Write for blogs

Diving into the search sewer

2011-01-20T00:41:00.001-08:00

How's it going with Google these days?

I wouldn't know, really, because I fled for Bing more than a year ago. The fledgling Microsoft search engine has its faults and quirks, but proves more than adequate for everyday searches.

You've probably seen the Bing commercials where people in a crowd start yelling out nonsense based on other people's nonsense (video below). Those are slaps at Google Instant, which fills in search results herky-jerky as you type.

Let's do a Google search. Say you're looking for songs by the band Hot Tuna. "Hot" brings you all "Hot Mail" results on page 1. Type in "Tu" and the search page's lead link goes to "Hot Tub Time Machine." Only when you type in all of the characters does Google deliver.

You can turn off Google Instant, but no such luck with the new auto-fill feature. While you're at it, you might want to quash ad personalization, which means you see what Google guesses will prompt a buy. In any case, Google SERPS (search engine results pages) show a major bias towards brands. Big brands.

Chaos, all right. Some people are used to it; some people aren't. Still, eight out of 10 people doing a search turn to big G.

Some experts in the SEO and SEM industries are going public with their beefs. Here's the word from SEO Jill Whalen in High Rankings Advisor:

"Since (Google's) poor results are being talked about with more fervor ... it's possible that they have indeed crossed the line. Numerous mainstream publications and highly regarded bloggers have taken notice and written about the putrid (search) results. ... Even though today Google is technically just an advertising platform that happens to offer Internet search, they built their reputation on providing superior results."

Vivek Wadhwa isn't as well known as Whalen, but he's a web guru affiliated with UC-Berkely, Harvard and Duke. He went after Google a few weeks earlier in a thoughtful Tech Crunch post called "Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google"

"You can’t easily do such searches in Google any more. (It's) a jungle: a tropical paradise for spammers and marketers. Almost every search takes you to websites that want you to click on links that make them money, or to sponsored sites that make Google money. There’s no way to do a meaningful chronological search."

Wadhwa correctly points out that the SERPS are big on editorial spam -- quickie superficial articles from content mills such as Associated Content and Demand Media. Seen an article about psychedelic music on a dentist's website lately? That's primo stuff, according to Google.

"This content is what ends up as the landfill in the garbage websites that you find all over the web," Wadhwa writes. "And these are the first links that show up in your Google search results."

Perhaps this is natural selection. Every No. 1 search engine in the web's history eventually turned up lame.

All that said, Google remains the go-to service for tricky searches. I turn to Google when all else fails and I go there when there's no time to spare on a search, despite the mess. (I know how to write detailed and clutter-resistant search strings, that's why.)

Bing continues to improve, but it's years away from emerging as the clearly superior service. Blekko recently popped up as an intriguing alternative for those with search/database chops. And Google does tend to get incredibly complicated problems sorted out in time. Meanwhile, we wait.

Something's gotta give.

(Unpaid Bing commercial from YouTube.)

Twitter: uncommonly good for web sites

2010-09-16T22:53:00.000-07:00

The Feedburner RSS service has a stat for something called "uncommon uses." That always makes me stop for a sec. What an odd-sounding concept. Are we talking ... guys in raincoats?

Thought of that the other day while marveling at the utility of the Twitter widget that appears on my web site about distracted driving.

I added the widget thinking it was a good way to promote the site's Twitter presence. The box appears in the sidebar and displays the latest items I've twittered.

Since the site's news stories automatically go to Twitter (via the sort-of reliable Twitterfeed), those headlines are displayed in the widget box, along with the usual 140-character Twitter messages. So far, common uses.

Over time, though, the Twitter display became integral to the site's news flow. Yep, uncommon uses:

Short news blasts: Something happens that's interesting but not worthy of a complete article. Instead, I twitter the news. Both my Twitter followers and site visitors see the item, instantly. That's a terrific bit of double duty and an incentive to take action when minor news pops up. Essentially, I'm using Twitter to send news to my web site and display it. Reaching the Twitter followers feels like a bonus.

News bulletins: If the story is big enough, I twitter the headline and get to work on my own article. Both audiences get the heads-up. When my homegrown story is posted, the headline automatically appears again (ideally with different wording).

Updates: The site has Wikipedia-style pages for all 50 states. These pages often are refreshed with local news, but that info could be inserted anywhere -- typically not at the top. So I update the page with the item, Twitter the news and the headline loops back to the sidebar widget. That link drives traffic to the standing pages and exposes them to readers seeking the news.

(The Twitter links don't all go to my site, they often point to another content provider, of course. Or perhaps there's no link at all.)

Flowing the news through Twitter and back to the site keeps things fresh and dynamic, especially since the Twitter widget appears almost on almost every web page. Search engines like that.

Update: Just after posting this, found a great idea on ProBlogger: Tweet your best comments.

Anyone else found uncommon uses for Twitter widgets or RSS dohickeys?

In dreams, answers to a writer's prayers

2010-07-20T00:54:00.000-07:00

We owe a lot to dreams.

The sewing machine. "Satisfaction" by the Rolling Stones. The Periodic Table of Elements. Miracle drugs. Frankenstein. Countless movies, epic poems, novels and works of visual art. All ported over from dreamland.

Almost every writer tells a story or two about how an idea came to them straight from dreamland.

I first encountered the dream freebie in college, while struggling with a long magazine piece. Had my article, just no way to begin it. Two, three days of dumb ideas and blank pages. Then, the next morning, voilà! I'd written the damn thing in my sleep. Nothing remarkable, but good enough. In the cold morning light, those opening paragraphs were things of beauty.

Deirdre Barrett of Harvard Medical School explains: "We can see things much more closely when we thing about them in dreams. (This) also helps us think outside the box. Our associations are looser, more intuitive and less linear."

Another school of thought says nothing is accomplished in dreams, really, they just get the credit for our musings just before and after sleep.

Maybe so, but I should have co-bylined the Sandman at least a half dozen times.

In recent years, I've taken to writing contemporary country songs in dreams. Curious, since I hate most modern country. One song, in particular, had real promise. Borderline brilliant.

A month later, I played Dwight Yoakam's greatest hits CD and learned he'd stolen it from me, almost line for line. Fine way to treat a fan.

Anyone else have experiences with dreaming and writing?

Another jazzy release from WordPress

2010-06-23T00:41:00.000-07:00

WordPress just released the 3.0 version of its software, but I've been in love with it for a while.

That's because the release was named after a jazz genius, Thelonious Monk, in keeping with WP tradition. (2.7 = Coltrane.)

Monk, one of the founders of bebop, always had the coolest album covers, especially the classic one for "Underground," which finds the master playing an old piano in a rural hideout. He's armed with an AK 47 rifle, dynamite resting at his feet. Plenty of French wine about for thirsty resistance fighters. And a cow. Oh yeah, the music's insanely good as well, starting with the famed first track, (yet another) "Thelonious."

Anyway, WordPress' take on "Thelonious" brings in a badly needed new default theme, "Twenty Ten." For most of us who import themes, there are custom backgrounds, multisite functionality, bulk updates for plugins, a lighter interface. Adding up to something like 1,200 fixes and enhancements.

Staying current with WordPress always carries risk because developers take their time about updating plugins and themes. Meaning that that image gallery or calendar or Twitter thing might just go ka-blewy -- like some crafty musician dynamited it.

Check out this WordPress video about 3.0 "Thelonious":

Spelling. S-P-E-L-L-I-N-G. Spelling.

2010-06-04T21:54:00.000-07:00

What a splendid job ABC and Scripps did with the National Spelling Bee finals.

The primetime competition took time to show the kids as kids, not just as juvenile bookworms. Viewers met the contestants in fun and flashy segments, Nickelodeon-style. Even Erin Andrews got in on the act.

Spelling is cool. Who knew.

One of the final four contestants outlined his strategy: "I just spell as I go." Quite a trick, considering most humans have never heard the words in the National Spelling Bee's final rounds. I knew exactly one, gnocchi, because I cook. Alas, the kid who drew the word wasn't a hungry Italian.

At that level, knowledge of the word isn't necessary, oddly enough. These young champs operate on the rules of spelling in numerous languages, including Greek, Latin, French, Japanese, Italian, German and Spanish. All of those came into play in the final round.

The rest of us, fortunately, can write well just knowing the rules of spelling in English.

Ever notice how so many people declare themselves lousy spellers, as if that were an incurable disease? Anyone can learn to spell at any age. Doesn't even take long, maybe a couple of hours a day for two weeks. (Grammar is another story.)

I always loved to write, but for many years operated without a fundamental grasp of spelling and grammar. Like a rock musician playing by ear, I got by. Usually. Somehow I ended up an editor and a teacher, and so became a student of the language in my mid-20s. Wasn't easy; wasn't hard. Just took time.

The confidence that comes with solid spelling skills shows up in the writing. Knowledge is power, as the Schoolhouse Rock folks made clear in "Grammar Rock."

Here are a few books aimed at adults that cover the basics of spelling. They're all available on Amazon:

"How to Spell Like a Champ" (Spelling Bee bible)

"Handy English Encoder Decoder: All the Spelling and Phonics Rules You Could Ever Want to Know"

"1001 Commonly Misspelled Words: What Your Spell Checker Won't Tell You"

As always, I recommend the language classic "The Elements of Style," one of the great books on any subject.

'Social Networking for Business' and IT guys

2010-05-20T11:22:00.000-07:00

Ever invite a bunch of IT guys to liven up one of your New Year's Eve parties? Didn't think so.

Rawn Shah's book "Social Networking for Business" strives to explain the Twitter-YouTube-Facebook dynamic to tech people and systems-savvy executives, which no doubt it accomplishes. For the rest of us, the book is a dry read and a head-scratcher.

"Social Networking" takes what is by definition a random populist phenomenon and boils it down to a taxonomy. Shah, an IBM tech guy, sees social networking in the same light as, say, Cisco networking. He refers to "social tasks" that help shape these interactive media, a telling choice of words.

He creates "social experience models," interesting but conceptually simple to those with a working knowledge of social networking sites and apps.

Here's Shaw on the variations of these models:

Most social environments implement multiple experience models, combined into different parts of the environment. This enables the environments to capitalize on different tasks when individual users require a particular type of experience.

Indeed. To be fair, one of Shah's primary concerns is not so much Digg or StumbleUpon but in-house top-to-bottom interactivity systems built by, and managed by, IT departments.

He successfully argues for social networking in all of its forms as essential for business, making "Social Networking for Business: Choosing the Right Tools and Resources to Fit Your Needs" useful for those of us dealing with dubious CEOs and boardroom luddites.

Fear of blogging -- and writing

2010-04-22T01:14:00.000-07:00

I once had a client seeking better visibility for his landscaping web site. He showed me a beautiful portfolio of his work, in photographs.

I suggested doing a blog, especially since the web site was outdated (and hideous). His English was OK but not great and he hated the idea. I have nothing to write, he said. What would I blog about?

Just use these terrific pictures and throw together some captions, I said. Every time you do a job put up the pictures. It would be a great little landscaping blog.

Long story short, my client was so nervous about writing even a few words that he wouldn't go near a blog. Fear of writing is a very real thing.

WordPress in 24 hours: Say what?

2010-02-15T20:03:00.000-08:00

More and more casual users are coming to the WordPress.org platform, a good and bad thing.

WordPress continues to evolve in user-friendly directions, but it remains an outpost of the Web's Wild West. The more you want out of WordPress, the more problems you'll have to stare down.

Let's take WordPress plugins, as just one example.

These independently developed extensions add functionality to a WP blog. They're essential to any blog's success. But WordPress' frequent updates to its core software can make plugins obsolete overnight. Plugins tend to conflict with each other, causing untold headaches ... such as the dreaded blank home page.

Plugin developers usually don't get paid, are in no way obligated to help users and tend to disappear when things go blewy. A plugin that seems a savior one day can be a pea soup-spitting demon the next.

Wordpress' users forums come to the rescue sometimes, but as often as not, reasonable requests for troubleshooting assistance are simply ignored.

You can learn a great deal whilst fighting your way out of a WordPress nightmare -- just don't expect things to be quick or easy. That's part of the price for hooking up with this free and amazing content management system.

This bring us to the new book "WordPress: 24-Hour Trainer" by George Plumley, which I've just read (and skimmed a bit). It purports to teach readers how to "create and customize WordPress sites" in a day." Say what?

While a quick-study newbie probably could launch a WordPress blog in a day -- using Fantastico for installation and a simple theme such as Kubrick -- no one can be "trained" to use WP in a day or even a week. Once you get beyond the simple write and post, WordPress development provides an ongoing adventure, not for the faint at heart.

Those coming to the platform without some knowledge of CSS, xhtml, PHP and javascript won't be doing much customizing, that's for sure.

I've coached quite a few WordPress newbies, some of whom really shouldn't be on the platform. Others dive right in and embrace the challenge.

Not sure where you'd fit in? Right here on Blogger is a good place to park those kids-and-dogs blogs.

In any case, the "24 Hours" spent reading Plumley's book would be better spent learning by doing. If that's too daunting, WordPress may not be the right platform anyway. Someone who needs a 350-page book to explain the basics of content management systems probably isn't a good candidate for the next level of WP use, where the action is.

To be fair, the author can't be blamed for the publisher's marketing hooks, and he probably would agree with most of the above.

Plumley is good at explaining how the CMS works and succeeds in keeping the book from reading like a tech manual. No doubt it would be handy to have around as a reference for newbies. (For more advanced users, there's the "WordPress Bible," which clocks in at almost 700 pages.)

Again, the best way to learn WP is hands-on. Much of the basic stuff presented here should be tackled on your own, via trial and error -- and there are always WordPress' excellent text and video tutorials. They're free, unlike the book, which goes for $45.

Welcome to my blog. Or not.

2010-01-05T01:20:00.000-08:00

Writers dread coming up with the first couple of sentences. The "lead" of an article (book, whatever) sometimes writes itself, but most of the time the damn thing has to be dug out of the cold hard ground.

So what to make of the beginning of a blog. Articles come and go, but weblogs last forever, or at least until the blogger wanders off.

You'd figure the initial post -- the hello, world! part -- would be among the most important assignments you give yourself. You'd be wrong.

The first half dozen or so posts aren't seen by many people you don't know. And out of that sixpack, the introductory piece will have the shortest shelf life. Once you start adjusting the focus of the blog, it might even start to smell funny.

Most first-time posters welcome the readers, who already know they're more than welcome. (Be original. Tell them to go away.)

Then it's on to some mission statements, typically described as a journey to be shared between blogger and reader. A call to community. It's all heffer dust. You know it; readers know it.

Why would anyone want to read about what bloggers intend to do, once they are doing it. Then there's the duplication in the form of that necessary evil, the About page.

The first blog I built for myself still carries around a massive Glenn Abel "biography" that no one ever reads. You won't either. Now I'm all about minimalism.

Do this instead:

Write an About page that runs no more than three or four paragraphs. Crisp and clear, keep it short. Include a contact me link.

Write a tight intro for the home page's sidebar(s). Maybe two sentences of pure pith. Include a photo or avatar, a link to the About page and a contact me link.

Write a brilliant on-topic post that welcomes no one and explains nothing about the blog's goals. Repeat. Forever.

Writer's block deserves a good beating

2009-12-04T13:50:00.000-08:00

To write well you must train. Build up those skills and use them daily. Sometimes, though, your writing just seems listless, even puny. Happens to all of us.

Try this:

I sometimes play games with myself while writing. For example, in a piece about boxing movies, I used boxing-related verbs and nouns throughout, but for the most part not while referring to boxing. I talked about the camera circling the actors, but not the boxers circling each other.

A good half of the verbs in the piece had some connection to boxing. When writing about the fight scenes, I dodged the obvious and the cliches, saving those punchy words for the rest of the piece.

This made use of the related words (corner, ring, glove, knocks out, spars, punch, rope, feigns) more interesting and less obvious. A few readers picked up on the technique; most probably didn't. The game forced me into using some words I wouldn't normally use -- and turned off the author auto-pilot.

Another fun thing is to adopt a character's voice. Maybe someone you know who has an interesting way with words or maybe a generic voice, like a film noir narrator. If you're writing about President Obama, sneak in some of his typical phrasings or expressions. Don't overdo it, though -- this is just between you and you.

Anyone know any good games? Please leave them in the comments.

SEO Whiteboard: Thank god it's Friday

2009-10-02T16:49:00.000-07:00

I dig Fridays.

So what, don't we all?

Yeah, it's the end of the work week, but my solo gig demands seven-days-a-week production. Working for yourself does kill that weekend and holiday buzz.

I dig Whiteboard Fridays, to be specific.

The web site SEOmoz.com produces a short video every week, often going over traffic-building techniques both complicated and simple. Even if I know the stuff, it's interesting to see how they present it.

Check out this week's vid post, about Quality vs. Quantity in link building. The on-camera talent is Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz.

My feeling about links is there's never a worthless one -- except for what Google calls "bad neighborhoods" (spam, scam, gambling, etc.) -- but getting a link from a high-traffic high-authority high-relevance site can do wonders. As in, you do a site about cars and land a red-hot link from the home page of Car and Driver.

