I'd Rather Be Writing » Blogging

Survey about Technical Writers and Blogging Activities

Tom Johnson — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 13:38:30 +0000

Jan 22, 2012 update: For results of the survey, see this post: Graduate Research Findings on Technical Communication and Blogging.

A graduate student is collecting information about technical writers and blogging. For more information, see her explanation below and then take the survey (it’s short):

My name is Michelle, and I am a first-year Master’s student studying Technical Communication. Currently, I am working on a research project looking at the use of blogs within the job of a technical communicator. I am looking for participants that work in the field of technical communication and use blogs in some capacity while at work. This survey does not require any personal identifiers or specifics relating to where you work to avoid any issues with proprietary information. I will finalize my research and findings within the next month, and I hope to share those findings in early December with those of you who are interested. Thank you to Tom Johnson for posting the link to my survey and to any of you who participate in my survey.

Take the survey

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Blog Versus Web Log: Back to Origins

Tom Johnson — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 04:35:01 +0000

I was talking to a colleague today about blogs. He said he’s starting a blog and wants to use it as a professional journal, to write about what he’s learning.

Our discussion made me reflect on my blog. I’ve used this blog for a lot of different purposes, it seems. Somewhere in this shuffle, I seemed to have forgotten its original purpose: “web log,” or journal.

Blogs today are too often focused on specific “brands.” They “target” specific niche audiences. The bloggers often end up thinking more about what their audience wants to read rather than what the writer wants to write. While this focus on audience is key for many types of writing, journals aren’t like that. Journals are much more internally focused, reflecting on the writer’s daily thoughts and events, with musings on what the writer feels is important or relevant.

One of my favorite posts by Alistair Christie addresses this issue. In It’s Got to Be Fun, Alistair explains that he hasn’t posted for months. The reason? He started writing for his audience rather than himself. He explains,

So what changed? Well, the problem stems from vain ambition. For some bizarre reason I started to get interested in page views. I also think I had some notion of building up a reputation for myself as a documentation expert within the tech writing community. What was I thinking?

The result of this was that I started to restrict myself to writing about technical writing, and when I was thinking about what to blog about I began to think along the lines of: “What can I write about that technical writers might be interested in, so that I can improve ITauthor.com’s Google page ranking?” But it worked. Steadily more people were visiting the site.

While it worked, his shift to from personal journal to audience-based articles took the fun out of blogging. It demotivated his writing.

I want to return my blog more to an ongoing journal of what I’m learning, even if that learning strays outside of my tech writing brand. I think web logs are better this way. They’re more honest and relevant. I don’t like posts that serve as mini magazine or newsletter articles — 5 ways to make money …, Tips for Working with X…, How to Increase… and so on.

The appeal of blogs has always been how close they are to truth and real experience. It’s the transparency and authenticity of journal-like entries that are more appealing to readers anyway.

———–

photo from Flickr

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Building Trust in a Corporate Blog

Tom Johnson — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 14:58:45 +0000

Larry Kunz

The following is a guest post by Larry Kunz, a consultant with Systems Documentation, Inc. (SDI) Global Solutions.

Writing a professional blog—whether you do it under your own name as Tom does, or under a company’s banner as I do—is about building a brand. By brand I mean the personality that you want to project.

Just as companies have brands in the marketplace, individuals have brands in the professional communities they inhabit. Companies and individuals want people to feel comfortable interacting with them. Building trust in the brand is the key.

The process of building trust is mostly the same for corporate blogs and for individual blogs.

Tom’s blog has helped him build a strong personal brand. While most of his readers probably know who he works for, he doesn’t speak on his employer’s behalf and the blog doesn’t affect his employer’s brand. By contrast, my blog affects both my personal brand and that of my employer, SDI. Nevertheless Tom and I operate in essentially the same way: we express opinions and invite dialog about issues related to technical communication. We reveal some of our personalities, but we avoid saying things that could damage the brand by offending or alienating readers. If I had a personal blog I’d write it the same way I write the corporate blog.

