Gary Vaynerchuk, author of Crush It!, says that one of the best ways to build readership for your blog is by commenting on other people’s blogs.
For one thing, it helps with your Google search juice. But more importantly, it lets people know you’re reading their blog and are interested in what they’re saying. Vaynerchuk says that we need to spend hours per day — hours! — posting comments on other people’s blogs.
While you may not have the time or desire to spend hours doing this (of course, you won’t crush it, says Vaynerchuk), you do need to leave some intelligent comments when you do. It’s not enough to just leave “Nice post!” as a comment. If you want to show the bloggers you’re truly engaged and interested, leave comments that show you have actually read and understood what they wrote about.
This does two things for you: 1) you meet like-minded readers, and let them know about your existence. When they find you, they’ll become readers, and you’re growing your social media footprint; and, 2) it builds backlinks to your own blog, which boost your search engine ranking.
This is a tried-and-true technique for building search rankings, especially as Google is recognizing authority of websites by their backlinks. They figure if a lot of people link to a blog, site, or even a post, it must be something worthwhile. And commenting, while not as powerful as, say, another blog post, is still a way to generate those much-sought after backlinks.
There are some search engine optimization companies that offer backlinking services to their clients, and will spend a lot of time (hopefully) leaving comments on people’s blogs, in addition to their other techniques and practices.
Less scrupulous companies will leave crappy comments that are nothing but spam, hoping that they won’t be deleted or caught in spam filters. While I’m not sure if Google or other search engines will penalize URLs that spam links lead to (if anyone knows, leave us a comment), it’s our fervent hope that the search engines will penalize those parasites, and that they suffer TSA strip searches and tax audits.
(WordPress has a great spam fighting software in Akismet, and it’s done wonders for this blog. It’s blocked 11,484 spam comments to date, and I deleted 35 spam comments right before I wrote this post. So I’m not a big fan of spammers.)
Basically, if you want your comments to be accepted and appreciated by your fellow bloggers, explain why you think a post is comment-worthy, talk about your own viewpoints, and maybe a reason why you agree or disagree. Engage in an ongoing conversation with those people. And if someone leaves a comment on your blog, respond, and check out the other person’s blog.
About the Author: Erik Deckers Erik is the VP of Operations & Creative Services for Pro Blog Service. He has been blogging since 1998, and has been a published writer for more than 22 years. He has written humor newspaper columns, business articles, radio and stage plays, and is currently working on a novel. He helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies, and is writing two other books on social media and networking. Erik frequently speaks on blogging and social media.
Professional Blog Service started a year ago out of Indy Associates to assist companies in generating content they need for most of their Internet marketing activity.
While at Indy Associates, we always recommended blogging as a good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy. With the popularity of social media sites like Linkedin, Facebook and micro-blogging service Twitter, the strategy has become even more important. The challenge for most of our customers was the blog content generation. Most companies do not have trained content writers that are able to develop conversational blog content, while writing for the search engines. Most important, many of clients have great ideas with no time to share them.
So, what have we learned in 2009?
Most companies still do not have the resources, or the time to write their own content.
2009 saw the unemployment rate hit 10% in November. It was reported that many companies laid off many in their workforce leaving those left behind with more work to do and little time to get it done. The last thing on anyone’s mind is getting blog content written, even though everyone agrees that marketing is still important in a down economy.
Blogging and Social Media continue to evolve from AOL of the 90s to Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter heading into a new decade.
“Two-thirds of the world’s Internet population visit social networking or blogging sites, accounting for almost 10% of all Internet time, according to a Nielsen report published in March of this year, “Global Faces and Networked Places.” These numbers keep rising as the year progresses. By 2012, IBM predicts that globally, a quarter of the global population will be using social media in some form.
Results still matter to most companies.
Learning how to play in social media is one thing. Getting people to interact with you is another. Your clients may or may not interact with you through social media. The challenge for all companies is finding out which ones they should engage. You may be able to sell like Dell, or respond to customer complaints like Southwest Airlines and Jet Blue Airlines have done. (Note to my former colleagues at American Airlines – take note!). Either way, Social Media and Blogging is measurable in some way depending on the strategic approach you take with it.
There are great tools like Yahoo Analytics (shameless plug as we are a Yahoo Analytics consultant). Radian6 and Scoutlabs can track who’s talking about you, and help you decide whether to act on the positive or negative media being generated.
We predict that 2010 will be the year of results with blogging and social media. In a nutshell, you are doing it to build your marketing list, or to generate interest in your products or services. To succeed, you will need:
An understanding of how your market uses blogging and social media, if at all
A plan to participate
Execution and commitment to the plan
Measurement of the results over the course of the year, not a month
If you can learn how to do it before your competition, you win. It will take them 12 months just to figure out what you have done.
Happy New Year from Professional Blog Service
About the Author: Paul Lorinczi Paul Lorinczi is the President of Professional Blog Service. The goal of the company is the help clients use Blogging and Social Media to expand their business online through planning, execution, and measurement.
The keyword conundrum is one that plagues all bloggers. We’re supposed to use keywords, but you can’t use too many, or you’re stuffing. You can’t use them just once, or you’ll get beat by anyone who uses them properly.
Search has gotten more complicated, as more websites and blogs appear, and people are getting smarter about SEO and how they use keywords. This means that we as bloggers have to create smaller and smaller niches (which is a smart strategy to begin with).
Let’s say my hobby is old-school pens. Not just any pen, like the $.69 Bic, but old fountain pens. More specifically, refillable fountain pens — the kind where the ink comes in a little bottle, and you need to refill it with an eye dropper.
Ten or twelve years ago, I could have optimized a website to be found if you searched for “pens,” or maybe “fountain pens.” But now, as more people have pen websites, I need to be more specific and only talk about “refillable fountain pens.” I could even take it one step further, and write about “repairing refillable fountain pens.”
And therein lies the problem. If I want to win any search for “repairing refillable fountain pens,” I have to use that exact phrase over and over. It’s a clunky, 4-word phrase that defies elegant usage. I can use it a few times naturally, like in a headline — “5 trends in 2010 for repairing refillable fountain pens” or Ashton Kutcher’s celebrity secrets for repairing refillable fountain pens.” — but I’ll plumb the depths of that barrel pretty quickly. So I need to find an alternative.
The body text is also important, but using that exact phrase is going to be difficult. The prevailing wisdom is that keyword density should be 1%, or 1 out of every 100 words. That’s not that hard to do if you have a short post. It’s when you get into 500 or 1,000 word posts that it gets a little awkward.
