Micro-blogging killed my blog

Looking over my sporadic posting habits of the last year and I realized that almost all of my linking to news articles, photos, and videos has moved to micro-blogging sites like Twitter and Facebook stream posts. I post pretty regularly on both of those sites, but only post to my actual blog when there's too much to cover in 140 characters or less, or when I feel guilty that I haven't posted to my blog in awhile. Sure, less time these days is a factor, but overall convenience is a greater factor. I wonder if this is a growing trend among personal bloggers -- have more people who blog for fun abandoned the long blog format?

Something is lost in micro-blogging. Before, I would usually post a link and then describe why I thought the link was interesting, or maybe combine several links in a post and describe a connection that may have been overlooked. Now, it's just a link. I may offer some commentary if someone responds, but that's rare. A typical post is usually just the link, a snippet, a thumbnail maybe (or not), but nothing about what I find interesting about the link. If this is a growing trend among all personal bloggers, blogging itself has lost a certain unique quality that made it special.

The long personal blog format, at least for me, will probably end up being personal internal stories not found 'out there' in the world, where you can simply link it off, because these are things that can't be covered in a short status update. Unfortunately, they are harder to write, require more thought, and as a result come with less frequency.

Frequency and the vitality of blogs are intrinsically related. People simply don't read blogs that are updated a few times a year. I could post my stats to demonstrate this fact, but my point is that statistically you're not likely to see that post anyway ; ) And without readers, of course, the blog is dead.

Well c'est la vie. As Kerouac said, "scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy." Like a spirit board spelling out nonsensical messages from the beyond, my dead blog will probably continue to be updated now and then. I'm just not going to deny that it is, in fact, dead.

Hey, that's a cool title for a blog! "My Dead Blog". Feel free to steal it.

Mark Cuban's rules for a successful start-up

Mark Cuban is an Internet billionaire who owes a substantial portion of his fortune to start-ups. How successful is he? Well, he's listed as #133 on Forbes' "World's Richest People" list, with a net worth of $2.8 billion, and The Guinness Book of Records credits Cuban with the "largest single e-commerce transaction," $40 million for his Gulfstream V jet in October 1999.

Wouldn't you like to get inside his head? Well, you can. Mark Cuban keeps his own blog at Blog Maverick. Here's his twelve rules for start-ups:

Of course, anyone who has started a company has their own rules and guidelines, so I thought i would add to the meme with my own. My "rules" below aren't just for those founding the companies, but for those who are considering going to work for them as well.

1. Don't start a company unless its an obsession and something you love.

2. If you have an exit strategy, its not an obsession.

3. Hire people who you think will love working there.

4. Sales Cures All. Know how your company will make money and how you will actually make sales.

5. Know your core competencies and focus on being great at them. Pay up for people in your core competencies. Get the best. Outside the core competencies, hire people that fit your culture but are cheap

6. An expresso machine ? Are you kidding me ? Shoot yourself before you spend money on an expresso machine. Coffee is for closers. Sodas are free. Lunch is a chance to get out of the office and talk. There are 24 hours in a day, and if people like their jobs, they will find ways to use as much of it as possible to do their jobs.

7. No offices. Open offices keeps everyone in tune with what is going on and keeps the energy up. If an employee is about privacy, show them how to use the lock on the john. There is nothing private in a start up. This is also a good way to keep from hiring execs who can not operate successfully in a startup. My biggest fear was always hiring someone who wanted to build an empire. If the person demands to fly first class or to bring over their secretary, run away. If an exec wont go on salescalls, run away. They are empire builders and will pollute your company.

8. As far as technology, go with what you know. That is always the cheapest way. If you know Apple, use it. If you know Vista... ask yourself why, then use it. Its a startup, there are just a few employees. Let people use what they know.

9. Keep the organization flat. If you have managers reporting to managers in a startup, you will fail. Once you get beyond startup, if you have managers reporting to managers, you will create politics.

10. NEVER EVER EVER buy swag. A sure sign of failure for a startup is when someone sends me logo polo shirts. If your people are at shows and in public, its ok to buy for your own folks, but if you really think someone is going to wear your Yobaby.com polo you sent them in public, you are mistaken and have no idea how to spend your money

11. NEVER EVER EVER hire a PR firm. A PR firm will call or email people in the publications, shows and websites you already watch, listen to and read. Those people publish their emails. Whenever you consume any information related to your field, get the email of the person publishing it and send them an email introducing yourself and the company. Their job is to find new stuff. They will welcome hearing from the founder instead of some PR flack. Once you establish communications with that person, make yourself available to answer their questions about the industry and be a source for them. If you are smart, they will use you.

12. Make the job fun for employees. Keep a pulse on the stress levels and accomplishments of your people and reward them. My first company, MicroSolutions, when we had a record sales month, or someone did something special, I would walk around handing out 100 dollar bills to salespeople. At Broadcast.com and MicroSolutions, we had a company shot. Kamikaze. We would take people to a bar every now and then and buy one or 10 for everyone. At MicroSolutions, more often than not we had vendors cover the tab. Vendors always love a good party :0

These are all off the top of my head. But they have worked for me so far.