The corollary is it sucks when they drop the link down the line, and you probably can't figure out why the traffic or Page Rank are down.

I experienced a drop in PR from 6 to 5 on the DVD blog about the time my friend left variety.com and her blog was discontinued, along with my high-authority incoming link. My DVD reviews blog has thousands of other links, but I mourn that one. Of course the drop could be due to a zillion other factors -- and Page Rank is only worth worrying about so much.

When I lose Page Rank, I point out that the measure (named for Google's Larry Page) doesn't matter all that much in terms of online traffic.

When I gain Page Rank, it's time to hail that great and flawless indicator of online success.

My Friday routine also involves opening the "Free Shirt" email blast from the online marketing guru Shoemoney. It's a picture of Shoe wearing some swag T-shirt. Unfortunately, his everyday posts have become about that informative --unless you care about his fame, his products, his travels. Too bad, Shoe used to be quite good and I learned a lot from him starting out.

So "Shoemoney -- Skills to Pay the Bills'" days are numbered on my poorly named list of "Top 10 newsletters for SEO, SEM, pro blogging."

In comes, what else, SEOmoz.com's daily blast.

How unique content builds Web sites

2009-07-06T16:39:00.000-07:00

You are a unique individual. No matter how high and mighty, no one is more unique than you. Not Angelina Jolie, not Barack Obama, not the Incredible Hulk.

Unique is an absolute, as most of us learned in high school English. Meaning there is no such thing as most unique, almost unique or any other shading.

That is unless you're a Google engineer.

Web search and traffic analytics operate with two "unique" concepts -- "unique visitors" and "unique content." Put simply, the more of these the better.

Unique visitors (aka absolute unique visitors) -- slanged down to "uniques" -- refers to the number of people who land on an Internet property in a given period, throwing out all repeat visits. Someone who calls up a site 10 times counts the same as another person who visits once.

The other major measure is total page views, a raw number that makes Web publishers happy because it's always higher. Both of these measurements come in and out of fashion with advertisers and others keeping score.

(If you publish a web site or blog, Google Analytics should be your traffic tracker. It's free and it's remarkable. Google now links AdSense with the Analytics, a vaguely creepy concept that makes the data even more robust.)

The other "unique" -- unique content -- represents a trickier concept. Google and the other search engines value original content over pretty much anything other than high-quality incoming links.

No one outside Google seems to know for sure, but the percentage of original content needed for a Web page to score as unique seems to be 65 percent to 70 percent. That gap allows for incidental repurposing of content such as blockquotes of cited passages or widely distributed quotes from press releases.

The flip side of this is duplicate content, sometimes a bad or very bad thing. At best, the publishing of duplicate content is no apparent help for those trying to lure traffic. Google and the other search engines seek to present content on its source page.

(Unfortunately, most people experienced in writing for the Web have horror stories about some scraper -- automated thief -- outranking them with their own work. There are remedies for content larceny, including contacting Google legal. I've done this successfully.)

My clients often struggle with the concept of unique content. Cutting and pasting material from several sources, for example, does not constitute original content. As the teacher used to say, you have to do your own work. And then present it in one place.

When clients send me text for a Web page or post, I always run a Yahoo! search on several of the sentences. Frequently, there are matches, meaning the content has been duplicated and thus already has been indexed in the SERPs (search engine result pages).

In general, this makes the "new" content worthless in terms of SEO. In extreme cases, copied content leads to search engine penalties. (Some SEOs say the duplicate content penalty is a myth.) Then there are the copyright violations, meaning possible legal problems. The Associated Press, for example, recently declared war on bloggers who dupe their news.

But the issue of duplication is not purely one of right and wrong -- even with permission from the creators, serial use of duplicate content can lead to wheel spinning or worse. Duplication of your own work remains duplication, even if the readers are being served. Remember that the Web revolves around links, not republishing.

Many writers build their site's authority and traffic by syndicating content on the Web. This is almost never a problem, even if you repeat the content on your own site. Google and the rest recognize this as a legitimate form of content distribution. Just don't count on your site getting credit for the work in the SERPs -- and don't be surprised if the ranking goes to another site.

Another point: Unique content does not mean unique topics, ideas or conclusions. Facts cannot be copyrighted. This is basically a matter of original wording, presentation and style.

Experts in search engine optimization universally agree that relevant unique content is the No. 1 element leading to success in terms of traffic, readership loyalty and ad dollars.

Unique content is king.

Anyone up for a lava party?

2009-06-09T00:06:00.000-07:00

Just finished a new web site that says aloha to people planning trips to the Big Island of Hawaii.

Specifically, it's a visitors guide to Hilo and the Volcanoes National Park -- the area on the east side of the island of Hawaii.

Please check it out, especially if you're unfamiliar with this unique part of Hawaii. The big draws are active volcanoes that rule over the lush ancient lands and the powerful observatories built upon the mountains.

The site -- bigislandeast.com -- uses City, a WordPress theme from the retired Revolution premium line. Revolution now is known as StudioPress. Only developers who bought licenses from the company before 2008 have access to these cool "oldie goldie" themes. I like both the old and new designs, and so do my clients.

The logo was done by Hawaiian/L.A. artist Kristie Kosmides.

The Flash-style gallery is actually a Javascript-based WP plugin known as Featured Content Gallery. That plugin has undergone a major rewrite since the City theme came out, so I did the update and all is well. Themes can live for a long time if you keep up with the updates and upgrades. I have another one that is almost ancient, but I love the look and it still gets the job done, many versions of WP down the road.

Big Island East is typical of hybrid blogs/web sites that seek to capitalize on the best of both formats. Visitors to this site, for example, can comment on almost all of the articles, even though they're not blog posts in the way most people think of them. But the look and feel of Big Island East would never be confused wih your basic Blogger/TypePad/WP theme.

(The closest current Studio Press theme is Lifestyle, which has just been updated to make it easier for average users.)

It's always a rush to finally finish a web site, especially one as content rich as this one. Kind of feels like the kid is leaving home. You're a wee bit sad to see the site leave the nest (always more stuff to fiddle with), but you're doubly glad to have it take flight and get out of your hair.

Stand by for WordPress 2.8. Or jump in now.

2009-05-16T14:48:00.000-07:00

The workhorses at WordPress.org have uploaded Version 2.8 as a beta, available to all.

There are more than 100 upgrades and fixes in this iteration, so you might want to jump on board when it's released. I am in the habit of waiting for a .1 version after a major update -- letting others deal with the release bugs -- but this time I'm going in on official release day. Easy to get a feel for the severity of problems in the release in the WP forums.

WordPress made updating a lot easier with 2.7, so this will be the first big test of that one-step process via the dashboard. Anyone who's been on WP for more than five months remembers the risks and pains of updating the old-fashioned way. There also is the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plug-in that has never failed me.

For the brave, foolhardy or public-service-minded, switching to the 2.8 beta is now an option.

Here are some of the promising new features in WordPress 2.8:

A new routine for theme installations. (Not that the old one was hard.)

A "custom header" for menu text. (Whatever that means).

A documentation lookup for the theme and plug-in editors. (How about a universal code string search?)

An end to notifying the author of his own comments.

Improved widget interface. (Thank God.)

Allow editing of all plug-ins.

An option to use plug-ins on individual pages.

The ability to run several galleries on a single page.

Improved database performance. (Always an adventure when the DB comes into play.

More subject options for tag clouds (such as show categories instead).

Blogging for money: a bankrupt concept

2009-04-24T03:24:00.000-07:00

The best way to make money blogging is to blog about how to make money blogging. No secret there.

How many people actually succeed financially at blogging? Recent estimates say maybe 2% of bloggers make a modest living, with the sweet spot somewhere about 100,000 page views a month.

"Brazen Careerist" Penelope Trunk, with 400,000 page views a month, says don't bother trying. Unless you already have a large and loyal audience, work for big media or are incredibly talented -- such as the alpa-female blogger Heather Armstong of Dooce.com.

Proceed directly to Trunk's straight-no-chaser post, "Reality Check: You're Not Going to Make Money From Your Blog."

Let me contribute this ugly sidebar: The amount of time it would take most of us to reach 100,000 page views -- via the obsessive link building that Google's search system pretty much demands these days -- leaves no time for actually producing content. That catch-22 drives most seasoned bloggers to the brink. Or the want ads.

Still, lots of bloggers are trying and some are succeeding, as Mark Penn of Burson-Marsteller reports in the Wall Street Journal: "Already more Americans are making their primary income from posting their opinions than Americans working as computer programmers or firefighters," he says. The columnist has taken some fire for his informal blogger census, and later issued a call for more reliable counts.

Penn's post remains must reading: "America's Newest Profession: Bloggers for Hire."

Hat tip to ProBlogger Darren Rowse, whose roundup post on blogging and money completes this downbeat trilogy.

Oh and ... This blog makes no money; I don't really try. The best techniques I know are to work multiple streams of income across numerous Internet properties. Some of the projects can be time-consuming flagships, but most should not require much updating. Read the ProBlogger post for various approaches to monetization.

7 things I learned at OMMA Global

2009-03-23T23:39:00.000-07:00

This real-estate web site guy and I engaged in some useless networking today at the online marketing conference in Hollywood.

First came the quick check of name badges. He read mine; I read his. No apparent help. Then a few minutes of what-do-you-do? Zip. We had nothing to offer each other, really, standing there awkwardly in the hotel's Grand Ballroom -- but it sure beat paying attention to the ad panelists as they droned on from the stage. Something about performance and ROI.

Real estate guy and I quickly agreed on one thing: Subscribe to the right feeds and you'll learn more from opening your morning email than from any of these multi-day online conferences.

Only a fool runs into a swarm of "experts" and comes away empty-handed, though. Here are some things I picked up at OMMA Global Hollywood just before fleeing the scene:

Great expression: "It's just new sprinkles on the same old cupcake." Man, I miss those corporate sayings of the week, spread on the wings of hipster salesmen.

Instant web traffic-builder. Work the word "Twitter" into all of your blog's headlines.

Analytic anality: "Metrics are useless if you can't act on them." The corollary being most second-tier metrics are useless unless you seek to kill time.

What to say to SEO clients: "If you build it, they will not necessarily come. You have to go out there and find them."

SEO tip of the day: "Build your keywords for conversions, not traffic."

Resistance is futile: "If you are going to be an online publisher, you are going to be invested in different distribution channels."

New definition of online video: A power point with some guy doing a low-fi voice-over.

Apologies to OMMA, which does put on a good show. I believe that if you go to any industry conference and have your mind expanded, you're either 22 or in the wrong business. Wish I could put names to these quotes from panelists, but I was in sloppy mode.

WordPress says let's go to the video (tutorial)

2009-02-20T23:38:00.000-08:00

I love online video tutorials for tech-related tasks. Not for resolving those hair-pulling, silent-scream problems, but for the minor mysteries.

In addition to the obvious show-and-tell benefits -- you watch the cursor do its thing in the code or CMS environment -- you also get to fast-forward past the obvious stuff.

I'm always multitasking until the teacher gets to whatever is throwing me. Maybe just sort-of listening with the video screen buried under the usual sea of open windows.

WordPress.org (the self-hosted platform) has more than its share of mysteries, so stand by for good news: the how-to archive WordPress TV is now on the air.

So far, most of the topics seem geared to WP newbies and the citizens over on wordpress.com, but no doubt you'll find something interesting in the tutorial directories. There's one section for WordPress.org and another for the plug-and-play WordPress.com, although some topics apply to both formats. In some cases, there are videos on the same topic for each "flavor."

Here are some of the basic videos in the WordPress.org category :

Adding a widget to your sidebar.

Adding an About Me or other page.

Publishing a post at a later time.

Here are a few of the more advanced topics:

SEO and optimization for WordPress ( a lecture)

The Gravatar plugin setup.

Add a PayPal button.

Change www to non-www via redirect

2009-02-13T15:12:00.000-08:00

If users can call up your blog using both www and non-www URLs, it's time to select a preferred domain and perform a 301 redirect.

You want all users to access your site the same way. Or at least Google does.

There are many variables at work here, so I suggest a search for redirect www and non-www and redirect non-www to www.

Confused? You might want to start with this squidoo page on 301 redirects.

You might also check the High Rankings forum for redirects or any number of other web forums, including Google's.

My knowledge of server-side is basic, so please read all you can about this issue, including Google's page on 301s. If your host is helpful with code, count your blessings and see if the support guys will check your work.

This code worked for me in changing www to non-www -- on a GoDaddy-hosted Apache/Linux set-up.

www to non-www

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^example.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

and for the reverse, non-www to www

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^example.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Don't forget to change "example.com" to your name.

I'm posting these because there are quite a few bad examples out there.

If you don't know what to do with these blocks, please don't try. Dig into the information linked above and learn all you can before acting. WordPress, in particular, has a complicated set of concerns about all this.

Good luck ... let's be careful out there.

Redirect update: Google and the other major search engines released a new "link" tag that is supposed to resolve issues of duplicate content on the same site. The links go on the duplicate pages and point to the canonical URL, meaning the one you want the search engines to serve up. Sounds like a good thing. Now if they can get Webmaster Tools to work ... )

Starting a blog? Start here.

2009-01-29T13:55:00.000-08:00

I love it when people do my job for me. Darren Rowse at ProBlogger just posted a best-of series of links for beginning bloggers.

Written for first-time bloggers but not for dummies. ProBlogger remains high on my top 10 list of email/RSS resources for blogging and search optimization.

Here's a vital question the blogging guru asks right away:

"Does (your blog) topic excite you? Are you motivated enough to write about it for the long term? ... Be brutally honest about this because as I found, we can sometimes fool ourselves into thinking we are interested in a topic when we are not. ... If you’re not interested in your topic your potential readers will sense this and the chances of success will fall."

Almost always true. I have had the experience of starting a blog that's off-topic for me, only to find I've later become fascinated with the subject. (That blog covers the national debate over driving laws for cell phones and text messaging).

And then Rowse hits this major, major point:

"If you’re wanting to develop a serious blog and have aspirations for it to be used on a professional sort of level (whether as a business or corporate blog, as a blog to build your own profile or a blog to earn income from advertising) I’d recommend you go in the direction of a stand alone blog."

You may be a mere babe in the blogging world, but these are grownup decisions that can make or break any project.

By stand-alone blog the ProBlogger basically means WordPress, the self-hosted CMS system found at wordpress.org (not wordpress.com). Rowse goes on to recommend simple hosted platforms (such as Blogger or TypePad) for people who are in it for fun.

Once again, if you're serious, I urge you not to go with a one of these prefab blogging solutions. I made this error on my first blog, DVD Spin Doctor, which is on TypePad. This led to innumerable headaches, including serial problems with Google that forced me to do reverse-SEO on the site. Going with TypePad for a content-heavy blog with commercial aspirations was the biggest error I've made in this business (so far).

With self-hosted blogging, your URLs do not have some Net publishing company's name included. And you're not looking at a nightmare when you want to move the blog.

Here is a blog built on WordPress(.org), the home video review blog DVD Gift Guide. Try doing that on TypePad or Blogger or WordPress' separate prefab blogging platform.

Of course, I'm hosted on Blogger here, for this straightforward writing project. Aha! Is that the mask of hypocrisy we see? Nah. Having a presence on Blogger has helped me understand the platform and help clients. No biggie. The price is right. Probably will move it to WP at some point.

Back to ProBlogger's incredibly useful post. Rowse goes through almost all of the issues a first-time blogger should consider. I agree with pretty much all of it. Thanks, man.

Top 10 reasons to do top 10 lists

2009-01-18T00:17:00.000-08:00

"The human animal differs from the lesser primates in his passion for lists of 'Ten Best,' " the writer and humorist H. Allen Smith observed way back when.

Here in the future, the Web and its social media sites prove Smith right minute-by-minute. An infinite number of top 5, top 10, top 20 lists are out there burning electrons.

Nowadays, these lists of no importance often are referred to as "link bait" -- the easiest path to getting noticed in the Blogosphere and on content-aggregating sites such as Digg.

And so we have "Top 10 Ways to Triple Your Google Traffic," "Top 5 Redneck Movie Villains," "20 Most Horrific Fashion Victims" ... the beat goes on.

Give top 10 lists a try on your blog -- almost any topic provides plenty of opportunities. Hit the right keywords and the Google traffic flows right in. Be sure to include both "Top" and "Best" in your headlines and title tags. Some traffic-minded web publishers break the lists onto multiple pages, with No. 1 at the end. Like those old Burma Shave highway signs. Annoying but effective.

Editors often spend time arguing the merits of these lists, unless they work at USA Today. But everyone in the media biz agrees there's one time when the lists reign supreme: the end of the year. Here's my friend Jonathan, a trainer, right on top of that with weight loss tips for the new year.

Like Christmas shopping ads, top 10 lists for the year keep appearing earlier and earlier. I actually saw a mainstream reviewer's list of last year's "best movies" in late October.

I'm plenty guilty, having done an annual list of the top DVDs since 2001, first for the Hollywood Reporter and then for my DVD blog. Check out the "Best DVDs of 2008." Google keeps sending readers to my 2007 list, but I hear they're really into archives these days. Jeeze.

