In high school, I was friends with an individual who repeatedly acted as if he knew everything anyone was going to say. If you got him started on a subject, he would completely dominate the conversation with minutae and commentary on every aspect of the issue at hand, while everyone else sat around staring at him.

What this individual didn’t realize is that effective interpersonal communication is a conversation, not a lecture. If I want to be lectured, I will go sign up for a college course and let a professor lecture; he’s earned the privilege by earning a high degree in the topic.

The same philosophy holds true on the internet. If you ride a topic until there’s nothing left to say about it, you’ve effectively killed the conversation. People come to your blog to get a quick summary of the topic, some directions for future thought, and some links to more resources on the thought. They don’t come there to have a topic written about to oblivion.

This is particularly challenging for a logorrheic individual like myself, so how do I find a balance between writing what feels right for me and writing a subject to death? Here’s what I use as a guideline.

Don’t write more than two hundred words on a single point. If you’re doing that, you’re writing too much. If you have extensive thoughts on a topic, try breaking things down into smaller sections that are easily digestible by your readers.

Don’t regurgitate other’s thoughts. Don’t relate in your own words what someone else says on the topic. Link to them and/or quote them, but don’t paraphrase them. This is the equivalent of stepping in front of someone in a conversation and saying, “What he means to say is…”; no one appreciates that.

Leave interesting threads in other directions, but don’t follow all of them. If you try to follow every train of thought that exists, your post will get long and boring very quickly. Let some of those threads of thought dangle; you don’t need to follow up on everything or simply excise them from the post.

Engage others in conversation, too. If you read a good post at another site, make it the start of your own post, but follow the guidelines here. Link to them and quote them, but don’t paraphrase them, and just add your own contributions to the thought. You don’t need to cover every angle, just continue the conversation.

Stick to your interests. I have no interest in talking about politics, for example, so when I start to rub up against politics, I let a thread or two dangle and run away quickly. What happens when you brush up against a topic, but stick to what you know? Readers are engaged.

Don’t be a know it all; practice good conversational skills instead.

Building a Better Blog for 2007 is a month-long series at The Simple Dollar, outlining steps you can take to build a long-term healthy blog that will attract readers. Jump ahead to the next essay, Use the Senses, or back to the previous one, Social Bookmarking.

Most bloggers are familiar with the “Digg effect,” a flood of traffic that comes from reaching the front page of Digg, a popular social bookmarking site (if you want to know more about it, you can see my observations on it). Similar traffic boosts occur whenever a site becomes “popular” in any well-travelled social bookmarking site, and the rewards are obvious: huge numbers of page views from real readers.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? Who wouldn’t want their site to have a huge spike in popularity? In fact, for some bloggers, it becomes so tempting that it becomes an obsession: can I sneak this post onto the front page of digg (or some similar site)? They wind up writing in order to grab cheap clicks and spend their time trolling the social bookmarking sites hoping to see another vote in their favor; meanwhile, their site is actually becoming less popular because the posts are no longer focused on the target audience and they’re appearing less frequently.

Chasing fame on social bookmarking sites is a doomed exercise. You might occasionally make a big splash, but your average day-to-day traffic will suffer as your regular audience moves on. Eventually, you’ll grow disheartened as the “valleys” between those social bookmarking “mountains” become lower and lower and soon your blog has lost all direction.

Here are some healthy tips for success with social bookmarking sites while keeping the focus of your blog in perspective.

Don’t promote yourself. Never submit a page of your own to a social bookmarking site unless you’re an involved member of that community. Regular users will check you out and if they see you’re a low-frequency submitter who only submits from one site, they’ll vote you down out of principle. This happened to me with a previous site on digg – I submitted pages from my site every once in a while and soon they were getting buried quite quickly with comments that indicated that I was spamming the site… which I was.

The pros and cons of links to social bookmarking on your site. Once upon a time, I included lots of links to social bookmarking sites at the bottom of each of my posts – and they got me nowhere. Since removing them, I’ve had much greater success with social bookmarking sites. Why is this? Many people see those icons as being pure self-promotion and they won’t bother to ever click them and leave with a bad taste in their mouth. These icons can sometimes even lead to downvotes on such social bookmarking sites. Although you’re somewhat more likely to have a page submitted to a social site with those links, your chances at striking gold are lessened – and they’re potentially damaging to your long-term audience.