Write for Readers, Not Spiders
Here’s where I differ from my SEO friends: I think it’s okay to keep your keyword density below 1% sometimes. Even a .25% is acceptable, or 1 time out of every 400.
That’s because you’re not going to win search with one blog post. You don’t need to swing for the fences on every pitch. You need to write several blog posts about your specialty for it to make a difference.
Here’s the key, it’s how well you write that makes the biggest difference. Do you write well enough that people want to read what you have to say? Or do you write a bunch of spider-oriented garbage that looks great to the search engines, but annoys your readers?
It’s not a matter of having more keywords than anyone else. I mean, I could write a sentence like “I love repairing refillable fountain pens, because repairing refillable fountain pens gives my life purpose and meaning, so I can continue making a living repairing refillable fountain pens.”
But who wants to read that? It’s clunky, cumbersome, and it looks like I crowbarred the keyword phrase into the post just so I could get them in there for the appropriate keyword density.
The short of it is, keyword density is not nearly as important if you don’t have readers. Yes, you can get them in there naturally, but don’t kill yourself or ruin your writing just to meet an acceptable percentage.
If you’re writing well, you’ll attract the readers (and the backlinks) needed to get your posts indexed and ranking high on search engines.
About the Author: Erik Deckers Erik is the VP of Operations & Creative Services for Pro Blog Service. He has been blogging since 1998, and has been a published writer for more than 22 years. He has written humor newspaper columns, business articles, radio and stage plays, and is currently working on a novel. He helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies, and is writing two other books on social media and networking. Erik frequently speaks on blogging and social media.
This post was originally published on February 10, 2009 on the DeckersMarketing.com blog, which will soon be closed down.
Neal “Taffy” Taflinger, of Indy.com posted a blogging question on my Facebook page a few days ago:
Question for you, Mr. Blogger Man – is it better to blog frequently so people know there is something to read or only as often as you have something valuable to say?
Rather than saying it’s one or the other, I would say post frequently and make sure you have something valuable to say.
Business blogs should post at least once a day (once a weekday is fine, and skip the weekends). Personal blogs like Neal’s or my humor blog can be once a week. However, once a week is the bare minimum. But I wouldn’t sacrifice either or choose one over the other. You need valuable content, and you need to post it with some frequency. The more you post, the more the search engines will find you (and love you!). This makes it easier to be found in the search engines for your particular search terms.
More importantly, you need to post consistently. If you post once a week, post it on the same day. If you post it daily, post it at the same time.
Plus, if you post regularly, your readers will know when and how to find you, and your readership will build more quickly and reliably than if you were to post every 7 – 15 days, without rhyme or reason, or any regular schedule.
Bottom line is this isn’t an either/or answer. There are those who say you can sacrifice quality for quantity, but since Neal’s blog is based on readership more than it is search engines, he should focus on quality, and don’t forget the quantity.
About the Author: Erik Deckers Erik is the VP of Operations & Creative Services for Pro Blog Service. He has been blogging since 1998, and has been a published writer for more than 22 years. He has written humor newspaper columns, business articles, radio and stage plays, and is currently working on a novel. He helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies, and is writing two other books on social media and networking. Erik frequently speaks on blogging and social media.
Demian Farnworth over at CopyBlogger came up with a list of the 10 Books That Will Transform Your Writing. Ten books, that if you read them, will help your writing improve just by reading some examples of what is good, and then modeling them
A few of Farnworth’s 10 transforming books:
King James Bible
Barbarians at the Gate – Bryan Burrough and John Helyar
Complete Odes and Epodes of Horace
Outliers – Malcolm Gladwell
While I’ve only read a couple of Farnworth’s recommendations, I have a few recommendations of my own. These are my own favorite books and the ones I read more than once just to get an idea of how I want my writing to look.
On Writing – Stephen King. I’m not a big fan of writing books and try to avoid them whenever possible. But more than a few writing friends recommended this one. Stephen King talks more about the desires and itch to write, and how he pursued his love of writing, even when he was first starting out. His story is inspiring and makes believe I can be successful.
Fool – Christopher Moore. Really, any Christopher Moore book will do. The guy is a comic genius and knows how to write humor that catches you off-guard and makes you laugh out loud. Moore writes off-the-wall, exaggerated characters who seem so natural in their setting, and their descriptions and his jokes seem so effortless. He doesn’t crowbar anything into his stories, they just flow.
My Beautiful Idol – Pete Gall. Pete is a writer here in Indianapolis, and has such tight writing that, after I read the first chapter, I started working to tighten up my own writing. I typically don’t notice the quality of writing unless it leaps out at me, good or bad. I’m more carried away by the story. But Pete’s writing just grabbed my attention, and made me pay attention to the quality of the words.
My Other Life – Paul Theroux. I read this novella in an issue of Granta, and became a fan of Theroux. I’m not a big fan of creative writing and the emotional angst anyone with an MFA feels compelled to flog, but Theroux is one of the few I actually enjoy. He’s got a mastery of the language that I wish I could reach.
Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut. Indianapolis’ son is a world-famous wordsmith whose mastery of the language shines through, even when he’s writing some of the weirdest stuff. While most of his novels are fairly weird, Breakfast of Champions turns the Weirdness amp up to 11 . But even in this opus of oddity, the brilliance of his writing is obvious.
Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman. The Romantic poet sure knew how to turn a phrase. He and a few other of the Romantic poets are great inspiration when you want to capture the flavor of language, and tap into its rhythm and energy, read someone like Whitman, Burns, or Lord Byron to get the creative juices flowing.
Kitchen Confidential – Anthony Bourdain. I worked in a restaurant for a few months when I first moved here to Indianapolis, and while I didn’t spend much time in the kitchen, I can tell you it’s hot, sweaty, unpleasant work. But Bourdain is able to make it sound glamorous, cool, and even enjoyable. If he can make kitchen grunt work sound fun and exciting, what can you do with your blog with his influence?
The Naming of the Dead – Ian Rankin. You can actually pick any Inspector Rebus novel by this Scottish writer to get a look at what good dialog looks (he’s written 20 Rebus novels alone; he’s written 12 others) like. The dialog is tight, believable, and sounds like real people. I figure Rankin knows what he’s doing, because according to literary legend, Rankin lives on the same street as J.K. Rowling, who lives in a damn castle. If he made enough money to be her neighbor, he must be doing something right.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson. The man’s crazed drug and alcohol addictions notwithstanding, HST was a brilliant writer in his early days. His writing suffered as he slipped deeper into his addictions, but his earlier stuff was brilliant. It packed all the punch of a Chuck Norris movie, and was as tight as a drum. That’s because Hunter would write a series of ledes (newspaper talk for “lead,” or the opening sentence of a story), and string them together. Rather than having only one punchy attention-grabbing sentence, he had a dozen of them. If you want to add power to your writing, get the early Thompson works. (Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail is another recommended read.)
