Telling it like it is

Penelope Trunk, on her Brazen Careerist blog, stated that you’re not going to  make money from your blog. However, she does say that blogging “…is a great career tool for creating opportunities for yourself.” Just don’t expect to make money from it.

She goes on to list the reasons why you should stop thinking about making money from your blogging:

1. Big bloggers come from big media.
2. Sure, there are exceptions. But you’re probably not one of them.
3. Even if you can do it, supporting yourself with a blog is crazy hard.
4. You probably have to be controversial to make money blogging.
5. You can make more money flipping burgers.
6. Please shut up about your book deal.
7. Blog for better reasons than money.
8. Banner advertising is the mafia.

She finishes her article with some advice from her writing teacher in graduate school: “Writing for a living is a very, very hard life. If you can do anything else for a living, you should.” then concludes with:

So the idea that blogging will help you get rich: Forget it. Your chances of that are so slim, while your chances of gaining the other benefits of blogging are very high. So blog, yes, and do it to reach real goals, just not financial goals.

Read the full article — and all the interesting comments — here: http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/04/21/8-reasons-why-you-wont-make-money-from-your-blog/

[Links last checked June 2009]

Blog post gone viral!

When I checked my blog stats after a weekend away, I saw this:

Blog post gone viral!

I’ve been averaging about 500–600 views per weekday, with about 250–350 on each weekend day, and the pattern is pretty consistent month after month. Not so on Sunday! I had a spike of enormous proportions — some 1650 views for one weekend day!

The reason?

Somebody had linked to one post of mine via StumbleUpon; the post was A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words, the one with the images from the beer company.

I don’t use StumbleUpon and I don’t know who put it out there, but it sure had an effect on my blog stats!

WordPress now allows Slideshare embedding

For some time now, WordPress has allowed bloggers to embed YouTube videos into blog posts. Recently they announced that we can embed TED Talks videos. Now Slideshare have announced that slide sets hosted on their site can be embedded into WordPress.

This is good news for me as I have several of my conference presentations on Slideshare. They get much greater exposure there than they do on my website. My web pages that have these slide decks probably get about 50 to 100 hits per month, but on Slideshare the views are now in the thousands.

Adding this capability to embed Slideshare slide decks into WordPress blogs is great and potentially offers them to a larger audience (I average over 500 hits per business day on this blog now, up from 400 per day just 3 months ago).

Over the next few weeks, I’ll embed my slide decks in this blog so that you can view them without going to another site. Meantime, if you can’t wait ;-) you can always click the Slideshare button on the right (just below Blog Stats) to go to all my slide decks.

[Links last checked April 2009]

Brilliant support from WordPress

I use the free WordPress.com domain for this blog, and I use one of the default themes — Neat — for this blog’s ‘look and feel’.

Some time ago I’d noticed that sub-bullets nested inside a numbered list didn’t display properly. Because I write a lot of step-by-step instructions in my blog posts, I finally decided to find out if I could change this behavior. I checked the WordPress.com forums and support knowledge base/FAQs, but found nothing at all about this. Then I figured that perhaps most bloggers aren’t writing step-by-step instructions that require sub-steps — only technical writers like me…

So I emailed WordPress Support. I explained the problem and how nesting a UL list inside an OL list is perfectly acceptable HTML, but despite that, it would not display correctly. By next morning I had a reply from Nick asking me to send through a link to an example post that showed this errant behavior. I did, and also sent him a link to a post showing how I was currently dealing with it using BR tags and asterisks for the bullets.

Within a couple of hours, Nick emailed me back saying that yes, it was an omission in Neat’s CSS, and that he’d now fixed it. I checked my example post and voila! It was all fixed and working correctly.

That’s pretty impressive service for a free product. Thanks Nick and WordPress!

Now I have to go back through all 600+ posts and correct those with nested bullets… I think that’s a job for a quiet, rainy day…

Etiquette for commenting on blog posts

I have a pretty good readership for this blog — those who comment are invariably polite. But some blogs, forums, YouTube comments etc. are far from polite. A couple of people (at least) have ‘written’ some etiquette ‘rules’ for commenting on blog posts:

• Grammar Girl’s How to write a great blog comment
• Yo comments are whack! video on YouTube

[Links last checked April 2009]

Author-it: Corporate blog

Author-it Software Corporation has joined the growing list of companies with a corporate blog.

