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| Why I Suck at Blogging and What It Will Take For You Not To Posted: 12 Jul 2011 04:45 AM PDT I’ve been a blogger for over seven years, and in all that time there is only one thing about blogging about which I’m certain. I suck at it. Let me give you a quote from Stacy McCain to help explain why that’s so and, hopefully, why you will care.
I am not an intensely competitive person. I never have been. Oh, I like competition and I played hurt on more than a couple occasions. I love winning and don’t like to lose. I don’t hate to lose, though, unless I know I’ve been playing in a crooked game. Blogging — very successful blogging, that is — is an exceedingly crooked game. Now I don’t mean that bloggers lie and cheat, though there are certainly more than a few who play unfairly. I mean that the game itself — the daily quest to pull in hits, move up the food chain, and land the big prizes that wait for those to reach the upper echelons of the blogosphere — isn’t fair and the rules are not what most bloggers are told they are. There’s a useful lesson here and I do hope you don’t think this is the kind of wailing in the dark posts that causes every emo teenager within a 100 mile radius to reflexively reach for their Bauhaus and Morrisey iTunes playlist. Let me give you a quick explanation and an illustration. Pretty much every article, online course, and book you will read on blogging will boil down to four points: 1) Find a lightly-occupied niche subject about which you know a great deal and about which you are passionate, 2) Write “killer content” about that subject, 3) Write guest posts all over the place to spread your name about, 4) Shill your blog posts to other bloggers like a junkie two days separated from his last fix. There. That’s it. You can now remove all the bookmarks to those “How To” blog sites you may have. You can throw away almost all those “Four Steps To Certain Blogging Success” PDF files you’ve downloaded. Heck, you can probably stop paying that big-name blogger all that money for the video course you bought a couple months ago. You can certainly avoid this post, which is the biggest piece of trips I’ve ever seen on the subject of blogging.
Wow. All I have to do to build a “million dollar” blog is follow a short list of non-specific platitudes? Well thanks, Daily Blog Tips, for that! What tremendous value your guest blogger has added to my life and career! That, though, is what passes at dozens of sites as worthwhile blogging advice, as bad as it was. That’s what thousands of hungry new bloggers get pretty much ever day from “gurus” who, for the most part, have no more lasting interest in your success than they do in the success of an ant dragging a leaf across the sidewalk. Their mission is to bring in the web traffic and generate cash. It’s their job. If you’re hinging your success on that advice, you’re likely to end up frustrated because there are a million other bloggers out there working the very same formula, doing the same things you are. You’ll need an edge, but you’re in luck, because there’s one more ingredient those other bloggers won’t get from the gurus. I’ll share it with you, but you have to swear not to tell anyone else. It’ll be our secret, okay? Networking. If you want a successful blog you must find the people who are the movers and shakers in your chosen niche and do everything you can, up to and including light stalking, to stay in their faces every day. The truth of the matter is that you can “do your homework” and “be passionate” but if you’re just another name on a web site masthead, your blog will go exactly nowhere. There is a reason that folks like Stacy McCain and Pete Ingemi get frequent Instalanches. They sent their posts to Glenn Reynolds over and over again until he got to know who they were. Sure, they wrote (and still write) “killer content” but the Blogfather had to see that content on a regular basis for quite a while before they became part of his regular reading rotation. But I’ll go one further. You can write all the killer content you want and guest blog until your fingers bleed, but if you don’t have a relationship with bigger bloggers that goes farther than a few e-mails a week, you’ll always be on the outside looking in. It’s no coincidence that the Pajamas Media guys link to each other all the time. They work together. They know each other (and linking helps the business, too). The Hot Air bloggers link each other’s posts. Glenn Reynolds links not only to his PJM friends but also to Ann Althouse. That’s not to say the people who whom they link aren’t good bloggers. They are. But they have an advantage you, who might have written a post just as good as they, do not: a relationship. That means you’re going to have to schmooze. You’ll have to get to conferences and blogger gatherings and stay for the after-parties. You’ll have to brush up on your handshake and your best smile. You’ll have to get in the middle of conversations on Twitter, Google+, and Facebook. It won’t be enough just to guest-blog; you have to guest-blog in places where those people are most certain to see your work. And even then you’re not guaranteed success. You have to keep at it, relentlessly, year after year after year. Don’t assume that because that big blogger remembered you once, they’ll remember you again. The next conference is coming and you can’t afford not to be there. Other bloggers will be there and I guarantee you they want what you have and they sure as heck won’t put in a good word for you if you’re not there. And this is what I mean by “crooked”. The rules most bloggers learn from the supposed gurus will never get you to where you want to go. Success in the blogosphere, like success anywhere else in business, depends far more on who you know — and who knows you — than what you know, how hard you work, or how well you perform. That’s the cut-throat desire to win to which Stacy refers. The winners in that newsroom weren’t necessarily the best writers or the hardest workers. The winners were the ones who made the contacts that mattered then busted their humps to keep those contacts fresh and vital and useful. I suck at blogging because I’m a rotten schmoozer and, at this point in my life, I’m not going to get much better at it. I’m an introvert who gets ground down quickly by crowds. I won’t elbow my way past a dozen other bloggers to shake hands with the big important person in the room. I’ve stepped aside to let someone far more hungry and eager take my place in a handshake line and I’ll do it again. I am who I am and, alas, that means I’ll be the guy most often remembered as “Oh, right! Him! Wow, how could I have forgotten Jimmie?”.  |
| Clearing the Browser Tabs – Mark Steyn and a Bottle of Wine Tuesday Edition Posted: 12 Jul 2011 03:10 AM PDT Two of the biggest stories in the United States right now are getting almost no coverage at all from the major media outlets. I don’t usually quote pieces in a CtBT post, but I need to bring Mark Steyn into the discussion.
The people who ran the school system, from the award-winning superintendent all the way to the teachers’ union representatives, simply lied. They lied to steal more money from you and me and to avoid doing anything that resembled hard work. They stole at least a full year of education from the students who were entrusted to them. Did you see anything about this on CNN? MS-NBC? NBC? ABC? CBS? Heck, not even Fox News dug into the story. I haven’t seen anything on the front page from the Washington Post or the New York Times. No one has sent a team of journalists to dig through the Atlanta Public School system as if were a book published by a certain former Alaska Governor. The same can be said for the still-growing Operation Fast and Furious scandal. I’m still waiting for the clamor from the White House Press corps asking what the President knew and when he knew it? I suspect I’ll be waiting until the Judgement Trump for that to happen. Save for Jake Tapper, no one else seems particularly interested in the pile of corpses Fast and Furious left in its wake. On the other hand, the left is taking quite an inordinate interest in what wine Rep. Paul Ryan drank the other night. Alas, the “economist” who blew Vinogate wide open has suddenly gone shy. Gosh, I wonder if it had anything to do with that $80 bottle of wine that sat on her table while she was winding up her tirade. And now, links!
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