Shaun Low

How do I blog if I’m not a writer?

This is the number one question asked by people when they’re thinking about getting a blog, or advised to get one to help them create a valuable presence on the web. And it should be. If your natural inclination isn’t to write or if you just don’t have the time, there are a number of options available to you, which I’ll cover later in this article. First, lets address the problem of “non” writers trying to write.

One, you don’t know how you’ll do if you don’t try. Who knows, you may turn out to be a natural. Two, if you stick to some simple rules, it makes everything easier:

1) Write about what you know. You talk to to colleagues, clients and people around you all day, giving advice, telling them what you need done and much more. Pretend you’re writing an email to someone (better yet, look at those emails you’ve written. Often they contain a lot of good info you can turn into posts), a an op-ed or anything else that makes it easier.

2) Posts can be any length you want. As a rule of thumb, they should be at least two paragraphs, but if its been a long day, do something like a one paragraph post on some bit of news in your industry. Nothing major, and probably something you’re already thinking about.

3) Don’t get bogged down in the details or making a perfect piece of art. You can always go back and change it later, the most important thing to do is get it down on paper.

4) If you use a content management system like Wordpress, use the post-date function. Sit down on a Sunday, take a few hours and write out your posts for that week. Then submit them and post-date them. This puts them in a queue that is published automatically on the date you specify.

If you have tried repeatedly and just feel overwhlemed, there are other options available to you as well:

1) Hire a writer. There are lots of good freelance sites like Elance.com where you can find decent writers to help you out. Use them once or a number of times, but always be sure to check their references and their previous work. Cragslist and other classified sites are also valuable for finding writers, again, just make sure you check for quality.

2) Delegate the writing to an assistant, then edit the content. They often know a lot about the industry and can write articles for you to review, which you can then edit and/or add your own spin to.

3) Get others in your company involved. Partner, colleagues, assistants…everyone can be valuable to you in generating content.

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About the author:
Aurora Brown is the Social Media Manager and Editor-in-Chief for Authority Domains online marketing
company. She currently authors the Authority Domains Search Engine Marketing Blog and is working on her first novel.

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The latest release of WordPress, version 2.6.1, came out a few days ago.

I upgraded this blog yesterday in a process that was painless as it happened literally with one mouse click and didn’t involve the manual upgrade process that’s usual with self-hosted WordPress, and which can be quite daunting for some users.

My hosting service, DreamHost, offers a simple 1-click install and upgrade service that makes the process of upgrading your blog as simple as, well, one click.

I noted on my tech blog last month what my WordPress upgrade path has been since I’ve been with DreamHost :

1. Backup the database: this is where everything in your blog resides - posts, comments, user settings, etc - so always have a recent backup (the WordPress Database Backup plug-in is very good).
2. Disable all plug-ins.
3. Run DreamHost 1-Click Upgrade and wait for email confirmation that the upgrade has been done.
4. Log in to the blog and re-enable all plug-ins (which I do one by one, checking the site each time to be sure there are no compatibility issues).

From step 3 to receiving the confirmation email usually takes less than 15 minutes. For all the steps 1-4, the total time, typically, is less than an hour.

As DreamHost makes a backup copy of my entire site before doing an upgrade, which I can revert to in case of any disaster, I usually don’t do the additional step of making sure there is a copy of the entire blog - everything that’s installed on the server - on a local computer before doing an upgrade, unless I’ve made changes to any core files or theme templates. I tend to do a full backup myself anyway from time to time.

As with all blog upgrades whether WordPress or any other self-hosted platform, there is a bit of preparation work to do before that one click where the absolutely essential steps are numbers 1 and 2 above (and see the full upgrade guide on the WordPress Codex which I always check even with a one-click upgrade procedure).

In thinking about how easy an upgrade is (and a fresh installation, too) using the type of service offered to its customers by DreamHost, I started wondering when installing or upgrading a blog platform like WordPress might universally become a sort of one-click process, with reliable and trusted functionality built-in to the platform itself.

Imagine how easy it would then be for literally anyone to manage their blog platform without being any kind of IT person, or turning to someone with tech knowledge for help. And the easier it becomes, the more likely it would be that more people will set up a self-hosted blog (check some pros and cons of self-hosting).

There is a plug-in for WordPress called WordPress Automatic Upgrade that many people swear by. If I wasn’t using DreamHost, I’d consider using that although I’m a bit put off by some of the horror stories in the WordPress support forum.

Yesterday, WordCamp took place in San Francisco. This is the grand-daddy of WordPress conferences, gathering together a great deal of talent in developers and bloggers to talk about the future of WordPress.

In reading much of the commentary about the event - notably ZDNet’s coverage and TechCrunch - I paid particular attention to commentary from WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg on what the developer priorities are in the coming year.

