blogging – Page 6 – President of Outskirts Press

The trouble with blogging – part five

I think I already mentioned that as a writer, the disorganization of the “typical” blog bothers me, and that may be why, instinctively, I start doing things that “force” organization to blogs, like naming them “parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5,” for instance. But that very philosophy is somewhat contrary to blogs in general. The disorganziation and immedicacy is what appeals to many people… and then “twitter” took that one step even further…

For example, blogs appear in reverse-chronological order, so writing a “series” requires new readers who come upon the blog in the middle to either miss the beginning or “scroll down” to the start. But do they scroll down? I would, because I like organization. But that very requirement of having to scroll down just to get to the “start” of something troubles me. Perhaps it’s the writer in me… I know that novels begin on page one. But blogs begin on the date they started, and that first blog isn’t at the top of the blog; it’s at the bottom.

It’s even more problematic since I’m writing many of these blogs in advance, and usually writing multiple blogs on the same day, and then scheduling them to appear on different days in the future. For example, I started this “Trouble With Blogging” series on January 3, but am scheduling them to appear throughout January, with the last posting in the series scheduled for the end of the month. But if I keep having to worry about writing a “series” in order to force a particular organization, I am probably missing the point of blogs…

Speaking of which, I just saw a link in the WordPress help section called “Write a book” and of course, being president of Outskirts Press, that phrase intrigued me, so I read the tip in which WordPress outlined a process for organizing a blog in a more traditional, book-like manner. Judging from the amount of blogs I’ve seen that offer any sort of organization like that (namely, none), I’d say that doesn’t seem to be too popular of a topic on WordPress.

Perhaps what people are expecting to see when they click on a “Write a book” link is a procedure by which they can take the content of their blog and publish a book out of it, and to that, all I have to say is… “We can help you with that.”

blogging

The trouble with blogging – part four

Another trouble I have with blogging is that most of them just aren’t very interesting.

In one of my previous “trouble with blogging” postings, I referred to the dilemma I have about what sort of confidential information I should share because that would be directly proportional to the “interest” factor. It all seems like much ado about nothing. While publicly I say that blogging and “tweeting” is the next best thing to sliced bread, for the everyday Joe I’m just not so sure anyone cares. I would think that most people are too busy writing their own blogs to read anyone else’s. But then, ironically, when I’m reading some of the blogs out there and seeing the number of comments some of them generate, I’m proving myself wrong in multiple ways simultaneously, and that’s always good for the ol’ ego.

By the way, that same belief I have that “no one has time to care” extends to twitter, Facebook, myspace, and linked-in, too, all of which I publicly recommend and almost none of which I personally have time for. Since “New Year’s Resolutions” are a big marketing push in my industry, I should touch upon one of my resolutions before January ends, and that is this: Making more time for the social media sites that I recommend. Time to practice what I preach, so to speak.

That reminds me: one of the reviews I received on Amazon for my book Sell Your Book on Amazon mentioned that very aspect — that I didn’t appear to do many of the very Amazon tactics I was recommending. That reviewer was right; a lot of the marketing tactics I suggest in my book are time-consuming, and I didn’t — or don’t — have time to do a lot of them. So my only response to that is, don’t let my personal short-comings prevent YOU from being successful. Or, as a parent might say to a child, “Do what I say, not what I do.” But, ultimately, every leader — and every parent for that matter — knows that you should lead by example.

And I’ve discovered that just because I don’t have time for that stuff doesn’t mean nobody does. In fact, internet stats seem to indicate quite the opposite. Most people seem to have nothing but time for social networking sites, so as an author, entrepreneur, etc, etc, you owe it to yourself to be out there on all those platforms in as consistent and professional a manner as you can muster. And… in spite of all my troubles with blogging, here I am.

blogging

The trouble with blogging – part three

Another trouble I have, personally, with blogging (and with social media in general) is that I simply don’t have the time to invest in many of the elements that are required for any such endeavor in this arena to be successful — and that is the “social interaction” part.

For blogging, that involves reader comments. I think many blogs are popular because readers have the opportunity to voice their own thoughts and participate in the discussion. And that, in turn, breeds more readers because the blog becomes more three-dimensional in nature as readers get a chance to a) read the original post and then b) participate by adding their own two-cents worth.

Currently, I have the comments disabled because, honestly, I’m still deciding what to do. Am I deciding whether I think comments are good or bad? No; of course they are “good.” But I’m trying to determine if I can “do them justice.” I don’t want to allow comments and then come across as a “jerk” when I don’t have the time to respond to them. It all comes down to time and resources. I’m writing this particular posting on December 17 at 2:01 in the morning. By the time it appears on my blog a month later, my mind will be well onto other things. Part of the advantage of WordPress (and one of the reasons I didn’t stick with my blog on blogger) is because this platform allows one to schedule blogs in advance.