Over time (and it takes time—there are no shortcuts) I think that my blog posts have built trust in my personal brand and in my company’s brand. Along the way I’ve adhered to three principles:

1. Reveal yourself as a person. On a corporate blog it’s essential to show that the corporation is made up of people who have likes, dislikes, opinions, and feelings. Details about yourself—what you like to do, what inspires you, what makes you smile—provide contact points where readers can connect with you. My readers know that I like baseball and that as a kid I was fascinated by space flight. You can reveal a lot without ever crossing the line into subjects that might offend (the proverbial religion and politics) and without endangering your privacy (for example, names of family members).

2. Have the courage of your convictions. Know what you believe, and express them consistently. If you speak without conviction, two outcomes will happen: your readers will see right through you, and you’ll begin contradicting yourself. Both outcomes will blow your credibility and undermine trust. I’m not saying that you can never change your mind — but when you do, acknowledge it and don’t disown the things you wrote in the past.

3. Acknowledge and appreciate comments. On a corporate blog, responding to comments is like coming out from behind the corporate facade. The reader interacts with a human being rather than with a logo or a brand name. For me, blog comments are gifts from people who took the time to read my content and then contributed a thought or a rebuttal. The best blogger I know for handling comments is Lisa Petrilli in her leadership blog C-Level Strategies. Lisa appreciates every comment she gets, and she responds with gratitude and encouragement.

Building trust—building a brand—takes time. Whether you blog on a corporate site or as an individual, you can succeed when you remain true to yourself, remain faithful to your convictions, and appreciate your readers’ feedback.

—————————-

Larry Kunz, a technical communicator for more than 30 years, works as a consultant with Systems Documentation, Inc. (SDI) Global Solutions in Durham, NC. He is a Fellow in the Society for Technical Communication (STC) and in 2010 received the STC President’s Award for leading the Society’s strategic planning effort.

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Three Solutions to the Corporate Blogging Paradox

Tom Johnson — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 14:26:55 +0000

The corporate blogging paradox

Corporate blogs suffer from an almost insurmountable paradox: you can write something interesting to readers, but it will make your company uncomfortable. You can write something that will make your company comfortable, but it won’t be interesting to readers.

The corporate blogger has a difficult decision to face. Do you want to gain an audience, build relationships with readers, and strike a cord of authenticity — while at the same time drawing heavy fire and criticism from your company? Or do you remain under the protection and guidance of the company (which pays your salary, remember) by writing safe content that supposedly furthers their goals but which connects poorly with your readers?

It’s not an easy decision to make. It appears that most corporate bloggers stick with the latter. And the results are telling. A recent Forrester poll found that only 16% of people actually trust corporate blogs. That means that more than 8 out of 10 people pretty much feel corporate blogs suck. If you can’t trust a blog, it’s hardly worth reading. And equally problematic, it’s hardly worth writing.

I usually tend to assume corporate bloggers are second-rate marketers who don’t understand the social media world or writing. But I’m a corporate blogger (I run LDSTech) who first started out as a personal blogger. My I’d Rather Be Writing blog is supposed to be an innovative technical communication blog. Yet I can’t really ignite a corporate blog despite having time and energy (and billing code) to do it. Why? What is the secret sauce to corporate blogging that I haven’t figured out yet?

Sometimes I believe I’m trapped by the paradox I’ve described. I’m not writing the real stories. Unlike with my personal blog, I’m not following my own instincts for what would be interesting. This is because the juicy stuff doesn’t get approved; it doesn’t align with the business scope and plan and purpose. The articles die with the product managers who shy away from the hot topics.

Once as a teenager I had the opportunity to visit with Steve Benson, a cartoonist. He was also the son of Ezra Taft Benson. Steve said that as a cartoonist, his job was to “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.” This advice has always stuck with me. Applied to corporate blogging, it puts the blogger in a precarious position. Do you afflict the company and comfort the reader? I’m not sure how long such a writer lasts in that position before the company decides it has had enough, no matter how many hits the articles are getting.

