Matt Yglesias notes that bloggers and others who write for the Web lack a luxury of those who write for print: “nobody has any idea who’s reading them.”  Whereas there are detailed metrics about pageviews on the Web, all print has to go on is circulation figures.  So they can blithely assume that their long features and hard news and the like are being widely read, whether it’s true or not.

Some time back, Steve Graham touched some raw nerves by pointing out that:

Most blog traffic is trash. I’ve written about it before, and it’s not exactly news. Everyone knows it. If you look at your stats, you’ll learn that half of your traffic–or a lot more than half–comes from search engines. People type in things like “nipple schoolgirl goat priest molasses,” and they end up at your site for ten seconds, and they leave, hopefully disappointed. Those people aren’t “visitors,” no matter how much you like to think they are. They’re just lost. And they don’t click ads. Even worse, you may be getting traffic because big bloggers link to you. That doesn’t make you a success. It makes you a pet, living on table scraps. When the scraps stop coming–when you say the wrong thing and stop toadying–those tasty scraps can stop coming, instantly, and then you find out how much readers really care about you.

This morning, Henry Copeland pointed out that Huffington Post has changed the display settings on its “Most Popular” widget to hide the fact that much of its traffic comes from salacious junk.

Apparently embarrassed by the importance of sex-driven stories in powering its traffic, Huffpo has recently changed its “most popular stories” feature to obscure how many page impressions each story gets.

The stories now seem to be ranked according to # of comments (see example of the new format at the bottom of the post) but earlier this summer, you could see the number of raw impressions each story was getting.

While serious policy-related “politics” stories, which Huffpo pretends are its bread and butter, got 50k impressions, stories like “When your Boob tape is showing” and “Women’s Iconic Swimsuit movie moments” got millions.

But, alas, that’s what people are interested in.  I’ve written more than 35,000 blog posts over the past six-and-a-half years and gotten a lot of satisfaction from getting traffic and commentary to substantive commentary.  All too frequently, though, those pieces get ignored and crap posts that took ten minutes to write go viral.

Steve Rubel offers “Three Tips for Managing the Stream Before it Manages You.” Between email, blog feeds, Twitter, Facebook, and various other applications out there, we’ve all got too much information to contend with. Those of us in the information business are even more overwhelmed because we both need to follow more things and figure out how to aggregate it usefully.

The first and last tips — relying on one or two aggregators and reading saved materials on your portable devices while stuck waiting — are things I try to do now, although not all that successfully or consistently. The second, though, is really intriguing:

Don’t Subscribe and Read, Archive, Search and Skim

In the personal productivity world,  some eschew sorting documents and emails in folders in favor of just throwing them into an archive where they can be easily searched later. The same approach works well for managing your stream.

Use a tool like Google Reader to subscribe to lots of content, including say all your friends on Twitter. However, view it as a personal, searchable database rather than another collection bucket you have to read and clear.

I do in fact use Google Reader to search for posts of bloggers I trust when I’m doing a roundup-style post.  And I frequently “mark all as read” to avoid a sense that I have hundreds more posts that I must get through.

At the same time, though, skimming blog posts and reading clicked links is one of the major ways in which I get ideas for posts.   I noted that in Steve’s comments and he responded, “I divide my feeds up. Some I read for that same purpose, others I archive and search.”

I’ve done that with Twitter, creating a group in TweetDeck for the people whose tweets I really want to read to distinguish those whom I merely follow out of courtesy.  I’ve divided most of my blog feeds in Google Reader into folders (Must Read, Europe, Security, Business, Sports, Blogging and Tech, etc.) but haven’t actually gotten into the habit of using them vice just starting with the most recent and skimming down until I get bored.

Image via Zee on TheNextWeb.com

Bernard Finel has been trying this blogging thing for a while and finds that it’s harder than it looks.  He notes that even very short posts require quite a bit of effort.