In reporting on Mullenweg’s presentation at WordCamp San Francisco, TechCrunch notes:

[…] The focus for 2009? Easier upgrades. Their growth, Mullenweg says, is not dissimilar from other popular products (he mentioned Microsoft, OSX, iPhone, Facebook platform as examples), and believes that good platforms need good self-updating systems. Automattic has a three-prong strategy for better updates: better community awareness, working with webhosts, and adding automatic upgrades functionality to WordPress. Mullenweg envisions the upgrade process to work just like Firefox: one-click, with a list of plugin and theme incompatibilities generated. WordPress.org’s plugin directory (and a recently-launched theme directory) will help make this possible. Many new features are also in the pipeline, including the much anticipated BuddyPress, but that a clean update system will remove one of the biggest thorns for WP users.

(The bold is my emphasis.)

This is very good news.

Until then, there’s DreamHost and 1-click.

See also this thought-provoking post by Sarah Perez writing in ReadWriteWeb - The Next Social Networks Will Be Powered By WordPress and Movable Type.

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I gave my mom my old weight loss blog a few years back. In spite of publishing it on its own domain (smart) I was still using Blogger (dumb) when I gave it to her. It is not that Blogger is bad, but that Wordpress offers so many customization options that allow you to effectively rank for a wider array of keywords, and thus earn more per word.

These are the steps I did to help move her blog over from Blogger to Wordpress.

Step 1: Download and install Wordpress (also requires setting up a MySQL database).

Step 2: Make Wordpress URL configurations.

Step 3: Cloned my mom’s old blogger theme design using Themepress (cost $10), and then had to hack the CSS by hand for about 10 minutes.

After verifying the layout was fairly decent I deleted the blogroll links and the opening post.

Step 4: publish my mom’s old blog onto blogspot.com so I could import it to Wordpress using the one click import located at domainname.com/wp-admin/import.php

After importing it I used Blogger to republish the blog back to her domain instead of leaving a copy on Blogspot, such that she does not have a stray cloned version of her site floating around.

Once import was complete I looked it over and verified it generally looked good. If you still have your old site up you can view the Wordpress blog version by going to yoursite.com/index.php (presuming you installed Wordpress in the root of your site).

Step 5: rewrite the .htaccess file to include both the Wordpress specific functions and rewrite rules needed to lose the dates from the URLs. The exact .htaccess file you need to write depends on your old URL structure and file extensions (the below one redirects html and shtml files). Our .htaccess file looked like this (note there were a few dozen lines like the first line, but I limited it to one in this example for brevity)

Please note that when Wordpress imports your blog some of the stop words are removed from the URLs, which can end up creating some mean 404 errors until you line up the new URLs with the old ones (which we deal with in step 7). Also, if you used Blogger tag pages then you might need to make your .htaccess file a bit more complex than the above one, adding entries to redirect the tag pages.

Step 6: Delete my mom’s old static file archives.

If you are afraid that something might get hosed up with the move you can rename the old archive files and folders. For example:

After these are renamed or deleted click around the site and verify it generally works.

Step 7: Installed a couple SEO related plug ins.

Akismet - comment anti-spam tool installed by default, but I had to get an API key and enable it.

SEO Title Tag - allows you to make the page title and H1 post heading different…great for on page optimization.

Redirection plug in - keeps track of 404 errors and allows you to redirect URLs.

What I did, rather than redirecting URLs, was find the URL slugs that did not align with the old URLs and rewrite the URL slugs to add the stop words into it (I believe the most common ones were and and the).

I monitored 404 errors logged by the redirection plug in for ~ 4 days and fixed everything I came across. I figure all the important, well linked to, and/or high traffic posts should have got traffic within the first 4 days.

After 8 weeks I will flush the 404 error log and look for any stray link equity that I am not capturing, and redirect those URLs to their new location.

WASABI Related Entries - this plug in automatically creates a list of related entries wherever you like in your theme (you can install it in the sidebar or possibly after your comments). The beauty of such a plug in is that it allows you to keep more of your PageRank flowing internally, and it allows you to put a bunch more keyword rich content within a page without it looking spammy. For instance, given the following image you know what the related post is about without even seeing it.

Lorell reviewed a variety of other related post plug ins.

Step 8: While I was fixing up my mom’s URLs I helped offset the revenue shortfall from the short term traffic decline by using IE conditional comments to place an extra AdSense block on her 404 page when Internet Explorer viewers accessed the error page.

Step 9: Final window dressings

Use Xenu Link Sleuth to crawl the site to look for any broken links you need to fix. Please note that you may need to change the number of threads running or Xenu might get blocked by your server. I had no luck with 30 threads, but 4 worked ok.

Set up your robots.txt file to prevent Googlebot from trying to create search pages (?s=). Also prevent them from trying to index admin pages, feeds, trackback URLs, and the p= post URLs (presuming you are using post slugs as mentioned above).

