Category Archives: Blogging

“Blogs don’t make money. But people with blogs can.”

Posted on by

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.

Is Ana Marie Cox wearing pants?

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Seven Years Before the Blog

Posted on by

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.

Mayor’s blog

Posted on by

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.

Butt cheek blogging

Posted on by
Reply

“The next time you’re in a public event, such as a lecture, play, or ballgame, look at everyone’s body posture. People who are disengaged are usually leaning back, resting comfortably on both butt cheeks. It’s only when they really get into it that they begin leaning forward, putting all of their weight on a single cheek.” —  Copyblogger

Jonathan Morrow explains why this is significant for bloggers. If you’re not a blogger you can skip his post. I just wanted to post the paragraph above. For the record, I’m usually a one butt check kind of guy.

Post number 4,000

Posted on by

In February smays.com will be seven years old. I have not posted every day since that first one in 2002, but I’ve been reasonably consistent. This is post number 4,000. A nice, round number of absolutely zero significance. But we bloggers must make note of such things.

If I had to guess, I’d say fewer than 10 percent of those 4,000 posts were in any way original. The rest were comments on, and links to, other posts, stories and articles.

The tools have gotten better since I began. There was no YouTube or flickr when I started. Social networking was still more of a concept than a web reality. And you pretty much had to be in front of a computer since phones weren’t smart enough or fast enough for surfing and blogging.

Can’t wait to see where we are at post number 5,000… or 10,000.

Henry’s blog as book

Posted on by
Reply

Some months ago I mentioned to Henry that he could have his blog printed as a book. He checked out a few services, pulled out some of his favorite posts and had them crank out a hard-cover book. I think they even have a name for this, “vanity press.”

I was impressed by the quality of the paper, binding, etc. The only thing that prevents me from doing one of these is having to select the posts. I’m all about digital and online and all that but I do love the smell and feel of books and it would be fun to have one on the shelf that I wrote.

Putting Ana Marie back on the plane

Posted on by
Reply

AmcblogAna Marie Cox was covering the McCain campaign for Radar Magazine until it shut it’s doors on Friday. AMC tweeted us to her blog for the story:

“It will cost about $1500 to cover just the last day of the campaign, and over $1000 a day for each day leading up to it. While I still blog for TIME’s “Swampland” * — and I will for as long as they let me! — I am without a source for travel funds. So, you know, anyone interested in sponsoring a foul-mouthed blogger, slightly used?”

Like a public radio fund drive, she offered premiums for different levels of giving.

“Over $100: My instant message screen name, regular personal updates via email and/or instant messages on election night.”

I kicked in$150 because I’m a fan and liked the idea of helping a blogger. Seems like I wasn’t alone.

“At the moment, donations come to about $2500 — a thousand past my goal of simply seeing the McCain campaign off into the gentle night come Nov. 4 (literally! sort of!), and just about enough to cover spending election eve out on the trail as well.”

Ana Marie is hardly the first blogger to ask her readers to support her work. But I think I would have been willing to pay $5 or $10 a month for a year to fund her efforts. Is this some kind of model for the future?

Update: 10/28/08

Should your company blog?

Posted on by

Matt Dickman (Techno//Marketer) is Vice President, Digital Marketing at Fleishman-Hillard in Cleveland, Ohio, and he says the answer to the question above depends on how you answer the following questions (Hint: the answer has to be ‘yes’):

  1. Are you listening to your online community? – Are you spending a minimum of two hours a day searching, reading Google alerts or using a monitoring tool like Radian6?
  2. Do you have something unique to say?
    – How will you differentiate yourself from other blogs and other
    companies? This could be your people, the information you publish or
    other forms of thought leadership.
  3. Are you willing and able to say it? – Can you talk about your industry and are you willing to put it out there?
  4. Are you willing to be challenged and criticized? – This goes with the turf. You have to be able to facilitate conversation in a respectful manner to grow a community.
  5. Are you willing and able to dedicate the resources to succeed?
    – People always underestimate this one. A good rule for this to succeed
    is to have one person dedicated to the success of your strategy for a
    minimum of 4 hours per day (2 hours of which is listening and
    commenting). That is one half of a full time person’s week. Have
    staffing plans in place as you grow and start realizing your success.

Matt has even provided a decision tree to help his more visual clients with these questions.

The two hour committment referenced in #1 sounds like a lot but I really don’t know how a company could get the most out their blog without the primary blogger investing that much time. You can’t be a naturalist if you don’t go in the forrest. Thanks to David for finding and sharing.