Last Wednesday we held the first Dinner Salon. This is an idea that I threw out on NextNY list a month or so ago, and Eric Nehrlich said he’d be interested in helping out. The two of us, with some feedback from Tony Bacigalupo wrote up a little manifesto, and scheduled the first discussion – on the topic we were both interested in – How to become a better blogger. We promoted the event and had five people come to the inaugural Dinner Salon.
We met at Sahara – a quiet Turkish restaurant next to where I used to live. A total of five people came to dinner. We had a good cross-section of people who all blogged for different purposes, so it was very interesting to learn from each other. We had a very nice time, and I want to thank all who came for making the evening so interesting. This post will summarize the conversation and insights shared that night.
Here are the people who came, and a little bit about their blogs:
- Eric blogs for largely personal reasons, but without a very clear focus. He writes about technology, becoming a technical manager, book he read, and other topics. Since I am interested in this area, I will attend that his blog is very good.
- Damian is a wine connoisseur. He blogs at redteeth.com. He said he originally started blogging about wine, but over time it evolved about the whole experience around wine.
- Fred is from a family that owns several Italian restaurants in US and Europe. He blogs at Inabbondanza. He also has a restaurant consulting business. His blog serves to reinforce his business. Fred also has other people working with him – a chef blogger in Rome, and another person who acts as a producer. Because he covers a lot of travel destinations, restaurants, and recipes, his older content is valuable, and he is able to charge a small fee for access to his blog’s archives.
- Maria Ogneva just started a blog a few weeks ago. She is an entrepreneur who is starting a company focused on helping real estate investors find each other, and is hoping to have her blog establish her as an authority in the plan.
- I (Jean, a.k.a. NY Web Guy) blog for a combination of personal and professional reasons. It helps me think and clarify ideas. Over time, I am hoping the blog will allow me to contribute to the conversation around technology, entrepreneurship and open source. I feel I have a bit of a focus, although perhaps not strong enough.
Here are some ideas that came up during the discussion:
- Blog Focus. It’s harder to build up traffic if your blog doesn’t have a focus. Your friends may read it, but for a casual visitor there isn’t as much of a payoff to continue to visit you, unless they happen to be interested in the same several areas that you happen to blog about. Around the table, we had three people who had very focused blogs, and two who didn’t.
- Stockpiling posts. Posting regularly is important. Depending on your focus, you also want to be careful about posting too frequently – that can dilute your message. If you have 10 posts per day on a topic, then you are crossing over to a media company, not just a blog. So if an inspiration hits and you have two blogging ideas the same day, write them up, but only post one – save one for later. This is especially good to have if you travel often – you can still have consistency even when you don’t have as much time.
- Publishing Schedule.
Inabbondanza, the blog focused on Italian culture has different focus area – food, places, culture, sports. They created a publishing schedule so that on a specific day of the week, the readers can expect posts about certain topics. For example – sports on Thursdays. Since they have readers that are really interested in Italian food, but not so much sports, this allows the readers to easily read only the content they care about.
- Color Coding.
Inabbondanza also color codes their posts to make it easier for readers to find what they like.
- Writing Classes. We discussed whether anybody took writing classes as a way to improve their writing. Nobody at the table has, but Fred had a cautionary tale for us. A chef that he co-blogs with took some classes for writing about food. After that, his writing became worse on some level – since he was trying to apply what he learned, his writing style became way too formal, which started turning off some readers. After some time, he went back to his old, more informal, style.
- Blogging Environment. Some of us shared that they have a special environment they setup for blogging, i.e. have several Firefox tabs open, for translation, reference, etc to have everything on the tips of their fingers.
- Blogging platform. We went around the table and it turned out four of five used WordPress.
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Creating a Community. The Wine and Culture-related bloggers both talked about how they created community, and even did a few offline events with their readers. I am not sure if this is as applicable with other types of blogs, but I am sure if you get big enough, it’s possible. From Eric:
We were talking about Damian’s wine blog, and he observed that it became less about the wine and more about the people and community as time went on. I mentioned Hugh MacLeod and the idea of “Social Objects“, which he summarizes in another post as “The main thesis is that it’s not the wine per se that is interesting, it’s the conversations that happen around the wine that are interesting. And that is true for all social objects. People matter. Objects don’t.” It’s all about the people, and I think Damian’s experiences bear that out.