Even short posts take me forever. Not writing the text, per se, but I think most posts are useful if you include a couple or three links to relevant other pieces, quote sections of text, comment on them, etc. And that is where I think I must be missing something. For me, each time I want to link and quote, it means I have to

1. Open the other blog post/news story on a separate tab.
2. It means clicking over, copying the headline of the blog.
3. Click back and paste in headline.
4. Fix formating of the headline to remove stray/excess html.
5. Click back to post I am commenting on.
6. Copy url.
7. Click back to my entry.
8. Highlight the headline from the post I am commenting, and link the url.
9. Click back to the other post.
10. Copy a suitable section of text.
11. Click back to my entry.
12. Paste it… strip out stray HTML… format it as a quote.

Then… finally… I can add my 2 cents.

If I want to comment on a debate in 2-3 other blogs, it is upwards of 30 steps just to produce a couple of snippets of text to frame my comments.

Then I need to proof. Choose categories. Decide on tags. And finally publish.

What am I missing? Is there some magic piece of software that would somehow simplify this process?

Not really, unfortunately.  There are plugins that suggest tags and whatnot that save a little bit of time but, basically, this is all work that has to be done. There are various software applications that will create blog-like posts, either by stealing posts wholesale from other blogs’ RSS feeds or by generating spammy links based on keywords.

But real blogging, especially the kind Bernard and I both prefer that includes multiple links, winds up being a lot more work than it would appear at casual glance.   In addition to the steps above, for example, I tend to search for photos or other art to illustrate my posts; that can add 10-15 minutes to the process.  And that’s to say nothing of the vast amount of material one has to read to find the things one wants to blog on.  Or half-written posts that, upon reflection, aren’t really worth publishing at all.  Not to mention various administrative work associated with keeping the site up and running.

Like most anything else, though, it gets easier with practice.  I can do most of the steps Bernard outlines in my sleep at this point, having written thousands and thousands of posts over the last seven years (19,212 at OTB alone).

One “trick” that I’ve adopted in the last year and a half or so that has really helped:  Getting a second monitor.  It’s much easier to compose a post on one monitor with the various pages that one wishes to link and/or quote in another.

Just when I think we’ve gotten the kinks worked out from converting to WordPress 2.5, Aaron Brazell tells me version 2.6 is about to come out! He’s written a handy dandy guide called 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.6 complete with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one. (Actually, below, what with Web pages not having backs.)

I’m not a developer, so a lot of the changes don’t have any obvious benefit to me. The Google Gears Support, Post Versioning and improved Press This bookmarklet functionality look like they would be useful to me. Post Versioning would be especially nice since I have on more than one occasion accidentally overwritten a post because I had multiple instances open.

Theoretically, I should stop editing posts in WordPress’ built-in editor and get used to using an external editor. I’ve never found one, though, that wasn’t more trouble than it was worth, requiring me to go into the WordPress editor and clean up bad coding.

I was contacted a bit ago by a “writer/author” seeking to have me contribute to “a book that will feature a selection of interviews with prominent bloggers.”

Dubious, I asked if her intention was to have the bloggers write the book for her. She assured me this was not the case, “any more than a reporter conducting an interview intends for the subject to write the piece for them.”

Her contribution to the project? “I furnish the subject with questions to which they respond.”

Not dissuaded from my original concern but intrigued, I obtained the list of questions along with the terms and conditions. Basically, for no compensation whatsoever, I was to indemnify the author and publisher for everything under the sun and surrender all rights to the material I wrote. The subject, essentially, is how to make money with a successful blog. Examples:

• What tips would you give someone to help them build a profitable blog?
• What do you think is the secret to blogging success?
• What are some common mistakes that you see bloggers make?
• What are the main ways that you generate income from your blog?

The answer to all of these questions can be summarized “don’t spend a lot of time writing for other people without compensation.”

• How do you find post ideas and keep your content fresh?

They just come to me, really.

Dan Drezner has published the penultimate draft of “SO YOU WANT TO WRITE A BLOG,” a commissioned book chapter for the American Political Science Association, on how to be a successful political science blogger. For an academic paper, it’s short and quite jargon free.