Industry Expertise

The only corporate blog I honestly follow is Scriptorium, and I’m not sure it counts as a corporate blog. Scriptorium is an XML publishing consultancy. I think their blog’s business-case purpose might be to get readers to see them as a trusted, go-to source for XML needs. But I find that their blog looks outward much more than inward. They write as industry experts, commenting on trends, technologies, news, and other industry topics. I don’t think I’ve ever read a post that overtly advertises what Scriptorium actually does. In fact, sometimes I’m not even sure what they do (is it DITA, XML, content strategy? content management?) Still, I really like their blogging model — positioning themselves as general industry experts.

To be an industry expert, you have to keep a pulse on what’s going on. You have to immerse yourself in other blog posts and releases and trends. As an industry expert, not everything you write will tie back to your company’s specialization, products, or services. It will merely relate to your field as a whole. For example, Scriptorium’s latest post is on the Perversion of Indexes. The post touches on the difficult of creating indexes with XML editors and modular content. I don’t know what Scriptorium does with indexes in their consulting, or if they have any kind of indexing tools or practices. But the impression I get is that Scriptorium is up-to-speed with index trends. And I begin to trust their voice.

Would such an approach work with other corporate blogs? I’m not sure, but it might be a more fruitful approach than writing about topics that make the company uncomfortable. Commenting on tech in general, and analyzing its relevance to the audience, might be a good way to stay relevant without making everyone in the company avoid speaking with you. As long as the focus is outward, rather than inward, you can avoid the marketing speak and heavy promotional tone, as well the self-inflicted martyrdom that a true journalist would probably undergo.

Customer Focus

Another common strategy in corporate blogs is to focus on the customer. Spotlight how your customers are using your products, their tips, tricks, questions, experiences, etc. This focus can shift the attention from the company to the customer, giving the impression that as a company you care about your users.

The problem with this focus is that spotlighting users no doubt involves a filtered selection of happy users, and ignores the angry customers or the ones who are sallying against your company with ugly shouts. And will you really address their true pain points and struggles? Or their road map demands? Essentially this focus can come across not too unlike a list of testimonials that companies sometimes display — a carefully selected list of people who have only the best praise for you. Other readers know this, so the appeal of the content remains low.

How-to Information

A third approach around the corporate blogging paradox is to avoid journalistic topics altogether and instead focus on help information, in the form of how-to’s, best practices, tutorials, and other instructional material. This approach may make the most sense: if you can’t write the real stories, why write any stories at all? Writing lukewarm stories that aren’t appealing to anyone is hardly any way to embrace the life of a writer. If you have this kind of all-or-nothing writer personality, you’ll probably find more space to breathe in the safe arms of help material.

Help material is almost never offensive. The biggest offense is explaining a bug, or admitting a quirk that isn’t yet fixed. Additionally, help material is universally welcomed into the world of useful information. Its content value is immediate and undeniable. Is it interesting? Maybe not. But it’s sure to keep you far from the edge of corporate danger, while at the same time not forcing you to sacrifice your journalistic ideals to tell the real story. That’s probably why being a technical writer is a good career for me. Because I’m too stubborn and bent on controversy to fit into the corporate blogging mode with any kind of comfortable fit. At least as a technical writer, I can avoid stirring up controversy and work on something productive. I can save my controversy digging for the off hours, on my own blog. Meanwhile, the challenge of solving technical problems, coming up with solutions, and figuring out the unknown can keep my attention and provide some level of creative fulfillment.

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The Most Important Stories … Aren’t the Ones I’m Writing

Tom Johnson — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 20:53:43 +0000

I was talking with a colleague the other day about how to increase the number of hits per article on our organization’s technology website. We get about 800 hits per article, which isn’t much given the potential audience.

To increase hits, I said we need to send these articles to all users via a newsletter. Email is the only way to reach a lot of people. People aren’t subscribing to RSS anymore. On my own blog, I can’t seem to go beyond 3,500 subscribers on my site. I feel I’ve hit the ceiling. Probably because RSS subscriptions just end up being a bunch of random noise after a while.

My colleague said, yeah, and blogging is dead.

This caught me a little by surprise, since he knows I’m a blogger. Why do you think so? I asked.