Write compelling content for your audience above all. If it is truly compelling, someone will submit it to social bookmarking sites for you. Both times I’ve popped up on major social bookmarking sites, it has been rather surprising (usually, this surprise has involved watching my site dead in the water for a little while, but I digress). I have considered that some of my posts might do well on various social bookmarking sites, but the ones that actually made it were a bit out of the blue (in one case, the post was kind of old when it appeared).

Don’t be afraid to reach out. The stuff that becomes popular on social bookmarking sites is often examples of people looking at common things through a different light. One way to do this without alienating your audience is by simply reaching out: look for new angles on your topic and research it appropriately. Every time I’ve had success with social bookmarking, it’s been as a result of reaching out.

In short, if your audience appreciates your writing, your best stuff will organically find its way onto social bookmarking sites. Thus, your focus should be on maintaining and growing your audience, not gaming social bookmarking sites.

Building a Better Blog for 2007 is a month-long series at The Simple Dollar, outlining steps you can take to build a long-term healthy blog that will attract readers. Jump ahead to the next essay, Don’t Know It All, or back to the previous one, Don’t Chase Away Your Readers.

Recently, I visited a very interesting blog that focused on personal finance and political issues targeting twentysomethings. The author had a very distinctive voice and he clearly had his audience defined, yet there was still one problem: he was often posting things and making statements that were going to drive away a big part of his readership. Case in point: I was greeted with a photoshopped picture of Paris Hilton with a disconcerting comment added across her chest and a post written in rather crude language about the dumbing down of America. Twentysomethings who are reading a personal finance / political blog are likely going to be fairly conservative and are going to be interested in information on how to get ahead in this world. The author got the twentysomething demographic spot on, but he missed the boat on the rest of his audience.

What’s the moral of the story here? Don’t scare away your readers. This seems like a simple idea, but it does require some forethought and it does require a bit of a filter on your thoughts. Although some will see a “thought filter” as being anathema to what their blogging experience should be, it’s a simple fact that some statements will drive away some readers. If this is a bargain you’re willing to accept, it’s your choice, but you should be aware of that fact.

How do you know if you’re going to chase away your audience, though? Before anything else, you need to clearly define who exactly your audience is. Figure out as many details about your “average reader” as you possibly can and develop a real profile for who exactly is reading your site. Is your reader likely to be a pop culture junkie? Are they liberal or conservative, or is it too hard to tell? Are your readers free spirits or the accountant type?

Here are some tips for making sure that you don’t accidentally frighten your readership into clicking away from your site.

If your audience holds a certain belief to be central, don’t insult that belief. For example, let’s say you write about Christian theology, but through this study you discover that you are an atheist. Your site likely has a highly Christian audience, so if you proceed to post a bunch of atheist positions, you’re likely going to destroy the audience you’ve built up. Similarly, if you post on financial issues, your audience is likely politically neutral with a slight lean towards the conservative. It would be a very poor choice to start a campaign for Dennis Kucinich for President in 2008 on your blog.

If you’re writing to adults (on non-”adult” themes, obviously) and your mother would be offended, don’t post it. Consider this: many blogs are read while people are burning extra time at the office. They click through the site and see a picture of a nearly-nude woman or of a man holding up a sign with an offensive slogan on it. How long do you think that window will be open? Not long, indeed. Remember that your readers are mature adults and minimize the content that might not be socially acceptable.

Avoid some topics entirely. Unless you’re writing specifically about a controversial topic, you’re better off avoiding it entirely unless your main topic of focus can offer a really useful and unique perspective on it. I have no intent to ever discuss abortion or sexual topics on this site; they just don’t fit and all they would do is either antagonize or scare off my readers. Even if I’m thinking about those topics, it’s just not a good choice to post them here.

Whenever you post, remember what the potential limits of your audience are and try not to push those limits too hard, or else you’ll see your traffic decreasing over time.

Building a Better Blog for 2007 is a month-long series at The Simple Dollar, outlining steps you can take to build a long-term healthy blog that will attract readers. Jump ahead to the next essay, Social Bookmarking, or back to the previous one, The Mini Audience.

This entry was written as a part of the Reviews and Predictions group writing project at ProBlogger.net. As always, The Simple Dollar is looking to put a personal finance spin on things.

