PureBlogging

How many times have you heard it said that on the web, content is king? Probably thousands. When we say content is king, what do we really mean? Is it the subject of a post? Is it a measure of how useful, educational, or instructional a post is? Is it a measure of how entertaining a post is? All of the above?

And yet, there are millions of blogs, written by competent, knowledgeable people. Supposedly, there is tons of good content online. So, what is it that separates one blogger’s hopefully link-worthy post from another’s? What makes one blogger get linked to or Stumbled, but not another?

I think it’s personality.

Content may be king, but personality is queen. In chess, the queen is a more powerful piece than the king. Yet without the king, there is no game, since the objective of chess is to capture your opponent’s king. But in blogging, there’s really no clear separation between content and personality.

The more of your personality you inject into your blogging, the more it’s going to alter and evolve your content. You can’t really separate them. Content the king and personality the queen are really two sides of yourself. The more personality you can convey in your blogging, the more unique your content will be. It will stand out, be remarkable–be bookmarkable and shareable via social media.

But people get all weird about how they feel about themselves. It takes guts to really put your personality out there. You risk getting slapped down or just ignored, and that’s a blow to the ego. But I’ll tell you what, I’m far more likely to ignore you if you don’t show me some personality, than if you do. Personality gets noticed, and then the content will have attention paid to it. Just as the flamboyantly powerful queen steals the show and takes all the attention in chess, personality is what attracts attention in blogging, as well. I would say it’s more important for people to like you personally than it is for you to write “killer content.” If chess had no queen, the king would be both more vulnerable to attack, and yet harder to attack, since the queen is the most powerful piece for both defense and offense.

So, how do you get more personality into your blogging, exactly? Here are some tips:

• Start video blogging. With video, your face, voice, and body language create a powerful personality impression on people… much more so than the written word alone.
• Write like how you talk, even if that means your grammar will not be perfect. I can write perfect English if I want to (I majored in it) but to me it’s more important my personality comes through. I want to write in a conversational, natural tone. I want to write like I sound. That means I’ll use “ain’t” (horrors!), sentence fragments, and otherwise break all manner of rules. Whatevs, I don’t care.
• Make it personal. I don’t mean tell us about your love life or your gastrointestinal status. I mean use examples out of your own life and experiences, let your opinions fly, let your audience know what you stand for. Here’s a secret: you don’t want everybody to like you. In fact, it’s best if some people disagree with you. If you try to get everyone to like you, you will be boring.
• Forget about what you think you should do. Do what you want. Do what matters to you. Do what means something to you. Be yourself strongly (if that makes any sense). Nobody wants to follow another follower. They want to follow a leader.

If you’re interested in creating better content, there only about eighty billion blog posts out there to help you with that, so good luck. I think it’s much more interesting and effective to consider how to inject more personality into your blog. Try it and see where it takes you.

Photo by Mark Coggins

When trying to grow a blog it only makes sense to pay attention to successful blogs to see what it is that is contributing to their success. Of course you don’t want to copy other blogs, but many times you can learn a lot and pick up some other ideas that can be adapted to fit your blog and its audience.

Most bloggers who are trying to learn from others will look around at other blogs within their niche that share the same target audience. However, there is potentially more to be learned by studying blogs that are outside of your niche.

Why Should You Pay Attention to Blogs Outside of Your Niche?

1. Creativity

Blogs in certain niches tend to be very similar. Many bloggers read each others blogs and share some of the same readers. Sometimes this leads to less originality and creativity. By branching outside of your niche you may see many new ways of doing things that you wouldn’t see within your own niche.

2. The Borrowing Factor

If you find something that you like at another blog and you want to borrow the idea and adapt it to your own blog, it will probably work better if that other blog is outside of your niche and has a different audience. If your readers have seen the same thing at another blog that they read everyday and you are executing things the same way on your own blog, it obviously won’t look very original. If you are borrowing ideas from blogs that your readers have never seen, it may come across as more unique.

