Robert Scoble, Microsoft's best known blogger, and Shel Israel, a veteran consultant for start up companies, have teamed up to write Naked Conversations: How blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers, a book the authors say is intended to tell businesses of all sizes and in all places why they will benefit from blogging. The following is extracted from Chapter 11, "Doing It Right," which balances a previous chapter called "Doing It Wrong."
This chapter and the next are dedicated to helping you understand some of blogging's finer points—not the tools and technologies, but the techniques and guidelines that have worked for other successful bloggers. This chapter also identifies many of the little details that can improve the effectiveness of and response to most blogs.
Here are our top 11 tips on how to do it right. We hesitate to call them "best practices," not just because the term has become a traditional marketing cliché, but because blogging is too new and dynamic to have any "tried-and-true practices."
Tip #1: What's in a name? Search engine results.
When our publisher, Joe Wikert, started a blog called The Average Joe in February 2005, he made a common first mistake. He didn't think through his title.
Quick: What does "The Average Joe" mean to you? Probably not much. It's like wheat flour. No shape. No meaning. A more specific title would make his blog easier to discover by people who might care about his subject and might be interested in his products or services. Based on its name, why would you want to read Joe's blog? How would anyone know it is about book publishing? What could someone possibly enter in a Google search that would return "The Average Joe" as the top-ranked response?
Your blog's name can help you own your market niche. Suppose someone named Paula wanted to make and sell baked goods from her home in San Carlos, California. What's the better blog title: "My Blog About Something Made with Flour" or "Paula's San Carlos Bread-Baking Blog"? By now, you probably understand how important search engines are to your business and how blogs impact them. A while back, we were looking for a book publisher. So how did we search? Our first query, as we recall, was something like "book publisher blog." We brainstormed for the words to enter that would help us find the right book publisher. A few we recall trying:
- Book publisher problem (or "hate," "sucks," or "avoid")
- How do you get a book published?
- Negotiating book publisher contracts
- Best business book publisher
- Author favorite business book publisher
- How to write a book
- How to get a book author deal
- Getting your book written
Before you enter your title, it's a good idea to spend some time, perhaps an hour, doing some search variations to find out what words bring up results similar to what your blog will contain. There are tools to help you come up with searches on your own, as well as tons of sites that'll help you better understand how people searching for information think. Search for "Danny Sullivan" or "John Battelle" and you'll find lots of search-engine optimization (SEO) tricks to help you, not to mention John's excellent book on searching.
But let's get back to Joe. In our search attempts, we noticed four recurring words in our entries: "publish," "author," "write," and "book." Those are the words Joe should want in his title tagline to optimize search engine results. He should also include his name, because blogs should be both personal and unique.
How about this: "Joe Wikert's Book Authoring and Publishing Blog"? Sounds boring, right? But here's what's more important. Go to a blog search service like Feedster. Enter in "publishing" and see what comes back. Notice that the blog title is underneath each post. Now, what's the likelihood that you'll click on a blog with the name "Average Joe"? Compare that to how likely you'll be to click on something that says "Joe Wikert's Book Authoring and Publishing Blog."
Joe can improve the name further. He already has something most of us don't have: authority. He's an executive at a publicly traded book publisher that's almost 200 years old and had 4 of the top 25 best-selling business books in 2004, according to the New York Times. Why not reflect that in his tagline?
"Joe Wikert, Wiley publishing executive who can get you published."
When we were searching for a publisher, we would have clicked there in a heartbeat.
As Wikert told us five months later, "I took your advice and changed the title to 'The Average Joe: A Book Publisher Blog.' Shortly after making this small change, I went from almost nowhere on search engines to #1 in the results of a Google search on 'book publisher blog.' I launched the blog on February 19. As of July 15, I've made 82 posts, had 353 comments and 46 Trackbacks, and gotten 43 links from 36 sites.
"How has this helped our business?" Wikert asked. "Well, I'd be hard-pressed to give you any specifics here. I don't know how measurable this is today or will be in the future. I'd like to think that new authors are visiting, liking what they find, and ultimately choosing Wiley as their publishing partner. I've tried to focus much of my posting attention on helping the new author. For example, I see that 'royalty payment,' 'average advance,' etc., are often the most popular search terms leading people to ‘The Average Joe.' As a result, I've tried to talk about every aspect of advances and royalties." We have observed first-hand the effect of Wikert's blog on his business; several aspiring authors have thanked us for pointing them to Joe's blog and expressed a desire to work with a publisher who "gets blogging."