Other writers I could have included, but didn’t for any reason: Douglas Adams, Dave Barry, Dick Francis,
About the Author: Erik Deckers Erik is the VP of Operations & Creative Services for Pro Blog Service. He has been blogging since 1998, and has been a published writer for more than 22 years. He has written humor newspaper columns, business articles, radio and stage plays, and is currently working on a novel. He helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies, and is writing two other books on social media and networking. Erik frequently speaks on blogging and social media.
If you want to add some life to your writing, to give it breath and a heartbeat, use metaphors. They’re the lifeblood of any vibrant, vivid writing, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction.
I’ve been using metaphors in my writing with great success over the last several years. It marks a significant improvement in the quality of my writing, and I’ve garnered more and better opportunities. Whether there’s a connection between the two, I don’t know.
I’m a big fan of metaphors, and I like them better than similes. From the Greek, metaphora means to transfer or to carry over. It basically carries a comparison from one idea or item to another.
There is one difference between metaphors and similes: similes use the words like or as in them, metaphors do not.
Similes
Life is like a box of chocolates. (Forrest Gump
There was a great shout like the roaring of an airplane.
I don’t like similes. They’re weak. They’re the pencil-necked milksop of literary devices. They say things are similar, but not quite that item. Life is like a box of chocolates, but not really.
Take a look at the last metaphor example: “Men’s words are bullets.” That’s a powerful phrase. It doesn’t say they’re like bullets, that they remind people of bullets, or “words can hurt people sort of like bullets can hurt people.” That’s just smarmy, wishy-washy pap.
“Men’s words are bullets,” on the other hand, makes you feel the the emotional damage that can be done by words, feeling the piercing, crashing power of a bullet fired from a large gun.
If you want to make your writing more powerful and add more life to your words, sprinkle some metaphors into your articles and watch what they’ll do for you.
About the Author: Erik Deckers Erik is the VP of Operations & Creative Services for Pro Blog Service. He has been blogging since 1998, and has been a published writer for more than 22 years. He has written humor newspaper columns, business articles, radio and stage plays, and is currently working on a novel. He helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies, and is writing two other books on social media and networking. Erik frequently speaks on blogging and social media.
When I was in graduate school, I noticed that most of my fellow grad students, and our professors, loved to use big words and long sentences.
They tried to use the most complex words and sentences as possible in their scholarly works. Paragraphs were measured in linear feet, not number of words. And it was not unheard of to spend 12 – 15 hours writing a simple 10 page paper.
Not me, of course. I had cut my writing teeth at my college newspaper, so I wrote like a journalist: short words, short sentences, short paragraphs. (Something that would send my 7th grade English teacher screaming from the room.)
I constantly got easy A’s on my papers, while the other students were getting B’s and hard-won A’s, and spending a lot more time on their work than I did.
It never occurred to anyone in the department that it was how I wrote that made the difference, not the quality of my ideas or the way I expressed them. I didn’t even stumble on this little revelation myself until many years later.
What I learned was, if you want to be read, write simply. Don’t be flowery or use $50 words. Write at an 8th grade reading level, or possibly even a 6th. That’s where most newspapers are written these days. TV news copy is written at the 4th grade level.
The American Marketing Association even backs me up on this.
Basically, they wanted to see if award-winning journal articles were written more simply than the non-winners (we call them “losers” outside the academic walls). They ran the text through Microsoft Word’s Flesch-Kincaid Reading Level grader, and did a whole bunch of complicated stuff with statistics that I won’t even pretend to understand.
The Reading Level score corresponds to the grade of education of the reader it would take to understand it. If your score is 8.4, it’s suitable for an 8th grader. A 14.6 is suitable for a college sophomore. A score of 21 or higher is suitable for Stephen Hawking, although he may find it a little pedestrian.
Here’s what they found:
Of the 15 articles with the best readability scores, 13 of them were award winners. They had scores from 12.3 to 14.4. Of the 11 worst least readable articles, 9 of them were “non-winners,” and carried scores from 18.3 to 21.3.
(Their own article has a 13.98 Flesch-Kincaid score. This post has a 6.7. I guess I win.)
So why is a lower reading score so important? Are we getting dumber? Do we all have the attention span of a bunch of hyperactive 12-year-olds?
No, the reason is our mental bandwidth. Let’s face it, we’re all busy, harried, and are running eight things through our brains at once. And that’s on a good day. When we’re confronted with a piece of text, we want it to be as simple as possible.
Simple doesn’t mean we’re stupid, or that our brains are shutting down. It means we don’t have to devote as much time and energy to it. We can process the text easily, absorb the information, and move on. We can absolutely read something that’s long and complex. We’re all smart people, and we can certainly read something written at a 12th grade reading level. It’s just that people sometimes need the break from the long and complex. Simple writing gives that to them, and as a result, is more readily accepted.
Basically, if you want to win readers, stick with the writing style the newspapers use. Short words, short sentences, short paragraphs. Most important information goes up front, least important goes last. Avoid needless words.
Otherwise, your readers will eventually get bored and go elsewhere.
(Note: If you’re a Mac user, and don’t have access to Word’s Flesch-Kincaid grader, you can download Flesh, the document readability calculator. I used it to grade this post.)
About the Author: Erik Deckers Erik is the VP of Operations & Creative Services for Pro Blog Service. He has been blogging since 1998, and has been a published writer for more than 22 years. He has written humor newspaper columns, business articles, radio and stage plays, and is currently working on a novel. He helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies, and is writing two other books on social media and networking. Erik frequently speaks on blogging and social media.
Yesterday, I gave a talk about Blogging Basics for Job Seekers to our local Business & Professional Exchange organization, a networking group for people who are looking for new employment.
I tried to explain blog writing as simply as possible, but as I was talking, I realized there’s more than one way to skin that cat, so I thought I would assemble a few of my favorite blog writing techniques here. Use any of them when you’re stuck, not so much for what to write about, but how to write it.