But if I then have to “revisit” this blog on January 18th, 19th, and 20th, to read and respond to comments that have been posted, that kind of defeats the efficiency I’m going for.

One could argue that means I’m not a good candidate for blogging at all, and there’s a lot of validity in that argument. All three of my “the trouble with blogging” posts support that very argument.

But, here I am doing it… nonetheless… for as long as I can… Will my lack of comments “kill” the blog? Or will I turn comments on at some point and either bite that time-bullet myself or delegate the process of comment-moderation to someone else? Only time with tell. Speaking of time, it is in short supply. And now it’s 2:04 am.

blogging, ceo, start-up

The trouble with blogging – part two

Another reason I’ve personally been reticent about blogging is due to the dilemma I have with preserving confidentiality, and this is probably something any CEO, or company employee can understand. In other words, what is okay to say, and what isn’t?

On one hand, the more personal, confidential, or private something is, the more “interesting” it is, so part of me wants to divulge stuff that will make this blog popular, or at the very least, interesting.

On the other hand, I have a responsibility to our authors, our people, and our board of directors to avoid saying anything that would jeopardize them (and by that, I mean, anything that could “cost them money”). In my position I learn things about the industry that isn’t common knowledge. I know about deals before they happen. I have an intimate knowledge of our own trade secrets and unique competitive advantages – the things that make Outskirts Press the fastest-growing self-publishing company and the only Inc. 500 company in our industry. Revealing ‘insider-y” information on those topics would make this blog fascinating to other entrepreneurs and CEOs, and certainly our competitors, and maybe even our authors, but revealing them could also jeopardize our value proposition.

If a CEO doesn’t reveal SOME of that stuff, what’s the point of reading the blog? I mean, the whole point of reading a blog by a CEO is that you expect SOME level of details not attainable elsewhere, right? But, on the other hand, how does a CEO blogger reveal interesting things that aren’t TOO confidential?

I’m not saying I have the answer. I’m just saying it’s something about blogging that troubles me…

blogging, self publishing

The trouble with blogging – part one

Even though, officially, I’m a “fan” of blogging and I suggest that all entrepreneurs, professionals, and writers partake in the exercise of blogging on a consistent basis, for a variety of reasons, I have some basic difficulties with the whole thing. I can appreciate the philosophy behind blogging, the concept, but when the logistics, the reality, start to unfold, it just really isn’t all that it is supposed to be cracked up to be.

There – that previous sentence is a perfect example of one of my troubles with blogging. The writing can be … sloppy. Let’s face it, the majority of blogs out there are hard to read because they contain spelling and grammatical errors. If you can filter through the majority of blogs and arrive upon the minority that are professionally written, you are still, more often than not, presented with a level of writing that is redundant and messy, not fully fleshed-out, or not organized in any manner.

For example, I run each of my blog posts through a spell checker before I hit the “publish” button, but there are those out there who are cutting their teeth on the instant-gratification-world of blogs, twitter, and youtube, who would argue that “spell checking” a blog misses the whole point! And then after I spell check it, I paste it back into the WordPress box, and then re-read it for grammar and, for lack of a better term, “user-friendliness.”

But, in many cases, I may want to add a sentence or two of clarification to my previously spell-checked work and no matter how careful I believe I am, a typo may sometimes slip through. Do I have time to spell-check it again? Or do I have time to drastically re-write sentences or even paragraphs in an attempt to make the writing “better” or more organized? Personally, I don’t and judging from the blogs in existence, few bloggers do. Now as the president of a self-publishing company, I’m hardly in a position to say “Blogging is fundamentally evil because it makes it easy to be a sloppy writer.”

No, I wouldn’t say it’s evil. But blogging does make it easier to be a sloppy writer, at least for me. And as a writer, I need things to motivate me to be a stronger writer, not things that allow me to be a weaker one.

Of course, the other side of the argument is that blogging, and self-publishing for that matter, at least encourages, and in many cases rewards, the act of writing itself — and in this day and age of movies, video games, and Iphones, that’s a small miracle that perhaps grants it some slack.

blogging

Back to the blog theme drawing board

This isn’t rocket science! But choosing an appropriate blog “theme” for the look and feel of my blog is proving more time-consuming than I would have anticipated. I stopped liking the “Journalist” theme when I began adding other widgets to the right-hand column, beginning with our twitter feed.

Note: Whenever you mention your twitter feed, you should link that twitter feed link to your twitter feed.