Sounds a bit above average to us, Joe.
Robert Scoble, Microsoft's best known blogger, and Shel Israel, a veteran consultant for start up companies, have teamed up to write Naked Conversations: How blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers, a book the authors say is intended to tell businesses of all sizes and in all places why they will benefit from blogging. The following is extracted from Chapter 11, "Doing It Right," which balances a previous chapter called "Doing It Wrong."
This chapter and the next are dedicated to helping you understand some of blogging's finer points—not the tools and technologies, but the techniques and guidelines that have worked for other successful bloggers. This chapter also identifies many of the little details that can improve the effectiveness of and response to most blogs.
Here are our top 11 tips on how to do it right. We hesitate to call them "best practices," not just because the term has become a traditional marketing cliché, but because blogging is too new and dynamic to have any "tried-and-true practices."
Tip #1: What's in a name? Search engine results.
When our publisher, Joe Wikert, started a blog called The Average Joe in February 2005, he made a common first mistake. He didn't think through his title.
Quick: What does "The Average Joe" mean to you? Probably not much. It's like wheat flour. No shape. No meaning. A more specific title would make his blog easier to discover by people who might care about his subject and might be interested in his products or services. Based on its name, why would you want to read Joe's blog? How would anyone know it is about book publishing? What could someone possibly enter in a Google search that would return "The Average Joe" as the top-ranked response?
Your blog's name can help you own your market niche. Suppose someone named Paula wanted to make and sell baked goods from her home in San Carlos, California. What's the better blog title: "My Blog About Something Made with Flour" or "Paula's San Carlos Bread-Baking Blog"? By now, you probably understand how important search engines are to your business and how blogs impact them. A while back, we were looking for a book publisher. So how did we search? Our first query, as we recall, was something like "book publisher blog." We brainstormed for the words to enter that would help us find the right book publisher. A few we recall trying:
- Book publisher problem (or "hate," "sucks," or "avoid")
- How do you get a book published?
- Negotiating book publisher contracts
- Best business book publisher
- Author favorite business book publisher
- How to write a book
- How to get a book author deal
- Getting your book written
Before you enter your title, it's a good idea to spend some time, perhaps an hour, doing some search variations to find out what words bring up results similar to what your blog will contain. There are tools to help you come up with searches on your own, as well as tons of sites that'll help you better understand how people searching for information think. Search for "Danny Sullivan" or "John Battelle" and you'll find lots of search-engine optimization (SEO) tricks to help you, not to mention John's excellent book on searching.
But let's get back to Joe. In our search attempts, we noticed four recurring words in our entries: "publish," "author," "write," and "book." Those are the words Joe should want in his title tagline to optimize search engine results. He should also include his name, because blogs should be both personal and unique.
How about this: "Joe Wikert's Book Authoring and Publishing Blog"? Sounds boring, right? But here's what's more important. Go to a blog search service like Feedster. Enter in "publishing" and see what comes back. Notice that the blog title is underneath each post. Now, what's the likelihood that you'll click on a blog with the name "Average Joe"? Compare that to how likely you'll be to click on something that says "Joe Wikert's Book Authoring and Publishing Blog."
Joe can improve the name further. He already has something most of us don't have: authority. He's an executive at a publicly traded book publisher that's almost 200 years old and had 4 of the top 25 best-selling business books in 2004, according to the New York Times. Why not reflect that in his tagline?
"Joe Wikert, Wiley publishing executive who can get you published."
When we were searching for a publisher, we would have clicked there in a heartbeat.
As Wikert told us five months later, "I took your advice and changed the title to 'The Average Joe: A Book Publisher Blog.' Shortly after making this small change, I went from almost nowhere on search engines to #1 in the results of a Google search on 'book publisher blog.' I launched the blog on February 19. As of July 15, I've made 82 posts, had 353 comments and 46 Trackbacks, and gotten 43 links from 36 sites.
"How has this helped our business?" Wikert asked. "Well, I'd be hard-pressed to give you any specifics here. I don't know how measurable this is today or will be in the future. I'd like to think that new authors are visiting, liking what they find, and ultimately choosing Wiley as their publishing partner. I've tried to focus much of my posting attention on helping the new author. For example, I see that 'royalty payment,' 'average advance,' etc., are often the most popular search terms leading people to ‘The Average Joe.' As a result, I've tried to talk about every aspect of advances and royalties." We have observed first-hand the effect of Wikert's blog on his business; several aspiring authors have thanked us for pointing them to Joe's blog and expressed a desire to work with a publisher who "gets blogging."