Matt Cutts offers some tips to protect your Wordpress blog from getting hacked. Patrick Altoft offers tips on how to use a Google Alert to check if your blog gets hacked.

Map out keyword strategy and assign old posts to related categories. Set your default category to something that is useful rather than leaving it as uncategorized. While editing particularly high traffic posts it might make sense to see if the page title or page contents could be further improved to make the post even more successful. In some cases a post can rank for a wide array of related keywords.

While ensuring that are category pages are linked to sitewide, I used conditional PHP statements in the sidebar.php file for monthly archives such that they were linked to from the homepage, but not from the individual post pages. This drives more link equity toward the category level pages, while driving less to the date based archives (as we would rather rank for low fat recipes than for August 2007).

As a bonus, one could also add a plug in for editing default category pages, but we have not done that yet as we still have a long way to go with categorizing the current contents first. Anyone know of a good plug-in to edit category pages?

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I’ve been reading Blogging Heroes by Michael Banks and I’ve noticed that throughout the 30 interviews (I’ve read 28 of them so far.) that there are a couple of common themes that all of these professional bloggers tend to come back to. Some of the folks that are interviewed include Mary Jo Foley, Gina Trapani, Chris Anderson, Philipp Lenssen, Frank Warren, Steve Rubel, Gary Lee, Robert Scoble, Peter Rojas, Rebecca Lieb, John Neff and Brad Hill.

This book is worth reading! If you’ve ever felt alone as a blogger, ever felt that no one comments, or that the only ones who do are hurtful, this is the next book you must read. If you’re thinking of starting a blog, the first step is reading here (or my book, of course. ). If you’ve ever wondered what sort of person it takes to build a successful blog, this group provides an excellent measure.

The themese are:

Probably the biggest theme that everybody mentions is being passionate about your topic, and you have to be passionate or it’s going to chew you up and spit you out. If you are not passionate about a topic you, will run out of energy very quickly. To me this is fairly obvious, although I suspect many people getting into this for the first time struggle due to the newness of blogging. Its something that overcomes any forward thinking on the idea of “Do I have the stamina to actually carry this out?“. The real challenge is that every day you have to think of something to talk about, to continually put it out there to build an audience. As readership grows, the demand seems to get greater and greater, and how do you manage that?

While these bloggers (in one case I believe one of the people in this book actually comes from professional journalism background) came into blogging from different angles and with different back grounds, the real meat of their message is that you have to continually stay on top of whatever your unique topic is. This point is really critical, as well selecting the right topic. Again we’re back to being passionate about it. This is absolutely critical in order to be successful.

So one of the biggest things I’m noticing in relation to this the book is that I think as a search marketer and as an online marketing professional. I take for granted, for example, the notion of monetizing a blog or website.
To me the idea of not monetizing a blog or website is foreign. Too many of those interviewed for this book, completely the opposite is true. Many started with blogs simply for the sake of spreading a common word or the own point of view. Many have started blogs and grown blogs to the point where readership exceeds hundreds of thousands of people per month. When I see such growth I cannot help but see dollar signs! Though, I do completely understand their point of view, and having to deal with the question “Is this a moral issue?”

So my personal opinion on this obviously is monetize, monetize, monetize! I come from a background of online marketing and I understand the inherent value of unique content and the traffic it can bring. I also understand the idea of having a return on this – the time invested. This isn’t simply a hobby. This is something where you do get to share knowledge and expertise as well as developing a return on the time you’re putting in. The time you’re putting into this hobby, you’re not getting back. So you need to be very careful that the time you put into blogging as a return of some in some form for you.

Overall I am a bit lukewarm with some of what’s talked about in Blogging Heroes as regards the perception of SEO. Many of those being interviewed see SEO as an adjunct, maybe something to be avoided. In a few cases, some of those being interviewed in this book actually feel SEO is meritorious and that it is worth pursuing; that there is a return on this approach. One of the common themes on the topic of SEO is the idea that it’s very simplistic and that you needn’t put a lot of time and effort into it. I actually agree with this wholeheartedly. The core of SEO is built around usability and that in and of itself leads you straight back to the content you’re producing and the format in which you are showcasing it to your users. Many blogging platforms, such as Wordpress, make this very simple to manage.

Blogging is the ideal platform for actually showcasing content in a manageable way. Being a writer (good or bad) or being a subject matter expert, or even simply someone who is keenly a interested in a topic, the blogging world and the platforms themselves enable you to quickly showcase your information. By managing very basic SEO points such as having correct titles, by ensuring that unique descriptions exist on pages, by managing your trackbacks properly, by using images and ALT tags properly you can help a blog to really become much more search friendly. Probably the one of the biggest pieces of advice that leads to a search friendly layout is that of managing your URLs effectively. By actually going in and selecting your URLs be shown as postnames in the platform, you’ve taken a big step forward in ensuring that the search engines can very quickly and effectively understand what the post is about. By managing this one item, you will change your URLs from a series of numbers to the actual words used in the title that you wrote for the post.

