewhere.

So, how do we apply this idea?

Only post useful content, even if that means posting once a week.

A revolutionary idea, I know.  Will it cost readers?  Maybe.  but so will the alternative, I think.  Some of the biggest bloggers post on an irregular schedule, so daily posting isn’t a hard and fast rule.

There’s something else that can make your blog more useful.  This one should be obvious, but I think it is so obvious that it becomes easy to miss.

photo credit: goodrob13

Have you ever tried to read a blog with light gray writing on a white background?  I’m 35 years old.  I’m not old, but I’m no spring chicken.  Reading gray on white is a pain in the ass.  I can’t make it out.  Same goes for that tiny print that the kids want to use these days. 

I know, I know.  Get off my lawn.

Seriously, though, your blog layout and design is an important part of being useful to your readers. If you make it difficult for readers to find archives or don’t offer a reasonably easy method of navigation, you’re making their job harder.  At some point, readers will decide that it is not worth the extra work to find out what they were looking for.

Now, I’m not a designer.  The “WJ” badge at the top of my blog is evidence of that fact.  But, I do what I can to make my blog easy on the eyes and easy to get around, and I do that by trusting my instincts but also asking for advice. 

That’s another way to make your blog more useful:

Make readability and navigation priorities in your blog design.

Do what you can.  If you have a crappy “WJ” badge until you are willing to invest in a better banner, then at least make sure people can read your blog.

So, what else? 

If I had to add a 4th way to make your blog useful, it would be this: 

Foster a true conversation with your readers.

I don’t need to tell you how this works.  You already know the drill.  Put something in the comments and I’ll write back.  Let’s do this one together, shall we?  

What do you think?  How can you increase your blog’s usefulness?

Some of you may already know this.  Others may not.

For the majority of the early part of my writing career, I wrote under a female pen name.  My alter ego produced literally thousands of articles on parenting, pregnancy, conception, and child rearing.  Chances are pretty good that, if you’ve spent any time researching some of these topics, you’ve read my work.

While I enjoyed the work and it helped to catapult my writing career, the time finally came when I needed to break out, and develop my own brand. 

Check out The Violent Truth of Branding over at Freelance Folder today to learn how I did it, what worked for me, and what pitfalls I fell into along the way.

—–

While you’re at it, make my friend Ritu happy by visiting my post, “The Exponential Power of Collaborative Effort“ over at Marketing Hackz today, too!

 It’s Friday, and I’ve put off posting since Wednesday to work on other projects, including putting some ad space on this blog.

Of course, not all of those projects were paying.  One involved Harrison Ford, and another involved Goblins.  I’ve been prepping the yard for our Memorial Day cookout, too.

So, with all of this busy-ness, I need your help.  Today’s high-quality kick-ass post that you’ve come to expect depends on you.

I want you to tell me the top 3 methods you use to juggle life and work,  down there in the comments.

Next time there’s a new Indiana Jones movie, Dungeons and Dragons release and a holiday all in one week, I can put them into practice.

C’mon, faithful readers.  Give me the hook-up.  When you’re done, make sure to check out the announcement over at Men with Pens today, too.  You don’t want to miss this one.

Photo by by morbuto

I’ve got a gaggle of only loosely-connected thoughts for you today, all on fiction writing:

My good friend Kam, who is a frequent commenter at The Writing Journey, has re-launched his Blog, and is now focused on his experiences and thoughts on Fiction writing.  He’s a good guy with a decent published novel and a great future, I think.  Give Kam a visit at Pens and Swords.  Tell him I sent you.

I’m not a great fiction writer.  I can do a passable job in certain aspects of fiction writing, and I can do them in small bursts.  But, it’s unlikely I’ll ever write a bestselling novel.

I greatly admire anyone who can finish a novel, whether or not it’s published.  I especially admire folks that can get published, because it says they’re not just a good writer - they’re good at the business of writing.

As a fan of role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, I’m a fan of collaborative fiction.  I’m especially geeked about the collaborative fiction/RPG project my good friends James and Harry have coming out soon.

World-building is one of the more interesting parts of fiction writing, to me.  Again, this comes from my RPG background.

I like the idea behind NaNoWriMo.  I think I’ll give it a shot this year.

I often wonder if I’m cut out for fiction.  Midwestern humility aside, I’ve got a decent writing voice.  I’m just not sure it translates that well to fiction.  I know I do all right telling stories, because I’ve had the same RPG group coming to my table to hear my stories for more than a decade.

All in all, I think I prefer Blog writing to fiction writing.  Maybe it’s the interactivity, maybe it’s the compartmentalization of it.  Hell if I know.  Maybe I need to think about writing short fiction.  Or maybe Blog fiction.  Is there such a creature?  If not, is there a market for one?