Sounds a bit above average to us, Joe.
Tip #2: Read a bunch of blogs before you start.
Before you start blogging, read a wide selection of blogs, so you understand what's out there. For that, we recommend you get an RSS news aggregator, which is a program that collects and displays feeds from multiple RSS-enabled blogs in one convenient window. (As we mentioned earlier, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.) There are several RSS news aggregators available for both Windows and Macintosh, most of them free. RSS is extremely important, and we will discuss it further in Chapter 14. What's important here is that RSS lets you cover much more ground than going to site after site with a web browser. When a blog is updated, an RSS aggregator delivers the updates to your e-mail application, making it at least 10 times more efficient to read than with an old-school web browser.
Blog search engines, or RSS search engines, are the best tool for finding blogs that interest you. We think all of them could be easier to use, but each keeps improving at its own pace. PubSub3 provides the best results via RSS subscription and has become our favorite as of this writing. Bloglines Citations4 is very easy to use and understand, so it's a good choice for a beginner, as are Feedster5 and IceRocket.
Technorati7 is valuable because it tells you who's linking to whom. That's very important to know. It's a good vehicle to see how each blog ranks. Technorati has also become a central conduit for "tagging," a new system for searching and finding photo and text blogs that interest you. More about that in Chapter 14.
You also can use an old-fashioned web search engine, such as Google, to locate blogs, provided you remember to always include the word "blog." What you miss in traditional search engines, however, is currency. They sometimes take a couple of weeks to pick up a new blog. That is beginning to change, however. Google Blog Search8 looks just like Google and is just as easy to use, but it finds only content produced after August 1, 2005. With some RSS search engines, your blog can be listed in a matter of days or even hours.
Let's say you're looking for blogs on quilting. You can do a search on quilting on any search engine and get a snapshot of the current—or past—state of the blogosphere. What if someone starts blogging about quilting later? But if you use an RSS news aggregator, you can subscribe to the search, and anyone who uses the word quilting on a blog, from that point on, will automatically show up in your news aggregator. Most bloggers use RSS search subscriptions to search for published content on their own names, companies, or competitors, and for common jargon used in their business categories.
Reading other blogs should help inspire you to write your own—and should give you some ideas of what is already being said and what you might contribute. If you read 50 blogs for two weeks and you still don't feel you have something to write about, you probably aren't going to be a good blogger. But, please stick around anyway. Even if you don't start your own blog, you can see what others have to say on blogs impacting you and your business, and you can be quick to comment whenever appropriate.
Tip #2: Read a bunch of blogs before you start.
Before you start blogging, read a wide selection of blogs, so you understand what's out there. For that, we recommend you get an RSS news aggregator, which is a program that collects and displays feeds from multiple RSS-enabled blogs in one convenient window. (As we mentioned earlier, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.) There are several RSS news aggregators available for both Windows and Macintosh, most of them free. RSS is extremely important, and we will discuss it further in Chapter 14. What's important here is that RSS lets you cover much more ground than going to site after site with a web browser. When a blog is updated, an RSS aggregator delivers the updates to your e-mail application, making it at least 10 times more efficient to read than with an old-school web browser.
Blog search engines, or RSS search engines, are the best tool for finding blogs that interest you. We think all of them could be easier to use, but each keeps improving at its own pace. PubSub3 provides the best results via RSS subscription and has become our favorite as of this writing. Bloglines Citations4 is very easy to use and understand, so it's a good choice for a beginner, as are Feedster5 and IceRocket.
Technorati7 is valuable because it tells you who's linking to whom. That's very important to know. It's a good vehicle to see how each blog ranks. Technorati has also become a central conduit for "tagging," a new system for searching and finding photo and text blogs that interest you. More about that in Chapter 14.
You also can use an old-fashioned web search engine, such as Google, to locate blogs, provided you remember to always include the word "blog." What you miss in traditional search engines, however, is currency. They sometimes take a couple of weeks to pick up a new blog. That is beginning to change, however. Google Blog Search8 looks just like Google and is just as easy to use, but it finds only content produced after August 1, 2005. With some RSS search engines, your blog can be listed in a matter of days or even hours.