Dear Mom: The nice thing about blogging is that it doesn’t have to be hard. It’s as easy as writing an email. And the important thing about blogging is that you make the subject matter as simple and easy as possible. “Easy enough so that your mother can understand it,” I tell people. So start your blog post like this: “Dear Mom, Let me tell you about this cool thing I learned today,” and then tell her about it. When you’re done, delete the salutation and opening line, and you’ve got your blog post.
What Can [Insert Movie/Song/Sport/Esoteric Trivia] Teach Us About [Industry/Job/Social Movement]: I very nearly wrote a post about “What Ultimate Frisbee Can Teach Us About Blogging” once (I was an avid Ultimate Frisbee player many years ago), but then I decided I hated those kinds of posts. Still, they’re very successful, and they do serve a purpose. They force you to do some lateral thinking, and find weird connections between your chosen song/sport/etc. and your subject matter. It also gives you a framework to start building the post, which makes the writing much easier.
Use the News: This one is especially important if you’re writing about your chosen industry or field. Find news articles in other blogs, trade journals, or even the mainstream news, and write a news-opinion piece about it. Talk about the basic details of the story, and then offer your opinion on how this will affect your industry, for good or bad. Spend about half your post summarizing the story (don’t forget to cite the article and link to it), and then the other half putting forth your own ideas.
Once Upon a Time: People love stories. We’ve been passing knowledge through stories since before we had a written alphabet. Storytelling is in our DNA. So rather than just put forth an idea in the most general, vague terms, tell a story about how you saw it used. Tell a true story, or make one up, as sort of a modern-day parable. If you need to, tell your story to someone out loud before you commit it to paper. You’ll find a story flows much more easily than just reciting dry facts and banging out 30,000 foot overviews.
Lists: Create a list of ideas or techniques, and give it a descriptive and persuasive title. People love lists, and they’re easily drawn to them. (Hey, it got you to read this far, didn’t it?) Plus it makes writing much easier. Rather than coming up with one really long idea, you can instead create five simple ones. A list will keep you focused and let you lightly touch on the different ideas you want to cover. Then you can expand each of them for later posts.
When you’re trying these techniques, don’t let them turn you into a word factory. Try to stick with the mantra, “one idea, one post, one day.” If you find your posts are getting too long, split them up into two different ideas, or make your post a two-parter.
About the Author: Erik Deckers Erik is the VP of Operations & Creative Services for Pro Blog Service. He has been blogging since 1998, and has been a published writer for more than 22 years. He has written humor newspaper columns, business articles, radio and stage plays, and is currently working on a novel. He helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies, and is writing two other books on social media and networking. Erik frequently speaks on blogging and social media.
A common complaint I hear from big-J Journalists about bloggers is that we’re not “real” journalists. That we’re somehow beneath their contempt and notice.
I first saw this attitude when I worked at the Indiana State Department of Health, and a few of my colleagues said we would never deal with bloggers because they only wanted to put out bad information. And in dealing with other Journalists, they almost seemed to say “blogger” with a sneer. As if “blogger” was something they stepped in on their way to the office.
As a result, many Journalists don’t believe things like Reporter Shield Laws should apply to us. For example, if an environmental blog were to uncover environmental violations by a large corporation, that blogger could be forced to reveal who his or her sources were. But if a newspaper wrote the same story, the reporter would not.
The biggest question comes down to who is a journalist. In the Branzburg v. Hayes case, Justice Byron White said
“Freedom of the press is a ‘fundamental personal right’ which ‘is not confined to newspapers and periodicals. It necessarily embraces pamphlets and leaflets. … The press in its historic connotation comprehends every sort of publication which affords a vehicle of information and opinion.’ … The informative function asserted by representatives of the organized press in the present cases is also performed by lecturers, political pollsters, novelists, academic researchers, and dramatists.”
Even back in 1973, when Justice White threw open “The Press” to anyone who produced the printed word, technology has widened the definition to anyone who writes for blogs, the 21st century’s electronic pamphlet.
In his article, Hudson also cited Kurt Opsahl, the staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who mentioned a couple examples where bloggers outperformed the big-J Journalists
“Bloggers hammered on the Trent Lott story (Lott’s comments about Strom Thurmond) until mainstream media was forced to pick it up again,” he said. “Three amateur journalists at the Powerline.com blog were primarily responsible for discrediting the documents used in CBS’s rush-to-air story on President George Bush’s National Guard service. And the list goes on.”
Cox lists several other national-headline stories affected greatly by reporting from blogs, including: Dan Rather and the Texas Air National Guard memos, the White House giving press credentials to James Guckert/Jeff Gannon, the resignation of CNN news executive Eason Jordan after publicity surrounding his remarks at the World Economic Forum and the John Kerry-Swift Boat Veterans for Truth controversy.
Or to put it another way, the big political scoops in the last 5 years have not been by the media, but by bloggers. Also called little-J journalists.
So, other than an overwhelming sense of elitism by the men and women of the dead-tree media, what really separates us from being real Journalists?
Is it the medium? Many former newspaper reporters and columnists have left the printed word, and gone on to start their own blogging career:
Ruth Holladay who is serving brilliantly as a cheerleader for traditional media and a thorn in the side of her former employer, Gannett
Lori Borgman the former arts columnist for the Indianapolis Star
(I’m curious what their colleagues think? Have these writers somehow fallen from grace, and are no longer “good enough” to be considered Journalists? Are they now mentioned with the same sneer I heard three years ago?)
Maybe the pay is the issue. The fact that bloggers don’t get paid as much as newspaper writers (who, frankly, are not known for their lavish pay and glamorous lifestyle) may be the deciding factor. However, there are some online writers who make a lot more money than most successful businesspeople, let alone Journalists. So that argument doesn’t seem to hold weight.
Maybe it’s the training. The aforementioned paper-turned-pixel writers notwithstanding, Journalists seem to think they have the super-secret training that makes them a font of reliability and trustworthiness. Yet I know a lot of journalists who can’t spell, don’t know grammar, and in some cases, just plain can’t write. I took several journalism classes in college, and I can tell you they don’t teach anything extra special that someone with a penchant for the written word couldn’t pick up.
Maybe it’s because the media is trustworthy and bloggers aren’t? You know, trustworthy. People like Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, and Ruth Shalit. Of course, Shalit is back in journalism, Blair is a life coach in Virginia, and Glass is now a multi-millionaire, thanks to the book and movie deals he has gotten.
Admittedly, these three are the exception to the rule, and not the rule themselves. But my point is there are bad apples in blogging and bad apples in Journalism. Still if you’re going to accuse bloggers of not telling the truth, you need to look at the journalists who make stuff up too.