Much of it deals with the benefits and pitfalls of blogging for scholars but there is plenty of useful advice for fledgling or would-be bloggers of all stripes. This is especially critical:

The distribution of links and traffic in the blogosphere is remarkable skewed, with a few blogs commanding the overwhelming share of links and hits. Over time the “elite” blogs have become more and more entrenched, creating a barrier to building up a significant reader base. Latecomers may therefore find it difficult to attract significant numbers of readers.

These ten points, which are explained in greater detail in the paper, are relevant regardless of your profession:

1) Imagine your audience.
2) Think small at first..
3) Write clearly and concisely.
4) Link, link, link.
5) Remember – you are the editor.
6) Develop a thick skin.
7) Respect the boundaries.
8) Expect and correct misinterpretations.
9) Dilute the risk if necessary.
10) If it’s not fun, then don’t do it!

Simply remembering that what you write on the blog may be read by others–and thinking through the implications of that–will save you a lot of heartburn and make the experience much more worthwhile.

UPDATE: Lorelle VanFossen has a much longer list, although there’s some overlap.

Again, just the high level points follow; click the link for the explanations.

1. Don’t Just Show, Show and Tell
2. Keywords, Keywords, Keywords
3. Write Clickable Titles
4. Make Your Point in the First 200 Words
5. Blog Writing Is About Editing
6. Make Your Words Timeless
7. Don’t Waste Words
8. Explain Jargon
9. Use Descriptions in Images and Links
10. Use Descriptions for Flash, Podcasts, Videocasts, and Screencasts
11. Present a Problem, The Solution, and The Results
12. Just the Facts, Ma’am
13. If You Have 100 Top Priorities, You Have No Priorities At All
14. Originality Will Always Win:
15. Move The Reader Through the Story
16. Blog Paragraphs Are Short
17. Use Command Verbs to Teach
18. No Wishy-Washy Passive Voice
19. Use Nouns and Synonyms
20. Comments Are Content
21. Visualize Who You Are Writing To
22. Clean Up Old Posts
23. Write Kinda Like You Talk
24. Mind Reading Writing
25. Avoid Screaming
26. Punctuate Properly
27. Blog Writing Isn’t About Smiley Faces
28. Teach Your Readers.
29. Make Me Think
30. Write With Conviction and Passion

Jimmie at The Sundries Shack laments the vagaries of the blogosphere:

I occasionally wonder why it is that after more than two years I’m still bumbling along with a hundred or so hits a day when plenty of other folks get a gajillion hits a day despite having the writing and intellectual chops of a concussed, mitten-wearing gorilla.

There’s no doubt a lot of luck involved in getting noticed and good writing isn’t necessarily a guarantee of success any more than bad writing a guarantee of failure. Still, the key is content, content, content. Unless you’re doing Lileks- or Wretchard length essays, it’s almost impossible to get steady traffic without posting 40-50 items a week at minimum. There are just too many sites competing for eyeballs for large numbers of people to make your site a daily stop unless you’re giving them something to read when they get there.

People who write quickly, prolifically, and about interesting things at least have a chance of breaking out of the pack. It’s not coincidental that most of the top bloggers are college professors, journalists, or self-employed. Unless you have the ability to blog during the day (or the discipline to get up early crank out several posts before going to work a la Ed Morrissey) you’re at a distinct disadvantage.

________

Related:

Getting Linked by Big Bloggers
How to Get Rich Blogging
How to Blog Good
Blogging and Power Laws
25 Pieces Of Advice For Bloggers
Blog Traffic Metrics
Building a Better Blogtrap
Climbing the Ecosystem
ONE YEAR BLOGIVERSARY
BLOGGING TIPS III
BLOGGING ADVICE REDUX
BLOGGING ADVICE II
BLOGGING TIPS II
BLOGGING ADVICE
BLOGGING TIPS

Doll laments her inability to get linked from big-name bloggers, who she believes only link one another. Harvey Olson believes the answer is to suck up to big-name bloggers with nice e-mails.