Three years ago, I started up a top 10 for horror videos, in time for Halloween. Walk this way for the "Top 10 Horror Movie DVDs of 2008."

Next I'll probably add a top 10 for romance movies keyed to Valentine's Day. Insidious, these lists.

Of course, no one knows which are the best DVDs, movies, TV shows, whatever. We're all guessing and inflicting our opinions on the masses. The film Academy uses its rat's-nest voting system to produce the one and only Best Picture of the year, an even more ridiculous proposition than a top 10, no matter who's doing the voting.

I hate the Oscars, but grudgingly admit it's the way everybody keeps score. This year, the best picture hardware goes to "Slumdog Millionaire." Promise.

Hmm. How about "10 Times the Oscars Actually Got It Right"?

Star time for Google's 'Did you mean'

2008-12-17T21:33:00.000-08:00

Google is fooling with one of its best features: the excellent misspeller's aid "Did you mean."

I've no idea how many people use this trick, but it's a good one: To see if you've correctly spelled a dodgy word, do a Google for that spelling. If the word is botched, up comes the red "Did you mean:" type, suggesting what is usually the correct spelling. No need to go hunting; Google provides a 3-second source.

This bit of dictionary duty really comes in handy when you can only offer a wild guess as to how a word is spelled. Say, type in onamatopeia and Google helpfully comes back with onomatopoeia. (Phonetic spellings often work.)

So now, Google is trial-ballooning a "Did you mean" with a couple of search engine results to make itself clear. Followed by the mess that your lowly misspelled word conjured up. Feel free to visit the web sites of your fellow language butchers.

Of course, all computers are dumb machines at heart. So this new approach should lead to even more search-page clutter, even when we're perfectly in the right.

Did Google mean to screw up a good thing?

(Hat tip to Danny Sullivan, who reviews several new Google search features.)

Welcome DVD Gift Guide, a seedling

2008-12-01T23:23:00.000-08:00

Starting a new web site is much like planting a spring garden. The creator envisions many wonderful things, some of which might even come true. A see-saw of successes and disappointments awaits, in most cases.

But for that one day when the web site is shiny and new, you get to savor pure potential and possibility. Nice. Then it's back to work, building traffic and pounding out content.

My latest site is DVD Gift Guide, an offshoot of the home video blog DVD Spin Doctor. The new site is much better looking than the blog, which shows its age and the many limitations of TypePad.

The Gift Guide is by definition a commercial enterprise, set up for an audience of Google searchers in search of a product tips and reviews. The revenue will come from Google AdSense and Amazon affiliate links. This business plan is unlikely to bring riches -- a statement that seems pessimistic, but is just facing reality. I plan to create as many worthwhile sites and blogs as I can, relying on strength in numbers.

Look at it this way: If you have 60 sites/blogs averaging only $20 a week, my lousy math says you bring in $4,800 a month. (Good luck managing all that.)

There exist some synergies from the site and blog. For example, I wrote a short review of "Hancock" for the Gift Guide, then expanded it into a full-blown "Hancock" Blu-ray review on Spin Doc.

DVD Gift Guide comes to market via a bloggers platform. It's built on WordPress, based on a template from Brian at Revolution 2. I configured the guide as a web site that takes advantage of a blog's assets such as reader comments, auto-pings, spam control and easy-to-deal-with RSS. (A lot of the web's design and development talent flows to WordPress these days.)

If you're planning a new site, I recommend looking into my approach. Who knows -- your site/blog just might yield a bumper crop.

Google knows best, for bloggers

2008-11-25T23:04:00.000-08:00

Dunno how long it's been up, but Google recently posted a best-practices guide for bloggers.

The content will seem familiar to those who've checked out the search giant's SEO guidelines. A lot of the information is shot-off-the-shovel basic. Still, the post should help bloggers just starting out. And it never hurts to see if you've covered the bases.

Here are some of the best practices. Google's tips are in boldface; my take follows:

Write well and often: Easier said than done, as readers of this glacial blog can attest. I've experimented with different posting rates on my blogs and can report a strong connection between frequency of site updates and Google traffic. One problem -- if you like to write long and strong, all that hard work gets pushed "below the fold" (down the page) before a lot of readers see it.

Categorize your posts: True, but don't get carried away. Google says it doesn't penalize for duplicate content these days, but avoid having one post appear in more than a couple of categories. I try to use one category per post, with a tag or two.

Create descriptive titles for each of your post. That means headlines, not necessary what appears in the title bar. If you're using WordPress, I recommend the All in One SEO Pack plugin, which allows for separate post titles (headlines) and browser title bar wording. Use targeted keywords in both.

If necessary, limit comment spam. The problem isn't going away. Spammers love bloggers who don't moderate their comments and pings. Be sure to pre-approve them if you're seeing a lot of generic complements such as "Expert, I was just thinking about that the other day ..." I don't approve a comment if it doesn't address the post's content in a way that a generic message couldn't. For WordPress, turn to the Askimet plugin. (Yeah, I'm solidly in the WordPress camp these days.*)

Publish a feed of your content. Absolutely. That's RSS, as in Really Simple Syndication. If you go through the user-friendly Feedburner, you can add email as a delivery option, which appeals to older readers. Feedburner is now owned by Google, so stand by for a transition at some point. Bloggers new to Feedburner should read every setup page carefully. (Learn from my recent mistake -- never lose your password. Those auto-email with password reminders are, in fact, part of a cruel joke and never arrive.)

* I no longer recommend TypePad because of its time-wasting text editor, its SEO-related problems with Google search, and its costs. If you need help with WordPress, I offer a reasonable deal on setup and coaching. Just send me an email.

Way back mashing: Google search in 2001

2008-10-09T16:24:00.000-07:00

Ten years ago, Google wasn't much. These days, of course, the company enjoys a near-monopoly, with increasingly spooky power over commerce and conversation on the Net.

Look at it this way: When was the last time you ran a search on Yahoo just because you thought its index would do a good job?

Google's decade-long rise to absolute power is nothing compared with YouTube's supersonic ascension of just a couple of years. So, you never know, we may yet see a killer app that guts Google. Or at least a viable option or two.

Until then, people who seek a broad audience on the Web will continue to read the tea leaves in Google's official communications and follow the teachings of professional nice guy Matt Cutts. (He runs Google's spam patrol.)

For me, as for most bloggers and web site pros, it's that old love-hate dynamic. The Google juice tastes a lot like Kool-Aid, and we're all drinking it.

So it's fun to be reminded of a time when Google was an option, not an imperative.

The world's default home page has been offering a look into Google's past with an option to explore its search index from 2001. From the Google blog:

We dusted (the index) off and took it for a spin, gobsmacked to see how different the web was in early 2001. "iPod" did not refer to a music player, "youtube" was nonsense, and if you were looking for "Michael Phelps," chances are you meant the scientist, not the swimmer.

I think of myself as having had a reasonably high profile in that Kubrickian year, but the evidence proves otherwise. A couple of crappy credits associated with the Hollywood Reporter and something I said in a speech. That's it.

These days, I'm all over the place on Google, for better or worse. More importantly, so are my Internet properties.

Maybe I'll have another glass of that fruity stuff after all.

The authority song and dance, from Google

2008-08-16T20:42:00.000-07:00

Those in authority get served the biggest glasses of Google juice. Authority always wins, as the man sings.

Sounds sinister, but it's not. When it comes to blogs and web sites, Google uses a concept called "authority" to help determine rankings for content to be displayed in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

Everyone's the world's leading authority on something, right? Perhaps you're No. 1 when it comes to your sister's astounding repertoire of nervous tics.

Authority in this sense, though, proves more of a popularity contest.

One important component for Google's algorithms is the number of incoming "deep links" pointing to a site. Deep links point to pages other than the index page, typically those with rich content. (The permalink page for a blog post qualifies.)

If enough of those links come from relevant sites with their own authority, good things will follow.

Other elements adding to site authority seem to be:

Age of the site. Younger sites tend to be sandboxed (another delightful Google-related term that basically means on probation).

Quality and depth of content, which are almost impossible to fake.

Freshness of content (although it's possible to rank high with great static content).

Quality of incoming links. Sites tagged .edu and .gov tend to have authority to spare.

Relevancy of links. If you're writing about football and espn.com links to you, that's golden.

High-quality directory listings, dmoz being the obvious example. This factor is on the wane.

Competent execution of site basics, and the absence of spam-like behaviors.

As for Google juice, that's simply the authority that can be passed from one page (or site) to another. (An anchor link is a vote for the target page/site.) Sites/blogs have a certain amount of juice to pass on to other locations, again based on their authority. (Here is a breakdown of how Page Rank works, with nifty charts that sure look authoritative.)

SEO-related toolbars for browsers can give guesstimates on any site's Page Rank, ranging from 0/10 (a new or crappy site) to 10/10 (Google). This blog ranks a 4/10, good but not great. My DVD blog ranks 5/10.

Controlling the flow of that good Google juice is one of the techniques used by SEOs (search engine optimizers). The nofollow link is used to cut off the flow to a specific page. An example would be when you link to your contact page off the home page. Why waste that precious juice on a service page?

If your Google Page Rank (named after Larry Page) hits, say, 4/10, you should think twice about reciprocal linking to a 1/10 blog unless it's really good and relevant.

Webmaster World, a forum with lots of authority, offers advanced reading on site authority and the juice.

While you're pondering all this, you might want to check out the terrific new album from the guy who wrote "The Authority Song," John Mellencamp. "Life, Death, Love and Freedom" has been getting great reviews, as most of his albums tend to do.

Mellencamp has matured into a fine American rootsy artist. (Yeah, I hate that Chevy ad, too.) He's chronically underrated by the listening public, based on the number of terrific albums he has in the cut-out bins.

And so here's a Google juice toast to Mr. John Mellencamp.

Bukowski: Straight, no chaser

2008-07-19T23:26:00.000-07:00

So you want to be a writer
By Charles Bukowski

if it doesn’t come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don’t do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it for money or
fame,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don’t do it.
if it’s hard work just thinking about doing it,
don’t do it.
if you’re trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.

if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you’re not ready.

don’t be like so many writers,
don’t be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don’t be dull and boring and
pretentious, don’t be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don’t add to that.
don’t do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don’t do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don’t do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

* * *

This poem seems to be everywhere in the blogosphere. Tough love. It comes from the poetry collection "Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way" by the great literary lowlife Charles Bukowski.

When I started out, a couple of older writers told me the same. Basically, if you don't have to write, don't.

My first college writing teacher read through my clips as a favor. I wanted to know if I should continue as a writer.

I respected the guy and had decided to stay in or get out based on what he said. The professor handed back the articles, looked at me real screwy and said, "What else would you do?" As in, do you really think you have a choice?

I got to use that line a few times while I was teaching.

Bukowski died in 1994, so he never read a blog. If the old madman were still kicking he'd surely have one.

I think most bloggers could benefit from reading Bukowski, whose booze-fueled writing typically was barroom conversational, unfiltered, short and punchy, profane and usually a lot of fun -- although he could break your heart just like that. A poor man's Hemingway, perhaps. They both have about the same number of posthumous books, anyway.

When I started in with Bukowski about 30 years ago, he wasn't much of a name anywhere but in the underground. You had to buy these cool indie Black Sparrow books that felt like smuggled-in editions of "The Tropic of Cancer" or "Lolita." The ink came off on your hands and the words would rattle around in your brain.

Check out Bukowski via the following books, or just pick another one with a cool title:

South of No North: Stories of the Buried Life

The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses

Post Office: A Novel

Hollywood

Imelda Marcos and the Templates of Doom

2008-07-07T17:29:00.000-07:00

I collect blog themes and web site templates and store them in mass quantities, convinced you can never have too many options.

Of course, every time I need a theme, I go out there shopping again, stocking up on everything that glistens for future generations of clients and my personal projects. I'm the Imelda Marcos of templates.

I've paid for templates only once -- a package deal for the Revolution family of themes from Brian Gardner. If you want one a la carte, it'll run about $80 last time I checked his site.

Check out this simple site/blog that I just put together using Brian's Revolution Business: HandsFreeInfo.com

HandsFreeInfo.com tracks the latest laws and legislation related to driving and cell phones. It also offers up some cell phone safety advice for drivers, as well as tips on buying hands-free devices.

Rev Biz is among the least ambitious of Brian's themes, most of which are built for people who want their blogs to look/act like web sites. The typical customer needs to wrangle a good amount of news- or magazine-style content. I didn't change much on the HandsFreeInfo template, but even the simplest of these jobs require some knowledge of xhtml and CSS. Brian and his forum moderators are quite helpful, usually.

Brian also has some free templates, including Vertigo, which I still like for my blog featuring online video news, Download Movies 101. Vertigo became overexposed back in its day, just as the Revolution themes seem to be everywhere these days. There's a reason for that -- they're among the best templates out there. Solution: customize like crazy. Check out the multiple-use templates package.

I also like the work of Andreas Viklund, a 28-year old web designer from Jokkmokk, Sweden. His templates are free and he asks only for a link back. Andreas' templates are super easy to work with if you know some basic CSS. (Or learn from using the templates, why wait.) Check out this template, andreas00, in action on the web site for Sherman Oaks area chiropractor George Kosmides.

Andreas has been quite active in past months. Just today he bowed Daleri Structure, a specialty item. I just discovered another designer from that part of the world; will report back after I've worked with his designs.

I've had templates on the brain because I'm about to go up with my long-promised psychedelic music site, which you can preview as I build it. (Nothing much there today but a cool video.)

Also, ProBlogger just asked its web-savvy readers for their picks for top WordPress designs. I trolled that that long comments thread and just had to pick up a theme or two -- or three or four or ... well, hell, I grabbed them all.

(Advanced readers will note that I've used the links in this post to support some of my ongoing interests, using targeted keywords and an affil link. Didn't write the post to do that, not at all, it just comes second-nature these days.)

Top 10 newsletters for SEO, SEM, pro blogging

2008-06-11T00:41:00.000-07:00

My email inbox probably looks like your email inbox, so I'm always looking to ditch regular transmissions from publications, blogs and such.

A few months ago, I decided to shift most of the subscription email to RSS, retaining only 10 regular email products.

Here are the 10 that remain. (Linkbait disclosure: Yes, it's a top 10 list.)

Subscribe to these -- via email or RSS -- read what comes in every day, and I guarantee you'll be up to speed on pro blogging, search engine optimization, Internet tech, social media and the like. I'm always amazed at how much is going on.

The newsletters list will change, as I add and subtract to stay at a perfect 10. I'll post the coming and goings on this writing blog -- why I added this and why I hit delete on that.

1. Dosh Dosh -- First on this list because it was the first pro-blogging site I tracked after quitting my day job. Maki, a philosophy student from Toronto, uses the graphic concept of marking each post with a piece of anime art. A while back, he shifted from quick tips and news to in-depth articles such as “How to Build a Better Content Model for Your Site: Understanding News Consumption Patterns” and “Publishing for Profit and Influence: It’s All About the Passion.” A class act. Highly recommended for beginners and intermediates.

2. SEO Design Solutions -- A relative newcomer to my inbox of the elite. This Chicago-based search engine optimization outfit writes a mean blog that’s mostly instructional. The target audience appears to be wanna-be SEOs and people who handles web sites for their business. These posts help me find new ways of communicating complicated concepts to clients. Recent topics include “Creating Synergy With Your Content” and “20 Practical SEO Tips to Supercharge Your WordPress Blog.”

3. High Rankings Advisor -- From another web-traffic shop, this one run by SEO queen Jill Whalen. The newsletter comes twice a month -- not nearly enough -- and it would be nice if there were more content -- but it’s a must-read. Free advice from a woman whose services come at a small fortune per hour. Recent topics include “Will Linkbait Ruin the Internet?” and “Do We Need SEO Standards?”

4. Andy Beard -- Another of my early blogging blogs. Andy writes some pretty high-end stuff -- think grad school for webmasters and SEOs. That’s when he’s not railing against the crums and bullies of the Web, which is pretty much most of the time. He carries the banner for bloggers from overseas who have to deal at a distance with U.S. outfits such as Google.

5. ProBlogger -- Darren Rouse says: “This site is dedicated to helping other bloggers learn the skills of blogging, share their own experiences and promote the blogging medium.” A bit understated, but OK. The blog serves people who want to make money from blogging, no easy trick. Rouse, an Aussie, shares information on how much he makes, where it comes from and which strategies are working for him now. Recent topics include: “How I Make Money Blogging” and “What’s a Blog Post Worth.” Essential.

6. Search Engine Land -- The RSS/email service “SearchCap: The Day in Search” delivers pretty much all the news that matters to the blog/SEO/SEM community -- which is more content than you’d expect. From Danny Sullivan, an industry star. Categories include “Link Building,” “Paid Search and Contextual,” “SEO and SEM” and “Social Media.” A lot of the content comes from mothership Search Engine Journal, but any source will do in the name of totality.