Chasing the Long Tail, Part I

The Long Tail is a term coined by Wired Magazine's Chris Anderson to describe the tendency of companies such as Amazon.com and Netflix to realize a significant profit from adding large quantities of less popular or obscure items to their inventory right along with widely popular ones. These thousands of inexpensive obscure titles often collectively match the popularity of a mega-blockbuster, for the same price or less. Anderson describes the effect in his (must-read) book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. According to the Wikipedia article on the topic:

Anderson argued that products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough. Anderson cites earlier research by Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Michael D. Smith, that showed that a significant portion of Amazon.com's sales come from obscure books that are not available in brick-and-mortar stores.

In other words, quantity over popularity (or even quality), a model where so-called "B" movies collectively equal a blockbuster in revenue.

*****

The Long Tail isn't just applicable to ecommerce. Bloggers, for example, see the same effect the longer they blog. One really popular post that generates an enormous amount of traffic may become overshadowed by years of boring, less-popular posts, your very own long tail. Each page on a website of any type becomes yet another entry-point that gets indexed by Google. Your posted pic of Paris Hilton's boob slippage may end up with less traffic on a day-to-day basis than the hundreds of articles you've written about your cats. To Google it's all the same. While keywords such as "boob" may be more popular and generate a hundred hits in a day, various combinations of keywords that generate a few hits, let's say one each, collectively outshine your Hilton exposé if there's enough of them. In a nutshell: One thousand blog posts with one reader each per day generates one thousand hits for your site, far outshining your popular post that generated one hundred hits.

This is why you should stop procrastinating and go start your blog already, just to get that long tail growing. Fret not my blogging friends if your blog sucks. The more you post that garbage the more traffic you'll receive, even if it does suck something fierce.

In Part II we'll examine an experiment I'm conducting on the Long Tail concept.

MySpace needs to get on the ball...

...with useful features. I've had a Facebook profile for awhile but never really did anything with it. At a friend's request, I started tinkering with my profile and found that I could import my blog posts directly. At MySpace, I have to copy and paste each time I make a new post. Seems like such an easy thing for MySpace to integrate as it's just a glorified RSS feed reader, but it's also enormously useful for busy people like myself. Sure, it only takes five minutes to log in and post, but why bother when you don't have to?

What's different about blogs

[Note: Fellow bloggers will find the following to be obvious. I'm posting it here for people I've encountered who don't know anything at all about blogs. Those who do can skip this post.]

There appears to have been some confusion in the past on what a "blog" is. I've seen the term used incorrectly to describe any user-submitted content on the web, and that's not technically correct. "Blog" has a very unique format and is different from things like forums, article driven sites, message boards, or comments sections. I thought I'd clear the air and post something about blogging as I'm a big fan of it and encourage people to write blogs about their interests.

Rather than explaining all the things a blog is not, let's focus on what a blog is. A blog (short for web log) is a chronological, typically reverse chronological, log of content. That's purposely ambiguous because once you have that basic idea down the varieties start. Back in the day, blogs were simple link logs that people put up linking to favorite web pages with a short commentary about them. In recent years that has expanded to longer journal-like posts of text and pictures, or just pictures, or just some other media content. Spin-off names have been created as well, like "vlog" for video logs, but they're all basically the same format. Chronological logs of content. That's different from other formats on the web because it is strictly linear by definition.

So what's a blog good for? Many people keep them as online journals, logging their life. Some still keep link logs, but they're typically longer posts than before. Some blogs are short utterances. Twitter, for example, is a service that forces 128 character descriptions of what you're doing at any given moment. It's more for the kids. There's a huge variety in blogging. If there's any way to apply a chronological log to something on the web, you'll find a blog for it. Is blogging some new fangled hippy term just for the kids? Heck no, older folks use blogs all the time. They use them for political rants, religious discussions, family photos, and so on. Remember, if there's a reason to log it, there's a reason to blog it.

There's gold in them there words

Steve wrote:

You were telling me something about making money blogging, how does that work? Is it something I can do, or do I have to know something about something?

A couple of other people have asked the same thing, so I thought I'd post a response.

Yes, you can totally make money off blogging. Sometimes it's hard. Sometimes it's easy. The subject matter of the blog is less important than the traffic it gets. It's all about the traffic. Traffic and subject matter often have a lot to do with each other, however. It's hard to make money off a personal blog, for example, because there's so many of those out there it's hard to get a good readership base. In most cases people just aren't interesting enough to carry an interesting personal blog. Of course, if you're famous, or if your blog is so witty it makes you famous, personal blogging has worked for some people. [Note: This personal blog makes $0]

The easier way, and this has worked for me, is to pick some niche you're interested and make daily posts about that. Then the blog's mostly about that subject and less about you. People show up to read about, I don't know, stamp collecting for example, and come back because they liked what you had to say about it, or the way you said it.