Over the past several years, blogging has grown from a passionate hobby for a few energetic souls into a lucrative business for some and a dream for many. As with any trend that grows into a phenomenon, it doesn’t take long before money invades, and we’ve seen this with the incorporation of context-sensitive advertisement in blogging and a backlash against it, along with hints of other major trends about to appear.

In 2007, I see six major trends emerging in the relationship between blogging and money. These trends will be both a positive and a negative for blogging as a whole. My personal feeling is that the door will be widened for more semi-professional bloggers (ones who generate a solid income stream from blogging, but not enough for full-time employment) but it will be more difficult than ever to build up to this point.

There will be more paid content passed off as grassroots content.
Pay-per-post schemes and the “All I Want Is A PSP” scandal were just the beginning of this trend. 2007 will see more and more paid content appearing in the context of the grassroots as advertisers learn to leverage enthusiastic small-scale bloggers.

This will go far beyond the earlier practices of giving away complimentary items in exchange for good press. Instead, advertisers will directly offer cash compensation in exchange for good product placement on the more popular blogs.

Corollary effects of more paid content include:
Small blogs won’t be trusted as easily. You’re a new blogger and you just love your Nintendo Wii? Chances are readers will be much less likely to trust you than they were before.
Blogger ethics will become a big issue. A backlash against paid placement will begin, with many bloggers wearing their ethical standards as a badge. In fact, I’m already guilty of this, and I expect the trend to continue.
Some popular blogs will begin to develop bad reputations. Whispers about sites such as Gizmodo have already begun, and this trend will continue in the coming year as various sites are revealed to have accepted cash for content. The effects of this are unknown and highly debatable.

A flood of top blogs will be directly incorporated into large media organizations.
Large news organizations will realize that, instead of applying their own staff to blogging (a format that many are clearly uncomfortable with), there is already a pool of great, enthusiastic writers who have proven their success in the field. Thus, in the coming year, many top individual bloggers (and likely their blogs) will be swept into media organizations, often representing publications as their “internet face,” as well as having space in print media.

This makes a lot of sense for three reasons: first, a successful blog is a very clear way of showing to a large media group that an individual has passion, drive, and pre-existing name recognition; second, a successful blog has a built-in audience that can be leveraged onto a print medium and also onto advertising structures; and third, successful bloggers already know how to blog.

Corollary effects of bloggers moving to media companies include:
Some second-tier blogs will make the big time. If you run a popular second-tier blog that hasn’t quite broken through, this could be your year to make the leap. Many second-tier blogs will be looked at and incorporated into large media companies as they seek to diversify their content production.
Some top blogs will take an anti-corporate stand. There will be a small movement against any blogs that “sell out” in this fashion. Already, some readers refuse to read “corporate” blogs, and as the popular second-tier blogs join in (often, the second tier is the source of a lot of the interesting blogosphere content), this will become a bigger and bigger issue.

Feeds will be leveraged as an income stream.
In 2007, more and more creative ways will appear for bloggers to leverage their feeds as a way of making more income. Methods for feed advertising will become more refined and some popular blogs will discover ways to actually charge for the use of their feed.

2007 is the year for this because of Windows Vista and its heavy incorporation of RSS feed reading directly into the operating system experience. As the year goes on and the Vista installed base grows larger, more and more people will discover the power of RSS feeds. This audience will grow, and there will be a very big opportunity for people who figure out ways to monetize this audience.

Corollary effects of more income stream leveraging include:
More and more feeds will have ads in them. If a non-personal blog has thousands of feed readers who never visit the site, it only makes sense for the blog to try to gain some income off of the feed readers. Mechanisms will grow to make this easier and easier, and soon this will be fully accepted.
Some top blogs will offer ad-free feeds for a tiny fee. It won’t be long before some top blogs implement mechanisms for providing certain feeds to certain people, and will begin charging small amounts for ad-free full content feeds, particularly to aggregators.

Blog spammers will become more intelligent.
Blog spamming has hit a wall. Most of the bloggers and entities that care about fighting spam are using clever methods for battling the spam, meaning that spamming blogs with content or creating splogs with content scraped from other sites is less effective than it used to be.