7. Silicon Alley Insider -- The Wall Street Journal for digital business. Everything boils down to money, so of course I love it. The information proves useful in my editorial ventures and in my investing life. Lively writing and plenty of exclusives. Only a year old, but you'd never be able to tell.

8. Search Engine Roundtable -- When buzz is building on the SEO/SEM forums, you’ll get a heads-up from these guys. News and notes put together by reps from the leading search engine marketing-related forums. A typical item points to a thread in the DigitalPoint Forums or Webmaster World (both recommended). Some items are kind of pointless bitching or just open-ended questions, but that’s life in the forums for you.

9. Shoemoney -- Jeremy Schoemaker became famous with a simple bit of inspired marketing: He posted a picture of himself holding up a check from Google AdSense for $133,000. The blog is all about making money, operating on the Internet and … Jeremy Schoemaker. Oh, and mixed marital arts fighting and whatever else the host is into. On Fridays he emails you a picture of himself wearing someone’s logo T-shirt and calls it a day. And still, I subscribe.

10. Tech Crunch -- “A weblog dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies.” Michael Arrington’s blog (with many contributors) knows what’s what with aps and gadgets and handy new web tools. If something’s going on in web tech, you’ll read it here. A financial site, mostly. Essential reading for blog pros and anyone else trolling for a living on the web. Here’s the place to track the next Twitter or iSomething.

Recent evictions:

johnchow.com -- all john, all the time
copyblogger.com -- too obvious and too frequently wrong

Incredibly, Write for Blogs didn't make the top 10. Subscribe to my email/RSS anyway -- it's above average and guaranteed to never clog your inbox.

SEO books for bloggers: required reading

2008-05-19T16:18:00.000-07:00

If you're serious about blogging, you also have to be serious about search engine optimization.

True, you can hire someone like me to do your basic SEO set-up work, but SEO is a process and you'll have to apply its golden rules day in, day out. Things like knowing how to word anchor links (never ever a "click here!") and how to do alt tags on images.

So, I make the case that blogging and SEO are strongly linked for anyone seeking to become a successful online writer.

There are some good SEO basics books (and some not-so-good SEO books). Here are two I recommend:

Search Engine Optimization For Dummies, Second Edition by Peter Kent. Yes, I'm serious. Good book. OK for intermediates as well as beginners.

SEO: Search Engine Optimization Bible by Jerri L. Ledford. Easy to follow. For beginners.

I'll also point to a good book on xhtml (html) and CSS (cascading style sheets), because it helps to speak the language (er, code):

HTML, XHTML, and CSS, Sixth Edition by Elizabeth Castro. Easy to understand, but far from dumbed down. If I needed to learn something complicated, I'd want Castro explaining it to me.

Books are, of course, old media, nasty as that sounds. If you want to keep up with SEO (a fast-moving serpentine target) and the latest tricks of the trade from "pro bloggers," you'll be using new media.

The next post on Write for Blogs will cover my top 10 SEO/blogger newsletters -- the ones I read whenever they hit my mailbox. Call it continuing education. School's out, for now.

Bad language, good blogs -- WTF

2008-05-02T22:08:00.000-07:00

I used to work for an entertainment industry trade publication, written for people in the industry. For a fairly conservative paper, it had a liberal commonsense policy on swearing:

If the word occurs naturally, use it. If the quote includes the word fuck, use it. If there is no good reason to swear in print, don't.

"It's not a family newspaper," was the saying on the copydesk.

This worked out well. I think I set that policy ages ago, and I continue with it on my own blogs. I swear most days in my real life; not much while writing.

Certainly, curse words flow on TV these days. I believe I've heard the F-bomb dropped by announcers on CNBC and Fox Sports. Of course swear words are always flying around on HBO and Showtime. The "asshole" barrier fell years ago on network TV, by one of the cop shows.

But the news media keep things pretty clean. One reason: Cursing in publication or in a post often comes across as juvenile, even to readers who swear. Something about putting down the words in black and white. It feels off, like when some bozo uses all CAPS in an email. This, to me, is the problem with using "bad language." Of course, there are publications that swear to be hip, like the laddie magazine Maxim, which pulls it off.

I do think you can swear occasionally on a blog without becoming offensive to a general audience. The work will be judged in context and as a whole, at least by smart readers. Forget the middle ground: The hyphens in f--k don't accomplish a fucking thing.

This policy wouldn't apply on sites/blogs intended for younger readers, of course, but if you're writing for the big kids, WTF.

Here's another take on blogging and swearing.

Bad jokes and bloggers: Don't be an April fool

2008-04-10T18:44:00.000-07:00

Coming home from a nice vacation always feels a bit weird. Among the reasons to be bummed is the inevitable avalanche of unopened email.

Most of us have spent hours wading through these aging e-messages. I go overseas for a month now and then, and upon return always set aside at least a day to sort it all out. This time, we were gone for only a week up in Big Sur -- but the email queues still were plenty scary.

I get a lot of SEO-related email, as requested from the top bloggers in that business. RSS is OK, but I do prefer email, perhaps just out of habit. I use a Yahoo email account for those subscriptions.

What struck me this time out was the amount of time-wasting material that flowed in from these "pro" bloggers. Taken day-to-day it's no big deal, but in a lump you can really get annoyed.

Our road trip coincided with April Fool's Day. Five days later, all that "fun" prank copy stunk like the beached dead fish we tried not to squash while hiking the coast.

Yeah, I'm a grouch and, yeah, everyone means well, but I'm not a big fan of wasting your readers' time.

One blogger devoted something like three screens' worth of copy to telling readers how to get along with Google. Stuff like, phoning the search engine engineers directly, stuffing a blog with keywords, linking out to bad neighborhoods and buying links in bulk. Readers got the joke in graf 2.

Goodwill goes a long way, of course. Shoemoney, the popular Net marketing guru, writes about wrestling now and then (yawn), and regularly posts pictures of himself wearing some company's T-shirts. I'm not complaining -- the guy gives away a lot of decent content. I do think off-topic posts are bad news when they're the blog's only entries of the day, though.

If you're writing for the public, be respectful of people's time, especially in the business arena. Injecting personality into a pro blog helps build audience loyalty -- lord knows I could use some more flare here -- but always keep in mind that goodwill is a finite resource.

That's this post's message, but if you have some time to kill, read on ...

Back to April Fool's Day: One clown decided to blog that Darren Rowse, who writes the excellent ProBlogger, had gone bankrupt and never had made more than $1,000 a month from blogging. Rowse then saw the libelous content on the Wikipedia page about him. An employee wanted to know if he'd be paid; a lot of people were confused. To make matters worse, the bogus post was time-stamped March 31.

Rowse reluctantly wrote about the incident today, also addressing spoofs in general:

"While it might be blatantly obvious to you and 99% of your readers that you’re not serious - you will fool someone. Perhaps they just read the title, perhaps the skim the post and don’t see the clues or perhaps they just believe it without question. As a result I tend to only play jokes that use my own name or reputation -- or would advise that if you’re going to involve someone else that you might want to check with them first."

Rowse isn't suing, apparently, making one joker a very lucky man. Also burned by this thing was fellow pro blogger Jeremy Shoemoney, who was falsely reported as arrested for riding a bike while intoxicated. Hic.

Rowse, for the record, has never wasted my time. Read him and learn.

And by the way ... thanks for your time.

Death provides lively copy for bloggers

2008-03-21T20:41:00.000-07:00

Death doesn't faze newsrooms. For editors, the order of the day, every day, is gallows humor -- whistling past the old graveyard.

Newspapers, in fact, love death. Funeral notices -- aka "fun notices" in the biz -- are a profit center for papers small and mighty. Craig's List won't be taking that niche away soon.

Death also keeps readers coming back. Obituaries are among the most-read features for older readers, many of whom begin their day by viewing the parade to the grave of their age's leading personalities.

I've made a habit of reading all of the New York Times' obituaries and recommend them to you. The Times obits editors are notoriously picky about whom they include -- basically, the subjects must have changed the world in some way. The Times' obituaries are little history lessons, famously accurate and routinely compelling. You can learn about a lot about the world.

I bring this up because the truism that death makes good copy applies to blogs as well. There is nothing morbid about this, unless you make it so. A well-written appreciation of someone's life can be a shared experience for you and your readers.

On my DVD blog, I'd been looking for a good reason to weigh in on the Stanley Kubrick DVDs that were released as a pack late last fall. The Kubrick films made their Blu-ray debut at a busy time for DVD releases, and I only got around to "Eyes Wide Shut."

The news of Arthur C. Clarke's death sent me straight to the keyboard. I know little about the man or his writings aside from "2001: A Space Odyssey." Still, my DVD blog was able to connect with a story that had people talking -- and I provided something of value by quoting the man several times in a review of his most famous work.

So did you hear the one about the dying futurist and the sexy alien ... ?

Just started blogging? Be a rock 'n' roller

2008-03-11T03:46:00.000-07:00

Unless you're famous or incredibly well connected, it's lonely work starting a blog. Especially before the search engines know you're there. The traffic comes in single digits, no one comments and there are only a couple of posts to show for all your efforts.

The temptation is to slide and wait for the action. It could be a long wait.

I think in the early stages it's important that new bloggers write as if they had a large enthusiastic audience.

We've all seen blog entries with something like, "What does it matter, no one reads this blog anyway." Ugh.

Story time: I remember seeing the rock band Dash Rip Rock long ago in a downtown L.A. club. They had to play after the headliner. Everyone in the audience left but five or six of us. Felt sorry for the boys. But that band played as if they were rocking Madison Square Garden.

Be like Dash Rip Rock.

Second opinion. Here is some advice from another angle, written by Maki of the blog Dosh Dosh: "The most important thing to do is to blog as if no one else was reading you." I highly recommend this blog for bloggers, which was incredibly useful to me in the early days and remains a favorite read.

It's time to do some work on your blog

2008-03-03T03:24:00.000-08:00

When it comes to blogging, what a difference a day makes -- especially if it's the first one of the month.

I've adopted the policy of updating all of my blogs come the start of each new month. The previous post may be only a day old -- maybe even a few hours old -- but that item sinks into fish-wrap waters the second the month rolls over.

Maybe readers don't care. I'm betting they do. At the very least, it's good motivation to update -- and lord knows we all need that.

Don't have an idea? You'll think of something. I just did.

How to break into screenwriting

2008-02-27T13:52:00.000-08:00

Wanted: Co-writer for high-profile Hollywood screenplay. No experience necessary.

Yep, it's for real. My friend Eric Estrin, left, has launched the "LA Observed Script Project," a collaborative venture that's partly an experiment and mostly a writing competition.

Estrin started off the project's screenplay "Right of Way" with a three-page setup. Then it was turned over to the masses. Wanna-be screenwriters are asked to submit a few pages. Each week, Estrin will pick the submission that best advances the story.

Brings to mind "Naked Came the Stranger," a sex novel written by a pack of journalists in 1969. Each writer contributed one chapter. Here, a different screenwriter adds on a few pages each week.

The first winning cowriter was Jerry Lazar, a journalist and magician who cranked out another three pages. Lazar is a man about town in L.A., but you don't have to be:

"Anyone who’s been part of a writers’ room knows how exhilarating it can be to work with a great team on an exciting project," Estrin wrote. "So picture LAObserved as the room and the whole world as the team."

The "Right of Way" story concerns an L.A. mayor dedicating to build a real transit system in that car-obsessed city. Yes, that makes the tale pure fiction.

"It’s going to be a drama, a darkish murder mystery filled with glamour, wit and big dreams, the stuff of life in Southern California," Estrin wrote in his screenplay-contest blog.

I'm thinking "Chinatown" on rails, but who knows what tone the script will take as it moves forward. Estrin seems open to radical suggestions: "If your vision goes off in an unexpected direction, and you can convince me it works in 1-5 pages, bring it on!"

Want in on the action? Next deadline for script submissions is Sunday.

Grammar police's most-wanted: bloggers

2008-02-14T21:35:00.001-08:00

A couple of heavyweight bloggers recently had their knuckles rapped over subpar grammar skills. The debate, predictably, turned to, "If people understand what's being communicated, why does it matter?"

Of course, I march with the grammar goon squad on this one. Casual conversation doesn't requite good grammar, true, but writing for a mass audience does. (Copy editors sometimes have to silence their overzealous deskmates with, "Edit copy, not speech!" Even the correctors need a break from correction.)

Puny grammar always makes the writer look bad. If a blogger doles out information that's desperately needed, it’s a lot easier to be forgiving. But when his or her readers have other choices, the smart ones will wander off.

I can sympathize. I slept through grammar in grade school, dropped out of high school and then wrote for a half dozen years using D-student grammar and sloppy spelling. I got away with it because of my sighing editors, who wielded mighty pencils.

Somehow, I ended up teaching incoming journalism students. Motivated by fear of student revolt, I spent a couple of years studying grammar and spelling rules. (This was a lot more fun than it sounds. I have Aspergian traits.)

Before long, I found my writing was greatly improved, not only by the new clarity but by a kind of strength and confidence. Like being a play-by-ear musician and suddenly acquiring the ability to read and write the notes.

It is never too late to learn. I always recommend "The Elements of Style" as a starting point. Killer book, short read. Almost fun.

Google SEO guru talks links, anchor text, domains

2008-02-04T17:38:00.000-08:00

I knew there was a reason I subscribe to email from Rambling About SEO. In an interview posted today, the blog managed to get some straight talk from Google's Adam Lasnik.

The Google search strategist puts out some choice information on topics often discussed by SEO bloggers. Here's a sample:

Anchor text from inbound links: "Useful descriptive Anchor text can be great, not only for the user ... but helpful for Google to better understand what that page is likely about. On the flip side of things, (there's the) smell test, and that if something doesn't smell right, smells fishy; doesn't look or seem natural, that's going to certainly raise a red flag for us."

Domain name wording: "I think people overemphasize the value of good domain names. ... I would say that while a domain name can be a factor in some ways how we view sites, how we view links; I would really say that it is relatively a minimal factor."

Internal links: "What we found is that sites that have a lot of links, 200, 300, or 500, tend to have links that have not been strongly editorially vetted. We would rather see fewer links that the webmaster has actually looked over, and that they are maintaining to make sure they are still fresh."

Dueling home-page file names: "If (the Googlebot) sees a page that is pretty much identical to something it has already seen, it will automatically make a determination regarding which page makes more sense, and it will run with this URL. ... In the vast majority of cases, it really has no negative affect at all."

Eric Enge asked the questions. Great job.

This is the kind of communication bloggers, webmasters and SEO providers need from Google, although I don't know why it usually gets done via random interviews like this and hints from Matt Cutts. The tea-leaf reading gets old.

Update: Here's an experienced SEO blogging about the same complaint.

Write and Wrong: TV on auto-pilot

2008-01-30T00:19:00.001-08:00

This guest post comes from my longtime pal Bill Braunstein, who has been in the TV writing business for decades. I don't know how he does it, putting up with the vagaries and politics of that profession. Please welcome Bill as WFB's first guest blogger:

The Writers Guild of America has finally agreed to drop its demands for jurisdiction in the areas of reality and animation writing so that contract negotiations with the AMPTP can move forward.

Many people on both private and public bulletin boards geared to “real” writers have expressed a degree of relief and satisfaction that reality and animation have finally been removed from the bargaining table.

So, in the spirit of self-reflection, it’s time for a serious examination of not just those two offending genres but a few others as well. Let’s start with reality:

Does anyone really think that reality shows have writers? Just because these shows have a beginning, middle and end, with indelible characters created by judicious use of sound bites -- all with story arcs and intriguing act breaks -- that doesn’t mean these shows are written.

All any potential reality producer need do is turn on a camera, tape everything that happens, and -- viola! -- there’s your program. Your Aunt Zelda’s home movies from her Finland vacation are as interesting as any reality show. Who needs a storyline?

And then there’s animation. Does anyone really think cartoon shows are written? The real creative work on animated shows is done by storyboard artists. Plus, if you just hire actors with funny voices, you’re guaranteed success. Fred Flintstone growling, “Yabba-dabba-do” always sets off howls of laughter. Animation “writing”? Ha! Yabba-dabba-do isn’t even a word.

And how about game shows? No sane person could ever say quiz shows are written. Access to Google, Ask.com or old Encyclopedia Britannicas qualifies one to work on shows like “Jeopardy.” Heck, there the contestants even do half the work by supplying the questions. Nope, quiz shows don’t have writers; they’re researchers. And they don’t even need to be smarter than a fifth grader.

That brings us to variety shows. No self-respecting TV fan could reasonably argue these shows are written. Staff members simply take old press releases or copy the backs of CD covers, and there’s your TV patter. Besides, how hard is it to pen, “Ladies and gentleman, a big hand for Celine Dion”? You call that writing? It’s criminal.

Which leads, quite logically, to crime shows. ... Could any level-headed person say these shows are written. Hardly! There’s a reason they’re called procedurals. So-called writers latch onto old LAPD handbooks, all to learn police procedures. They stop by local precincts, peruse the evening’s crime logs, drop in a few character names ... and there’s your next episode of “CSI.”