The title of this post is “Are Bloggers Unaware? “ I believe for the most part they are aware. They are aware of their reader’s responses. They are aware of their own subject matter knowledge. There are aware of their own passion for the subject.

I’m not sure that beyond that -passion- a lot more is needed, for most blogs. In fact, if you are passionate about a topic, it will show through in your writing and in your presentation. That passion alone will draw readers to your space. So whether you are blogging for business, pleasure, a hobby or any other reason, bring your passion for the topic to the forefront. Do not enter into blogging if it’s on a whim, for a quick win, or if you simply feel like trying to make some money quickly.

The bottom line is making money online does not happen quickly.

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About the author:
In-House SEM
SEMPO BoD member
SES speaker

In addition to volunteering time on the BoD at SEMPO and co-chairing the in-house SEM committee, I also moderate at www.searchengineforums.com and I write in-house focused articles for www.searchenginewatch.com.

Sometimes I offer consulting for clients and I’m currently writing a book due out this fall on blogging and making money (McGraw-Hill publishing).

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Like most bloggers, I struggle with true metrics for my blog. The problem isn’t so much about technology as it is about understanding what is useful to know about my blog to make it better and attract more of an audience. I’ve got lots of metrics that I can look at today, from my Technorati ranking to where my blog is on the Power150 list. I can check the number of comments I get, or look at the number of daily or monthly impressions. There are several big problems with any of these approaches, though:

1. RSS skews most metrics - When readers are consuming your posts through RSS, most of the time they don’t need to visit your site. While this may reduce your page views and monthly visitors, it can often lead to a greater engagement and wider distribution. 
2. Inbound links aren’t all equal - Perhaps the greatest injustice of many metrics systems today is that they reward “linkbait listing” (the activity of listing a large number of blogs and links in the hopes those sites will also link back to you). As a result being part of some of these lists, some blogs can be propelled to higher numbers of links and authority without producing any quality content to earn it.
3. Content expires though it may still be relevant - One of the most frustrating things about Technorati as a tool is that it expires older content. There is lots of good content that is getting ignored simply because it was written over six months ago.
4. There are multiple ways to measure engagement - Looking only at links to a post or comments are incomplete measures. People use different sites and different ways to engage with content, from commenting to saving it.

In a sentence, the real challenge for blog metrics is to find a more comprehensive way to see if people are really connecting to the content on your blog. Melanie Baker, the community manager at yet another smart Canadian startup called AideRSS emailed me last week with a very interesting solution to this challenge of measuring “social engagement.” They have created a system using what they call “PostRank” to measure the engagement of any individual blog post. Posts are ranked from 1.0 to 10.0 with the top score going to those posts that generate the most activity. Instead of just focusing on inbound links, their ranking system looks measures such as comments, number of saves on del.icio.us, number of Tweets mentioning the URL, and how many Diggs a particular post gets. Then an aggregated score for your blog is calculated based on the individual performance of your blog posts. This is brilliant for a number of reasons:

1. It separates metrics into blog posts instead of one big number. This means that you can get a better sense for which blog posts are really working and driving engagement and which aren’t.
2. By allowing you to view your entire blog in terms of your top, best, great and good posts, you can start to spot trends in what content is the most viral.
3. As the name suggests, the site can be used to make your RSS subscriptions more useful by helping you to filter all the posts you get into just the top posts which are the most discussed.

There are only two slight limitations in their model that I can see. The first is that it only looks at a small subset of sites where engagement can happen so some large sites (such as a social network on Ning, or a Facebook group) where there may be lots of discussion can get ignored. The sites AideRSS uses are also very US-centric, which means that significant international discussions could often get ignored. The second limitation is that some of the blog-wide metrics that could complete the picture of blog influence, such as number of RSS subscribers or affiliations of a blogger are missing - so it’s not a complete picture of blog influence.

Still, the idea of using PostRank to filter posts and judge the quality of a blog overall is one worth taking a look at. Particularly if it could be easily combined with a tool like Alltop which pulls in RSS feeds by category to make reading blogs and finding the highest quality blogs in a particular category easier.  Any service that can give bloggers a better idea of how to produce higher quality content AND help readers to more effectively decide what content in their flood of RSS subscriptions is most worth reading http://gr.aiderss.com/ should be a big hit.

If you haven’t visited this site yet, you need to check it out. A great place to start is with Melanie’s blog post where she remixes Viral Garden’s list of Top 25 marketing bloggers in order of “social engagement.”  Also, in case you’re curious, here’s what AideRSS came up with as a list of my top ten posts from the last year:

My Top Ten Blog Posts: