Today, I start an experiment here that will take the blog off track a bit, but which could better build readership. “What?” You ask. “Joe, don’t you have another experiment going with comments turned off?” Yes, and that one ends next week.
The experiment comes to answer a question: What is the best way to be the better blogger? I need to make money writing at a time when writing is becoming a commodity service. Increasingly, journalists like me are obsolete. The answer I seek may be to the wrong question; perhaps blogging isn’t the writing I or many people like me should pursue. But I try.
In January, at Blogging Pro, Paul Scrivens dropped bombshell post: “Blogging Success: You Don’t Have What It Takes.” He writes: “It isn’t going to happen. You don’t deserve the traffic or the money. You don’t deserve the fame and recognition that can come with a big blog. Do yourself a favor and stop pretending.” Ouch, but Paul is right. Most people will never make money blogging. That said, he offered up a helluva recipe for success, taken from Robin Sloan writing at Snarkmarket. Robin applies economic concept “stock and flow” to blogging/new media/journalism:
Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people that you exist. Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you pro duce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.
This concept make loads of sense to me, and it’s the approach I see that the most successful blogs take. Perhaps John Gruber is good example. John’s flow is the huge number of aggregated posts he writes. Often he links to someone else’s story or blog post with a short comment. So John delivers a fairly consistent flow of posts, from which he builds audience. I had condescendingly looked down on the aggregation approach, but that’s old-school journalism arrogance on my part. Bad Joe.
Less frequently, John writes a much longer post, something with shelf life—his stock. The enduring post, the stock, is valuable in another way: Search engines. A good evergreen post about a good topic can pick up the long tail of traffic. People searching for that content will find these stock posts.
I’ve got plenty of stock but not enough flow. My biggest stock is at Betanews, where the posting has a decisively more disruptive edge. There, some commenters accuse me of writing flamebait posts, with sole purpose of driving pageviews. Definitely, blog titles are provocative as are many posts, but my writing is differently directed: To generate discussion and debate. I don’t much care what anyone thinks of me, which gives freedom to be audacious and to take contrary positions I might not even really believe.
Now here’s a confession: Less than half my Betanews writing reflects my own opinions. I purposely circle topics from different viewpoints to churn up debate. Whether or not people like or despise what I write, if the posts get them rethinking their personal viewpoints, all the better. If the tech companies I write about adapt their business practices for the benefit of customers, better still.
There is stock, because my emphasis is generating original content. But I now see that my blogging needs more flow. For my experiment, I will increase the number of posts over the next week or so, and many will be links to others’ posts with some added commentary. I’ll also take tweets and expand them—make flow from flow. I’m not sure how I will deliver flow at Betanews or even whether it makes sense given the site’s format. But here I can easily let the posts flow.
Photo Credit: Gifford Photographic Collection/OSU