You can read it or subscribe to an RSS feed of it here: http://www.author-it.com/blog/

Looking back on the first year of this blog

In late 2007 I decided to stop producing the quarterly, 2-page PDF CyberText Newsletter and to shift the content and delivery mechanism to a blog. I did this with some trepidation as I couldn’t guarantee that all my 250+ newsletter subscribers (though only about 90 readers on average) would be familiar with a blogging medium and RSS feeds. Many would be, so I figured I’d give it a try and see what happened.

What happened has been a slow explosion of both my capacity to produce information (I’ve written just under 500 posts in 12 months, compared to the 50 or so I could cover in four issues of the newsletter), and the readership of my blog. My blog now gets around 400 readers a day, and the number has climbed steadily, gathering momentum from about June 2008.

Blog stats for 2008, by month

As you can see from the graph above, I’m now getting about 8000 ‘views’ per month. The slight dips in November and December are related to holidays, such as Thanksgiving in the US in November and the Christmas/New Year vacation.

On a daily basis, the pattern of viewing shows a distinct correlation with the typical working week, with most views occurring Monday to Friday. The graph below is the month from 24 November to 21 December 2008 — the yellow highlighted areas are Monday to Friday, with a distinct drop off in viewing around Thanksgiving.

Daily stats, late Nov to Dec 2008

As a technical writer, I thought that my readership might be other technical writers, but that’s not necessarily the case.  The posts that attracted the most readership have been those on other computer-related issues — typically how to solve a problem or how to do something. Here are the top posts for 2008:

Top posts for 2008

My goal with this blog is to share information that I find useful. And also — to quote my friend and ex-colleague Stephanie — to prop up a dodgy memory! I learn so many new things all the time, it’s hard to remember how to repeat something some months later, so this blog has become a ‘brain dump’ for me. A central place where I can store all those bits of knowledge that might have ended up on unread sticky notes many years ago.

Others have obviously found my brain dump useful too, so I will continue with it. Until now, my output has been at least one post a day. I hope to keep to that in 2009, but there may be days when the memory bank is empty and I just have nothing to share! ;-)

WordPress quick start guide

Tom Johnson at I’d rather be writing has written a WordPress Quick Start Guide in Wiki format and posted it on the WordPress Codex.

This is great for those who want to run WordPress on their own site. It doesn’t apply to those who are using WordPress.com to host their blog (like me at the moment).

Thanks for writing and sharing this, Tom.

Corporate/business blogging

Some months ago I was involved in a discussion with a company about corporate blogging. Should they do it or not? If so, what was the best way to go about it? What were the pitfalls?

Prior to that discussion I sent them a list of links that talked about many of these issues, and a set of questions they needed to ask and answer within their team.

Questions

• Will you have one blog (with several writers) or many (one per writer; e.g. MSDN)? How will you maintain ‘voice’?
• Who will write the blog posts?
• Who will maintain the blog?
• Who has the final say on what gets posted or not? Are there any controls or approvals prior to publishing?
• Will you allow comments? On all posts, or just some?
• Where will you host the blog? SUGGESTION: If you are a large company, host it yourself on your own website and link to it from your menus. Do not use an external blog host like Blogger, WordPress etc. (though you can use their install-it-yourself technology) if you are a large company.
• If you have photos, make sure they’re of real people at the company or the company’s events. ALWAYS get permission to use photos of people (internal or external).
• What will you write? PR stuff, events, general articles, “how to’s”, who’s doing what and where, new products/releases, future plans?
• What design will you use? SUGGESTION: Use the corporate look and feel or something close to it, or at least an obvious message that this is your company’s blog (e.g. MSDN, branded with the company logo).

Links

Some of these resources may help:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_blog Wikipedia: a good overview of corporate/business blogging
• http://www.ivt.com.au/news/id/86 “Corporate blogs: Minefield or bonanza?”; towards the end there’s a list of guidelines
• http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3517546 “Corporate blogs: Measure their value”; quite a bit on measuring the ROI of corporate blogs
• http://www.inc.com/articles/2003/07/bblogs.html “Blogging for business”; the interesting stuff is about half way down starting from this paragraph: “Why all the fervor?…”
• http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/blogs/policy.html Sun’s corporate blogging policy—no legalese!
• http://www.socialtext.net/charleneli/index.cgi?corporate_blogging_policies: “Corporate Blogging Policies” with some general guidelines and links to some policies from large organizations.
• “15 companies that really get corporate blogging” Article from Josh Catone at SitePoint with some links to their recommended corporate blogs.

[Links last checked August 2008]

Articles and blog posts related to Author-it

Did you know that Author-it’s website has a page dedicated to Author-it-related articles out there in the blogosphere?

It’s here: http://author-it.com/index.php?page=31652