He quickly distinguished between professional blogs and personal blogs, and said he was referring to personal blogs. Very few personal bloggers can command large audiences, he said. Dooce is one of them. We couldn’t think of many more.

I didn’t think much of this conversation until later in the evening, talking with my kids. For some reason I started telling my six-year-old some stories about different experiences I’ve had in life. Then we started talking about the past, and how her older sister was eight months old when 9/11 happened (we were in New York). I told her the story of how I got my job in Egypt, after waiting two and a half months after the interview. I told her the story of drug dealers shooting into our house in Florida, and why we came to Utah. I told her the story of how I miraculously fixed the lawnmower last week, and how I unscrewed an impossible drain. She looked at me with both curiosity and seriousness. She hadn’t heard many of these stories before.

And then it hit me. I haven’t written the most important stories of my life. This blog, this professional blog, only tells one kind of story. It tells the story of my professional life, of my thoughts surrounding my career and all the issues involved in it.

As long as you have the same career, you share some commonality with me and may find the content relevant. But there’s a certain sadness about this blog and all professional blogs, as they distract from the time we might spend telling stories that matter more in our lives.

I do have a personal blog, but it doesn’t receive the attention and care of my professional blog. My writing is sloppy and unstructured, almost stream of conscious. It’s hard to find motivation, for some reason, to write the real stories of my life.

Partly, I see so many tangible rewards for a professional blog. Immediate praise and engagement, career leverage, networking, career advancement, professional reputation — all of this increases with each good post on my professional blog.

With the personal blog, there isn’t the same reward. A reward exists for sure, but it’s a different kind of reward. It’s the same reward you receive for keeping a personal journal.

For now, I am resigned in having two blogs. One is my more historical, unadvertised blog where I write the personal stories of my life. The other, this blog, is where I explore topics related to technical writing.

Regardless of the blog, I will always try to write the real stories.

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Why Is Corporate Blogging So Hard?

Tom Johnson — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 16:12:01 +0000

I’m not sure entirely why, but corporate blogging can be quite difficult. On my professional blog, I can post several times a week in the spare moments of my days, sitting down for 30 minutes here or an hour there and have some substantial content to show for it. But at work, I can spin my wheels on full throttle for hours and only have 1 or 2 posts all week — not really interesting ones — to show for it. Why is that?

One difference is knowledge. On my professional blog, I already have the knowledge I need to write the post. I can pull from my own experience, or from books I’m reading, techniques I’m trying, documentation I’m writing, etc., as I craft a post. I have ideas brewing in my head all day, and in the back of my mind I’m always thinking of the next post.

On the corporate blog, though, I can’t always pull from my own experience. I don’t know the details of what I should write, because I’m not the subject matter expert. I have to track down the experts, and then ask them the right questions. I have to hunt around for the story; I have to locate the information.

In addition to gathering information from external sources, on the corporate blog I also have to stay away from controversy. Every story ends positively. I can’t go for the jugular, so to speak, and enter controversial territory with an open-mind like I can on an independent blog. Instead, the end is usually written from the beginning. Things turn out well for the company.

Another problem with corporate blogs is the lack of voice. Is there really an “I”? Or is it a fake “I”? If there is no true “I” behind the posts, how can the blog ever move beyond marketing material and corporate communications? And if there is an “I”, do I no longer represent the company or organization that I’m writing on behalf of (because I am myself now)? How do I both represent myself and my employer?

Most importantly, why don’t the words just flow? Is it because they aren’t my words? Is the perspective just not my perspective? Are the points I make not not the points I would make? Can such a writing situation ever be successful?

An Attempt and New Effort

After reflecting on why corporate blogging is sometimes so hard, I decided to go about it as if I were writing a post on my own blog. I remembered a discussion I had with a colleague about the difficulty of getting volunteers to produce work. This turns out to be one of the central questions in working with a volunteer community and is an inherent obstacle in nearly every open source effort. I decided to focus on this somewhat controversial issue and write about it.

In thinking about this issue, instead of brainstorming privately, as I would do on my personal blog, I decided to brainstorm collectively. After all, I have 5,000 people in my organization. I can call them all and get various viewpoints. Most of them are just sitting at their desks, in their cubes.

