I just bought a whiteboard. Oh, how I love whiteboards! Those great big open expanses of scribble space are truly inspiring; they free the mind to wander.
My other favorite scribble spaces:
Bliss.
[This is part 3 in a series.] Hosting a blog is easy. Writing good content is hard. With that in mind, I’ve summarized some writing tips that I try to use. As I said earlier, I’m a newbie to blogging, so I won’t pretend to speak with authority. But this playbook is helping me become a better writer (I think!), and it may give you a few handy tips too.
Write with passion
Life is too short to waste on things you don’t care about. If you’re going to write, write about topics that matter to you. Your passion will show through.
Make it personal
People want to get a sense for the personality behind a blog. Letting your voice shine through really helps establish a connection with your readers. So describe your personal experiences, express your opinions and motivations, and be yourself in terms of writing voice.
Share intelligently and write with integrity
Pretty much everything you write is recorded somewhere online, and it may well be played back to you at some point in the future. So share intelligently. You might not want to go into depth on your lifelong passion for setting things on fire, for instance. Then again, the risk of being revealed is as real for a blog as it is for anything else you write or speak these days. So above all, speak with integrity: align your words with your actions and beliefs.
Use heads, decks, and leads
Jon Udell, one of my favorite tech bloggers and a writer at InfoWorld, advocates this technique from the publishing world:
Heads are titles, decks are subtitles, and leads are opening paragraphs. Writers and editors spend a lot of time thinking about heads, decks, and leads. That’s because writers and editors know that readers usually scan first, then dive in when they’re hooked by one or more of these devices.
…
I put some thought into what that element will contain when I’m writing an item. In effect, the first paragraph element is the lead, or blurb. Sometimes it’s just a plain paragraph. But sometimes it will contain an image, or a quotation, when these are appropriate and useful hooks.
Read more on that here.
Get to the point FAST
Unless you’re writing a story (see below), try to get the point across in the title and the first few sentences. Often I draft an entire blog post, then write the title and first paragraph to make sure they “tell the truth” about the rest of the post. This also works for many other kinds of communications, including email, documents, meetings, and phone conversations. Provide context and a summary up front, then elaborate. This saves your audience time, for they immediately know whether the rest of the content is personally relevant and interesting.
Tell stories
People really love reading stories; we’re wired for it. Here’s an example from my buddy Mike Zintel. Mike often writes in narrative style, and that makes him a lot of fun to read. It also happens to be the way he speaks a lot of the time, and I love hearing the ghost of his voice when reading his posts.
Short posts good, long posts bad
Or, if you write too many short posts, “Long posts good, short posts bad”. The point being to mix it up. Short posts are easier to read but tend towards cotton candy. Long posts pack more punch but require more commitment from the writer and the reader. I’ve found most readers appreciate a variety, and I as a writer, do too.
Personally, I tend to write longer stuff. Must…rein…self…in.
Chunk big topics into small topics
(For some reason I am reminded of my grandmother saying, “Chew each mouthful of food 33 times before you swallow.”) Some topics are easier to communicate by breaking the writing up into parts. Do that. Focus each post on a distinct sub-topic and call it out as such in the heads, decks and leads.
Create a discussion, not a broadcast
I much prefer blogs that invite discussion by enabling reader comments and responding over time to reader feedback. Often the comments are more insightful and entertaining than the original blog post. And as a writer, I learn something new from every comment. Corollary: respond to commenters, and thank them. Comments are gifts; someone is taking time out of their day to gift you with attention.
Others have said it better than I can
In particular, read this article, “How to write a better weblog”. It’s inspirational, entertaining, and offers some great practical advice.
Happy writing!
Update 4/28: Do what works for you. Some of my favorite writers have an approach that is nothing at all like what I lay out here. And that’s good too. Chacun à son goût.
I’ve been blogging for about 6 months now. I’m definitely still a fumbling newbie, but despite a few mishaps it’s proving to be great fun and a wonderful way to meet and stay connected with people. A few friends interested in running blogs of their own have asked me what tools I use to do it, so I’ve put together a few posts describing my approach. This first one is about the blog publishing services I use. I’ll do a follow-up later on the hard part: writing.
A word of warning before I dive in: the setup I use is great if — and only if — you want to have complete control over your blog’s content and features, and you are not shy of doing a wee bit of PHP code tweaking. If that doesn’t sound like fun to you, check out blog hosting services instead. Blog hosters do all the heavy lifting for you, and most of them are free. LiveJournal, MSN Spaces, MySpace and Blogger are some of the most popular.
Now, for those of you who want all the bells and whistles, on to my config:
Blog publishing: I use WordPress, which is one of the top blog publishing packages. It’s quite feature-rich; I haven’t found myself wanting yet. WordPress is easy to extend with plug-ins that offer new features. And with only a little more work you can hack the PHP code to customize anything else about the blog, since it is entirely open-source. You can host it yourself to get complete flexibility, as I do, or use the hosted version from WordPress.com.
Design. Blog look and feel is currently derived from a theme called “Almost Spring”, which you can find here. WordPress’ main site lists many other themes.
Spam. Blog comments tend to attract spammers. I use Akismet, another free WordPress plugin, to find and destroy spam. It works incredibly well, with almost no false positives. Staying spam-free is easy.
Tags. UltimateTagWarrior is a great WordPress extension that helps you add tags to blog posts and display a tag cloud. This screenshot shows you the current tag cloud for MyOwnPirateRadio:
Tags are a useful way to discover posts, as opposed to text search or looking through chronological archives. The tag cloud display gives you an immediate feel for the topical content. And as a publisher I can add nerdy references like this to my posts: all blog posts related to business models.
Comment Discovery: Brian’s Latest Comments is a nifty little plugin that displays an overview of the recently active articles and the last people to comment on them. Here’s a screenshot:
Statistics: Stats packages help build a picture of which sites refer traffic to a blog, and which content on a blog is most popular. My web hoster offers a popular statistics package called AwStats. I also use StatTraq which is a WordPress plug-in. StatTraq is a little better at giving blog post-level details, so I use it more often than AwStats. I triangulate between the two sets of statistics, since there are often significant differences. I’ve also tried Google Analytics and found it to be slow and inaccurate. It’s a little hard knowing which numbers to trust.
Web hosting: I host my blog with iPowerWeb. They have proven to be a great Web host over the last few years; inexpensive rates, good support, high reliability, and excellent flexibility about what software you put on your server. If you’re looking to build a custom web site of any sort you should take a look at iPowerWeb. Thanks Craig L for that reference.
Email digest. Some people prefer getting blog content via email instead of RSS. To enable this I’m experimenting with FeedBurner Email Subscription Service. I just did a post on it, which you can read here. FeedBurner also promises a few other benefits to do with blog stats and caching; jury is out on that.
Grant Total Cost: $7.95 per month, which is iPowerWeb’s hosting fee. Everything else is free.
Seth Godin writes:
There isn’t a market. There are a million markets. Markets of one, or markets of small groups, or markets of cohorts that communicate. …the idea of monolithic marketing messages to monolithic markets makes no sense. The race is now to be the first mover in the micromarkets where attention matters.
Yes. Wise. I have two riffs to offer on that: one on software, and one on writing.
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