The writing on law or medical dramas? Please ... These aren’t written. Ask any lawyer or doctor for his case files, cross out the names of the “perpetrator,” “victim” or “deceased,” and then sprinkle liberally with make-believe names. Add a “Fade In” at the top, a “Fade Out” at the end, and you’re watching “L.A. Law” or “ER.”

Comedy shows? Any person with his head twisted on straight knows these shows aren’t really written. They all follow the same formula: Find a great standup like a Roseanne Barr, Jerry Seinfeld, or Tim Allen. Have them do their act with great improvisational actors. Roll camera. Stop every 30 minutes. Instant sitcom. Where’s the writing?

And movies? Come on. .... Take a look at screenplay adaptations. No one can doubt the author of any book is a true writer--unlike someone who adapts said book into a screenplay. The creative heavy lifting is already done. All any potential adaptor has to do is just take away the parts of the book that isn’t the screenplay. Does it get any easier?

Lastly, there are original screenplays. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, are these people really writers? There isn’t a person on the planet that doesn’t own a dictionary. And every screenplay yet to be written is within those pages. All you have to do is just join the words together in the right order. Creating screenplays isn’t writing, it’s a logic puzzle like a giant game of sudoku.

So, there you have it.

The only sane conclusion one can come to is that no real writing takes place in Hollywood.

Or that judging what is and what is not writing, is a very subjective business.

Unless you consider the obvious: it’s all writing.

Bill Braunstein has been a Writers Guild member since 1989. Oddly enough, he’s worked in scripted television, animation and reality.

The word on Word 2008 for Macs

2008-01-26T20:55:00.000-08:00

I've just upgraded to Microsoft's Office: Mac 2008. So far, just feeling my way around, trying to determine what's what with the palates and inspectors and such. The software runs natively on my Intel-based Mac, which means it's faster.

My version is the Home & Student Edition, which costs about $130 at Best Buy (and Amazon).

A big change is the word-processing toolbar atop each individual document. That seems like a good thing. Always hated that cluttered, confusing toolbar glued to the top of the screen.

The biggest upgrade seems to be the Publishing Layout, a new feature for Mac that eases preparation of pages to be used for presentations, brochures, that sort of thing. No apparent help for Web work.

Also, you're no longer able to build and run macros -- not good at all. If you work on the Internet and deal with text from a lot of sources -- especially text with Smart Quotes -- this will be a loss and a compelling reason not to upgrade. Macros will scrub and polish the text until it's ready for the Web, if you learn some simple programming. Now they expect you to create Apple Script for jobs like this, not likely for this end user. (I remember problems with macros on the last release as well.)

One more issue of note. The Word documents are saved in .docx, not the old .doc (something to do with xml and file size). People who aren't up to date with Word won't be able to open the documents. Of course Mac users are used to that sort of stuff and tend to save outgoing files as text anyway. I have a client who wants everything for his site in Word, go figure. But you can save the documents as "Word 97-2004" and get that familiar .doc

There is a lot of grousing about this release, so you'd do well to read up on the pros and cons. There are options, including Google's Docs and Apple iWork '08. I'm used to Word and wouldn't consider a downgrade given what I do.

I'll update this post in a month or so. Meanwhile, get the rundown from a real software reviewer in MacWorld's Microsoft Word 2008 review.

Bed and blog vs. the home office

2008-01-22T19:10:00.001-08:00

Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger polled his readership on the question: Where is your favorite place to blog?

I clicked on "Home office." That covers 99% of the content on any of my blogs.

When I started full-time blogging and such, I thought I'd do a lot of off-site posting, to hold off cabin fever. Like those guys you see hogging the tables at Starbucks.

Bought a laptop PC. Would have preferred a Mac laptop, but they were too pricey and I needed a PC for various reasons -- such as checking site changes on different systems. My son and I decided on a Sony VAIO, which has worked OK even with Vista. Not that I ask much of the machine.

The heavy lifting is done on my home office's Mac Pro, with the dual=core Intel Xeon chip. Great machine. I wouldn't be without a Mac. Windows always feels cheap and nasty to me (disclaimer: I own AAPL stock).

The reality is, I multitask like crazy. It's hard to get away from my room full of stuff and be effective. My writing is task-specific and a bit mercenary, so I'm not really into a coffeehouse vibe while writing. Unfortunately. Tunnel vision works out well for most writers.

Anyway, you can see the pie chart with results of the ProBlogger poll, based on 1,400-some responses. No. 1 was "home office," with 51%. The No. 2 answer was "in bed," which would be the last place you'd find me blogging.

This led to Darren's cool link-bait head: 14% of Bloggers Prefer to Do It in Bed. (That's why he's the pro blogger.) 51% of Bloggers Do It in Home Offices didn't have the same ring, he explained.

Wall Street Journal liberates op-ed content

2008-01-11T23:42:00.001-08:00

Forget the noise about the Wall Street Journal's content going all-free now that Rupert Murdoch owns the shop.

The Journal has just liberated its op-ed content (opinion pieces and editorials), but told would-be freeloaders: "It's as close as we'll get to conceding there is such a thing as a free lunch." Say what? As in, that's all folks?

Wait. Here's a further piece of clarification from the new combined editorial and Opinion Journal page: "Please enjoy our message of free people and free markets -- for free."

Now we know. For free.

Update 1/25: Rupert Murdoch told a panel at the World Economic Forum that there would still be limits on the Journal's online content. "The really specialized (material) giving the greatest insights, that will still be a subscription service," he said. (Hat tip to Reuters)

Warning: Graphic images of text

2008-01-09T00:13:00.000-08:00

Designers and developers love to incorporate text and headlines into their image files. I finished a project tonight in which one entire page was turned into a graphic. Art, headlines, text, footer, the whole thing.

Looked good to me. But not to Google or Yahoo's search robots. The bots see just the title bar, the file name and perhaps some alt text.

If you write search-engine-aware copy, follow that work through the design process. Look at the finished page via the source code (under View in most browsers). You should see the heads, text and links. If not, find out why.

If you can grab the heads and/or text as a colored block and place it all on your desktop, you're dealing with an image.

Use of search-engine-aware copy is the No. 1 driver of placement on the SERPs -- search engine results pages. (I'm including title bar wording in that.)

Every other web site I've helped as an SEO had this problem of text buried in images. Often key terms appear only in banners that are really images. If you have a custom banner that says "Widgets for Small Business" and the file name is banner.jpg, guess what the search engines register. Java looks great, but has similar issues.

Now comes word that Google is working on a way to read text in images. About time. The technology has broader implications than this, but perhaps a side benefit will be to make SEOs and designers better friends.

Read more about Google's optical character recognition scheme.

Porpoise Mouth: psychedelic music for body & soul

2007-12-21T17:21:00.001-08:00

When asked what his favorite music was, Duke Ellingtonsaid: "There are only two kinds of music. The good and the bad. I like the good." That pretty much covers it. So when I made up a Last FM radio station for psychedelic music, I included the Duke's "Caravan." Huh?

I didn't include the so-called psychedelic classic "My Green Tambourine." Or "If You're Going to San Francisco." Or any other of the nehru-jacket songs that cashed in on the hippie-music craze. Sun Ra sits next to Pink Floyd on my magic bus.

To me, psychedelic music at its best transports listeners to another place, another state of mind. "Discorporate and come with me," Frank Zappa invited us in a song. ("Discorporate means to leave your body.") Zappa wasn't a drug guy, but he made his share of psychedelic music.

This bit of off-topic comes to the blog because I'm building a site about psychedelic music. Of course, I need music and I found it on the Last FM platform, which more or less lets you build your own radio station without worrying about copyright fees.

Many blogs and web sites are including audio and video as a matter of course. When you're starting up a Web project, be sure to ponder how you'll bring multimedia to the site. Before long, text-only sites will be considered quaint, academic, out of touch.

Meanwhile, discorporate and check out my Porpoise Mouth station below. If you'd like to know when porpoisemouth.com goes up, just send me an email.

Starting a blog: What would you do differently?

2007-12-15T19:27:00.000-08:00

A lot of bloggers vamp on this topic: What would I do differently if I were able to go back and start my blog again? Here's my take on the occasion of my 50th post here:

A couple of things come to mind, such as getting control of my domains/URLs and keeping them straightforward instead of having TypePad or Blogger in the mix.

I do appreciate both of these services, but think I'd have been better off on the bigger sites using WordPress and a host. Seth Grodin, who writes one of the world's top blogs on TypePad, has said the same. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of TypePad. Just wish it was free.

WordPress brings its own set of problems and certainly throws up barriers for bloggers who aren't tech savvy. When asked for advice these days, I recommend Blogger for personal/hobby blogs; TypePad for non-tech people who want to build some kind of active business blog; and WordPress for those comfortable with, say, FTP and HTML. CSS helps a lot.

With TypePad you get tired of hearing, "It doesn't do that like that." Blogger just doesn't do that. With WordPress, you get tired of figuring out how to do that.

I just updated my Download Movies 101 blog to the latest WordPress, quite the adventure, only because I spaced one freaking detail. That's the thing with WordPress -- make an error, pay the price. I didn't find the help forums any help. Just kept trying to figure it out until I did. Took three days. Learned a lot while clanging around, though.

On TypePad, there's great tech support and an even better auto-help. Blogger is so simple, it's tough to screw up.

Back to doing things over: I started my DVD blog without giving the content's structure much thought. Made up categories as I needed them. Ended up with a rat's nest that had to be blowtorched.

Darren over at ProBlogger just posted a handy "mindmap" that should prevent this sort of thing. Self-explanatory, simple, essential. Don't forget the part about writing series.

Anything else? Oh yeah, I'd have read more blogs about blogging. Starting with this one. (Say what?)

Email newsletters: the old in-and-out

2007-12-05T01:04:00.000-08:00

I wake up screaming. In fear of smothering in email news updates. I use RSS as well, but find that it's easier to prioritize, file and dump content pushed to my incoming email box.

Aside from the newspapers -- New York Times, L.A. Times -- I'm on the receiving end of something like two dozen SEO-related newsletters.

A client once asked which SEO books I'd read while learning that voodoo. Well, there were a couple of books (good and bad) but the nature of SEO is right here and right now. And so every day, the mailbox groans under the wisdom of the SEO elite.

These email provide an excellent alternative activity to writing. All writers have cherished ways of dodging that blank screen. This is my No. 1. Convinced myself that "ongoing education" in SEO must eat up at least 90 minutes a day. Good for the clients, bad for the blogs.

New law: If a new email product comes in, one must go out.

IN: SearchCap: Outstanding roundup of posts about "what happened in search today as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web." Easy format: Homegrown stories up top with heds and blurbs, then categorized headlines below. I head straight for the "Searching" and "SEO & SEM" listings, skimming over a lot of links in categories such as "Paid Search & Contextual" and "Local Maps & Local." A terrific free service from Search Engine Land, which just celebrated its first anniversary. Happy birthday to them.

OUT: Copyblogger: I've been reading this popular blog since midsummer and have tired of trying to figure out why it's popular. To be fair, I'll say several posts have been quite good, including this one about writing and fear: The Nasty Four-Letter Word That
Keeps You From Writing. I'm not in the target audience, which seems to be wannabe ad copywriters and marketers. Copyblogger's content soon came to grate on me -- lame link-bait headlines and too many watery posts by guest bloggers. The blog clearly is bigger and more useful than Write for Blogs (a leisurely side project for me), and it just might provide inspiration and illumination for you. (If so, here's hoping for a quick graduation.) Whatever. I'm putting a -30- on that clutter.

Traffic jam, upon request

2007-11-25T02:32:00.000-08:00

At some point, almost every blogger feels the need to juice the traffic stats. Maybe it's to impress someone, to pass a milestone -- or just for a quick ego boost.

The social net Digg can do the job, assuming the blogger knows how to sling link bait. That usually means targeting adolescent males and topping the post with a gotta-click headline.

This morning, top Digg topics include "The 16 Ugliest Men in the History of Rock and Roll" and "How to Write an Episode of 'Dukes of Hazzard.' " If enough readers digg the post, the traffic gushes in. No guarantee the superuser clique that runs the site will look favorably on the contribution, however.

For a flow of more organic traffic there are Reddit and Propeller (Netscape). They work the same way as Digg, but the audience proves to be more mature and less excitable. I also like the lower-profile Truemors (disclosure: I am some kind of sanctioned "Truemorist").

Then there's BlogExplosion, a free and totally reliable source of raw traffic. (No, this is not a paid post.)

BlogExplosion works like a co-op. Members visit other blogs and get a visit from someone else in return. Bloggers can allocate their credits to various web sites in which they have an interest or send it all to one place. (This has nothing to do with selling links, the target of Google's latest police action.)

BlogExplosion content isn't filtered for quality as it is on StumbleUpon. The site serves up a lot of marginal content -- from mommies, work-from-home gurus, Filipino teenieboppers, rightwingers, bloggers who blog about writing.

The neighborhood might be a bit run down, but anyone who wants a blog seen can make it happen here.

Don't count on these new readers to make return visits, though -- BlogExplosion doesn't even display the real URL for its "surfers." These visits provide an uptick in the blog stats, that's about it. As a marketing tool, BlogExplosion seems borderline worthless.

One member I encountered in a forum said she visits these blogs while doing laundry or watching TV. She never actually reads them, just waits out the timer in order to get a credit (return visit). Too bad -- every now and then members will come upon some finds.

I usually enjoy rummaging around. Here are some of my favorites from BlogExplosion, so far:

The Fourth Avenue Blues from Andrew of Alabama. A talented writer in his mid-30s details his battles with booze and mental illness in a format that feels like a series of short stories.

Sex is the New Blog links to to adult sites of an artistic bent. Mostly soft porn, classy nudes and lipstick lesbians, but be prepared for some hard stuff as well. Clever and classy commentary from the host. Well worth a visit if you're open to such things. (BlogExplosion has an adult-site filter if you choose to use it.)

Kimchihead dishes out pulp non-fiction. "Names of people and places have been changed to protect the innocent. And to protect me from the not-so-innocent," Mr. Kimchihead writes. Almost all noir-influenced blogging blows, but this guy has the touch, on his snub-nosed keyboard.

Follow-up on social networks:

TechCrunch on "Why Digg Is Still the Best"
Center Networks on "Propeller Update - Up... Up... And Away!"

Wall Street Journal: free at last!

2007-11-13T19:47:00.000-08:00

News Corp. chieftain Rupert Murdoch today confirmed that the Wall Street Journal web site is going all-free. This is great news, unless you run a financial blog or site.

"Instead of having one million (subscribers), (we'll have) at least 10 million-15 million in every corner of the earth," Murdoch told shareholders gathered in Australia. Those subscribers fork over about $50 a year on average.

(Update 1/11/08: Looks like the chief had second thoughts. At least a bit more of the Journal is free.)

The Journal made premium content work. When I worked with the Hollywood Reporter's web site, we always debated the free model vs. "the Wall Street Journal model." Since The Reporter dispensed exclusive entertainment industry news to pros, the web site had long been financed by subscriber expense accounts. In 2006, the publisher made almost all content free, in a move that had all of us sweating. It worked out, more or less. In any case, it was clear this was the way things were going in web media economics.

The New York Times, as you probably recall, made the move last summer, killling off the hated Times Select, which firewalled columnists and the full archives.

My standard advice to writers remains to always read the New York Times. That's where the standards are set for news and feature writing. No other paper comes close. But taking a good look at the Journal's writing always pays off.

The Journal writers are great at serving sophisticated and relatively unsophisticated readers at the same time. No matter how complicated or obscure the topic, there's always some basic information in the story to orient baffled readers. The Journal team's great trick is to do this without talking up or down. A lot can be accomplished in the parenthetical.

Update 10/14: WSJ adds Digg buttons to some of its content.

Want some cheap promo? Get carded

2007-11-01T00:53:00.000-07:00

It's a simple thing but I bet most people don’t spend enough time talking up their blogs or web sites. People aren't impressed by the news that any of us are bloggers, but when we apply some enthusiasm to describing the unique content, that's another matter.

I do it all the time: Someone asks what I do, I mumble something about a couple of blogs, web consulting -- and let it go at that. Compare that with, "I write a high-end DVD blog, specializing in the cool and the unusual. And I write a blog about (dumb grin for efffect) writing for blogs." Oh, really? ...

Yaro Starak, who writes blogtrafficschool.com, had a good post on the power of word of mouth promotion the other day. He says, "Talking about your blog can generate exponential exposure, as your friends tell their friends about your blog, and so on and so on, creating a pyramid growth pattern of word of mouth. ... All you need to do is create the initial awareness."

Maybe so. The more memorable the concept, the better.

Two things I’d suggest, from experience.

Very few people can recall even simple URLs.

1. Have a business card (or cards) made up for your site(s). Just the URL and a half-dozen promo words. It'll run you about $15 at Staples.

2. Here's the important part: Carry these cards and hand them out! I have several URL cards and use them, but too often forget to refill my wallet. Duh.

When I see people I’ve carded, they almost always have checked out the blog and have something intelligent to say about it.