Sidebar: Did you know twitter isn’t profitable? They haven’t figured out a way to monetize their traffic and all that bandwidth is costing someone something…. so, twitter-people, listen-up: The same thing happened when the Internet first launched. No one could figure out how to “make money” with it. Then, this company called Google came along and figured that it would make money with the Internet the same way companies have been making money for decades — through advertising. Twitter, add contextual advertising tweets through applicable accounts and posts and you’ll have figured out a way to monetize your business.

Anyway, back to the story. The twitter feed widget for the “Journalist” theme is horrible. The CSS doesn’t highlight the linkable words. Translation: “CSS” stands for Cascading Style Sheet — the aesthetic architecture for dynamic webpages.

So, now I’m trying INove — I think that is the name of it — and it already has a few more advantages over Journalist. For one, it’s not QUITE as black/white stark, but still keeps that as the basic color scheme. Hey, WordPress, what’s with all the pink-colored font choices in your theme selection?

Another advantage is that the widgets “look” a little better. And the right-hand column width is wider, which allows me to use the actual width settings for the graphics. With “Journalist” I had to force a width of 160 to my photo and the book covers, which required HTML to ‘shrink’ the image dynamically from 200 pixels wide to 160. It still looked okay, but sometimes when you do that, the image looks horrible, so why not keep the native width settings if I can?

Well, one reason is that now my photograph along the right is enormous… it’s a little TOO big, I think… but I’ll stick with it for now and see how I feel about it in the future. I like having the cover images 200 pixels wide, and I’m afraid if they stayed at the same size and my photograph was smaller than the overall aesthetic of the page might suffer.

I also realized another criteria I’ve had in the selection of my themes since the beginning that I may have failed to recognize. The “main content” section/column needs to be white. I realized this fully today as I was looking for a substitute to “Journalist” and selected a number of possibilities that had alternate colors other than white in this big “text space.” In my opinion, that’s a no-no, for two reasons.

1) It’s “easiest” to read black type on white spaces, so why mess with people’s eyes?

2) When/if I ever get around to adding graphics to these postings, I don’t want a big ugly “box” around the image AND I don’t want to have to worry about background color matching the color. White just makes everything easier in this regard. Life is hard enough; take the gimmees.

Another advantage to this new theme is that the RSS Subscription button and the Search functionality is included in the actual theme, rather than my having to add those features as widgets. This was one thing I liked about the “Blix” theme, which is what we are currently using for SelfPublishingNews.com – so I’m happy I found another blog that shares those advantages.

blogging, branding

Fine tuning the blogging platform

Well, I think I’ve settled on the “Journalist” theme for the blog. One could argue it’s pretty boring (and one would be right) so my hope is that the scintillating prose I splash across the page brings all the interest the blog needs. Oh, and the covers of my books “pop” the most against this stark black/white landscape, which itself is rather appropriate for a blog that covers “publishing,” among other things.

This theme also doesn’t have that annoying “tag line” to the blog name which says something like “Just another WordPress.com blog” and which I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of except by selecting a theme that didn’t say that. It must be me, because I can’t imagine a platform that prides itself on its flexibility doesn’t allow the blogger to remove that from their heading. But I couldn’t figure it out in the 2 minutes I devoted to the task, so choosing a theme without that tagline seems to work. The downside is that there isn’t a graphic heading at all. Or maybe that’s an upside — it prevents me from having to design something. Besides, this blog is supposed to be branded by yours truly, so my photograph there hopefully provides all the branding this blog platform needs.

I also can’t figure out how to change the “Name” of my blog, in spite of the promise WordPress made when I first named it that I could change it whenever I wanted. The lack of the word “of” is bothering me. When I initially named it, I just strung some keywords together, but now it’s TOO close to an actual, grammatically-correct sentence, that the absence of the word “of” looks like a mistake. <sigh> I’ll keep trying to figure it out.

This photograph I’m using along the right-hand side is the same one I use everywhere else, so it appears on the backs of my books, it appears on my book web pages, it appears on Amazon, etc. The image you choose for yourself when establishing your brand is important, so take the time to do it right. Have it professionally taken, and then acquire the rights from the photographer to use it however you want (yes, you have to acquire those rights — just having a picture taken of you doesn’t entitle you to use that image; it belongs to the photographer).

By now I’ve also added a few “widgets” to the side column of my blog, specifically three image widgets that allow me to add a photograph of myself (for blog branding purposes) and the covers to some of my books. A nice thing is that when I write and publish future books — this blog will cover that process in great detail — it will be an easy matter to add those cover images to the column, too.

blogging, search engine optimization

Titling your blog postings

The third titling opportunity for optimizing your blog is the headline used for each specific blog posting. This one is a tight-rope act. You want to optimize your posting headline for search engines, but you also want it to serve the purpose of accurately identifying the content/topic of the specific post.

