“In America today, there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers. Already more Americans are making their primary income from posting their opinions than Americans working as computer programmers, firefighters or even bartenders.”
“Pros who work for companies are typically paid $45,000 to $90,000 a year for their blogging. One percent make over $200,000. And they report long hours — 50 to 60 hours a week.”
Hugh MacLeod is a blogger who draws cartoons on business cards. And/or you can have cards made that feature one of his cartoons. Mine came in today. I can’t tell you how much more fun these are to give out than the official Learfield card.
A couple of years ago my friend Everett asked my advice on a website. He’s a veterinarian and had your basic Web 1.0 site. I suggested he think about a blog because I knew he was a good story teller and would be a natural. And he is.
He often writes about cases he sees in his practice and gets lots of feedback from readers, many of whom have questions.
“Even though I certainly cannot prescribe for a pet that I have not examined, sometimes I can clarify a situation, or make suggestions. Sometimes they just have questions that weren’t addressed in the original post, but are related to the topic. I receive questions from around the country, and even Europe and (today) Tanzania.”
I share this as just one more example of the powerful difference between a blog and the old “brochure” sites that are still all too common. Some day –soon, perhaps– this will not be worth mentioning. Everyone will get it and all or most websites will be blogs or have a strong blog component. I believe this is called the “Duh Moment.”
Everett’s blog is YourPetsBestFriend.com. If you have a pet, it’s a must read.
Watching MO Senator Claire McCaskill play with her new blog.
“These (photo) are the Generals and Admiral all testifying at our Armed Services hearing this am. I will ask questions shortly.”
The thought of a member of Congress “reporting on” a hearing she is covering is… is… sacrilege? Heresy? What word would be strong enough? The obvious problem is, the senator is –by definition– partisan. No way you could trust what she reports. Right?
So, how is this different from Sean Hannity? Or Chris Matthews? Or Rush? No doubt about which side of an issue they come down but they have thousands of viewers. Can we automatically assume every post by Senator McCaskill is tainted and unworthy? That every tweet by @joliejustus is designed to mislead and spin us?
Or can we mix it in with all the other “reporting” we get, factoring in her point of view? I don’t know the answer to that question but if there is one, every reader will come up with their own.
I’m one of a few hundred (but growing fast) “followers” of Tony Mesenger’s Twitter feed. Tony’s a reporter and columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and covers the Missouri Legislature and state government. He clearly gets Twitter and blogging and makes great use of both.
Tony joined me at the Coffee Zone for an el grande mocha latte doodah where I got him to put down his cell phone for half an hour to talk about his life as a Twitter junkie.
AUDIO: Listen/Download interview MP3
Before going to work for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Tony was a metro columnist and city editor for the Columbia Daily Tribune and the editorial page editor at the Springfield News-Leader.
I do these from time to time, in spite of how self-serving they seem. That’s never my intention, given the modest traffic through this little alley of the Internet. I’m talking about Google ranking and how well blogs do in this most important metric.
In July of 2006, I posted passage from John Burdett’s second novel, Bangkok Tattoo. The subject –and title of the post– was “Western Concept of Self.”
Today, I happened across the post and decided to Google “western concept of self” (minus the quotation marks). Those are pretty common terms and Goggle returned almost 13 million pages with one or more of them. My little post was number two on that list.
So when clients ask me, how can they get their website to show up on the first page of Google search results, I always tell them the same thing: Start by making your site a blog and update it every day.
“Isn’t there some meta-thingy you can hide on the page that will force my site to the top of the rankings?”
Yeah, maybe. But I’m not your guy for that. I love that Google almost always helps me find what I’m looking for and I’m not keen on helping someone game the system. Even for money. (God, I hope I don’t get hammered by all the SEO experts. Can I just stipulate that you guys are right and I’m wrong?)
One final point and it has to do with blogs vs. newsletters. I’ve posted on this in the past. It came up again recently. The “village elders” of a local organization were unhappy with the blog one of their members maintains for them. They didn’t like having frequent, short items and wanted to go back to their “newsletter” format. Save up any news and post it all, once a month, at the same time.
Nothing wrong with that approach if you’re only interested in reaching the people who are already in the organization and know to go check the website once a month. But if you’re trying to reach more and new people, you want that Google juice. Blogs deliver. Newsletters… not so much.
Dave Winer says he’s made more than $2 million with his blog over the last 12 years. And he’s never put a single ad on it. He explains how this came to be –and the role of a blog– in this excellent post:
“…it’s a way of communicating what you’re doing. Companies, consultants and authors need to do a lot of communicating, and blogs allow you to go direct, and be more efficient, less diluted. People get a real feel for who you are and how you think and what you’re like as a person. Why would I ever let someone else hitch their “message” on this — it would get in the way of me making money!
If I had any advice to offer it’s this — get in the habit of communicating directly with the people you want to influence. Don’t charge them to read it and don’t let others interfere with your communication. Talk through your blog as you would talk face to face. You’d never stop mid-sentence and say “But first a word from my sponsor!” — so don’t do that on your blog either. I can’t promise you’ll make any money from your blog, and I think the more you try the less chance you have. Make a good product and listen to your customers to make it better, and use the tools to communicate, and you may well make money from the whole thing. To expect the blog alone to pay your bills is to misunderstand what a blog can do.”
If you’re a blogger or think you might ever be, this post is worth a read.
Suppose you had a friend that was really smart and funny, and that friend got to cover and live-blog White House press briefings that you could watch “with” her (on C-SPAN) and chat back and forth. Does that sound like something you might be interested in?
Okay, Ana Marie Cox isn’t a friend of mine but she feels like one. I’m one of her legion of fans that go back to the Wonkette days. She now works for Air America.
I don’t know if this is journalism or not and I don’t care. In the same way I don’t care what you call The Daily Show. I call it fun and interesting.
I think of this as the MST3K effect. Even a boring press conference is fun if you’re watching it “with” fun people.
Every year on this date I pause to recall that it was way back in 2002 that I began blogging. Like many others, I was posting little rants on my website before we had the tools and the name, but this is the date I started “writing some stuff down.”
That post was a long quote from Carl Hiaasen’s novel, Basket Case. He described two types of journalists and alluded to the “slow-strangling dailies,” a number of which have finally strangled in the last year or so.
On the 4th anniversary of this blog I met some friends and had four beers. I’m afraid 7 beers would put me out of commission for several days, so we won’t do that.
Another thing I used to do was browse back through the earlier posts but with 4,000+ that is no longer practical. So this post will serve as another scratch on blog wall.
Let’s say you’re the mayor of a medium sized town in the midwest and you’re excited about work getting started on a new federal courthouse project in your city. You send a little press release to the local radio and TV stations and the daily newspaper, hoping they might shoot some video or stills of the big cranes or have you on the morning show to talk about what this means for the community.
You might get a mention but not much more. Let’s face it, your new courthouse has limited interest. So you take your Flip video camera out to the site and put a couple of minutes on your blog. And you do this for anything you think the people in your town might care about. How long before your blog becomes a regular stop for those interested in local news? Cost? Virtually zero.
I helped my friend John get started blogging but he’s figuring out the video and YouTube thing. And in all fairness, the local media might have done stories on this. But I can understand if they didn’t. I made similar decisions back in the day. After all, there was only 24 hours of airtime. You had to go with what appealed to the largest number of people. Now you can appeal to literally everybody.
You could have a local government page; a local sports page; a local church news page; a local education page… you get the idea. Provide the hosting; tools and training and use your medium to promote them all.
This is happening all over the country and it will continue. Because people like John have news they want to share and there’s just no more friction.