Writing alt tags that matter

2007-10-27T02:12:00.000-07:00

We all know about alt country, alt rock and now even alt classical, but what about alt tags?

A little background: The alt tag (or alt attribute -- the proper name) describes web site images to someone not able to view them. Such as blind people or dumb search engines.

Alt tags are found in the html code that controls display of graphics. The tags were designed as an aid for people with text-only browsers or those with crappy dial-up connections who turned off the slow-loading graphics. Ah, the bad old days. The alt attribute/tag works for folks with mobile devices or cheap handheld thingies.

The alt-whatever also serves people with disabilities. The computer's audio text application reads them the image description. Say (in a weird electronic voice), "Bill Clinton swears on a Bible photo." Upstanding netizens do a public service by writing thoughtful descriptions. Those who don't flirt with severe karma.

The alt tag's constant companion is the title attribute, which is automatically assigned the file name. Usually the alt area gets this info automatically as well. On Blogger, however, the space is blank. Upload the photo and dig into the html string that results. Look for this: alt="". The micro space between the quote marks is yours. Four-six words please.

Readers usually see the title information by letting their cursor hoover over the image (then the little colored text box pops up). Some browsers also display the alt tag info.

If your photo jpg file is named "mug 29-81," no one benefits. Meanie.

So the savvy and righteous path looks something like this:

Give images destined for the Internet a descriptive file name such as "Shecky Greene photo.jpg"

Change the alt tag to a something like a photo caption: "Shecky Greene eats birthday cake photo"

Earlier this week I did:

title='American Gangster Denzel Washington'

alt='American Gangster star Denzel Washington confronts foe'

It takes discipline to consistently write descriptive alt lines, especially when the post has other time-consuming elements. Wish I could say I was 100%.

Perhaps this side effect helps us both:

Good alt tags aid search engines in their examination of your page. The engines have moved away from the once-mighty meta tags and now focus on contextual elements such as the page's headlines, text -- and clues such as what's in the image descriptions. Hmm.

Related post: Avoid the search-engine suicide of important text trapped in images.

First person: Looking into the evil 'I'

2007-10-15T14:20:00.000-07:00

Today, I did my bit for the environment. Called the city and ratted out the managers of the apartment building that overlooks my house.

They'd gifted me with a giant nasty mattress, one that an outgoing tenant left behind. The building's carpet cleaner came late Friday. He did his thing and left. About the same nanosecond, the giant nasty mattress mysteriously appeared up against my garage wall. The neighbors to the south had a similar gift, a grotty twin-bed mattress.

(Today is blog for the environment day. Please don't be gross when you move. End of PSA.)

"Can you at least make the building pay for the pickup?" I asked the city worker. The heinous act was good for a $1,000 fine, she told me. But ... did you see the guy leave the mattress there? Well, no, I stammered: He was there, he left, minutes later I saw the giant nasty mattress. Sorry, she said. Circumstantial evidence won't cut it.

Evidence is on my mind because I just left the downtown courthouse, where I'd been a juror until this morning's mistrial (crazy plaintiff). Last Wednesday morning, when this legal adventure started, I found myself on the pavement thinking about the government. 7:30 a.m.-5 p.m. jury duty in beautiful downtown L.A. Then, that evening, the thrilling conclusion of my 12-hour traffic school -- all of which ...

OK, enough. Next topic, please.

Still with me? Most of you are long gone. To me, those opening paragraphs are great stuff, the big news out of my day-to-day. To many readers, those sentences are worthless. The stuff of bad blogs.

Journalism teachers always said leave yourself out of the story. In the 1970s, the "new journalists" (Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe) smashed that longstanding rule with a great and gaudy glee. But their would-be successors in the newspaper biz did so many pratfalls that first-person was ushered back to its rightful place in columns and on the op-ed pages.

Writing in the first person is tough duty. Intimidating. Until I started blogging, I never dared compose in the first person. During a long stretch of reviewing DVDs for print, I would do whatever it took to avoid the evil "I" -- even if the content suffered because of that linguistic limbo dance.

Now, after a year or so of blogging, first person feels pretty good. I can slip in and out of it without setting off the burglar alarm.

Some writers -- such as the mighty she-blogger Dooce -- are great at handling first person. That's their natural voice. If you're not so blessed, at least give some thought to how often you open the "I."

I just read an interesting post from Raj Dash called "41 Reasons Why Your Blog Probably Sucks." Reason No. 8: Too personal.

Every time I tell potential clients that blogs can be great for business, they squint and say something like, "Aren't they just for college kids writing about their stupid lives?" (I deal with a tough bunch.) First-person content, done poorly, is about as popular as giant nasty mattresses.

My new rule: If first person makes sense and helps make the point, you'll hear from Me. If not, the writing is all straight-up.

Writing lessons from Ernest Hemingway

2007-10-07T01:34:00.001-07:00

For the first 5 years of my life, my young mother and I lived with my "uncle," a doctor with a big house and an even bigger heart. Parke Smith and his wife, Iva, were major figures in Miami society, back when it was a relatively small town.

"Doc" loved big game fishing and docked his boat in Cuba. The slip next to his was occupied by Pilar, the famous boat piloted by the even more famous Ernest Hemingway. The men were close friends, and family lore has it that Iva became a character in one of Hemingway's novels because of a daring bathing suit she wore.

I don't know if I ever met the great writer, but I do remember the day that "Mr. Hemingway" died. I was banished to the guest house while the Smiths mourned their friend. "To Dr. Parke G. Smith in admiration for his sportsmanship," Hemingway wrote in a leatherbound book he had given my uncle. It was "Big Game Fishing in America."

In college, I spent a summer reading Hemingway under the direction of a professor who looked much like Norman Mailer. He came to class in shorts and flip-flops but always seemed to be addressing the Roman Senate. The hot wind blew through his hair at all times. He was a fine teacher, even if he read an awful lot into Hemingway's mostly straight-up writing. That was a good summer.

Can't say how much of an influence Hemingway's books and wonderful short stories had on my writing -- probably some but not nearly enough. I often think of him while writing dialogue. A great place to start with Hemingway are the Nick Adams stories.

Hemingway often held forth on the subject of writing. Here are some quotes worth passing on:

All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." (Have you read it lately? I have. Incredible.)

It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

Develop a built-in bullshit detector.

Never write about a place until you're away from it, because that gives you perspective

Poor (William) Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the $10 words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.

News links and the lost generation

2007-09-30T02:32:00.000-07:00

I was just reading about a leading blogger's frustrations with a London newspaper for interviewing him at length but not linking to his site, when clearly it would have been appropriate and gracious.

I'd say the author of this story in the (U.K.) Guardian was pretty thorough in his use of links, even though our blogger, Andy Beard, has a legit beef. Europe long has been ahead of the U.S. in connecting print and online.

When you read a lot of blogs, of course, you take it for granted that links will be made, that they will be relevant. And that comments will be encouraged (even if they're monitored). On that level, almost all major newspaper sites fail. Most rarely link out except in listings, "service" stories and the like.

The New York Times, for example, inserts links into some of its main news stories, but they almost always go to the Times' archive search results for the linked terms. These keyword links appear automated and rarely are of much use. (This may be linked to recently abandoned attempts to restrict all archive access.) The Los Angeles Times' hard news stories typically contain no links.

I worked on newspapers and magazines for decades, and in web news publishing for 13 years. It took a lot of work to convince execs that linking was a good thing. Why would we send people to other web sites? We want them to stay here and view our ads. That sort of thing. When I pressed for links to direct competitors, it was time to break out the defilibrators.

Another barrier: Good contextual linking can't be done by computers, despite what the database guys promise. Doing that job well means dedicated manpower. As in salaries and benefits. Tough sell.

In my experience, publishers talk up a storm about the Internet being the future, while their online units gasp for basic resources. This seemed to be a universal experience for web news units, based on the annual commiseration confab hosted by the Online News Assn.

(My old boss, publisher Bob Dowling of the Hollywood Reporter, actually demanded we hire a links editor. Smart guy.)

Suits and bean-counters aren't the only resisters: Most reporters and editors have only recently warmed to online as anything more than a repurposer of news. Still, far too many editorial staffers would just as soon see new media go away -- too much extra work, too complicated, too transparent.

I do believe the sea change will come only when Gen X starts filling the executive ranks. On this front, mine is a lost generation.

(Confession/disclaimer: I use links on my DVD blog to link to Amazon products. Although the content on Amazon can be quite useful, I profit from any sales. ... Feel free to tear the mask of hypocrisy from my face.)

TimesSelect: Good riddance

2007-09-19T01:06:00.000-07:00

Great news just in from the Old Gray Lady: TimesSelect is no more.

Unless you paid (one way or another), the TimesSelect program denied access to the New York Times' Op-Ed and news columns, as well as searches of the national newspaper's archives.

No one liked the idea when it started two years back, especially existing paper subscribers, who were suddenly cut off until they went through a buggy online signup process. The Times' Web-only readers had to pay $50 a year to view that content -- after a decade of getting it free.

On Tuesday, The Times explained the liberation this way:

Since we launched TimesSelect in 2005, the online landscape has altered significantly. Readers increasingly find news through search, as well as through social networks, blogs and other online sources. In light of this shift, we believe offering unfettered access to New York Times reporting and analysis best serves the interest of our readers, our brand and the long-term vitality of our journalism. We encourage everyone to read our news and opinion -- as well as share it, link to it and comment on it.

A bit of upstairs/downstairs remains: The Times' online archive now is wide open for searches back to 1987, but print subscribers have access to articles dating back to 1851.

What changed ... was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

The few newspapers that could make money for "premium content" have been retreating as Web economics make it clear there's more money in ads than online subscriptions. The most successful online premium purveyor, the Wall Street Journal, appears headed that way under Rupert Murdoch. Update 10/12: Murdoch confirms the site is going all-free.

The web site I worked on for a decade or so, hollywoodreporter.com, opened up almost all of its content a year ago after having most of its existence financed by premium subs. Spooky but my boss made a good call.

Back to the Times:

I've made this point several times on the blog: If you're serious about writing for a mass audience, the New York Times is a must-read. Every day.

I live in L.A., where we have a very good local paper. Yes, the other Times. (Ever notice how so many people hate their city's newspaper? I worked on a real stinker back in Florida, and even my closest pals hurled abuse at me about that daily.)

About a year ago, I decided to have but one paper hit the doorstep each morning. Wasn't hard to choose. The L.A. Times now competes for my attention via its nightly email. The Wall Street Journal, I do miss.

The New York Times recently upped its subscription price and cut the physical size of the newspaper to that ratty new "national print standard." Yuck.

I love that Old Gray Lady anyway. All is forgiven. Baby, you're the best.

Update: 12/11/07: New York Times traffic soared with the demise of Select. In October, the site added 4.9 million readers, according to comScore.

Meaningless word coined by a psychotic

2007-09-12T16:35:00.000-07:00

I just created a word. A compound noun to be exact. With a snazzy hyphen. One for the ages: ice-goof.

Who invested this authority in me? No one, really. I just needed a word, it didn't seem to exist, so voila!

Every single word in every language had an inventor, of course, and I think ice-goof is as good as a third of them.

What is an ice-goof? Use it in a declarative sentence, please?"

OK.

" 'Blades of Glory,' The Will Ferrell ice-goof, opened at No. 1 on the box office charts."

This noun/adjective might not catch on, but by venting this bit of improv I avoided a description that feels familiar and worn, such as "skating comedy." Not quite Kerouac, but I try.

This, according to Merriam-Webster, is a neologism: "a meaningless word coined by a psychotic." (I am not making this up.) Fortunately, that is the No. 2 definition. The first is a bit more kind: "a new word, usage, or expression." Want to dig in? Here's "A Century of New Words" (Oxford Paperback Reference) from John Ayto.

New words tend to start off life hyphenated. The hyphen adds some clarity, reducing the shock of the new. Then they close up as usage widens. The "Shorter Oxford English Dictionary" just de-hyphenated 16,000 words. (De-hyphenated?) So icegoof could happen. If we all believe, yes it could.

Give it a try. Next post, make up a word or two. Do a mash-up (n., neologism).

More on hyphens: See the usage of "box office charts" up above? For editors who work on the Hollywood trades, which deal with box-office numbers all the time, the two-word-hyphen thing got really old with repeated use. So, for some of the trades, it's simply boxoffice. (The rest of America, curiously, has not felt the need for that economy.)

Same sort of thing with "Web site." You see "website" more often these days as the original connection to World Wide Web unravels a bit. This is the kind of evolution that keeps psychotics and linguistic professors in business.

Noted with pleasure: NYT tech guy Pogue

2007-09-07T19:02:00.000-07:00

David Pogue, the New York Times' technology and personal electronics guru, does a great job writing user-friendly copy about user-hostile material.

Pogue comes across as a real everyman, a friendly geek who's just trying to sort out the quantum-leaping jumble of tech developments for the folks in his audience. His weekly online videos are a hoot -- a homespun contrast to the sleek hip image of the products he reviews.

Here's how Pogue kicked off his latest State of the Art column, about a new movie download service:

If you had to make a master list of all the world’s problems, “limited access to movies” probably wouldn’t appear until Page 273,996.

Truth is, life is teeming with opportunities to see movies: movie theaters, video stores, DVD-by-mail services, TV movie channels, pay-per-view, video-on-demand, Xbox 360, iTunes, Internet downloads, hotel rooms, airplanes and so on.

But according to the team at Vudu, all of those outlets are flawed.

I really like the way Pogue gets into this article. It's a delayed lead, meaning he waits a few paragraphs before getting to the point. Pogue engages the audience right away -- the first two grafs deliver a modest bit of Seinfeld-esque observational humor: Everyone agrees and nods.

The kicker, the third graf, is the one that keeps you reading. Only after that curious sentence does the columnist start telling his story, getting to the who-what-when-where-how-and-sometimes-why three grafs later than most writers would.

Pogue pulls it off in part because of his economy -- he burns off just three sentences. They're all in separate paragraphs, encouraging the reader to move through them quickly. (Paragraph length is a great way of controlling pacing.) The lead wouldn't work if it were packaged in one bulky paragraph.

Pogue almost certainly didn't sit down and select that approach -- he just started typing. It's in his bag of tricks, though, and at some point he learned the lesson I'm offering in this post: Smart, short delayed leads make great audience bait.

Breaking down good writers' content almost always pays off. Give it a try next time you're reading the Times or a writers magazine such as Esquire or Vanity Faire.

(If Vudu, the product, interests you, be sure to check out my blog Downloading Movies 101.)

MSN Live beta now fishing for testers

2007-09-04T15:18:00.000-07:00

Microsoft is running a public beta for its new webmaster-assistance center, Webmaster Portal ("creative name ... we're really good at marketing," the writeup says with a wink.)

If you write a blog are you a webmaster? Sure, why not.

(I always thought that "webmaster" tag was a hoot -- it surfaced in the early days of the web when guys who knew a bit of code liked to operate like the Wiz of Oz behind that flimsy curtain. Kind of a Dungeons and Dragons influence in there.)

You should apply because people who are accepted (maybe that's everybody) get access to troubleshooting tools to ensure the MSNBot is crawling your site; sitemap creation and ping services; web site stats; and some other vague stuff. MSN Live Search absolutely matters, even though it's in the shadow of Google, like everything else.

Google provides many free resources as well, including the awesome Google Analytics (Urchin) and various submission tools.

These are great free marketing and research services for any, ahem, webmaster. Grab them while they're free.

Speed links: When to write, how to comment

2007-08-29T23:07:00.000-07:00

Hit a trifecta of strong posts in my morning reading.

1. Zoning out for writers
I run warm and cold on copyblogger.com, but here's a fine piece by Michael Steizner. "Five Tips for Finding Writing Time" promises, "Despite the challenges we face, there are proven tactics that can really help us sit down and write." Here's one of them:

Identify Your Productivity Zone
Figure out when you are most able to write. For me, it’s between 9am and 11am. You know you’re in the zone when you can crank out writing. When in the zone, I can easily write a few well-written pages of copy. When I’m out of the zone, I’m lucky to write a single paragraph all day. Find the zone and you’re on your way to more productive writing.

Michael goes on to say, "When in the Zone, ONLY write." I'm nodding like a bobblehead. When the copy is good and you're atop a gusher, cash in.

In a related post, Jurgen Wolff of TIme to Write surveys "The Creative Environment for Writers."

2. Earn your comment links
ProBlogger spends some quality time on the ups and downs of commenting for the sake of drawing traffic. Most savvy bloggers do it in the early going, at least, but there are plenty of ways to make yourself a pest even if you're not technically spamming. Here's Darren Rowse on "Excessive self linking," something he witnesses daily.

The practice of leaving links inside posts is not something that bothers me too much -- unless it gets excessive. A well placed link back to something you’ve written ... can really add to a conversation. ... What does risk annoying others is when you include lots of links to yourself in every comment you make and/or when the links are irrelevant to the topic and/or when you just leave a link without saying anything else. Keep links relevant and in moderation. ...

3. She's a rich girl ...
"Case Study of a Teenage Millionaire." Dosh Dosh looks over WhateverLife.com and has some advice for its creator, a 17-year-old dropout who earns as much as $70k a month being cute and wry.