- Sticking it to the Reader. We discussed how to make writing more gripping. Eric brought up the book “Made to Stick” (Eric’s Review), which talks about how to craft a compelling and memorable messages. One technique mentioned in the book is the inverted pyramid that journalists use. Start with your most important idea you want to convey, and then add details in the rest of the article. This way, if the reader stops reading at any point, they will still get most of what you are trying to convey. The book has a lot of other insights as well.
- Optimize for Search. Eric shared his observation that a lot of readers may come through search engines. They can also leave very fast – you need to make it easy for them to stay. Make sure your blog layout is such that they can find other posts that might be interesting to them. Include links to your most popular posts, and random posts. Trying to understand who your users are is very valuable, since you can then think of way to target people in the same demographic.
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Getting Ideas. One of the people suggested that he used free-association brainstorming and mind maps to get ideas about what to write about, and how to cover a topic more completely. This made me think of improvisation classes that I took at UCB. Improv generally can make you more creative, so classes could help improve blogging.
Post Length.
We discussed the issue of a length of posts. I referenced the post by Steve Yegge, who writes essay-like posts. He says that a longer post takes longer for people to digest, and some will be turned off. But over time, a long substantial post will have more influence than several shorter ones. However, without having a lot of traffic already, it’s hard to build up readers this way – most people just won’t bother. I know I started to break up some of my posts into series format, the way Paul Mark Andresen does. You also don’t want your posts to be too short. Eric later sent out some good links to Jakob Nielsen’s post on content strategy, where he examines the issue of content length. Here is another great post by Nielsen where he suggests that if you are a world-class expert, you should write articles.
From Eric’s email:
He suggests that different lengths are appropriate for different readers – “On the Web, you can offer both short and long treatments within a single hyperspace. Start with overviews and short, simplified pages. Then link to long, in-depth coverage on other pages.”
Personally, I don’t seem to write short posts – most of them are on the longer side. I think that would definitely be a good strategy if I was more famous. This is an issue I am very interested in when it comes to my blog, so I’ll be thinking and reading more about it.
How to Increase Traffic:
Great focus on a specific topic will attract people interested in that area.
- In blogosphere, linking and comments are a form of social currency. People see where their traffic comes from, so the more you link to others, the more they will link to you. Providing a link to a relevant blog post you did when you comment is also a good way to get some readers.
- Monitor the current memes in your area (i.e. Techmeme.com), and write posts on the current memes. Since a lot of people are talking about this topic, you are likely to be a beneficiary of some of the traffic.
- Find blogs related to your focus that syndicate content, and sing up. For example, I syndicate my blog on NextNY blog, and my company’s blog. When I write relevant posts, I tag them appropriately and they show up on there. This increases the reach of your ideas. Over time, if you have good and relevant content, people will want to subscribe to you directly.
- InAbondanza contacted local meetups in the related area – meetups of Italian expatriates or ones focuses on Italian Culture. Since the meetups didn’t have a voice, the blog became a good spot for the community to frequent, and many people from the groups subscribed.
- Syndicate your blog. Adding your blog to other, more popular sites, is one way to increase the reach of your ideas. Also, as time goes on, people will notice that you (hopefully) have something interesting to say, and will subscribe to your blog directly.
- Pre-writing and timing posts to be posted when a certain events occur. For example, Hank Williams wrote an post about the Chandler project since he knows that space very well. He posted it around the time that there was some news related to the project, which meant that people were looking for information about it. Another popular blogger found it, linked to it, and thus he got pretty good traffic from it.
- You need to make it easy for people to stay with your blog – i.e. introduce who you are, etc.
Somebody asked a question about if there are any good books on blogging. Nobody really knew, except for a short book on blogging etiquette called Blogging (Quamut) – it was suggested as a good short primer (online version here).
Private Blogs. We talked about entrepreneurs using blogs to promote their companies, to announce their plans, and generally to make their companies more approachable. This is what Maria is trying to do at meetmojo.com. It was interesting to find out that two of the guys who are also starting companies keep internal blogs. This allows them to communicate with their employees and investors. Sort of like status report for investors.
More Resources:
Guy Kawasaki’s Article on Blogging.