They are both wrong.

To begin with, it is simply untrue that the highest trafficked bloggers only link one another or are generally parsimonious with their links. Indeed, Glenn Reynolds is a one-man linking machine who sends out InstaLanches by the tens on a daily basis, mostly to blogging small fry. Similarly, Michelle Malkin and Markos Zuniga grace relative unknowns with linkage on a daily basis.

It is true that these sites and other popular blogs tend to link disproportionately to other popular blogs. That, however, is not a conspiracy but a tautology. Sites tend to be popular because they’re well written and provide interesting information. Those that do so on a regular basis tend to get noticed, linked by other bloggers, and then caught in a virtuous cycle whereby, if they continue to produce interesting content, they keep getting increasingly linked and read.

So, my quick advice for those seeking to get linked by the top bloggers is to write interesting things on a regular basis. Doing that will almost surely get you linked by several smaller bloggers, at least one of whom will be read by some somewhat bigger bloggers. Those people will notice your work and link to you. Those links will eventually be stumbled upon by bigger bloggers.

As for e-mailing bloggers, flattery is less useful than precise targetting. The more popular the blogger, the more e-mail they get and the quicker they are likely to be to add you to their spam filter if you send them junk. Here are a few quick tips:

1. Write an interesting post. Hint: Not all of your posts are interesting.

2. Select your target carefully. Rather than creating a mailto with every blog you have ever heard of, think of what the bloggers you read tend to write about. Send your pitch to no more than five of them; preferably, just one or two.

3. Write a clear subject line. I get a lot of mail. My default position is to delete anything that has a high probability of being spam or uninteresting. “You might find this interesting” is generally not a good title, as “But I probably won’t” is the natural response.

4. Make it easy. Give the blogger a two or three sentence–max–summary of the post if it’s long. Include a link to the post. Include the entire text of the post. Unless they are regular readers of your site and you have some sort of relationship, simply sending along a link to the post with the expectation that they will click through is not a great idea.

Sometimes, I will link to a post that I received from an e-mail that violates one or more of these rules. Far more often, though, I have failed to post on a good tip that got buried in my inbox because it had an uninteresting subject line or otherwise failed to grab my attention.

See OTB’s Blogging Tips archives for related pieces.

Steve Bainbridge passes on word that Edelman* and Intelliseek have produced an interesting report, “Trust “MEdia” – How Real People Are Finally Being Heard – The 1.0 Guide to the Blogosphere for Marketers & Company Stakeholders” [PDF]. From the executive summary:

Bloggers are speaking and being heard in real time, and only recently has the marketing community begun to grasp bloggers’ impact on brands, business and issues. Because of their speed, bloggers can and do alter the volume and tone of any conversation. Gone are the days of waiting months to get reliable feedback on an initiative. The new reality is this: any blog author with a passion for what you’re selling knows what you’re doing the minute you do it—and maybe even before. Bloggers comment immediately, and marketing and business professionals can quickly lose control of the conversation.

This white paper is an initial look at the dynamics of the Blogosphere. It’s intended to inform marketing and communications professionals about the who, what, where and how-to of blogging. If this paper has done justice to the subject of blogging, it
also should sound a huge wake-up call. Blogging is not a passing fad . . . but any brand, business or organization that fails to
grasp the fact may very well be.

Bainbridge analyzes the report’s key suggestions and agrees with them wholeheartedly. The key point, though, is one that is simultaneously intuitively obvious and yet almost universally ignored:

Bloggers write about only what’s interesting to them, so connect with the blog author by sharing information that his or her readers might appreciate. [Yep. I get lots of irrelevant stuff that would never get into the blog. So the sender often gets added to my spam file]

Engage with the blogger on topics he or she has raised, thus establishing the relationship first. Don’t wear out your welcome. Make choices about who to contact, when to contact, and how frequently. [Political PR people are terrible at this. I get three or four canned press releases a day from some Congressional staffs. They too go into the spam file eventually.]