Her first Adsense paycheck was $2,790 and she has already rejected a $1.5 million buyout offer. I’m referring to Ashley Qualls, the founder of Whateverlife.com, a free MySpace layouts website. ... Inspirational, no doubt. And a clear example of the massive potential that the web has when it comes to generating substantial and consistent income.

Fact errors, libel and blogs: How to cope

2007-08-26T15:53:00.000-07:00

Like the man says at the end of "Some Like It Hot":

"Well, nobody's perfect."

That includes every blogger on the planet, of course. I've had to deal with a couple of unpleasant fact errors in the past six weeks. No fun. Never is.

One disadvantage bloggers have compared with mainstream media writers is the lack of backup. Some bloggers have editors, but 99% do not. Editing is one thing; fact checking is another. You can't truly edit your own copy. You can ensure the text is accurate in most cases. Bearing down on facts takes time but in the long run pays off. Usually. I used to work at a magazine where every statement of fact, no matter how minor, had to be signed off on by a checker. (Guess what: The magazine was sued anyway.)

Fact-checking on the Internet can lead to trouble. Wikipedia, the resource of choice, is full of inaccuracies -- unintentional and intentional. Once bogus material gets posted, it tends to spread virally, even if the author tries to chase down his offending material. So insisting on, say, two sources guarantees nothing. Yikes! Might be time to visit a library or make some phone calls. Just like a reporter. Then again, look at page 2 of the New York Times and check out the quarter-page of corrections it runs every day. Screwing up is part of writing for the public, alas.

Here are a few ideas on how to deal with your fact errors.

1. Don't defend the error

2. Don't go into mourning

3. Don't blame the messenger

4. Correct the error

~~bad~~

5. Apply transparency

6. Learn something about libel law

AP Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law

The Copyright Permission and Libel Handbook.

Let's be careful out there.

This post is part of ProBlogger's 31 Days to Building a Better Blog" project.

A tale of two how-to SEO books

2007-08-21T18:50:00.000-07:00

Just polished off some homework reading, the book "Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day."

One thing the 300-page paperback has going for itself is timeliness: it's about a year old. Quite a few SEO-related books date back five years or so, for some reason. Perhaps that's when the SEO guys starting coming up from the underground.

The authors are Gradiva Couzin and Jennifer Grappone (pictured), who come with a combined 16 years or so of SEO experience. Their products include the book's handy companion site, Your SEO Plan. Check out that site's simple and elegant optimization if you visit.

The book seems to target people doing SEO part-time for their company web sites. The authors take the "one hour a day" concept seriously, telling readers what to do, when to do it and how to chart their progress. Anyone smart enough to handle SEO doesn't need that kind of hand-holding.

The do-this-do-that routine soon got old -- and cluttered up the book. Finding the pockets of good information was almost too much work. Ultimately, I had to force myself to finish it. Too bad, because the authors have a lot to offer.

I'm a student of SEO. Neither novice nor expert. I've had a fair amount of success (and failures) bringing traffic to a dozen or so web sites and blogs over the past decade. (I offer SEO-friendly editorial services to web site owners.)

So when I read Peter Kent's "Search Engine Optimization For Dummies" earlier this year, it was a bit of a sheepish undertaking. But as with some of the better books in this yellow-and-black franchise, woven in with the basics was plenty of information for more-advanced readers. (That kind of parathetical knowledge stacking is what makes the Wall Street Journal so useful to investors of all levels.)

Kent's breezy book was a pleasure to read. It was a good refresher and I learned a lot as well. If I'm a dummy, at least I'm a well-informed one. (Be sure to get the second edition.)

Completists should check out "An Hour a Day." From a library if possible.

The recommendation for beginning and intermediate SEO students is to go with the "Dummies."

Warning: Do not 'steal the lead'

2007-08-13T18:37:00.000-07:00

In the newspaper business, young headline writers always are warned not to "steal the lead." Like most forms of theft, this marks the offender as lazy and morally adrift.

Here's an example straight from the crime lab: A reporter writes a lead (an article's opening paragraph or two) that says, "Big Business increasingly finds itself under fire for poor treatment of elderly workers." Our shifty/lazy copyeditor comes along and tops the story with the following headline: "Big Business Under Fire for Treatment of Elderly."

Every word of the headline comes directly from the reporter's lead. So any impact that might result from the author's carefully chosen words has been deflected by the headline. The reader has an immediate deja vu, having read the same sentence twice. Repetition of just the verb can have the same effect. Take another look at this blog post's headline and lead. Yeech. Give me rewrite!

Online, where stories often are accessed via blurbs (short summaries), the repetition can be compounded. So you see the headline twice, and the lead twice. One click away. Ugly. Boring.

In print or online, I never let my editors steal leads. In many cases, they did not realize they were doing anything wrong -- it just seemed the clearest and most accurate way to summarize the story. (Headlines usually must index the story, true.) Or the headline just wrote itself. (Always be suspicious of easy writing, the ancients said.)

But working solo on a blog, you can steal from yourself all you like, right? Not if you're smart.

A headline gives you one shot at grabbing a reader. The lead gives you another. They should work in conjunction, a whip-smart one-two sales pitch. When a blurb, subhead or photo caption comes into play, there's another opportunity to enchant the reader.

Major newspapers and magazines are good at this -- take a look at how their editors finesse these elements. Learn from the big-leaguers -- and join them.

Blogging at home: Don't feed the morlocks

2007-08-09T21:15:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to blog about what it's like to blog as an occupation. I do other things -- consulting, writing for other media, managing web sites, L.A. lunch-taking, running my NCAA 08 team -- but most of my time is spent butt in chair, in my home office. Blogging. Or futzing with my blogs.

So I'm busier than when I worked for Corporate World Inc. Fortunately, another blogger has a head start on this topic. The post is called "Cons of Being a Problogger." Here is some selected wisdom of David Peralty at the blog xfep.com (Extra for Every Person):

Most people wouldn’t expect working from home to be an item on the cons list, but it is. There are a lot more distractions at home from telemarketers, family and friends, and objects you own. I have found days wasted in front of the television, or on the phone, when I should have been getting work done instead. ...

When working as a problogger, you will spend an inordinate amount of time on a computer. So much so that you will have to become an expert at using one. ... (Your) computer(s) will stop working at the worst time, so you best get good at repairing them or know someone that can. ...

There is something about problogging that requires a strange personality. One that can deal with being alone for long periods of time, and yet that same person also has to be able to network, and be interesting to be around. This type of personality is rare, and also a bit odd. ...

Between the high amount of focus and concentration, and the near zero amount physical activity, blogging can really wear you down.

Not sure these are all negatives, but they are true in my experience.

I was surprised to experience what David talks about in the last item, about blogging taking a physical toll. When you go to a bricks-and-mortar workplace, you expend energy all day long just moving from one place to another, getting gas, picking up dry cleaning, walking down hallways, dodging the boss, wandering off to lunch. Even if you sit on your rear all day at work, you're burning calories with supplemental activities. So you're going from sedentary to, um, blob.

If you're home all day, and "going to work" means moving from one room to another, nothing is burned off. Even if your exercise routine and diet stay the same, you're soon in a hole and the extra pounds start adding up. (My official excuse: My trainer moved to London. Bad timing, mate!)

So if blogging full-time is in your future, budget another hour or so a day for hiking, swimming, whatever.

Any form of "getting out of the house" takes extra time out of the workday.

Some other quick thoughts: Your presence at home means more mess, more shopping, more domestic projects. ... Email, IM are just as bad as phone calls in the distraction dept. ... Blogging advice is everywhere and it's tempting to read it all, seeking that one terrific tip that'll turn it all around for your projects. You can chase links and read all day long. ... It is easy to lose control of your schedule. When I get on a roll with writing, I sometimes go until dawn. Argh. Being a morlock sucks. Resist the siren call of the night shift.

(Hat tip to copyblogger)

Send in the clones & desperate bloggers

2007-08-05T19:25:00.000-07:00

If you've spent any time seeking advice about blogging you know that a lot of the content out there is either recycled or a variation on well-known themes. Some of the posts you'll read here do that.

This to me is analogous to what happens in, say, fitness magazines and personal-finance publications. There are a couple of dozen topics on which most beginners need or want information. Those stories are presented with new graphics, new headlines and come from new writers. Maybe they contain updated information, but they're part of the playbook. Same with evergreen content for more advanced readers. Most readers don't mind the repetition unless they're outgrown the publication.

This partly explains why the Wall Street Journal always carries a piece on something odd like ferret-legging contests on page 1.

I have learned a great deal from some of the blog pros' blogs, such as Dosh Dosh, ShoeMoney and ProBlogger. These guys do a great job; they are rewarded with swarms of traffic and comments. But they, too, tend to repeat themselves.

The blog pros are in the same boat as, say, Money or Men's Health. If people come to you seeking tentpole knowledge but you're off working in the fringes, that's not good sense or good business. In writing, this dynamic would be be called elegant substitution -- variety for the sake of variety. Fortunately, on the Internet, there's almost always something new to talk about. I do, however, see a lot of the same material over and over in all of these blog blogs. The trick is to find new ways of doing older things.

This brings me to a post on BloggingMix.com: "Guilty or Not? Are You a Desperate Blogger?" I love this topic and the direct way it's presented. Its issues are frequently debated, but to me the headline and post felt fresh and original. I went right for it, passing by a pack of links to familiar stories.

Anyway, let's get to the content.: Here are some of the nine signs of desperation from blogger RJ Tayaban along with a sentence or two taken from his comments:

Fake your own comment(s) and use positive feedback: If you haven't received comments from your readers, perhaps it's about time that you reflect on your writing skills, styles or even the topic you blog about.

Create numerous accounts with digg, reddit and delicious then submit and vote your own post: ... I don't create multiple accounts and use it to vote for my own submissions. This is kind of 'losserish.' ... I personally believe that it's ethical for bloggers to submit and book mark their post with digg, reddit, delicious, netscape, sphinn etc. This is an effective way to reach more readers.

Steal concepts and ideas from other bloggers: ... The most despiteful manifestation of desperation. If you don't have anything to blog, then don't blog.

My take:

1. Faking comments may be effective since no one wants to be first at a party. I don't do it, but I do ask my friends to comment once in a while on specific topics that suit them.

2. I agree with RJ: Waiting around for people to share your content on the social net sites won't get you anywhere when your blog is new. My standard is, The post should be on-topic for the site, it should bring clear value, and the blurb and headline should be truly reflective of the original post's content. Also, be sure to participate in that community, vote on other posts and bring in other people's content.

3. Ditto.

Most of us are scrambling for attention (traffic) and success (money or however you define it). The temptations are many and the ethical guidelines are, well, being written. This is a medium for existentialists.

Update 8/20: Dosh Dosh just posted a related piece about "meta blogging" and all the repetition.

Video killed the text blahs

2007-07-31T02:33:00.000-07:00

One cool way to change up a blog is to use embedded video. Text and photos usually get the job done, but sometimes moving images and audio are a perfect complement to your posts. Or they are the posts.

I just added a pair of YouTube embed videos to my dvd blog posts on the death of Ingmar Bergman -- a couple of short-film parodies of his early heavy-duty works. In this case, only the shorts could tell that story. Also on my site is a category called DVD Blog Theater -- an archive of videos I've used in various contexts. Many videos on YouTube include embed coding for viral distribution; some do not at the request of content providers.

I own none of the copyrights on these videos. So why do I feel entitled to display them? My assumption is that the people who host these videos have cleared copyrights. I have not acquired or uploaded these files. If my readers did a search, they could find the files just as easily as I did. These files do not exist on my site, just the window and/or link. The right to link freely has been upheld repeatedly in the courts.

Won you over yet? Didn't think so. ...

If I found out there was any dispute over the materials, the links would come down immediately. To continue would be ethically and legally problematic.

So far in the brave new world of supermarket-style video streaming, the responsibility of preventing copyright violations has informally fallen to the content owner (who must police the copyright) and to the uploader or host of the video (who needs to clear the content and/or remove it when asked). Google/YouTube, as you probably know, are busy producing a copyright filtering system to eliminate material that's been declared off-limits. The courts are waiting.

In the real world, it's often the case that creators of short-form content are delighted to get exposure via, say, YouTube. Often, they submit the content. This includes most TV networks, music labels, and the makers of trailers and short films. None of this applies to pure piracy, of course, as in downloading a feature-length movie off any of the bit torrent sites.

I wouldn't want to take this mangy pack of arguments into court, but that sort of logic is why YouTube is still with us. This uneasy truce with the content providers and courts allows YouTube to continue its video revolution.

URLs get a new look from Google

2007-07-25T15:04:00.001-07:00

Traffic thunder-god Google is starting to treat hyphens/dashes and underscores as word separators in URLS. Feel free to do a Pee-wee dance.

OK, this would seem to be a bit technical and slight, but if you create a lot of pages or use TypePad this is really good info.

Until now, the search engine saw hyphens/dashes as a signal different words were being represented. Underscores meant the words ran together. Why? Who knows. One of those rules I could never keep straight, anyway.

This is great news for TypePad users because that blog service defaults to underscores in URLs. In theory, we on TP could see some traffic bumps off this (my blog there is DVD Spin Doctor).

C/net posted coverage of Google Webspam guru Matt Cutts' talk at WordCamp 007, in which he powerpointed this and several other forum-bait issues.

Hint: If you're using WordPress, be sure you're on top of how that blog system creates URLs and what you can do about it. My startup Download Movies 101 uses WordPress -- and I definitely need to practice what I preach here.

I'm on the three major blog platforms now. Will post a compare/contrast before long.

GoDaddy.com Discount Domain Club

A sixpack of writers blogs

2007-07-22T01:29:00.000-07:00

Making some progress filling in the sidebars on this (relatively new) blog, seeking good resource links for writers and wannabes. Yep, those new book links are advertorial. I confess.

Anyway, I went looking for blogs similar to this one, dedicated to the craft of writing and figuring out how that unfurls in the 2.0 world. Tips, SEO text techniques, headline help, war stories, that sort of thing. Came back with a sixpack of sites to recommend, but surprisingly it was tough to find more. Most of the "writing blogs" were about marketing. To us. Everyone selling an e-book or subscription something. (If you know of a good web writers blog, please share via the comments.)

Here are my picks, so far. The quest continues:

Angela Booth's Writing Blog. The "veteran writer and author" is heavily into self-promotion but she always seems to mind the content. The blog is a good read if you don't mind the plugs for her various ventures. Knows her stuff. Typical posts: "If you're a writer who doesn't 'get' blogging" and "Writing and commitment." Best for beginners and intermediates.

Copyblogger. Outstanding site dedicated to ad copy and marketing text. "The art and science of compelling copy." Brian Clark is blogger in chief but has help. Typical posts: "Do you make these mistakes when you write?" and the Link Karma series.

Dosh Dosh. All about making money with blogs. Writer Maki transcends his subject, making this a great resource for anyone posting anything online. My first or second read every day. Typical posts: "A comprehensive guide to StumbleUpon" and "How to choose the right blog niche." I've learned tons from this site but haven't made much money. Hmmm.

ProBlogger. I've written about Darren Rowse's fine site several times so this will be short. Another making-money blog. Check out how he deftly mixes links and his own text. Typical post: "Rediscover your blogging groove."

Time to Write. "I'm a writer, teacher, and hypnotherapist," Jurgen Wolff says in his About. He's also a "writing coach." Never heard of that calling but Manhattan probably is crawling with them. Typical posts: "Writing for children" (via graphic novels) and "How to piggyback onto a successful book." Posts are short and clear; we all could learn from that.

Writer's Resource Center. Name a topic, it's probably covered here. Freelancing, poetry, fiction, technical writing, jobs. Lots of how-to lists. Typical post: "15 craft exercises for authors." Go for the info; quality of writing ranges from just OK to pretty good.

I'm inspired by all of these destinations. And my shaky search results for "top writers blogs" tells me to keep plugging away on this one. Maybe Write for Blogs will make your list.

Headlines: Hail to the thief

2007-07-20T01:33:00.000-07:00

One way to pick up some reader interest is to "borrow" titles and expressions from popular culture or literature. Pros do it all the time -- just pick up a copy of the New York Times and you'll spot at least a couple. Boomers salivate at the mention of any Beatles song title, for instance. So you get something like: "Say you want a revolution? So does Google." "The publicity machine: twist and shout." Or "Steve Jobs: a day in the life." Most people would dive right into those posts.

It works like this. You're stuck. No headline comes to mind. Or what comes to mind bores even you. Nothing to say, but it's OK. Just start running Beatles songs and albums through your mind (or browser). Something will fit. Never fails.

Authors and the marketing units of their publishers are more than hip to this. For example, I just came across a mystery by Lee Child titled "Bad Luck and Trouble." Original? Yeah, when bluesman Albert King used the phrase in "Born Under a Bad Sign." Come think of it, "Born Under a Bad Sign" would be a great title for a novel ... except there are at least four books already using it. Speaking of Cream (say what?), I'm putting off working on a detective novel called "Strange Brew."

