There are just too many blogs out there. Blogging began as a way for experts to share some of their knowledge with the world, and as it became easier and easier to publish online they’ve degraded into a sounding off point for anyone with a WordPress or Blogger account. If you don’t proofread, you probably shouldn’t be publishing online. If you learned everything you know about a subject from other bloggers, you probably shouldn’t be publishing online and if you find yourself repeating the same things over and over again, you either need to publish less or you probably shouldn’t be publishing online. I mean literally, it is a massive waste of your time, as well as your readers.
Websites are 10x more efficient when you cover a different topic every week. It’s another target for long-tailed search you didn’t have before, and that’s what grows into success in web publishing. How often do you think someone searches for “Why is Social Media Important?” How about “Tips to optimize a LinkedIn profile?” If you write three posts this week on either of those subjects, and I write “How to optimize on LinkedIn”, “How to Optimize on Twitter”, and “How to optimize on Facebook”, which blog will get more hits from search? Ok, this was my tangent, back to the Pyramid.
Writing should come from an area of substance, but I begin to think more and more that most writers just decide they want to write about something before they have any experience, and expert bloggers are partly to blame. How many times have you read that a good way to improve your profile is to “Write a book or publish a blog”?
Think of blogging like the capstone on a pyramid. The base of your pyramid should be learning. Learning should be broad, a strong foundation for everything you do. I have studied everything from psychology to typography to improve my skills as a web developer. I don’t always use everything I’ve learned, but it gives me a good perspective on my deficiencies and strengths.
The middle part of your pyramid should be doing. Practice makes perfect, and if you’ve never ran a marketing campaign, what in the world made you think of starting a marketing blog? There are a hundred skills you’ve exercised in your life; a hundred possible starting points for a blog were you can add real world value. Blog about a sport you played in high school, the work you do as an adult, but never about a job you’d like to have or something you want to get into. At least provide that context to the readers if you do. However, that’s a case study (something just as valuable) and not really a blog in the general sense.
Finally the capstone of your pyramid should be writing about it. So you’re a martial arts expert eh? You’ve studied all styles of martial training; you decided to become a shaolin practitioner and practiced your skills for over a decade. You wear your black belt with pride, and can break bricks like twigs. You have become a true expert, but the most valuable book you can publish isn’t on your martial training as a whole, but on a single form or practice that you’ve mastered above all else. “The Iron Shirt: Qigong and Meditation Techniques”.
I know that this type of advice is paramount to speaking to a brick wall, and is just as likely to alienate a beginner as it is to teach them (after all, who wants to put in the time and hard work to truly become an expert?). It’s also counter intuitive to the lesson of adopting early, which is a primary mainstay of becoming successful online (someone mentioned a lady who had developed a following of over 500,000 on Pinterest in the last few months). The truth is that the pundits who really shine in blogging arrange a trinity when it comes to this; practiced knowledge, early adoption and good writing. It has a lot to do with luck and timing, but you can adopt early as often as you want and you’ll still not become synonymous with success in your niche without practiced experience.
two of my favorite sentences from this post:
“If you don’t proofread, you probably shouldn’t be publishing online.”
and
“a hundred possible starting points for a blog were you can add real world value.”
Thanks for Reading Ordinary Dad. It’s easy to try and model your blog after another successful blog, you can practically plagarize it if you aren’t careful. We’re all always concentrating on our next big project, but writing is better as a reflection, not a prediction.
Adam Justice recently posted..5 Tools You Didn’t Know about, but Desperately Need
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Hey, Adam. I disagree. Even if you model your blog after a successful one, while keeping a unique style of writing you can’t plagiarize, especially when you mention the source of your knowledge.
Elena recently posted..Transferring your CNA license to Another State
I love this analogy Adam. What makes my situation a little unique is that I’ve been in the financial services industry for almost a decade, but the big bank I’m currently employed with strictly prohibits me from voicing an opinion on anything involving that. I’m not about to call big brother’s bluff on that either. And considering that I’ve only been involved in Social Media for 8 months or so, I’m hardly “experienced” in that realm either. But I’m still enjoying the blogging ride, and meeting folks like yourself make it even more rewarding.
Tony Bennett recently posted..Comments are Like Crack – What’s Your #SocialMedia Drug of Choice?
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Oh don’t get me wrong Tony, blogging is a form of mass media, and it’s an open forum. As a student of Social Media, Mindy Koch made a blog solely to track her progress in building an online presence.
It’s basically just a follow up to my guest post on Spin Sucks. The quality of a blog has more to do with writing than it does experience, but social media blogs are the epitome of the reddit centipede, digesting OC of others and repeating themselves until the words don’t even sound real anymore. Before you blog, do an experiment (I’ve saw you use this method before Tony!), or expand on the ideas of another instead of just repeating it.
This is the 4th incarnation of my Webmaster blog, and this time I’ve noticed this time around that everyone thinks that all bloggers are trying to be the next Chris Brogan. Blogging used to be like a journal, but somewhere along the line people decided that it was a good traffic generation tool. That’s fine, I know a lot about traffic generation, but I get confronted everyday with people that miss MAJOR points on subjects they write as an expert on. I’m trying to get these messages across before I open the SMS site at the end of this month, after that I really need to adopt a different journalistic style.