3. Objectivity

Sometimes it is difficult to objectively look at other blogs within your niche. Most likely you have visited these blogs many times before and you probably have already formed opinions. It may be easier for you to visit blogs that are successful outside of your niche to get an objective look at what makes them successful. You will be less attached to the topic and the audience, so you can give it more of a fair evaluation.

4. Variety

By observing only blogs within your own niche you are seriously limiting the variety that you will find. By evaluating blogs from any niche you can open yourself up to opportunities to learn a lot from a far greater number of bloggers.

Some Tips for Learning from Other Blogs:

1. Find Common Ground

Look at blogs that share something in common with yours or that share something in common with where you want your blog to be. If you are the only author and you have no intention or interest in adding other writers, don’t spend too much time evaluating large blogs that have an entire staff of writers.

2. Pay Attention to the Community

You can also learn a lot from observing the readers and the community of a blog. How does the blogger improve interaction with the community? How many comments do posts generally receives? How many stumbles or social media votes do posts receive?

3. Beyond the Blog

Pay attention to other factors besides the blog itself. Does the blogger leverage a network that he or she has built be running other websites or blogs? Do they use a free giveaway like an e-book to draw readers? Does the site include features such as a forum in addition to the blog?

4. Design

Try to get a feel for how the design of the blog has factored into its success. Does it use a custom design, a premium theme, or a free theme? How does the blog design stack up in comparison to other blogs.

5. Other Factors to Observe

There are any number of things you can look at to observe what has led to the blog’s success, including posting frequency, post length, post quality, writing style, social media integration, ads and monetization, branding, focused or general, the about page, ease to contact, navigation, featured content, page load speed, use of the sidebar, services or special features, etc.

My name is Kevin, and I’m a procrastinator.

Now, when you hear those words, you may think to yourself, “Hello! A kindred spirit! For I, too, have been known to put off work in favor of more immediate pleasures!” You may be thinking, “O-ho, my friend, but you are not a true procrastinator. I have been known to avoid responsibility for up to a week’s time!” You may be thinking, “Wow, for a guy who bitches so much about the quality of writing on the Internet, this guy sure chose a hackneyed way to begin this post.”

In truth, only the final observation is truly accurate, because if I am not the world’s worst procrastinator, I am almost certainly included on the list of the world’s top hundred offenders.

But enough about my life, marked as it is less by achievement and more by marathon sessions of eating French-onion-flavored Sun Chips in front of four to six episodes of Battlestar Galactica. I was forced to consider procrastination this week after reading a post at the estimable Copyblogger web concern, titled “How to Stop Thinking About It And Write.” The guest poster, Jane Northcote, offers several very useful suggestions on how to stop procrastinating and start writing, including a stimulating message from Raymond Chandler about blocking out time in your day for The Trade. It’s a great post full of great insights, and I recommend bookmarking it for those times you feel unmotivated.

There’s something more, though, to procrastination, and here it is: Procrastination isn’t really about avoiding work. It’s about avoiding what you think of yourself.

When you’re doing work — whether it’s writing, or graphic design, or just about any other creative endeavor — you’re really laying yourself bare. You’re putting yourself on display. You’re giving yourself the opportunity to fail. That may seem like a grim assessment, but it’s what your brain is focusing on when it chooses to procrastinate. That’s why we even put off things we love doing, like writing — because wasting an hour of our lives clicking on random links on Digg and Reddit is a more attractive prospect than spending an hour of our lives risking failure at something we love.

The problem is exacerbated when you’re working for yourself, or working on a personal project, because the outside forces motivating you aren’t as prevalent, and you’ve only got your own brain to encourage you — and if your brain works like mine does, encouraging you isn’t what it’s best at.

“Why work, when you could screw it up?” Your brain might say to you. “Hey, let’s run through that fantasy again where you’re the Green Lantern and you’re rescuing Reese Witherspoon from Dick Cheney’s island fortress. That’s fun, and there’s less risk of screwing up.”

In his book The Now Habit (probably the best text on procrastination I’ve ever read), author Neil Fiore argues that procrastination is a symptom of a more deeply-seated problem, which is why it’s so hard sometime to just sit down and force yourself to do work (something many motivational speakers and personal development writers have told me to do). The key to truly overcoming procrastination, Fiore argues, is overcoming all of the negative self-talk (for want of a less “I’m-OK-you’re-OK” kind of term) that’s floating around in our heads. It also means overcoming perfectionism.

There are a few pieces of that kind of negative self-talk that are common to many of us, and that should be ignored at all costs:

“It’s not going to be any good.” This is the Big Kahuna of procrastination thinking, the reason most of us choose to spend Five More Minutes doing something pointless and distracting rather than focus on doing the work we love. And the best response to give when your brain tells you that the project you’re working on won’t yield great results is: “Yeah? So what?”

The best way to thwart perfectionism is to embrace the imperfect. Yes, you’re going to screw up. Yes, there are going to be people out there who don’t like what you’ve done. Yes, you’re going to find at least five ways to revise that blog post, and you’re not going to find them until after you’ve posted it. But so what? These things happen, you know. There are people out there who hate Shakespeare, and not just because they can’t penetrate his 16th Century iambs. There are people who think The Beatles are overrated. There are those (myself among them), who think revered filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick and Robert Altman are just sort of good, as opposed to virtuosic. People respond negatively to stuff. It’s a fact of life. The real truism, though, is this: The only really bad works of art are the works of art that were never completed. The best way to become a bad writer is not to write.

“Once X happens, I can finally start doing Y.” Once you’ve mastered good writing, you can finally start blogging. Once you’ve learned to play an instrument, you can start recording a demo tape. Once you’ve perfected a framing technique, you can start being a photographer.

This kind of thinking isn’t just inefficient and counterproductive, it’s recursively inefficient and counterproductive. How are you going to blog if you don’t just start writing? It’s the ultimate in self-defeating thought, because it tells you that you can’t slaughter the cow until after you’ve eaten the steak. I suspect it’s a result of the miserable conundrum many of us find ourselves in when we enter the job market: No employer will have you without extensive experience, but you can’t get that experience without being gainfully employed.

Here’s the thing to remember: About 90 percent of everything that’s out there is either average or lousy. This is not a bad thing. Much of it is the result of people who have only just started out in their chosen field, and still have a lot to learn. You have to get good somehow, and there is absolutely no other way to do this than by playing in the sandbox until you get it right.

“Everyone else out there seems to be so much better at this than me.” That’s not really true, and it’s a result of our tendency to do two things: Migrate toward that which we like, and compare ourselves to others. A wise friend once told me that it’s stupid to compare yourself to others, because given enough time, you’ll invariably come out looking worse for the comparison.

Again: It doesn’t matter, because comparisons are ultimately meaningless. For instance: I’m a fan of Radiohead. I think they’re just about the best band performing today — possibly the best band to ever come out of the UK. I’m also a fan of Belle and Sebastian, another great band from the UK. If forced to compare the two, I’d say that Radiohead makes Belle and Sebastian look like a high school literary magazine staff with guitars. But that doesn’t mean I don’t still love Belle and Sebastian. The perfect need not be the enemy of the good.

“I’m paralyzed by my options.” I’ve always been a big fan of this one. I’ve got so many interests — how do I focus? What if I zero in on one thing (like, for instance, blogging) to the detriment of all the others (like, for instance, acting or music or photography), and then find I don’t like it? I’m risking wasting my time!

The solution here is easy: If you can’t choose between multiple things, choose all of them. It may take a bit longer, but applying your passion will be worth it. And chances are, some of the projects that you start will eventually lose their appeal, and you’ll naturally start to sharpen your focus on one or two things. The key is to not be afraid to leave projects unfinished, particularly if you’re spending your time finishing what you love.

So, there you have it. Follow these simple steps and you’ll never procrastinate again! Right? Right?

No, probably not. Overcoming procrastination is a long and rough road. You’ll have good days and bad. You’ll have unprecedented stretches of productivity that amaze you, and you’ll have times when you can’t convince yourself to do anything but the least of your obligations. There’s nothing wrong with this, unless you truly stop trying.

Now: Get to work.

There is lots of advice about making your blog a success. Much of the advice focuses on the content you write, monetization strategies and building links with other bloggers. But I’m not going to talk about those. Instead, I’ll focus on three things within you that will help you to be successful as a blogger. I call them the three Ps - personality, passion and persistence.

Personality

When you write content for a blog post, the actual content is of course important, but how you write it is even more important. Everyone has a unique voice, and you can let that shine through in your blog posts. It may not be quite the same in every post, as you might change your tone depending on the subject matter, but in general your readers will be able to tell that it’s you. Some people are great at letting their personality show on their blog. With those bloggers, you feel like you’ve dropped by for a chat with a real person. If your readers are ready to brew a coffee and stick around to talk to you, then you have probably put your personality on show.

Passion

Passion is about showing that you care. It doesn’t mean that you have to care equally about every topic you blog about. That would be unrealistic - and hard to sustain. However, when you blog about things that you’re not interested in, the lack of passion shows and readers may opt to stay away. (As an aside, don’t assume that your writing lacks passion just because readers don’t comment. You may have to spend time building up readership before you get regular commenters.) Most of the things I blog about are things that have affected me, and therefore I care about them. When I review something on this blog, it’s something I have used. When I write about freelance writing, it’s an experience that I want to share. The more passion I have for a topic, the more people read.

Persistence

This is all about staying power. After you’ve been blogging for a while, you may feel like you’ve run out of ideas. With more than 1,000 blog posts under my belt on my main blogs, and hundreds more on other blogs, I feel like that sometimes. This is when you have to show what you’re made of and pull something out of the hat. One of the things I opted to do on my freelance mentoring blog was to release myself from the daily posting grind. Instead, I try to post longer, better thought out posts a few times a week. In between times, there’s always link love to fill in the gaps.

I firmly believe that these three personal qualities are part of the recipe for blogging success. Have you got any qualities to add to the list?

If you want to make money as a blogger then you need to be able to exude confidence about your work. A confident blogger is able to write with authority about his subject which means that people are going to take what he says more seriously and be more interested in reading it (and telling others to read it). A confident blogger will be able to sell herself as a blogger to people she wants to sponsor her work, advertise on her blog or pay her to write posts on their sites. And a confident blogger will have what it takes to encourage people they don’t know well to check out their blog.

Here are some basic tips for exuding more confidence as a blogger:

• Don’t diminish what you do. The biggest mistake that bloggers make is to diminish their work by talking about it as if it doesn’t matter. You’re at a party and someone asks you what you do. You say, “I write” or “I blog”. They say “oh, about what?” You give a lame answer that doesn’t really describe your work. You’ve just lost a potential reader. Plus you’ve exhibited the fact that you don’t take your own work seriously. Be proud of what you do. Be comfortable explaining it to others. Hand them your business card which has a link to your URL and encourage them to check you out. If you feel good about your blog, others will too.

• Bid a professional rate when applying for blogging jobs. If you don’t just blog for yourself but also apply for blogging jobs then you want to make sure that you’re not taking on low-paying work. This will trap you at the bottom rung of the blogging ladder where you won’t really love what you do and you’ll start to feel bad about blogging.

• Create a professional bio for your “about the author” page. It’s easy to write a bio that says you’re a part-time blogger who likes cooking and knitting. Don’t do it. Your bio should be a professional description of who you are as a blogger. It should include information about the blogs that you’ve worked on, your other writing experience and any experience you have in the industry about which you are writing. If you want to include your interests so that your readers feel closer to you, do it in a short sentence or two at the end of the professional bio.

• List your accomplishments somewhere on your blog. This may be in your bio or it may be as a post but somewhere there should be a place where people can see the achievements that you’ve made in blogging. This may include reaching a milestone number of RSS feed subscribers, creating your first WordPress theme or getting your first comment from a Problogger on a post. Keep it up to date and print out a copy to hang at your desk so you can remember these great things as well.

• Write a list of what you know as a blogger. This also gets posted at your desk and makes you feel and act more confident. You know what keywords are. You know how to install WordPress plugins. You know a lot so remind yourself of that and start acting like it’s true!

• Network with professionals in the field. You feel more confident when your work is getting recognized by other bloggers who your respect. Get out there online and start networking so that can happen.

• Put together a blogger’s media kit. You should have a basic press release. You should have a complete blogger’s bio. You should have a page of information for advertisers about why they would want to support you. This can be used as a business tool but is also a great little package to make yourself feel more professional about your blogging.

• Make a business plan. You don’t have to get in-depth about this but you should create a basic business plan to define what you want to do with your blog over the next few years. This will serve as a foundation for creating a blog that you can really feel confident about.

• Become an expert in your subject. The real key to feeling confident in blogging is that you know what you’re talking about. You should always be reading up on your topic and immersing yourself in it any way that you can. This will create a natural confidence that will shine through in your communication with others – both on the blog and when you’re discussing the blog out in the real world.

Just think for a minute about which blog post you are more likely to read – the one that says “I’ve been immersed in this topic for ten years and know what I’m talking about so I’m going to tell you” or the blog that says “I don’t really know much about this but I think you should do what I say”. Likewise, think about which person’s blog you’re most likely to search for – the person at a party who answers “what do you do?” with “oh, I write stuff” or the person who says, “I blog about Topic X and provide information about A, B and C”. You will naturally be drawn to the more confident person. If you want to succeed in blogging, that’s the person that you need to be.

Question of the Day: What’s the biggest clue to you that a blogger isn’t confident in their work?

Related Links: Are You A Confident Freelance Writer @ Freelance Writing Jobs and Building Self Confidence with Blogs @ Blog Business World

As we approach the beginning of the Major League Baseball season I thought it was appropriate to drag out at least one baseball analogy to mark the occasion: Are you a singles hitter, or do you go for the home run?

What I’m referring to is, how do you decide which keyword phrases to target when writing your posts?  Do you go after the lesser searched phrases that will send a smaller stream of traffic to your site, or do you go after the keyword phrases that will send thousands of visitors daily.  On the one hand, going after less popular phrases will make it easier to rank higher on Google, but your return will be much smaller.  Your #1 ranking may only result in new 30 to 40 visitors a day.  On the other hand, the most searched keywords can direct thousands of new visitors to the #1 ranked site.  However, there is more than likely over 1 million sites competing for that top spot.  It’s not easy to reach, and it’s even harder to hold.

Is one strategy better than the other?  That really depends on your abilities and the resources (both time and money) you have to devote toward achieving your goal.

Sticking to the baseball analogy, not every player is a home run threat.  We all know about the Hank Aaron’s and Barry Bonds’ of the league (steroid argument aside, the guy could crush the ball), but we don’t pay much attention to the players that day in and day out hit for average and consistently scored runs.  And the players without the ability to hit home runs at will usually got out when they went to the plate looking for the homer.  For the average player the long ball came as a result of taking a good swing at a pitch that they could handle.

For many successful bloggers, that is how they go about blogging.  Day in and day out they post solid content that is either aimed at a lesser searched keyword phrase, or that answers specific questions for their readers.  They don’t necessarily worry about how Google will look at them on the major search phrases.  They go to the plate to hit for average.

Along the way, something the write may make solid contact, they get noticed, and the ball goes over the fence for a score.  Even though their strategy wasn’t to try to take on the big hitters, they manage to rank high and see a huge influx in traffic, even if just for a little while.

What that means for you is, start off smaller.  Learn to hit the ball well before you start swinging for the fences.  Learn how to get your site ranked well on the lesser searched keywords, then start moving up into the more competitive terms.  As you become more skilled at marketing your blog, you can take on more and more competitive terms.  As your skill and your content grow, Google will start to notice.  For now, don’t worry about the long ball; hit for average and continue to score runs.