The bracketed/bolded comments are Bainbridge’s and I couldn’t agree more. (This is also true of other bloggers, by the way: Don’t send out a press release on every post on your blog to the top 100 blogs on the TTLB Ecosystem; that will just annoy about 99 people every email.) It’s more work to be selective, to be sure, but it’s infinitely more useful.

*My sources at Edelman, Marshall Manson and Mike Krempasky, let me down big time on this one.

Ken Kelly, aka Dennis the Peasant, provides a detailed handy dandy guide on how to get rich by creating a highly trafficked weblog with little or no actual writing talent. Along the way, he insults almost every successful blogger on both sides of the aisle and their readers, often humorously.

In Part One: What Do I Blog About?, he advises, “Remember, you are not a United Way agency. Your job is to generate interest, not to educate or inform: Interest means traffic, and traffic means money.”

Part Two: Know Your Audience explains that, “Everybody else reads blogs during work hours because it’s the one thing they can actually do in that cubicle that doesn’t suck as bad as work itself.” He also has some very good tips for producing tons of posts every day without doing any thinking or writing.

Part Three: Your Blog’s Theme teaches how to quickly come up with a cookie cutter formula to attract a niche audience without ever having to say anything original.

Part Four: Your Blogging Persona builds on the previous lesson.

Coming Up Next: Part Five: Writing Posts

As if you needed another reason to leave Blogspot, here’s one for you: They can delete your site without notice and won’t even respond to your inquires.

Like most bloggers, I started out on Blogspot with a site at outsidethebeltway.bloggspot.com on January 31, 2003. I quickly outgrew the limitations of the service and moved to the current domain on April 4. Still, I maintained several sites at Blogspot, including the original OTB (as “OTB Backup Site”), a Dallas Cowboys blog with Steven Taylor that we started nearly three years ago, a 2008 campaign blog, and some pop culture sites.

When I logged in on November 11 to post something to the Cowboys blog, I was shocked to see that all of my sites (save a very outdated login to the first variant of the Command Post) were gone from the Dashboard login page. I checked the FAQs and the announcements to see if any explanation had been posted to no avail.

So, I sent a message to Blogger Support. I got an automated response saying,

Thanks for contacting Blogger Support. Since we cannot always respond personally to every message we get, we encourage you to check Blogger Help, where you can find answers to many common questions. Here are some of the top articles which could help you out. . . .

None of them helped me out in the least.

If your question or problem is not addressed anywhere in our documentation, please simply reply to this message and let us know. We will help you out as soon as we can. Thanks for your patience.

Sincerely,
Blogger Support

So I did. Finally, a week later, I received this message:

Thanks for your note. This is an automated update from Blogger Support. Due to the tremendous amount of help requests from users, we’re currently unable to offer timely, personal assistance to everyone.

Now, my user account has been deleted entirely and at least two of the sites’ URLs have been taken over by squatters.

Let this serve as a cautionary tale. Get your own domain name and host your own blog. Unless you’re offering up videos or other large files, it’s quite inexpensive even if you get a substantial amount of traffic. If someone else has your blog and shuts it down, there’s nothing you can do about it.

Update (3/17/06): Still no resolution on this. It turns out that several other bloggers are getting hit with this problem with similar lack of responsiveness from Blogger.

I’ve noted before a trick I learned from Kevin Drum: That, while links to articles from the New York Times go stale after a few days, forcing those who want to read them to purchase them at outrageous rates, they offer bloggers the ability to link to an RSS version by searching for an alternative URL at the New York Times Link Generator.

That only works, though, if the link is fresh.

In writing my previous post, I found an expired NYT link after doing a Google search for some quoted text mentioned by Ivo Daalder. The redirected link gave me the first 50 words and offered to sell me the rest. I next went to Kevin Drum’s archives but, alas, he linked the same version (the RSS version sometimes isn’t available the first couple of hours after the story goes online).

But here’s something new (to me at least): The Link Generator now notes that, if it doesn’t work, “try adding /partner/rssnyt onto the end.”

It worked!