Adam Justice recently posted..Social Media Measurement: ROI is Hard to Come By
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I’m with you, Adam. If I see one more “How to optimize your Linkedin account” post — especially when they have absolutely nothing new to add — I’ll literally scream. Oops, there goes one ((screaming)). I love to read blogs, but I get so tired of seeing promising headlines that don’t deliver. (Don’t tell me you’re going to reveal secrets unless you actually have some to share.) The problem is that most people don’t know how to be different. They never learned how to fly their freak flag and bring a little of their own unique flavor to that thing that everybody else is doing. I’m on a mission to change that…”Be a Chef!” (not a cook)
Tea Silvestre recently posted..How to Keep Bears from Eating Your Business
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Adam,
A great post, and a little harsh. I think you are missing two important elements where blogging differs from website/paper writing.
1. Blogging is just as much about participation as it is writing. The design choices you make are critical to building and sustaining an audience.
2. Successful bloggers seamlessly include multimodal elements (such as your pyramids) that act as metaphors for the audience.
3. There could never be too many blogs. Why would anyone dissuade folks from writing?
Twitter: jgmac1106
You know, you’re right Greg. The lines between a blog and an information website has blurred to the point where the words are interchangeable. Most websites use content management systems, and the types of blogs I am targeting with this isn’t the same thing that someone would have described as a blog 3 years ago.
I don’t know what to say to someone who is offering terrible information up as “valuable”, and I don’t know how much of the general public can tell the difference either. It is damaging, but the context of the author’s experience is exxagerated because they’ve read in another blog that it will help their brand to appear like an expert. I wouldn’t ever dissuade someone from starting a ‘blog’ about any of their hobbies or skills, or something they are pursuing. There is a difference between a traditional blog and the resource websites full of re-hashed information (a lot of it based on misunderstood elements and inaccurate information that was derived fronm other ‘blogs’ that don’t have a clue, and misinterpretations from what is an author’s opinion and what is factually accurate).
Instead of repeating best practices you read somewhere else, you should question to credibility and verifiability of those practices. Re-Tweeting with an @ mention is more effective than a Twitter Re-tweet? Do an experiment, confirm that before youput that out to thousands of people who are there to take your word for it. In oriental martial arts, you were required to trace your lineage back to an old master. In this blogosphere, you can re-write 1,000 posts from 1,000 other bloggers who have 0 experience and got their information from 100 other places that had no experience, and claim to be a master because you can recite information even though you don’t even know if it’s correct.
It becomes even more apparent to me when I tell someone who is supposedly an expert on SEO that a certain action has major SEO benefits. They ask me how it’s possible because the page rank is lower than it should be. Even the experts learn from erroneous blogs, even though there are canonical white papers and blogs written by the people who write the SEO algorithms themselves. Why pass up the person who wrote the book to learn from a guy in a suit with a cool goatee who sold pitney bowes postage meters before becoming an SEO expert last week because he liked the ring of it *breath*. In reality (according to Google themselves) PR doesn’t have the bearing of relevance when it comes to backlinks or SERP ranking, and people who study SEO for their business know about this. They also don’t write SEO blogs, so people get false information that is heavily influenced by other blogs that haven’t ever studied the SERPS for anything. btw, PR only affects how often a page gets crawled, it doesn’t affect the page’s ranking in SERPS. for example, I have a 2 month old domain already showing up on the front page of Google SERPS for its targeted keyword, with a PR of 0).
Adam Justice recently posted..Social Media Measurement: ROI is Hard to Come By
Twitter: etelligence
“If you don’t proofread, you probably shouldn’t be publishing online.”
AMEN!
I think you’re right, Adam. Too many bloggers spewing a bunch of mumbo-jumbo without any real-world experience to back it up. I actually have a blog entitled “Does the World Need Another Blogger?” that I’m looking to publish here in the next few weeks. If you think about it logically, though…if a blogger really has nothing new to say and ESPECIALLY if they can’t say it in a clever, interesting way…no one will read it anyway. So maybe it ultimately doesn’t really matter.
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Just loved your content. Great article learned a lot from it. Yes you are saying right optimization is one of the most important factor for increase page ranking.
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Hi Adam, I liked your pyramid metaphor. Your post is instructive. Like Tony, I also cannot blog about my work life, as it is confidential. With so many economic changes, I encourage people to learn to blog, but realize not all people will become experts. Ya gotta start somewhere…
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Hi Adam, I liked your pyramid metaphor. Your post is instructive. Like Luanne, I also cannot blog about my work life, as it is confidential. With so many economic changes, I encourage people to learn to blog, but realize not all people will become experts. Ya gotta start somewhere…
There are many social site are available for making friends and sharing of ideas to each other.thanks for sharing the article
yesh I need to scan only 1 document and send it to someone by email for my job hunting. Thanks for Sharing this article