In 2007, I think the tactics of the game will be rewritten. Spammers will start using “smarter” tools for this: they’ll learn to avoid places where defenses are strong (comment spam on well-developed sites) and hit where defenses are weak (real vs. fake filtering).

Corollary effects of intelligent blog spamming include:
Sites with effective comment spam defenses will see the flood subside. Repeatedly spamming a site that just blocks the comments is a net loss for the spammers. Eventually, they will begin to improve their programs to largely avoid sites that have strong comment spam defenses and focus on sites where the defenses are weak. This also means that well-defended bloggers will gradually be able to spend less time battling spam and more time developing content.
Splogs will appear more human-like and will see greater success. As the algorithms for developing automated bogus content grows better, splogs will appear that will fool most algorithms used to determine whether or not blogs are real.
Flagging blogs as real or fake will begin to take off If splogs get too effective, tools will appear for flagging splogs for general audiences, perhaps even becoming a feature in browsers.

Bloggers will band together
Blogging in groups will become a major trend in the future as more individual bloggers come to the (rightful) conclusion that they won’t ever make the “big time” alone. The amount of time to make a top-tier blog is tremendous and it is extremely challenging for an individual to make it work (I only do it because I don’t sleep much).

Group arrangements such as boing boing will become more prevalent as the year wears on. This, of course, leads to some interesting side effects.

Corollary effects of group blogging include:
More blogs with high posting rates will appear. With a team of bloggers, it becomes much more reasonable to keep a blog going and post compelling new content ten times a day.
The average posting rate of a successful blog will accelerate. As more blogs move to this rapid schedule, all blogs as a whole will begin to post at a slightly faster rate.
Blogs who can keep up will make more money. Only some blogs will be able to keep up, and those that do will have more and more pages appearing on Google and linked to by others. There will be some additional room at the top if you can keep up with the pace.

A blogging metric standard will emerge
At some point in 2007, a true standard for comparing blog presence and traffic will emerge. Current tools, such as Alexa and Technorati, have serious flaws that prevent them from being the metric, but they are steps in the right direction.

As more “big money” moves into blogging, the powers that be will demand accurate statistics on where their money is going. Once a standard becomes clear, individuals who avoid the standard will be left out in the cold in terms of attracting advertisers.

Corollary effects of metrics include:
It will become much easier to rank blogs in various ways. The closest thing to a blog ranking that exists now is the very sloppy popular blog listing at Technorati. A strong system of metrics would allow blogs to be teased out based on a wide range of factors.
Reader surveys will become a part of this metric system. Blogs who wish to succeed will have to demonstrate some information about their readers to advertisers. Some, like Gawker Media, are already doing this, but this will become more prevalent in the future.

In short, 2007 will bring a maturation of blogging in several ways. As large media groups continue to move in, blogging outside of the personal realm will be forced to move out of its current gawky adolescence into something of an adult.

Once you’ve figured out who your audience is, it becomes much easier to determine whether or not content is appropriate for your site. The simple question of whether or not it appeals to this group is enough to decide whether or not it should be posted on the site.

Obviously, if your audience is broad, you have the potential to reach a very wide audience of readers, which is a good thing. However, broad generalizations rarely resonate with your readers. If I write a very, very general post about personal finance issues that tries to encompass everyone, I’ll bore almost my entire audience by either writing something too basic to be useful or too broad to be worthwhile.

The key to getting around this problem is defining a number of “mini” audiences. Whenever you write a post for a blog with a wide general audience, you are going to strongly engage a segment of the audience and very weakly engage other segments of the audience. If you want to keep the weakly engaged segments around, you need to regularly write posts that will deeply engage them as well.

Here are some ideas that will help you define and write for audiences within your audience.

Make a list of sub-interests within your topic. Within your area, what are some of the specific sub-topics that you write about? For me, I have a plethora of them: frugality, debt management, financial planning, investment advice, and so on. What are yours? Often, this will overlap strongly with a list of categories for your site.

Occasionally, check that you’re writing posts for each of these sub-topics. If there’s one you’ve neglected lately, that’s likely an area that you can focus on in the near future. Even better: giving yourself a very narrow focus for a new post can often fuel your creative juices.