So, if you come across a link to a NYT article that has expired, try appending /partner/rssnyt and cross your fingers.

Iowahawk provides some pithy advice on How to Blog Good, specifically, to Style-ize For Maximal Impactfulness.

Blog Dimension 1: Pith. In today’s go-go-go world, readers need their opinions now. They need them fast and to the point. Remember rule number one: do everything within your power to increase the economical verbal tersity of your posts, because what is increasingly certain in this increasingly time-strapped blog market in which we blog in, it is the growing situation in which John and/or Mary Q. BlogPublic will not stand for some endlessly meandering blog entry, all ‘gussied up’ in some flowery punctuation, blithering and yammering on and on and on and on, never – or frequently seldom ever – getting to the crux of the point that the blogger (or group blog, or web diarist, or whoever) is arguing in favor, or possibly against, of, which frequenty creates a frustrating situation for those many, many readers who have increasingly decreased time to keep wading through a seemingly endless — and often redundant — yammering and blithering post by a blogger that keeps repeating himself and/or herself without her or him or them ever finally getting to the original objective point of their article, or post.

True.

Related: Blogging Tips category archive

The proprietor of Simon World compliled a huge list of blogging tips from his own experiences and those of other bloggers entitled, “Everything you wanted to know about blogging but were afraid to ask.”

This caused Glittering Eye to take a look at the traffic, start dates, links, and professions of the TTLB Top 20.

More than half of the top twenty are professional writers; several are academics; some were celebrities at least to some degree before beginning to blog.

[...]

[O]nly two of the Top 20 Ecosystem blogs started after 2003 and both of those were started by people with some degree of celebrity prior to blogging.

There’s another little piece of prevailing blogging wisdom that I have serious doubts about: the idea that the most successful bloggers have something unique or fill a niche. With the exception of Boing Boing (and Boing Boing is the oldest by a considerable margin) all of the top blogs comment on news of the day. Sure, they have constituencies and points-of-view. Unique? Hardly. But most have been in their niches for quite some time.

So, here are my tips for becoming a top blogger: be a celebrity academic or journalist and start your blog in 2000 or before. Be outrageous. Attract attention. Throw red meat.

There’s something to these, to be sure. I’ve often noted that, like golf, the key to blogging success is taking it up earlier. And academics have huge advantages in both training and time.

I would note, though, that the coding here is a bit off. While I have a PhD and taught college for a few years, I haven’t worked as an academic during the life of this blog (although one of my co-bloggers does). LaShawn Barber did some freelance writing before starting her blog but didn’t take that up full time until well after the blog was entrenched in the upper reaches of the Ecosystem. Of course, Josh Marshall (Talking Points Memo) and Kevin Drum (Washington Monthly) are journalists who aren’t labeled as such. Drum became a journalist, though, as a result of the success of his previous blog, CalPundit, which was actually ranked higher in the Ecosystem in those days than now.

It’s true, too, that being controversial is helpful in garnering attention. Still, most of the top sites listed are analytical and reasonably fair in their coverage. Very few of them routiely provide much in the way of “red meat.”

The other thing I’d note about the numbers in the table is that blogging was around a long time before 2003. When I started OTB at the end of January 2003, it was ranked in the 700s of the Ecosystem; it’s now #11. While 11 of the top 20 sites are older than mine, that means nine sites have displaced those that once occupied those exalted positions.

It’s not surprising that being around long enough to build an audience would be an advantage in getting linked by other blogs. And there’s no surprise, either, that those who can spend a lot of time reading and writing will have a big advantage over those who can’t. And a nationally syndicated column or a big market radio show can’t hurt, either. But you’ve got to write something that people want to read or they’ll quit coming back once the novelty has worn off.

Hat tip: Watcher of Weasels

John Hawkins offers “25 Pieces Of Advice For Bloggers.” They’re worth heeding if you’re trying to launch your blog into the “big time.” Whatever that is.

See also my Blogging Tips category archives, which collect various similar commentaries from myself and around the blogosphere I’ve collected over the last couple years.