I just don’t see what the big difference is, other than bloggers don’t kill a lot of trees to get their message out through a dying medium. Yes, there are bad bloggers, but there are bad journalists. Yes, there are bloggers who lie, but there are lying journalists as well. (Some people might say that term is redundant.) Yes, journalists are trained as writers, but there are a lot of trained writers who use the electronic medium instead of newsprint.
If the U.S. Supreme Court opened up the definition of Citizen Journalists to pamphleteers and leaflet-writers, then they can certainly open it up to bloggers. And as bloggers, we need to make sure we can meet that expectation. We need to take on the mantle of Citizen Journalist ourselves, and then make sure we live up to that standard. (I’ll discuss that more in the future.)
So what do you think? Are bloggers journalists? Or are we a bunch of cranks sitting in our parents’ basement under bare light bulbs, writing about conspiracy theories and Paris Hilton sightings?
About the Author: Erik Deckers Erik is the VP of Operations & Creative Services for Pro Blog Service. He has been blogging since 1998, and has been a published writer for more than 22 years. He has written humor newspaper columns, business articles, radio and stage plays, and is currently working on a novel. He helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies, and is writing two other books on social media and networking. Erik frequently speaks on blogging and social media.
Okay, he didn’t say it was me per se, but rather anyone who was reading his blog post.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Content is not king. You are. (or Queen.) Content is currency. You’re the king.
Content is a means to deliver interest. It’s a gathering place for you and the people you hope to entertain/attract/educate/equip. That doesn’t make it the king.
And while I like Chris Brogan’s channeling of Mr. Rogers — everyone is special, a sentiment I firmly believe — I think new online relationships are started by our content.
Whether it’s our ideas, the words we choose, or how well we string them together, people find us because of search. They stay with us because of quality. They form relationships with us because of, well, us.
But I submit that it’s still the original content that started it all. You can’t win search without good content. You can’t win fans without good content. And people won’t stick around without good content.
Content may be currency in Chris Brogan’s world, but in a culture that worships the Almighty Dollar, I think the currency of ideas is our king.
About the Author: Erik Deckers Erik is the VP of Operations & Creative Services for Pro Blog Service. He has been blogging since 1998, and has been a published writer for more than 22 years. He has written humor newspaper columns, business articles, radio and stage plays, and is currently working on a novel. He helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies, and is writing two other books on social media and networking. Erik frequently speaks on blogging and social media.
The Best, Easiest Way to Build Blog Readership
Gary Vaynerchuk, author of Crush It!
, says that one of the best ways to build readership for your blog is by commenting on other people’s blogs.
For one thing, it helps with your Google search juice. But more importantly, it lets people know you’re reading their blog and are interested in what they’re saying. Vaynerchuk says that we need to spend hours per day — hours! — posting comments on other people’s blogs.
While you may not have the time or desire to spend hours doing this (of course, you won’t crush it, says Vaynerchuk), you do need to leave some intelligent comments when you do. It’s not enough to just leave “Nice post!” as a comment. If you want to show the bloggers you’re truly engaged and interested, leave comments that show you have actually read and understood what they wrote about.
This does two things for you: 1) you meet like-minded readers, and let them know about your existence. When they find you, they’ll become readers, and you’re growing your social media footprint; and, 2) it builds backlinks to your own blog, which boost your search engine ranking.
This is a tried-and-true technique for building search rankings, especially as Google is recognizing authority of websites by their backlinks. They figure if a lot of people link to a blog, site, or even a post, it must be something worthwhile. And commenting, while not as powerful as, say, another blog post, is still a way to generate those much-sought after backlinks.
There are some search engine optimization companies that offer backlinking services to their clients, and will spend a lot of time (hopefully) leaving comments on people’s blogs, in addition to their other techniques and practices.
Less scrupulous companies will leave crappy comments that are nothing but spam, hoping that they won’t be deleted or caught in spam filters. While I’m not sure if Google or other search engines will penalize URLs that spam links lead to (if anyone knows, leave us a comment), it’s our fervent hope that the search engines will penalize those parasites, and that they suffer TSA strip searches and tax audits.
(WordPress has a great spam fighting software in Akismet, and it’s done wonders for this blog. It’s blocked 11,484 spam comments to date, and I deleted 35 spam comments right before I wrote this post. So I’m not a big fan of spammers.)
Basically, if you want your comments to be accepted and appreciated by your fellow bloggers, explain why you think a post is comment-worthy, talk about your own viewpoints, and maybe a reason why you agree or disagree. Engage in an ongoing conversation with those people. And if someone leaves a comment on your blog, respond, and check out the other person’s blog.
Erik is the VP of Operations & Creative Services for Pro Blog Service. He has been blogging since 1998, and has been a published writer for more than 22 years. He has written humor newspaper columns, business articles, radio and stage plays, and is currently working on a novel. He helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies, and is writing two other books on social media and networking. Erik frequently speaks on blogging and social media.
Tags: blogging, comments, Gary Vaynerchuk
Posted in All Posts, Business Blogging, Business Blogging Content, Networking, Social Media, Writing | 3 Comments »
A Year in Review
Professional Blog Service started a year ago out of Indy Associates to assist companies in generating content they need for most of their Internet marketing activity.
While at Indy Associates, we always recommended blogging as a good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy. With the popularity of social media sites like Linkedin, Facebook and micro-blogging service Twitter, the strategy has become even more important. The challenge for most of our customers was the blog content generation. Most companies do not have trained content writers that are able to develop conversational blog content, while writing for the search engines. Most important, many of clients have great ideas with no time to share them.
So, what have we learned in 2009?
Most companies still do not have the resources, or the time to write their own content.
2009 saw the unemployment rate hit 10% in November. It was reported that many companies laid off many in their workforce leaving those left behind with more work to do and little time to get it done. The last thing on anyone’s mind is getting blog content written, even though everyone agrees that marketing is still important in a down economy.
Blogging and Social Media continue to evolve from AOL of the 90s to Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter heading into a new decade.
“Two-thirds of the world’s Internet population visit social networking or blogging sites, accounting for almost 10% of all Internet time, according to a Nielsen report published in March of this year, “Global Faces and Networked Places.” These numbers keep rising as the year progresses. By 2012, IBM predicts that globally, a quarter of the global population will be using social media in some form.
Results still matter to most companies.