Follow the interests in as many subtopics as you can. Someone out there is likely writing about a specific sub-topic that you want to include. Bookmark that blog or subscribe to its feed and follow what they’re saying. For example, professional blogging as an income stream is one topic that I follow for The Simple Dollar, so I keep in touch with sites like ProBlogger. Another example? I like to write about money saving technologies, so I also follow Lifehacker. I also write about parenting issues as they relate to money lessons and saving money, so I keep tabs with parent hacks.

Write occasional posts for specific or even individual readers. If a writer writes to you with a specific question or idea, it’s almost always a good idea to see if this will transform into a post. Often, the person emailing you has hit upon some sort of specific niche that isn’t being covered at the moment by your blog – but nearby niches are, which means that there are readers out there that you could intensely engage with a post that touches on the topic of the reader’s contact.

Building a Better Blog for 2007 is a month-long series at The Simple Dollar, outlining steps you can take to build a long-term healthy blog that will attract readers. Jump ahead to the next essay, Don’t Chase Away Your Readers, or back to the previous one, Search Engine Optimization Doesn’t Matter.

Some of you are probably sitting there stunned right now. Without search engine placement, it’s very hard for a site to get a lot of attention from search engines, isn’t it? Yet I’m fairly sure that (to a degree) even SEO professionals will agree with the premise here when I make the case for it.

First, what exactly does SEO do? SEO helps you to improve search engine placement by helping you identify and accentuate keywords and keyphrases on your website so that search engines such as Google will rank you highly for those keywords. Their advice revolves around several points: use your keywords and keyphrases on every page, get a lot of inbound links, and make sure that you continually have fresh content.

I argue that a good, healthy blog already does this.

First, keywords and keyphrases already appear on most of your pages. If you’re writing a focused and well-written blog, you will already be using your site’s keywords over and over without even trying. For example, the site you’re reading will have the phrase “personal finance” all over the place because I write about personal finance. The same holds true for “debt,” “investing,” and many other related terms. Why? That’s what I write about. Thus, these phrases come up again and again in my natural writing.

Second, a well written blog will simply draw inbound links. As long as you participate in the community and reach out on occasion, your site will automatically gain links from a variety of other sites – carnival links, links from your comments on other sites, and links from people who just discover you and add links to your compelling work. These links add up over time, and their diversity will appeal to the search engines: your work must be important because it’s linked from a huge number of pages.

Finally, a blogger always has fresh content. The simple practice of blogging means that you’re regularly updating your content and generating new pages. Basic blog design will ensure that these pages are interlinked, meaning that any internal pages you have that are heavily linked will boost your homepage and other pages on your site.

Search engine optimization does work, but most of the principles will cause much larger boosts on static sites than on blogs. Why? Blogs naturally do the things that SEO groups recommend. Note that I am not saying that SEO is worthless for blogs; I’m just saying that in the larger scheme of things, a blog owner is better served focusing on design and content than on SEO tricks.

Here are ten things your blog should be doing already that will help with search engine optimization. If you’re doing these, then you’re already doing enough; focus on the content instead.

Basic META tags should be in your template. Each page should have a META description tag and META keywords tag, but adding these to the site is as easy as dropping them into your template file. Make them once and they’ll be a part of your site for good.

Each page should link back to your main URL. That way, if/when an individual post becomes very popular, it will lift your homepage (and other internal pages) due to the associated rank.

All of your posts should be accessible by clicking links from the home page. This means that your homepage should link to archives, and these archives should link to all of your posts. This way, search engines can find every post on your site.

The name of each post should be in the title of that page. Most search engines give preference to page titles that contain the entire search term, so make sure that your blog uses the title of the post in the title of the page. Usually the name of your site and the title of the post is more than sufficient for a title for an individual post.

The name of each post should ideally be in the URL of that page. Many search engines give preference to page that contain the entire search term in the raw URL, so make sure that your blog uses the title of the post in the URL in some form.

Keep your pages fairly short. Don’t have individual pages that are more than 250 KB in length if at all possible. Search engines often stop at lengths in this range.

If you’re doing all of these things, you’re already ahead of many people. Now, sit back and focus on the content; the incoming links are the next big part you need, and content does that better than anything.

Building a Better Blog for 2007 is a month-long series at The Simple Dollar, outlining steps you can take to build a long-term healthy blog that will attract readers. Jump ahead to the next essay, The Mini Audience, or back to the previous one, Leverage the Past.