I made a few phone calls. Some weren’t there; others were. They had a lot to say. Suddenly the whole topic started to come alive. I collected viewpoints here and there, and broadened my initial understanding of the topic.

This led to a small epiphany: Whereas on my personal blog, I mainly do the research myself, either by reading or thinking, in a corporate setting I have access to dozens of subject matter experts who can point me in the direction of all kinds of interesting ideas. Perhaps corporate blogging, then, is a bit easier?

By doing about an hour’s worth of research, I had all the information I needed to draft the article. At this point, it became easy. I knew how to structure the information, to divide it with subheadings. I knew just the right length for paragraphs and for the article as a whole. I knew how to weave in other voices, perspectives, and links. All this came natural since I approached it in the same way as a personal blog post.

Do I have any strong personal opinions in the article? Am I putting forward any controversial perspectives? Not really. But I think those dangers are less likely to happen with the community topics I’m writing about, and so they’re not an issue. I might have used “I” and drawn upon personal experiences if appropriate, but it didn’t fit this topic. Yet the article still aligns with what I myself would say.

If you would like to read a draft of the article I wrote (which is still in progress), you can view it here.

—————————–

Image from Flickr

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Post-Publishing Word Count Can Be Three Times as Long

Tom Johnson — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 15:34:39 +0000

Recently I’ve been playing more of a blogger role at my job, doing more user awareness than user education. This will only increase during the coming months, and if I do a good job, I might finally show the importance of this neglected role.

Part of the reason we’re doing more user awareness is because we’ve suddenly published dozens of new websites, tools, and other technical solutions, and we’re trying to help the general membership come up to speed with what’s new.

As a strategy for user awareness, some leaders made a list of topics they want me to emphasize in regular web articles over the coming year. In determining a cost/time estimate, I’ve decided to account for post-publishing time as well, since merely publishing articles no longer addresses the whole time involved in writing.

The time involved in writing an article or a post depends on how many comments and responses you get from readers. After you publish an article and send the link across Twitter, Facebook, and other channels, comments start to pour in. Users may respond in comments below the article (if you have a comments feature), or they may respond on Twitter, Facebook, forums, email messages, in their own blog posts, and other ways. It’s the writer’s responsibility to respond to feedback where necessary.

Sometimes the post-publishing word count is actually longer than the pre-publishing word count. For example, my post on the enterprise help authoring problem was about 500 words long. However, the post received more than 30 comments. I responded to many of these comments. The total word count of just my own responses was about 1,800 words — more than three times the length of the original post! In this case, the bulk of the writing for the post came in the post-publishing phase.

Pre- and post-publishing word count -- sometimes the post-publishing word count is a lot higher.

Granted, making a comment doesn’t often require the same effort as writing the original article, but there is still time involved. The number of responses required also depends on how I comment. Sometimes my comments elicit new responses from readers (it’s a conversation, remember), so the response length can increase even more.

Twitter and Facebook Conversations

Conversations also take place over Twitter and Facebook. For example, last week I published an article about a crowdsourcing site my organization created. I included the #lds hashtag on the tweet, and as a result, the tweet was retweeted 20 times, with a total reach of about 6,600 people according to Tweetreach.

An article also has a conversation taking place on Twitter

Tweetreach lists all the people who mentioned the article. It would be good to at least read these retweets to see if the readers have questions or responses or other comments on the article. Many people on Twitter simply retweet the link, which doesn’t require a response. But a good social media strategy would probably have me follow the people who retweet the content, or at least take note of the Twitter audience. The same applies to Facebook.

My basic point is that the time estimate for writing should include both pre-publishing time and post-publishing time. I’ve written similarly how technical writers should not consider a help file complete when it’s initially published. Help is in a state of perpetual beta — you’re always improving the information as questions, problems, bugs, and other issues come to light.

Worth the Effort?