Let's say you're looking for blogs on quilting. You can do a search on quilting on any search engine and get a snapshot of the current—or past—state of the blogosphere. What if someone starts blogging about quilting later? But if you use an RSS news aggregator, you can subscribe to the search, and anyone who uses the word quilting on a blog, from that point on, will automatically show up in your news aggregator. Most bloggers use RSS search subscriptions to search for published content on their own names, companies, or competitors, and for common jargon used in their business categories.
Reading other blogs should help inspire you to write your own—and should give you some ideas of what is already being said and what you might contribute. If you read 50 blogs for two weeks and you still don't feel you have something to write about, you probably aren't going to be a good blogger. But, please stick around anyway. Even if you don't start your own blog, you can see what others have to say on blogs impacting you and your business, and you can be quick to comment whenever appropriate.
Tip #3: Keep it simple. Keep it focused.
Most people enjoy breezing quickly through a great number of blogs. If you want others to talk about you and pass around your information, you should make it easy for them to do so.
With that in mind, it's best to have each post contain just one idea or one set of links. One guy who makes it hard is Mike Gunderloy.9 His page of links to other blogs works well for people who visit with a web browser, but it's hard on bloggers who try to link to a single one of his entries. On a web browser, Mike's page looks great. However, most influential bloggers watch sites like Mike's via their RSS aggregators rather than using a web interface, and when viewed in RSS, Mike's blog shows an entire day as one entry. This makes it very hard to read or e-mail to others. Imagine that an item two-thirds of the way down his page interests you. "Hey, Jane, check out the cell phone link here. Just scroll two-thirds of the way down this entry," you have to write. That just isn't as quick and easy as "Hey, Jane, check out this link."
Tip #4: Demonstrate passion.
Tip #5: Show your authority.
We offer these two tips together because they are separate components but should be inseparable in your blog. A good corporate blog is both passionate and authoritative. Passion alone does not make a point, as many teen diarists have shown. Authority alone is boring, as Randy's Journal, discussed in the preceding chapter, exemplifies.
How do you demonstrate your passion for a topic? One way is to post often. How often depends on how much competition you have and what kind of audience you are trying to build. When we look at Technorati and PubSub lists of the world's most popular bloggers, they all post more often than once a day.
However, on days when you feel life's distractions conflicting with your blog's topical passion, we advise taking a break. There are days when you will just not be in the mood. Don't force it. One of Microsoft's most popular bloggers (at least he was until he stopped posting in 2004) was Christopher Brumme.28 His blog wasn't one that most people would read. He works on the highly technical .NET Common Language Runtime team. He would post only once every month or so, and his posts ran about 11,000 words each. He ignored most of the tips we offer here. Nevertheless, he was very popular with software developers, the only audience he cared about. Developers flocked to Brumme's blog because he had no competition. There are few people with his technical knowledge, and none who write about the innards of .NET, so he got away with posting infrequently and no one ever doubted either his passion or his authority.
Authority is the other essential element of a successful blog. Blog what you know. If you're a plumber, an auto maker, an NBA team owner, or maybe a French t-shirt maker, showcase your knowledge to audiences who care.
That advice isn't as easy as it sounds, but a good way to start is to talk about what it entails to do whatever it is you do. Look at how Thomas Mahon did it in his English Cut blog,29 discussed in Chapter 5. Mahon demonstrated what he knew about—cloth, fit, measuring, and so on—everything about making fine suits. He posted pictures of suits in the making. He demonstrated he knew what he was doing.
Enticing influential people to link to you is extremely beneficial. You get exposure to large audiences, and the implied confirmation of your authority brings all sorts of benefits. For instance, one of the guys we trust entirely is Doc Searls. We've been reading him for years, and we both tend to think if he says something, we can assume it to be true. So, when he links to something and says it's great, we trust him, and we confer that trust and authority on the site to which he pointed. Get five popular and widely trusted bloggers to link to a new site, and you've hit a home run. You might be able to fool one guy, but it's very hard to fool five.
Tip #6: Add comments.