‘Twas a week before Christmas
And all over the ‘net
Bloggers everywhere were writing
Is it Christmas yet?

The Simple Dollar is offering a Christmas challenge to all of you. If you meet this challenge, I’ll add a post to The Simple Dollar linking to the (family friendly) URL of your choice. Best of all, you can spread some real Christmas cheer to some lonely bloggers (remember, a link is a great gift for any blogger!).

Here’s what you have to do to enter:

1. Visit ten blogs and post ten comments between now and Christmas. These shouldn’t be regular blogs that you visit, though I encourage you to leave comments there as well. Although I prefer personal finance blogs, they can actually be any kind of blog that you’d like. Can’t find any good blogs? Try visiting some of the blogs on my blogroll (over on the right hand side, there) or visit pfblogs.org and click around a bit. You could also peek at the blogs I’ve tagged on del.icio.us for some interesting ones outside of the realm of personal finance.

Once you’ve found an interesting blog, read for a bit, then leave a comment on an interesting post. Repeat this nine more times.

2. Write about it! You can either add a comment to this post or else write on your own blog and link back here (just make sure I can find it – you might want to contact me just to make sure).

Write about the experience you had doing this. Did you find any particularly cool blogs? Did you find a post that really made you think? Let us know what interesting things you found during your blog excursion. Be sure to give us a URL to the most interesting blog that you found!

3. Leave a link! Once you’ve done these, be sure to leave a link to a site somewhere and I’ll link to it on a summary post this Friday. If you write on your own blog, I’ll link to that post; if you add a comment here, I’ll use whatever URL you leave. If you don’t have a site of your own, I encourage you to use a link to your favorite charity.

That’s it! Leave a comment or email me a link to your post by 12:01 AM this Friday. On Friday, I’ll post a list of all of the Christmas goodies you guys found.

Once you’ve reached a point where you have a healthy number of posts, you’ll find that even your best, most original ideas overlap with ideas you’ve posted on in the past. Some people see this as a problem; they worry that they’re out of original ideas. Successful bloggers, however, see it as an opportunity.

Let’s say you’ve been working hard on your blog for six months, and it’s been growing an audience at a rate of 5% a week. At the start of your seventh month, 66% of your audience has never read any of your earliest work, and that’s assuming no audience turnover at all. In other words, every six months, the vast majority of your audience is unfamiliar with your work that is six months or older.

This is an opportunity. You have an audience that you can expose to some of your best writing for the first time. You also have the power to accentuate your posts with additional information, increasing the mindspace of your blog. Even better? You have a great opportunity to get more pageviews from an average visitor.

Here are some guidelines for leveraging your older posts.

Link related points in your new posts to old posts from your archives. If you reference a topic that you wrote about in the past, add a link to it. Often, merely linking the point in your new post directly to the post in your archive is the best approach, as it allows readers to dig in deeper if the topic interests them. Over time, you’ll link together sequences of these, leading people deeper and deeper into your archives. It becomes something of an organic site tour, leading people through threads of thought.

Post surveys of your archives. Every once in a while, you can post surveys of your archives. These posts can be pure retrospectives, providing a selection of links of your best older work to new readers. These are often great posts for the end of the year, or for filling space while you’re on a vacation from your blog.

If you’re using WordPress, try out the related entries plugin. This plugin automatically finds posts potentially related to your current post and appends them, giving your readers quick links to additional writings in your blog similar to the topic at hand. This is very good if your site is full of content-heavy posts, as the tool will automatically find supplemental content (and potential page views) for every post you make.

Maintain a “greatest hits” section of your site. Keep a brief list of some of the most popular posts on your site and link to this archive on every page. This allows every casual reader to your site to quickly find some of your best work. Keep the list short, though, or else you may overload the attention span of casual visitors and they won’t visit anything at all.

Don’t replace new content with old content. Some blogs figure out that leveraging your archives can be an easy way to generate post counts, so they load up their site pointing to old posts all of the time. After a while, it becomes really clear to the audience that these blogs have nothing new to say. In short, leverage your archives, but don’t lean on your archives.

Building a Better Blog for 2007 is a month-long series at The Simple Dollar, outlining steps you can take to build a long-term healthy blog that will attract readers. Jump ahead to the next essay, Search Engine Optimization Doesn’t Matter, or back to the previous one, Guide Your Users.