One problem with this heavy post-publishing model is that responding to comments often constitutes a one-to-one effort, whereas writing the article is a one-to-many effort. The payoff for writing the article affects 80 percent of the users, whereas the payoff for responding to comments only affects about 20 percent of the users. At some point, you may be expending a lot of effort responding to individual comments without having much payoff for that time. Because of this, it’s probably best to not spend time responding to every comment — just the ones that seem to need a response.

Real Time Approval?

Another aspect to consider with the post-publishing word count is approval. When writing content in a corporation, much of this content has to go through several approval processes before it’s published. For example, you may need approval from the product manager, the communications director, the intellectual property department, and the website owner before publishing. The original article is highly scrutinized.

But what about approval processes for the post-published content? Remember this content may be three times as long as the original article. Should each of these comments go through approval as well?

Post-publishing activities in social media channels cannot go through the same approval processes because there’s an entirely different dynamic and time constraint on the content. Conversations take place in near real-time. Companies should just assume some risk by allowing writers to respond with their own judgment on articles. The risk of a poor comment is lower than the risk of not responding at all (or not responding in a timely way). I’ll probably address real-time engagement in a future post.

Overall, not a lot has been written about post-publishing process and efforts, but this is an area that deserves more attention.

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Content Curation versus Content Creation

Tom Johnson — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 14:03:02 +0000

Scott Abel has a good post on content curation strategies. He writes,

In order to develop an active and engaged audience, you have to publish as much interesting and informative content as possible — as often as possible!

He notes how tweets and blog posts are short-lived, so you have to keep publishing all the time:

… Add to the mix the sheer volume of tweets, posts, and updates being made every hour on socially-enabled sites around the digital globe, and you’ll soon realize the best strategy for getting noticed is to publish as often as possible, 24 hours a day, especially if you are trying to reach a global audience.

In order to satisfy the demand for content, you need a content curation strategy:

…I decided what was needed was a way to curate content and publish it to social networks automatically.

For more, see Content Curation: Streamlining The Process Of Populating Your Social Networks With Relevant, Interesting and Engaging Content.

I’ve noticed a trend about content this year. Last year, I could publish a post and still get comments 3-4 days later. This year, the comments mostly stop the day after I publish the post. Twitter is even more transient, but it’s always been that way.

Scott is right about the abundance of content — there are too many new posts to read, new tweets published, new articles posted each hour. Why should I bother to read something published last week, or worse, last year? The amount of content increases exponentially.

No one has the stamina to publish interesting and engaging blog posts day after day unless it’s his or her full-time job. I struggle to publish several posts a week, and lately I’ve been feeling even more strained for original content.

Many say blogging itself is in decline. Janet Egan highlights a recent Pew study showing headlines about blogging’s decline:

What’s really interesting about the Pew report is the way various news organizations summarize it in their headlines. The top themes seem to be blogging in decline and and (gasp, shudder) old people using the Internet. Here is a sampling of the headlines, in the order they showed up on Google News when ordered by relevance:

Pew study: Everyone uses email, but blogging is on decline USA Today (blog) – Stan Schroeder

Blogging ‘Peaks,’ But Reports Of Its Death Are Exaggerated Wired News (blog) – Ryan Singel

Pew: More Old People Using Facebook, Teens Blogging Less Switched – Amar Toor

Millennial Generation’s Web Dominance On The Decline, Pew Study Says The Huffington Post – Amy Lee

Older web users catching up: Pew report CBC.ca – Matt Kwong

Internet is No Longer a Domain for the Young Alone Ecommercejunkie.com

Elderly people rapidly adapting to online social networks TechRadar UK – Adam Hartley

Old catching up to young on US Internet: study AFP

Content curation is much easier than content creation, because you don’t have to strain for original thought. Just note something interesting, maybe make a few remarks, and voila, you’re satisfying your hungry audience’s need for information.

This post, despite my more extensive commentary, is still in the style of content curation.

Content curation with commentary such as this evokes more of the conversational web; these curated posts give me interesting starting points, so I’m already going in a good direction. You don’t have the blank page fear, faced with the raw need to create.

Despite the growing trends of content curation, I’m not sure I want to transition from content creation to content curation just to keep up. It seems a step downward. If a curator’s life is only to push article after article across Twitter, Facebook, and WordPress, day in and day out, as many times as you can sanely publish in one day, then let me out of that information ratrace.