Learning how to play in social media is one thing. Getting people to interact with you is another. Your clients may or may not interact with you through social media. The challenge for all companies is finding out which ones they should engage. You may be able to sell like Dell, or respond to customer complaints like Southwest Airlines and Jet Blue Airlines have done. (Note to my former colleagues at American Airlines – take note!). Either way, Social Media and Blogging is measurable in some way depending on the strategic approach you take with it.
There are great tools like Yahoo Analytics (shameless plug as we are a Yahoo Analytics consultant). Radian6 and Scoutlabs can track who’s talking about you, and help you decide whether to act on the positive or negative media being generated.
We predict that 2010 will be the year of results with blogging and social media. In a nutshell, you are doing it to build your marketing list, or to generate interest in your products or services. To succeed, you will need:
If you can learn how to do it before your competition, you win. It will take them 12 months just to figure out what you have done.
Happy New Year from Professional Blog Service
Paul Lorinczi is the President of Professional Blog Service. The goal of the company is the help clients use Blogging and Social Media to expand their business online through planning, execution, and measurement.
Tags: blogging, business blogging, Social Media, Social Media Analytics, social networking, social networks
Posted in Blog ROI, Business Blogging, Business Blogging Content, Research Desk, Social Media, Social Media Analytics | No Comments »
Don’t Stress Over Keywords in Your Blog Posts
The keyword conundrum is one that plagues all bloggers. We’re supposed to use keywords, but you can’t use too many, or you’re stuffing. You can’t use them just once, or you’ll get beat by anyone who uses them properly.
Search has gotten more complicated, as more websites and blogs appear, and people are getting smarter about SEO and how they use keywords. This means that we as bloggers have to create smaller and smaller niches (which is a smart strategy to begin with).
Let’s say my hobby is old-school pens. Not just any pen, like the $.69 Bic, but old fountain pens. More specifically, refillable fountain pens — the kind where the ink comes in a little bottle, and you need to refill it with an eye dropper.
Ten or twelve years ago, I could have optimized a website to be found if you searched for “pens,” or maybe “fountain pens.” But now, as more people have pen websites, I need to be more specific and only talk about “refillable fountain pens.” I could even take it one step further, and write about “repairing refillable fountain pens.”
And therein lies the problem. If I want to win any search for “repairing refillable fountain pens,” I have to use that exact phrase over and over. It’s a clunky, 4-word phrase that defies elegant usage. I can use it a few times naturally, like in a headline — “5 trends in 2010 for repairing refillable fountain pens” or Ashton Kutcher’s celebrity secrets for repairing refillable fountain pens.” — but I’ll plumb the depths of that barrel pretty quickly. So I need to find an alternative.
The body text is also important, but using that exact phrase is going to be difficult. The prevailing wisdom is that keyword density should be 1%, or 1 out of every 100 words. That’s not that hard to do if you have a short post. It’s when you get into 500 or 1,000 word posts that it gets a little awkward.
Write for Readers, Not Spiders
Here’s where I differ from my SEO friends: I think it’s okay to keep your keyword density below 1% sometimes. Even a .25% is acceptable, or 1 time out of every 400.
That’s because you’re not going to win search with one blog post. You don’t need to swing for the fences on every pitch. You need to write several blog posts about your specialty for it to make a difference.
Here’s the key, it’s how well you write that makes the biggest difference. Do you write well enough that people want to read what you have to say? Or do you write a bunch of spider-oriented garbage that looks great to the search engines, but annoys your readers?
It’s not a matter of having more keywords than anyone else. I mean, I could write a sentence like “I love repairing refillable fountain pens, because repairing refillable fountain pens gives my life purpose and meaning, so I can continue making a living repairing refillable fountain pens.”
But who wants to read that? It’s clunky, cumbersome, and it looks like I crowbarred the keyword phrase into the post just so I could get them in there for the appropriate keyword density.
The short of it is, keyword density is not nearly as important if you don’t have readers. Yes, you can get them in there naturally, but don’t kill yourself or ruin your writing just to meet an acceptable percentage.
If you’re writing well, you’ll attract the readers (and the backlinks) needed to get your posts indexed and ranking high on search engines.
Photo: Flickr: J. Dueck
Erik is the VP of Operations & Creative Services for Pro Blog Service. He has been blogging since 1998, and has been a published writer for more than 22 years. He has written humor newspaper columns, business articles, radio and stage plays, and is currently working on a novel. He helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies, and is writing two other books on social media and networking. Erik frequently speaks on blogging and social media.
Tags: blogging, keywords, search engine optimization
Posted in Business Blogging, Business Blogging Content, Communication, Writing | No Comments »
How Often Should You Post?
This post was originally published on February 10, 2009 on the DeckersMarketing.com blog, which will soon be closed down.
Neal “Taffy” Taflinger, of Indy.com posted a blogging question on my Facebook page a few days ago:
Question for you, Mr. Blogger Man – is it better to blog frequently so people know there is something to read or only as often as you have something valuable to say?
By an incredible coincidence, my good friend Doug Karr wrote an article about the very same subject on his Compendium Blogware work blog.
Rather than saying it’s one or the other, I would say post frequently and make sure you have something valuable to say.
Business blogs should post at least once a day (once a weekday is fine, and skip the weekends). Personal blogs like Neal’s or my humor blog can be once a week. However, once a week is the bare minimum. But I wouldn’t sacrifice either or choose one over the other. You need valuable content, and you need to post it with some frequency. The more you post, the more the search engines will find you (and love you!). This makes it easier to be found in the search engines for your particular search terms.
More importantly, you need to post consistently. If you post once a week, post it on the same day. If you post it daily, post it at the same time.
Plus, if you post regularly, your readers will know when and how to find you, and your readership will build more quickly and reliably than if you were to post every 7 – 15 days, without rhyme or reason, or any regular schedule.
Bottom line is this isn’t an either/or answer. There are those who say you can sacrifice quality for quantity, but since Neal’s blog is based on readership more than it is search engines, he should focus on quality, and don’t forget the quantity.
Erik is the VP of Operations & Creative Services for Pro Blog Service. He has been blogging since 1998, and has been a published writer for more than 22 years. He has written humor newspaper columns, business articles, radio and stage plays, and is currently working on a novel. He helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies, and is writing two other books on social media and networking. Erik frequently speaks on blogging and social media.
Tags: blog, blog writing, blogging, writing
Posted in Business Blogging, Business Blogging Content, Communication, Writing | No Comments »
9 Books That Will Improve Your Writing
Demian Farnworth over at CopyBlogger came up with a list of the 10 Books That Will Transform Your Writing. Ten books, that if you read them, will help your writing improve just by reading some examples of what is good, and then modeling them
A few of Farnworth’s 10 transforming books:
While I’ve only read a couple of Farnworth’s recommendations, I have a few recommendations of my own. These are my own favorite books and the ones I read more than once just to get an idea of how I want my writing to look.