The niche can be anything. If you want to do it as a hobby and make just enough to pay your internet bill, you can pick a really small niche, like 17th century American poetry (since the colonies were just being formed then, that's a really small niche). Then there's mega-niches. That's something not being covered by mainstream media but still has a huge interest. There's this one guy who makes a fortune just talking about mobile phones, for example. Then there's the stuff that is so over-covered that you might as well not even bother with it: politics, porn, celebrities, and so on. You'd have to be pretty good to carve a spot for yourself in those areas.

The way you make money off the blog is either passive or active. Passively, you can just put up Google ads. They pay you a few cents for every ad that's clicked on. The more people who visit your blog, the more likely an ad will be clicked, the more money you make. You can get as creative as you want in making blog posts, but making money off it is all statistical. X traffic divided by X clicks = X cents, that sort of thing. There's roughly a 1.5 to 2 percent average click-through rate in relation to to page views. It's a science and there's even a formula for making it successful. Actively making money off your blog means you're hitting the streets selling ads. I'm lazy, so I usually go the passive route.

Here's my formula: You find some niche that isn't being covered and that you're interested in. You have to be interested in it or else it will get old real quick. You write daily posts about the topic. The daily posts are important because you want people coming back daily. If people are interested in the topic, and you write interesting posts, and you make daily posts, they come back daily. Simple as that.

The posts don't have to be long. A paragraph or two is best. The secret to writing for the web is that nobody actually reads anything anymore. It's a post-literate society and people are more likely to train their eye on a symbol than a really long article. People skim articles. If you've read every word of this post, you're abnormal.

Really what you're doing in making blog posts (according to my formula) is summarizing things other people have posted to the web and then linking to it. You write a paragraph or two explaining what it is and why you think it is important, and then you link out to the original content. The reason readers come to you is because the web is huge place, and it's easy to get lost. You become a guide. You're like a daily digest about whatever the topic is.

And then... you just give it all away. Seriously, you let people rip you off and put the content on their sites. You even make it easy for them to do so. The reason why is because search engines rank sites with a lot of links to them higher in the search results. Doesn't even matter if your content is good. It's all about the links. Your job is to make this linking really simple by letting them just steal the content. If your blog is about 17th century American poetry, you make it really easy for other people interested in 17th century American poetry to syndicate your content to their site in exchange for a link.

I used this method to take a completely obscure website about a niche topic, buried along with the hundreds of thousands of other sites about the topic, to number four in the Google search engine results for its keyword. This was all within a year, and that's pretty darn tough. So basically the formula works.

Of course, that's passive money making. You make daily posts, people show up, you get paid. It's not a lot of money and it's completely related to how much traffic you get. Some people earn enough to live on, but they all cater to mega-niches and work the site as if it were a job. Might as well treat it as a job and take the active route. This entails going out and selling ads directly. You end up making far more than you would passively.

In short (and this is what the post-literates skim for), yes, you can totally make money off blogging. It depends on 1) How into it you are, 2) If you've got a viable niche, 3) How much traffic you get, and 4) Your money-making model.

The thing I left out above is that sometimes it's not about the money, it's about the SWAG. If you picked the town you live in as your niche, you get freebies from people. Go to a restaurant and say you want to review the place for your local blog and see how you're treated. Sometimes the perks are better than the pay : )

A farewell to Mothman

Beginning in November 1966, the small town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, was terrorized by sightings of what came to be known as Mothman. The creature was described as larger than a man, a near 10-foot wingspan, with the ability of helicopter-like take-offs and flying speeds of nearly 100 miles an hour. Over one hundred people say they saw him in the span of a year, and the sightings coincided with many strange happenings in the area, including UFO activity and the appearance of men-in-black. Mothman struck fear throughout the region and across the country. The bizarre events climaxed with the collapse of the Silver Bridge in December 1967, killing 46 people. Those 46 people drowned in the icy waters of the Ohio River below. Many say Mothman was an omen of the disaster because he disappeared directly after. But to this day, those associated with the Mothman mystery have fallen victim to his curse, dying each of them in strange and unexplainable deaths.

That's him in the picture below. No, the other guy. I'm a dork. I know.



Point Pleasant erected this statue to commemorate the story after the 2002 movie The Mothman Prophecies, starring Richard Gere. Each year they throw the Mothman Festival, and believe me that's the only reason to go to Point Pleasant.

So why am I talking about Mothman? Well, I noticed Kathleen is still out in West Virginia and I wanted to scare her! Hi Kathleen : )

Nah, seriously, it's cause I'm already missing an old friend. I just finalized selling an online magazine of mine to a UK company (not Kentucky, the other UK) and I sort of miss it. It's where I wrote about these bizarre stories and legends a la X-Files that I came across in the news. I am probably the last X-Files fan on the planet, but hey, I said I was a dork didn't I? I just find it more interesting to live in the mystery rather than in the know.

So anyways, they wanted it. I talked them into a good deal for it. That's that. Move on to the next chapter. It took up a good portion of my day, and I'm already backlogged on about $6,000 worth of work that I should really stop procrastinating on. Besides, it's not like I'm going to just stop making crop circles in the neighbor's lawn just because I'm not writing about it later.

That said, it's always, always hard saying goodbye to old friends, even when they're Mothman.