You may be a center of attention as you’re publishing, but the instant your information well dries up, you’re forgotten. As a curator, you’re a nameless supplier to the information junkies of the Internet.

Content curation is something that, if everyone did, there would be no new content. Think about that from a Kantian perspective.

Content creation, not content curation, is also more rewarding. A good post changes how you think. It converts you to a new perspective. When I closely examine an experience, perhaps research it, and analyze it into the shape of a post, by the time I click Publish, something has changed inside of me.

I don’t think Scott is recommending content curation instead of content creation. He’s right that curation is the only way to keep up. But surely there’s a balance to remember — for every few posts you curate, write something of your own. Switch off between long and short posts on your blog. Let the content you curate be a starting point for a more in-depth analysis.

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Technology vs. Content, or Why Teaching WordPress Is Frustrating

Tom Johnson — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 14:16:05 +0000

Over the past several years, I’ve trained a lot of people on WordPress, through individual one-on-one training, seminars, workshops, and conference events.

Most of the people who want to learn WordPress have plans for blogging. They think blogging requires you to understand the technology before they can jump in. But the technology is easy — learning how to navigate and publish content with WordPress is a no-brainer. The hard part is creating regular, interesting content. I’m not sure how to teach content creation. Here’s a graphic comparing the two processes.

Managing the technology is easy; creating the content is hard.

While managing the technical aspects doesn’t have to involve more than a five-minute registration process at wordpress.com for a new blog, creating post after post involves much more skill.

For example, if teaching someone how to blog, here is some advice I would give: Focus on story. Don’t shy away from transparency. Avoid posts that are too long. Stick with a consistent focus. Give your opinion, not just the facts. Incorporate voices from various sources. Publish during the work week. Respond to comments. Reinforce your main ideas through visual graphics. Write for yourself. Find a higher purpose in your activity. Choose a topic you’re passionate about, but also something you regularly do. Don’t expect a lot of visibility early. Read a lot. Ask questions to brainstorm ideas. Follow your gut feeling. Keep the ideas simple and straightforward. Find a financial ROI. Write everyday, but don’t necessarily publish every day. Explore alternative points of view. Let posts mature a few days before publishing. Structure text with subheadings and lists. Use catchy but descriptive titles. Push boundaries but don’t violate confidentiality. Be consistent in publishing. Somehow find time for it all.

I could go on and on. Blogging is all about the content, not the technology. That’s why my workshops on WordPress are frustrating. I know that what I’m teaching isn’t the hard part. The technology is easy. It’s the content creation and production that’s tough. But I can’t really teach that. I can share my writing techniques, but my techniques may work only for me.

I’ll grant that creating a blog theme from scratch, or making heavy customizations to the layout and style of a theme, is more difficult. But in my experience, people care much more about the content than the design.

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Guest Post on Firehead Blog — “Finding a Content Strategy for Your Blog”

Tom Johnson — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 14:32:18 +0000

Today I have a guest post on the Firehead blog, run by CJ Walker. It’s called Finding a Content Strategy for your Blog. Here’s an excerpt:

To have a successful blog, you have to push out content on a regular basis – several posts a week, if not more. Not only do you need frequency of content, but also consistency in the topic. Basically, you have to pick a focus for your blog and stick with it every week.

Pew study: Everyone uses email, but blogging is on decline	USA Today (blog) – Stan Schroeder
Blogging ‘Peaks,’ But Reports Of Its Death Are Exaggerated	Wired News (blog) – Ryan Singel
Pew: More Old People Using Facebook, Teens Blogging Less	Switched – Amar Toor
Millennial Generation’s Web Dominance On The Decline, Pew Study Says	The Huffington Post – Amy Lee
Older web users catching up: Pew report	CBC.ca – Matt Kwong
Internet is No Longer a Domain for the Young Alone	Ecommercejunkie.com
Elderly people rapidly adapting to online social networks	TechRadar UK – Adam Hartley
Old catching up to young on US Internet: study	AFP