Other writers I could have included, but didn’t for any reason: Douglas Adams, Dave Barry, Dick Francis,
Erik is the VP of Operations & Creative Services for Pro Blog Service. He has been blogging since 1998, and has been a published writer for more than 22 years. He has written humor newspaper columns, business articles, radio and stage plays, and is currently working on a novel. He helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies, and is writing two other books on social media and networking. Erik frequently speaks on blogging and social media.
Tags: Copyblogger, quality, transformation, writing
Posted in All Posts, Business Blogging Content, Communication, Networking, Writing | 1 Comment »
Want to Make Your Writing More Vivid? Use Metaphors
If you want to add some life to your writing, to give it breath and a heartbeat, use metaphors. They’re the lifeblood of any vibrant, vivid writing, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction.
I’ve been using metaphors in my writing with great success over the last several years. It marks a significant improvement in the quality of my writing, and I’ve garnered more and better opportunities. Whether there’s a connection between the two, I don’t know.
I’m a big fan of metaphors, and I like them better than similes. From the Greek, metaphora means to transfer or to carry over. It basically carries a comparison from one idea or item to another.
There is one difference between metaphors and similes: similes use the words like or as in them, metaphors do not.
Similes
Metaphors
I don’t like similes. They’re weak. They’re the pencil-necked milksop of literary devices. They say things are similar, but not quite that item. Life is like a box of chocolates, but not really.
Take a look at the last metaphor example: “Men’s words are bullets.” That’s a powerful phrase. It doesn’t say they’re like bullets, that they remind people of bullets, or “words can hurt people sort of like bullets can hurt people.” That’s just smarmy, wishy-washy pap.
“Men’s words are bullets,” on the other hand, makes you feel the the emotional damage that can be done by words, feeling the piercing, crashing power of a bullet fired from a large gun.
If you want to make your writing more powerful and add more life to your words, sprinkle some metaphors into your articles and watch what they’ll do for you.
Erik is the VP of Operations & Creative Services for Pro Blog Service. He has been blogging since 1998, and has been a published writer for more than 22 years. He has written humor newspaper columns, business articles, radio and stage plays, and is currently working on a novel. He helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies, and is writing two other books on social media and networking. Erik frequently speaks on blogging and social media.
Tags: Communication, metaphors, writing
Posted in Business Blogging Content, Communication, Writing | 3 Comments »
The Best Way to Get and Keep More Readers
When I was in graduate school, I noticed that most of my fellow grad students, and our professors, loved to use big words and long sentences.
Not me, of course. I had cut my writing teeth at my college newspaper, so I wrote like a journalist: short words, short sentences, short paragraphs. (Something that would send my 7th grade English teacher screaming from the room.)
I constantly got easy A’s on my papers, while the other students were getting B’s and hard-won A’s, and spending a lot more time on their work than I did.
It never occurred to anyone in the department that it was how I wrote that made the difference, not the quality of my ideas or the way I expressed them. I didn’t even stumble on this little revelation myself until many years later.
What I learned was, if you want to be read, write simply. Don’t be flowery or use $50 words. Write at an 8th grade reading level, or possibly even a 6th. That’s where most newspapers are written these days. TV news copy is written at the 4th grade level.
The American Marketing Association even backs me up on this.
In January 2008, authors G. Alan Sawyer, Juliano Laran, & Jun Xu published the study, The Readability of Marketing Journals: Are Award-Winning Articles Better Written?
In a word, yes.
Basically, they wanted to see if award-winning journal articles were written more simply than the non-winners (we call them “losers” outside the academic walls). They ran the text through Microsoft Word’s Flesch-Kincaid Reading Level grader, and did a whole bunch of complicated stuff with statistics that I won’t even pretend to understand.
The Reading Level score corresponds to the grade of education of the reader it would take to understand it. If your score is 8.4, it’s suitable for an 8th grader. A 14.6 is suitable for a college sophomore. A score of 21 or higher is suitable for Stephen Hawking, although he may find it a little pedestrian.
Here’s what they found:
Of the 15 articles with the best readability scores, 13 of them were award winners. They had scores from 12.3 to 14.4. Of the 11
worstleast readable articles, 9 of them were “non-winners,” and carried scores from 18.3 to 21.3.(Their own article has a 13.98 Flesch-Kincaid score. This post has a 6.7. I guess I win.)
So why is a lower reading score so important? Are we getting dumber? Do we all have the attention span of a bunch of hyperactive 12-year-olds?
No, the reason is our mental bandwidth. Let’s face it, we’re all busy, harried, and are running eight things through our brains at once. And that’s on a good day. When we’re confronted with a piece of text, we want it to be as simple as possible.
Simple doesn’t mean we’re stupid, or that our brains are shutting down. It means we don’t have to devote as much time and energy to it. We can process the text easily, absorb the information, and move on. We can absolutely read something that’s long and complex. We’re all smart people, and we can certainly read something written at a 12th grade reading level. It’s just that people sometimes need the break from the long and complex. Simple writing gives that to them, and as a result, is more readily accepted.
Basically, if you want to win readers, stick with the writing style the newspapers use. Short words, short sentences, short paragraphs. Most important information goes up front, least important goes last. Avoid needless words.
Otherwise, your readers will eventually get bored and go elsewhere.
(Note: If you’re a Mac user, and don’t have access to Word’s Flesch-Kincaid grader, you can download Flesh, the document readability calculator. I used it to grade this post.)
Photo: Peyri
Erik is the VP of Operations & Creative Services for Pro Blog Service. He has been blogging since 1998, and has been a published writer for more than 22 years. He has written humor newspaper columns, business articles, radio and stage plays, and is currently working on a novel. He helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies, and is writing two other books on social media and networking. Erik frequently speaks on blogging and social media.
Tags: academia, blog writing, copywriting, graduate school, writing
Posted in Business Blogging Content, Communication, Writing | 1 Comment »
Five Quick and Easy Blog Writing Techniques
Yesterday, I gave a talk about Blogging Basics for Job Seekers to our local Business & Professional Exchange organization, a networking group for people who are looking for new employment.
I tried to explain blog writing as simply as possible, but as I was talking, I realized there’s more than one way to skin that cat, so I thought I would assemble a few of my favorite blog writing techniques here. Use any of them when you’re stuck, not so much for what to write about, but how to write it.
