PureBlogging

I Stumbled Upon this post at Rauru today that suggests when blogging that you should write your headlines before you write the actual post. Ikki says:

As I said on a previous post, headings are the first impression you make on your audience. Focusing on crafting a great headline for your blog post will entice them to keep reading what you have to say.

Furthermore, writing your headline first will help you keep your contents well-structured. What lies behind this statement is the fact that you’re developing your contents from the idea expressed in your heading – instead of backwards. This will keep your writing closely aligned to the engaging promise delivered by your headline to your readers.

I respect this strategy (and with all due respect to Ikki), and if it works for you than that’s great, but I find the opposite to be true for my own writing. I almost always write the post first and then determine what I think the headline should be based on what I have written. The biggest reason for this is that when I start writing, I don’t always know what I am going to say for the duration of the entire post, and therefore surprise myself in the end.

I understand Ikki’s point about keeping your post structured by starting with the headline. I could see how it might keep you focused on what you’re trying to say, but on the flipside, I like to be able to have free roam in my writing, and let it take me where it wants to go naturally. Sometimes I will find that I have written a different post than what I had originally set out to do, but that’s ok, because often times, it will turn out better than the original idea I started with.

To me, staying confined to your initial idea of what a post should be about can hinder your writing, and I just don’t see how that would benefit the finished product. That is unless you have been assigned a specific topic to write about with little room for your own thought, which could be the case in some instances if you are blogging for someone else.

This is just my opinion. What do you think? Which method do you prefer?

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Let’s continue with the “Blogs on…” series, our little series of “getting to know you” posts, which were intended to give my readers a little insight on the stuff I read in various categories, and likewise for readers to share some of their favorites in the comments as well.

I started out with blogs on blogging, then blogs on movies. Now, let’s do blog on music.

Also, just so this post doesn’t seem totally off topic, I should mention that blogs in all industries can often provide insight into good blogging strategies, whether it be in the are of design, marketing, or writing. Even if you have a blog about making money online, you can learn things from blogs about movies, football, or pottery. I think you get my point.

1. MTV News – Ok, this is really more of a news site than a blog, but its suscribable by RSS feed, which is good enough for me. This is one area where MTV still excels as far as I’m concerned. Like I mentioned on the movies post as I linked to the MTV Movies Blog, their television content leaves a little to be desired, but you can still get good new from them online.

2. HypeBot – This is a blog by Bruce Houghton (a WPN Blog Partner), which keeps up with happenings in the online music industry. It’s not so much a place to get news on artists, but to learn about industry news, and he is always on the ball there.

3. MySpace Blogs – There’s no better source for information about bands than to go directly to their MySpace page and follow their blog there. 9 times out of 10, this will be the best place to get the most current news on the bands you like. Just subscribe to the feeds of you favorite bands, and you won’t have to worry about keeping tabs on them.

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Read Write Web posted some fascinating findings from a survey it conducted recently, in which they asked 20 bloggers and social media consultants how much they make. An intrusive and personal question perhaps, but that’s why half of them agreed to give out that information on an anonymous basis.

Rather than write it all again, I’m going to use my coverage for WPN liberally:

It looks like the average rate on a per-post basis is $25, though some reported to make as little as $10 and as much as $80. “Let’s say these people are half-time pro-bloggers making $25 per post, writing 3 posts per day,” Kirkpatrick [of RRW] says. “That’s $75 per half-day, a little less than $20 per hour, about $1500 to $1750 per month for half time work. Take two of those jobs at once, do it for a year, and you’ll make about $40k.”

You could do worse, but in-house bloggers seem to be doing better. According to Kirkpatrick, respondents reported annual salaries ranging from $45k and $55k with benefits up to $70k, $80k and $90k with bonuses. “We’re tempted to say, based on the anonymously submitted but descriptive replies we got, that the closer to pure journalism our respondents were doing the lower their wages were,” he says. Now that’s interesting. Critics of blogs as news sources (like the one discussed in this article) ought to love that little nugget.

Those in-house bloggers still didn’t make as much as the participating social media consultants who make as little as $150 an hour, and most commonly about $300 an hour. That’s fascinating considering the amount of sponsored content infiltrating social networks. I have to wonder how the pay rates of these consultants reflect their practices in terms of white hat/black hat.

These numbers (while it should be kept in mind that there were only 20 anonymous participants) might make you jealous or provide you with motivation to reach that point (unless you’re already in the same range or are doing better). What do you think?

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I got a few more comments when I just did a short list of links, than when I included little explanations with them. I don’t know if here is any real significance to that, but I’ll just go with the quick links format. You can discover what they are for yourselves

- How To Build A Community On Your Blog

- Rules For Accepting Guest Posts

- BlogWorld Expo: Doing Business With Advertisers (Video)

- Self Branding: Comments That Leave More Than Just An Opinion

- The Dinosaur and the Journalist

- How do I import my blog entries or RSS feed into Facebook?

Enjoy.

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OK, yes, this is the third post in a row about Johns Wu and his $15 million Bankaholic blog. I keep bringing it up because not only is this a wildly inspirational story for all bloggers aspiring to achieve success at the hands of their blogs, but I keep getting more info.

I talked to Wu a second time and came away with some more insight into his deal, which I wrote about in yet another follow-up piece at WebProNews.

Since we’re all about blogging here, I didn’t want this nugget to float by off the radar, so you can read that here.

From the little I’ve communicated with Wu, he seems like a pretty cool guy with some personality. He likes BBQ and making his own beer (not to mention Subway at drinking on the weekends [I wonder if he's checked out Google's latest Google Labs project - the drunken email filter aka: Mail Goggles]).

Anyhow, Wu said taht user engagement was a huge part of why his blog was bought by Bankrate.

He also noted in a comment on WPN that Shoemoney is the reason he got into web publishing. Not a bad endorsement for Shoemoney huh?

It just goes to show that you can learn a lot from other bloggers, and translate that knowledge into a ridiculous amount of money for yourself.

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I want to talk a little bit about user engagement. This is a subject I got into in my article for WebProNews about Johns Wu, but when it comes to blogs, it can really make or break you. First of all, if your users are not becoming engaged in your content, then you’re probably doing something wrong.

In other words, if you never get any comments, then something’s not right. This could be for a variety of reasons however.

1. Your Content.

The most obvious reason for lack of user engagement is having bad content. If your content is boring, poorly written (to the extent that it becomes unreadable), or just simply brings nothing new to the table, people are just not going to be very interested in reading it, let alone commenting on it.

2. Visibility

It could also just as easily be that readers can’t find you. If they don’t know you exist, they  can’t very well comment on your artilces either, this is where marketing comes into play (obviously).

3. No Encouragement

Sometimes people need a litle encouragement to actually participate in the conversation. There’s no reason why you can’t come right out and say something like “please let me know what you think in the comments”, or to a more subtle extent, something like, “what do you think?” Let readers know that you really are interested in what they have to say, and this can spark quality discussions, that can often even turn out to be more useful to readers than the original post itself. That is the beauty of a blog as a source of information, you don’t have to rely on one perspective.

Advertisers will salivate at a blog that gets a lot of comments, because not only is that a sign of the blog’s popularity, but is also a strong indication of a like-minded readership (even if opinions vary, the base interests are probably still there), which can make ad targeting easier.

There is no question that user engagement is paramount to the success of most blogs.

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