For one of our other blogs, at Self Publishing News, one of my requirements for the headline titles is that they contain either “self publishing” or “self published.” One of my purposes with that blog is to establish it within the circle of “self publishing” sites that appear from that specific keyword search. The downside, of course, is that having such a mandate prevents the headline from being as applicable as it otherwise could be. Which is better? Who knows… So I’ll do an A/B test with that blog and this one to learn the answer to that question. These posting headlines, at least so far, have been more subject-applicable than search engine optimized.

Do you see how I linked “self publishing” up there to Outskirts Press? “Self Publishing” is the most valuable keyword term for our self-publishing book company, and Google’s search engines particularly like to see applicable search terms that are linked to the applicable website. Blogging is all well and good for creating a platform for your career, but the blog, in and of itself, probably isn’t your (or your company’s) sole presence on the Internet, so it is important to “link” the two, and when doing that, you might as well link them in a way that is most conducive to search engine optimization.

When mousing-over the link, without clicking on it, you may also notice in the information bar (at the very bottom of your browser) that I’m using a tracking code with a tag. In this case, the tag is “BrentBlog” – and when I aim links from this blog to Outskirts Press, I try to remember to add that tracking code, which will allow us to analyze the quality and quantity of the traffic we receive on Outskirts Press that originates here. Ultimately, those statistics allow me to justify my time-expenditure on this endeavor (or prevent me from being able to justify it) to our Board of Directors. If links originating from this blog are following to Outskirts Press, and registering for free publishing information, and then, ultimately, quality book publishing, I’ll be able to establish that this blog has a true value, rather than simply a perceived one. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to engage in activities that only have perceived values.

Isn’t that nice? I’ve just established my “exit strategy” to this blog, so if it “stops” in the future, I can blame it on my Board of Directors. “Blaming the Board” is a CEO’s most valued– albeit least publicized — prerogative.

Amazon, blogging

Amazon Blog and Embedded Videos

So here’s summary of the results of our little Amazon blog test from yesterday. I have my Amazon blog picking up my RSS feed from my WordPress blog at www.brentsampson.com – and yesterday I embedded a video from YouTube into the blog, which always appears fine in WordPress — I love you, WordPress — but as we saw in yesterday’s blog, it was handled a little differently by Amazon. Instead of embedding the actual video which streams from YouTube, Amazon places a thumbnail image representing the video along with a link to the original blog source. From there, you can watch the actual video.

I guess that’s not SO bad, in the overall scheme of things. I would rather people read my brentsampson.com version of the blog anyway, because it contains other elements not present in the RSS version, like the images along the right, the additional SEO tactics, and the menu bar along the top. I’m only “using” Amazon to try to attract traffic, so if Amazon would prefer to send that traffic to the original source so nice and kindly, that’s fine with me.

For those of you paying attention, you will also notice that WordPress automatically linked to my domain name when I added the www in front of it, but failed to automatically include a link when I just entered brentsampson.com — so while referring to the “www” in today’s Internet nomenclature has become passé, there is still a cause for it in some places.

Thank you, Amazon.

blogging, branding, search engine optimization

Naming your blog

The username or domain name you use for your blog is the most heavily weighted in terms of search engine optimization, so the URL is the single most imporant part of branding your blog. The second opportunity comes in the form of titling or naming your blog. Currently as I’m writing this (in December 2009), the name of this blog is “CEO Self Publishing Start-Up OutskirtsPress.com” which is not so much a title as a string of keywords I’m hoping will result in my blog being found in relevant search engines. An ideal blog name would be a combination of two things — an accurate, grammatically correct description of the blog’s benefits or purpose AND an infusion of relevant, highly-applicable search words or keyword terms.

My current name misses out on the “grammatically correct” portion of that criteria. Of course, I’m composing this blog posting in December of 2009 so perhaps by the time this blog launches in January 2010, I will have had time to arrive upon a better name. Like the headline of a press release, or the subject heading of an important email, or the title of a book, the name of your blog is vital, and it’s mandatory that you spend time getting it exactly right. Fortunately, WordPress allows you to change the name of your blog at any time, and then that new name propagates through previous posts. In essence, that means you can deliberately change your blog name from time to time to massage your SEO position/tactics. And, frankly, that’s probably what I’m going to do, so even though I’m writing this in December 2009, you may be reading it years later (isn’t the archival power of the Internet great?) and as a result, it is anybody’s guess what the “name” of this blog may be in the future…