When you’re trying these techniques, don’t let them turn you into a word factory. Try to stick with the mantra, “one idea, one post, one day.” If you find your posts are getting too long, split them up into two different ideas, or make your post a two-parter.
Photo: plindberg
Erik is the VP of Operations & Creative Services for Pro Blog Service. He has been blogging since 1998, and has been a published writer for more than 22 years. He has written humor newspaper columns, business articles, radio and stage plays, and is currently working on a novel. He helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies, and is writing two other books on social media and networking. Erik frequently speaks on blogging and social media.
Tags: blog writing, business blogging, writing
Posted in All Posts, Business Blogging, Business Blogging Content, Communication, Writing | 4 Comments »
Bloggers Are Citizen Journalists
A common complaint I hear from big-J Journalists about bloggers is that we’re not “real” journalists. That we’re somehow beneath their contempt and notice.
I first saw this attitude when I worked at the Indiana State Department of Health, and a few of my colleagues said we would never deal with bloggers because they only wanted to put out bad information. And in dealing with other Journalists, they almost seemed to say “blogger” with a sneer. As if “blogger” was something they stepped in on their way to the office.
As a result, many Journalists don’t believe things like Reporter Shield Laws should apply to us. For example, if an environmental blog were to uncover environmental violations by a large corporation, that blogger could be forced to reveal who his or her sources were. But if a newspaper wrote the same story, the reporter would not.
The biggest question comes down to who is a journalist. In the Branzburg v. Hayes case, Justice Byron White said
Even back in 1973, when Justice White threw open “The Press” to anyone who produced the printed word, technology has widened the definition to anyone who writes for blogs, the 21st century’s electronic pamphlet.
In his article, Hudson also cited Kurt Opsahl, the staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who mentioned a couple examples where bloggers outperformed the big-J Journalists
Or to put it another way, the big political scoops in the last 5 years have not been by the media, but by bloggers. Also called little-J journalists.
So, other than an overwhelming sense of elitism by the men and women of the dead-tree media, what really separates us from being real Journalists?
Is it the medium? Many former newspaper reporters and columnists have left the printed word, and gone on to start their own blogging career:
(I’m curious what their colleagues think? Have these writers somehow fallen from grace, and are no longer “good enough” to be considered Journalists? Are they now mentioned with the same sneer I heard three years ago?)
Maybe the pay is the issue. The fact that bloggers don’t get paid as much as newspaper writers (who, frankly, are not known for their lavish pay and glamorous lifestyle) may be the deciding factor. However, there are some online writers who make a lot more money than most successful businesspeople, let alone Journalists. So that argument doesn’t seem to hold weight.
Maybe it’s the training. The aforementioned paper-turned-pixel writers notwithstanding, Journalists seem to think they have the super-secret training that makes them a font of reliability and trustworthiness. Yet I know a lot of journalists who can’t spell, don’t know grammar, and in some cases, just plain can’t write. I took several journalism classes in college, and I can tell you they don’t teach anything extra special that someone with a penchant for the written word couldn’t pick up.
Even the Washington Post isn’t immune from bad writers. Meanwhile, there are several outstanding bloggers who produce some outstanding prose that would make any big-J Journalist green with envy.
Maybe it’s because the media is trustworthy and bloggers aren’t? You know, trustworthy. People like Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, and Ruth Shalit. Of course, Shalit is back in journalism, Blair is a life coach in Virginia, and Glass is now a multi-millionaire, thanks to the book and movie deals he has gotten.
I just don’t see what the big difference is, other than bloggers don’t kill a lot of trees to get their message out through a dying medium. Yes, there are bad bloggers, but there are bad journalists. Yes, there are bloggers who lie, but there are lying journalists as well. (Some people might say that term is redundant.) Yes, journalists are trained as writers, but there are a lot of trained writers who use the electronic medium instead of newsprint.
If the U.S. Supreme Court opened up the definition of Citizen Journalists to pamphleteers and leaflet-writers, then they can certainly open it up to bloggers. And as bloggers, we need to make sure we can meet that expectation. We need to take on the mantle of Citizen Journalist ourselves, and then make sure we live up to that standard. (I’ll discuss that more in the future.)
So what do you think? Are bloggers journalists? Or are we a bunch of cranks sitting in our parents’ basement under bare light bulbs, writing about conspiracy theories and Paris Hilton sightings?
Stacks of newspapers photo: John Thurm
Ann Arbor News photo: mfophoto
Erik is the VP of Operations & Creative Services for Pro Blog Service. He has been blogging since 1998, and has been a published writer for more than 22 years. He has written humor newspaper columns, business articles, radio and stage plays, and is currently working on a novel. He helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies, and is writing two other books on social media and networking. Erik frequently speaks on blogging and social media.
Tags: journalism, journalists, media, newspapers, reporters, writers, writing
Posted in Business Blogging Content, Communication, Writing | 5 Comments »
It’s Good to be the King
So who’s the king? Content? Frequency? Me?
When it comes to the whole “Content is King” discussion, no one can agree.
Chris Baggott, CEO of Compendium Blogware says it’s frequency: the more you post, the more searches you win.
I say content is king: the better you write, the more people will return.
Chris Brogan says it’s me, and he looks so cool in his shades, I want to believe him.
Okay, he didn’t say it was me per se, but rather anyone who was reading his blog post.
And while I like Chris Brogan’s channeling of Mr. Rogers — everyone is special, a sentiment I firmly believe — I think new online relationships are started by our content.
Whether it’s our ideas, the words we choose, or how well we string them together, people find us because of search. They stay with us because of quality. They form relationships with us because of, well, us.
But I submit that it’s still the original content that started it all. You can’t win search without good content. You can’t win fans without good content. And people won’t stick around without good content.
Content may be currency in Chris Brogan’s world, but in a culture that worships the Almighty Dollar, I think the currency of ideas is our king.
We’re just the power behind the throne.
Photo: Chris Brogan
Erik is the VP of Operations & Creative Services for Pro Blog Service. He has been blogging since 1998, and has been a published writer for more than 22 years. He has written humor newspaper columns, business articles, radio and stage plays, and is currently working on a novel. He helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies, and is writing two other books on social media and networking. Erik frequently speaks on blogging and social media.
Tags: blogging, Business Blogging Content, Chris Baggott, Chris Brogan, Social Media
Posted in Business Blogging, Business Blogging Content, Communication, Writing | 2 Comments »
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