A good blog is a conversation, not a one-way PR channel. Get over the fact that you won't have full control. Instead, embrace the extension. If you don't allow Comments, your corporate blog is likely to be seen as a PR channel and will be far less likely to be either trusted or followed. This does not mean you need to tolerate excessive rudeness. After Scoble and Israel were hit with some truly ugly comments, Israel imposed his "living room rule," which states: "If you are a guest in my home and you are rude to me or my guests, I will ask you to be more polite. If you do not comply I will make you leave, and you will not be allowed back in. The same goes for anonymous commenters. If you will not let me know who you are, then you are evicted." The "living room" policy has made life easier and more pleasant. We advise you to post it once and enforce it ever after.
Reprinted with permission of John A. Wiley & Sons © 2006.
Tip #3: Keep it simple. Keep it focused.
Most people enjoy breezing quickly through a great number of blogs. If you want others to talk about you and pass around your information, you should make it easy for them to do so.
With that in mind, it's best to have each post contain just one idea or one set of links. One guy who makes it hard is Mike Gunderloy.9 His page of links to other blogs works well for people who visit with a web browser, but it's hard on bloggers who try to link to a single one of his entries. On a web browser, Mike's page looks great. However, most influential bloggers watch sites like Mike's via their RSS aggregators rather than using a web interface, and when viewed in RSS, Mike's blog shows an entire day as one entry. This makes it very hard to read or e-mail to others. Imagine that an item two-thirds of the way down his page interests you. "Hey, Jane, check out the cell phone link here. Just scroll two-thirds of the way down this entry," you have to write. That just isn't as quick and easy as "Hey, Jane, check out this link."
Tip #4: Demonstrate passion.
Tip #5: Show your authority.
We offer these two tips together because they are separate components but should be inseparable in your blog. A good corporate blog is both passionate and authoritative. Passion alone does not make a point, as many teen diarists have shown. Authority alone is boring, as Randy's Journal, discussed in the preceding chapter, exemplifies.
How do you demonstrate your passion for a topic? One way is to post often. How often depends on how much competition you have and what kind of audience you are trying to build. When we look at Technorati and PubSub lists of the world's most popular bloggers, they all post more often than once a day.
However, on days when you feel life's distractions conflicting with your blog's topical passion, we advise taking a break. There are days when you will just not be in the mood. Don't force it. One of Microsoft's most popular bloggers (at least he was until he stopped posting in 2004) was Christopher Brumme.28 His blog wasn't one that most people would read. He works on the highly technical .NET Common Language Runtime team. He would post only once every month or so, and his posts ran about 11,000 words each. He ignored most of the tips we offer here. Nevertheless, he was very popular with software developers, the only audience he cared about. Developers flocked to Brumme's blog because he had no competition. There are few people with his technical knowledge, and none who write about the innards of .NET, so he got away with posting infrequently and no one ever doubted either his passion or his authority.
Authority is the other essential element of a successful blog. Blog what you know. If you're a plumber, an auto maker, an NBA team owner, or maybe a French t-shirt maker, showcase your knowledge to audiences who care.
That advice isn't as easy as it sounds, but a good way to start is to talk about what it entails to do whatever it is you do. Look at how Thomas Mahon did it in his English Cut blog,29 discussed in Chapter 5. Mahon demonstrated what he knew about—cloth, fit, measuring, and so on—everything about making fine suits. He posted pictures of suits in the making. He demonstrated he knew what he was doing.
Enticing influential people to link to you is extremely beneficial. You get exposure to large audiences, and the implied confirmation of your authority brings all sorts of benefits. For instance, one of the guys we trust entirely is Doc Searls. We've been reading him for years, and we both tend to think if he says something, we can assume it to be true. So, when he links to something and says it's great, we trust him, and we confer that trust and authority on the site to which he pointed. Get five popular and widely trusted bloggers to link to a new site, and you've hit a home run. You might be able to fool one guy, but it's very hard to fool five.
Tip #6: Add comments.
A good blog is a conversation, not a one-way PR channel. Get over the fact that you won't have full control. Instead, embrace the extension. If you don't allow Comments, your corporate blog is likely to be seen as a PR channel and will be far less likely to be either trusted or followed. This does not mean you need to tolerate excessive rudeness. After Scoble and Israel were hit with some truly ugly comments, Israel imposed his "living room rule," which states: "If you are a guest in my home and you are rude to me or my guests, I will ask you to be more polite. If you do not comply I will make you leave, and you will not be allowed back in. The same goes for anonymous commenters. If you will not let me know who you are, then you are evicted." The "living room" policy has made life easier and more pleasant. We advise you to post it once and enforce it ever after.
Reprinted with permission of John A. Wiley & Sons © 2006.