I worked at the trade paper The Hollywood Reporter for many years. Its headlines are packed with rock music references, because it was a rock & roll kind of newsroom. Or used to be.

Of course, no need to stop with pop. Literature is full of great and mighty titles to abscond with. Help yourself. Everybody else has. Think William Faulkner came up with "The Sound and the Fury" on his own?

Thing is, nobody minds. Those readers who make the connection usually appreciate your assumption that they have fine educations. Those who don't get it feel a tingly bit of deja vu -- or at worst think you're a terrific writer.

Used in moderation, this evocative technique can be funny, poetic or quite powerful. Don't consider it plagiarism; it's simply a moveable feast of words.

Pro bloggers get a BizWeek salute

2007-07-16T19:39:00.000-07:00

Here's a must read for anyone hoping to see some money out of blogging (or getting weary of trying). BusinessWeek profiles 13 bloggers who've managed to make a decent living -- or better. The story is titled "Bloggers Bring in the Big Bucks," although in most of the cases "big bucks" is definitely relative.

The cast includes Perez Hilton, Michelle Malkin, the ladies of Go Fug Yourself, Jason Kottke and two blog-riches purveyors I read daily: Darren Rowse of ProBlogger and Jeremy Schoemaker of ShoeMoney (pictured).

From the intro:

From cat pictures and celebrity gossip to tech news and politics, the stars of the blogosphere earn plenty of dough, regardless of subject. Some bloggers start their sites intending to make big profits. But most of the bloggers we talked to had more modest expectations, and saw their blogs unexpectedly turn into businesses as traffic picked up and ad dollars rolled in.

The story echoes the advice I see over and over from bloggers who've made it: Don't give up. The most common mistake that bloggers who hope to turn pro make is quitting too soon. Don't we all want to believe that one!

Read the BusinessWeek story on bloggers

Write like you talk and lose your audience

2007-07-14T14:34:00.000-07:00

I was just reading a blogging 101 post that repeated the same bad advice beginning writers always get: Write like you talk. Must have seen this a dozen times in the past month.

Only the truly crisp-and-clear speakers should take this seriously. I, um, tend to wander around in speech, you know, and often go on about things that distract from the point, um, whatever that is. My grammar ain't so hot and I sometimes swear when marking time with adjectives.

Develop an inviting personality to use in your writing. It’s an acting gig to some extent since that person is “always on.” Most of us speak in run-on sentences when conveying something of substance. Good writers mix up the lengths of their sentences. It's effective.

The point, I think, is to avoid coming across like The Voice of God. When I taught writing to new journalism students, they rarely started off with any personality. (Well, one guy did but I later found out he cribbed from Steve Martin.) Almost all of them tried to mimic the editorial pages. They came across like someone who knows it all and preaches from the mountain top. You know.

Blogging for money: Fool's gold or gold rush?

2007-07-12T17:01:00.000-07:00

Here's a good roundup story out of London about people trying to make a living off blogging. The Times Online piece cites a study that says spending on blog advertising is expected to pass $300 million by 2010. But, it notes, only about 7% of people blog with the intent of making money.

I have always gone with the oft-repeated advice: Write for art, write to communicate, but most of all write for money. Pardon the interruption from the house mercenary. Now back to the Times story:

Henry Copeland, founder of Blogads, which connects bloggers and advertisers, understands the temptation (to seek blogging fortune). “It’s the Horatio Alger story of the 21st century,” he says. ... Successful bloggers must work long hours -- “18 hours a day, truly compulsively”, Copeland says. They also need the guts to commit themselves fully to their projects, even if it means uprooting their lives. Perhaps most importantly, they need to cultivate a voice that will attract readers and keep them coming back. “Voice is a one-in-100,000 kind of thing,” he says.

Of course, one primary source of blogging revenue is helping people who want to make money blogging. The story includes quotes from one of these bloggers, Darren Rouse, whose ProBlogger is one of my everyday reads.

Rowse cautions that it is hard to turn a blog into a thriving business, “but with a long-term vision, sustained hard work, a lot of creativity and some luck it’s possible . . . I mean, I was a guy whose computer expertise extended to knowing how to send e-mail and use a word-processor four to five years ago and now I make a living blogging. If I can do it, I suspect that others can.”

The Speed-link express

2007-07-09T03:47:00.000-07:00

Are Social Bookmarking Buttons Useless?
Dosh Dosh unveils results of poll on whether people actually use these bits of graphic clutter when they're attached to a post. Here's the verdict: 64% of voters do not use social bookmarking buttons, with 19% of them not knowing what they are at all.

Why StumbleUpon Sends More Traffic Than Digg
ProBlogger's Darren Rowse posts a case study comparing traffic sent from StumbleUpon and Digg. He finds that the StumbleUpon crowd performs much better in the long-tail arena, although both 2.0 sites deliver plenty of traffic. At least to him!

Of course -- this post doesn’t really illustrate that StumbleUpon is better than Digg or that Digg is better than StumbleUpon. In fact, if anything it shows how they compliment each other quite nicely.

Blogcatalog a Blogger Social Networking Hub
Andy Beard compares and contrasts Blogcatalog, MyBlogLog and Bumpzee. Similar to results from Digg and the like, he finds that Blogcatalog readers don't seem much interested in subscribing or hanging around for more than a few seconds.

I'm giving Blogcatalog a shot; just set up a home there for my blogs. Be sure to check out the fun-house photo. (Who came up with those square pic formats, anyway.)

Verbs: Get an active workout

2007-07-06T17:16:00.000-07:00

I worked with a crazy man long ago who counseled me to go through my stories and eliminate all passive constructions. I took the advice and it worked like crazy.

The active voice always bring more punch to your content. Instead of saying, "I was taught to use the active voice by a crazy man" (passive and wordy) go with "A crazy man taught me to use the active voice" (active and crisp).

The passive voice works when you are downplaying the person or thing doing the action: "President Kennedy was assassinated today by a lone gunman" (vital words up front) not "A lone gunman assassinated President Kennedy today."

What else did the crazy man say? Get rid of "is" and "to be" constructions whenever you can. Replace them with stronger, more direct and descriptive verbs. Don't squander these opportunities to engage the reader. Every word counts. Smart crazy man.

Look, Ma, no commas

2007-07-05T19:13:00.001-07:00

Want some new energy in your writing? Play a game with yourself.

One way to ensure you remain challenged with familiar subject matter is to add a secret scheme to your article/post. I started doing this a few years back with DVD reviews. It always helped when my attention was going astray. Sounds dumb -- but it can be fun.

Here's the idea: Write your post without commas. Don't write sentences over 5 words long. Don't write sentences under two dozen words long. Write in character. Make every verb related to your topic. Make the first sentence also the last. Imitate an author you admire. Write as if the item were a play.

Sound too tough? Consider the case of one Ernest Vincent Wright. He wrote a book without once using the letter "e." And on the subject of lowercase e's: We all know about E. E. Cummings.

How to be a guilt-free slacker

2007-07-02T19:04:00.000-07:00

Blogs need to be fed. Sort of like kids. You may not be feeling it, but that's tough. The content has to go up if you're serious about building an audience and a reputation.

Imagine a daily newspaper not coming out one day because the editorial staffers had the blahs. (Fortunately for readers, no one ever puts this to a vote in newsrooms.)

There are ways to get around grinding out a post as pure duty. One is the perfectly respectable method of pointing to someone else's great post, giving the writer the props and tossing in a few sentences of your perspective. Another is the "speed linking" post -- basically a roundup of the good stuff you've read in the past few days. Some bloggers make this a regular feature. I'm guessing most readers are like me -- they like seeing these once in a while, say weekly. Any more and you're just freeloading.

Look for opportunities to recycle some of your work done for other media. This assumes, of course, that you've done some writing in the past about your blog's subject matter. (You haven't? Hmmm.) I find my DVD reviews quite handy for this, since so many movies go through multiple editions on home video. Today and Friday, I got lucky -- I had decent material on "Masters of Horror" and "Gunsmoke" that plugged right in to the current info. (Be careful about reusing content from your blog, however. Search engines aren't big fans of that technique.)

Then there's the "guest blogger." The big boys and girls like to do this -- offer lesser-known bloggers a chance to get exposure via their higher-profile sites. Win-win. Or you can shop around for a like-minded blogger who's up for a "vacation content share" -- she posts on your blog when you're gone, you do the same. We did this recently on Life and Fitness Coach.

HTML lists for fun and profit

2007-06-29T02:40:00.000-07:00

Everybody loves lists. Remember back in the '70s when we all ate up "The Book of Lists"?That baby sold over 8 million copies and counting.

Lists work especially well in blogs, for many obvious reasons. Lists provide visual relief from run-on copy and they're often efficiently instructive or just fun. Anyone looking to scare up some traffic via the social network sites should be thinking "Best ... " "Dumbest ..." "Easiest ... ."

Top 10s have been the American way up till now, but the blogisphere seems to prefer top 7s. Why? Five items seem a bit bare; 10 items fill more than one computer screen if there's accompanying text, defeating part of the purpose. Your mileage may vary. Top 7 seems weird, but I figured out how to get around in one case, a listing of Jack Nicholson's best DVDs.

If you're blogging with WordPress, the post editor gives you buttons to create either of the most-used lists: "ordered" or "unordered." I don't see that aid on Blogger or Typepad, but lists are easy to hand-code. Here's how.

An ordered (numbered) lists takes these tags:

<ol>
<li>Great to be first</li>
<li>Second's cool, too</li>
<li>Third is OK, I guess</li>
<li>Fourth you're out of the medals</li>
<li>Fifth is for slackers</li>
</ol>

No need to enter numbers. You get:

Great to be first

Second's cool, too

Third is OK, I guess

Fourth you're out of the medals

Fifth is for slackers

For unordered lists, just sub in the tag with ul and /ul. You get bullets:

Great to be first

Second's cool, too

Third is OK, I guess

Fourth you're out of the medals

Fifth is for slackers

You don't have to use numbers or bullets, of course. In this tribute to the late Jerry Falwell (yeah, right), I used graphic pitchforks.

A lot to talk about with lists; look for future episodes in, what else, the list of lists.

Write a blog? You gotta have style

2007-06-27T00:26:00.000-07:00

A personal style is as essential in blog writing as it is in enjoying the nightlife. Style, as editors and writers define it, is the collective wisdom on how to handle the many variations found in the language -- things like spelling, abbreviations, numbers, dates, places, time of day and hyphenation. There are thousands of issues. Almost all publications spell it out for their writers and editors via a stylebook.

Who determines the proper way of doing all these things? Usually, it's the editor who took on this thankless task ages ago, whose name is lost in the ether. Style tends to be a form of inertia, unless someone gets worked up enough to change this item or that.

There are two major stylebooks in the English language:

"The Chicago Manual of Style" is widely used by magazines, book publishers, academics and technical writers. This graybeard started in 1906 as a way of wrangling typography. The last update came in 2003, which means we won't see another until 2015, at best. This book keeps alive many of the old ways -- the serial comma, the spelling out of all numbers up to 100, etc.

"The AP Stylebook" helps keep newspaper writers and editors honest. Almost all daily newspapers are members of the Associated Press, a co-op that shares content via the "wires." The AP book takes a to-the-point view of the language. So the third comma in a series isn't there (who needs it) and all numbers over nine are spelled out.

Almost all publishers have an internal stylesheet that notes exceptions to the big books. At my last gig, we never spelled out, say, 8% while the AP goes with 8 percent. Why? No one could tell you. It's the way it's always been.

When you write a blog, you're creating a publication. You gotta have style. If you don't come from publishing, just keep some mental notes or a log of how you tend to handle style points -- things like numbers, dates and abbreviations. This makes writing easier because you're not making a decision over and over. Consistency is a key element in providing smooth copy, which can make readers instinctively feel at home.

Want to write like a pro? Get a copy of the "The AP Stylebook" and keep it on your desk for quick reference. Lots of good advice in there. Read it cover to cover every couple of years. Then you'll be stylin'.

Surprise! You're a book author

2007-06-25T00:02:00.000-07:00

I’ve always had a fear of writing long. Real long. As in writing a book.

I have no problem cranking out thousands of inches of DVD reviews a month, or filing 50 of more items on any of my blogs -- DVD Spin Doctor, Download Movies 101 and here on Write for Blogs. Add it all together and there’s enough copy to fill a book every six months or so.

If you’re working with a niche blog and posting daily, you are in a sense writing an ebook, organized by chapters (categories). The text is edited and clean (right?).

At some point, it’s wise to take a good look at what you have and at least consider putting it all together in book/PDF form. This is simple repurposing. Many top-shelf journalists have gone that route in print, sometimes quite profitably. Ebooks probably won’t sell many copies unless they’re laser-focused and somehow connected to making money, but they’re quite valuable for marketing your blog -- and yourself.

If you’re good and lucky and aggressive, you might land a traditional print book deal. Here are just a few of the people who’ve done it: Gina Trapani, Wil Wheaton, Penelope Trunk, Seth Godin, the guys at Hot Chicks With Douchebags, Julie Powell and Shauna James.

Check back around the holidays and see if I’ve followed my own advice with Writing for Blogs.

Here are a couple of decent posts about getting that book deal:
How to get a six-figure book deal from your blog
How to get a book deal with your blog

The glass bead game

2007-06-23T00:49:00.000-07:00

This quote about writing gets around, apparently, but it's shiny and new to me. Wonderfully said:

“I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountaintop, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten --- happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.”

-- Brenda Ueland

Amazon vs. the review community

2007-06-21T00:13:00.000-07:00

There's a riot going on over at Amazon.

Longtime volunteer reviewers were astonished when the online retailer this month rolled out a new layout for books, CDs, DVDs and the like. The result is less clutter, which Amazon has been fighting even as it filled the pages with more ads, product "suggestions" and assorted dingo balls. The longtime system of new reviews appearing in full under a couple of spotlighted reviews is gone. In its place are three "most popular" reviews, with a narrow strip of "most recent" review blurbs to the right.

(Update: Great news. Amazon has returned to the old format. Smart guys and gals over there.)

The reviewers were talking boycott because the scheme clearly favors older reviews that have had time to build up support (readers' votes as helpful). The writers point out that readers are unlikely to venture off the home page for the item, thus having no opportunity or motivation to vote for newer reviews. I learned after decades in print publications and Web sites that pretty much no one likes redesigns at first. This one, however, goes beyond the shock of the new.

I've been writing about books, music and videos on Amazon since the mid-'90s. I am ranked No. 1,139 (fairly high), have submitted 238 reviews and received 1,509 reader votes. My main area, DVDs, has been especially screwed over by this change because titles often are upgraded.

As an example, here's what happened to my last review, about Fox's new double-disc of "The Hustler." This upgraded DVD replaced a single disc released in 2002. So instead of my release-day comments on this new DVD -- the exact product they are selling on the page -- the main review is of the 2002 disc. Unless a reader happens to note the date on this 5-year-old review, he or she is getting detailed but bogus information on the product. The new review of the new project is dumped off to the right side as a blurb.

The forum for Amazon reviewers is en fuego, as you'd expect.

Here's a sample, from "Schtinky":

I just posted a review and watched it go into the junk pile at the side of the screen. I'm not so sure I'll continue reviewing if this "new" format sticks. What, exactly, are the chances of backing out of this fiasco? Coke did it, Amazon can too.

"Mirasreviews" is one of the calmer protesters:

If all customers were diligent seekers of the best, latest, and greatest variety of reviews, we would have no problems. But most customers just take what they see on the main page. Those are our readers. Amazon needs to make features for how customers really behave, not for how we would like them to behave.

This affects customers as well, who in the long run I believe are the biggest losers. (Take another look at my example.) My immediate reaction upon seeing the change was, It's over.

I've put too much energy into posting uncompensated reviews over the years to expend any more on fighting city hall. I wish the activist reviewers the best, and if they are successful in getting this fixed maybe I'll be back. Like they say here in Hollywood, What's my motivation?

Disclosure: I run Amazon ads and contextual links on my DVD blog.

The sweet spot: Writing well = traffic

2007-06-20T01:17:00.000-07:00

Glen Stansberry of the blog LifeDev unveils a major traffic-building technique: become a better writer. I'm hoping that's true (and that Glen one day learns how to spell Glenn!).

Here's a snippet from his post on ProBlogger:

Good writers have an advantage on traffic because their readers come back every time they write a new article. Many blog readers are also bloggers, so they in turn link to the posts. The more links a blog has, the higher its posts rank in search engines, and the blog receives even more traffic. Not only that, compelling content gives readers a reason to submit to social sites like Digg and Del.icio.us ...

There are 38 responses to the piece. Here was mine, deep in the thread.

Outstanding post. People with a desire to write should put themselves in a position where they have to write every day. Blogs are great for that. No writer is excited every time he sits at the keyboard; in fact, most pros do not enjoy writing. A daily post to a blog is an enforced discipline that will work wonders for anyone’s skills. Glad to see you included grammar. Knowing how the language works is powerful stuff.

"I hate writing; I love having written." -- Dorothy Parker (pictured)

How to write when you can't write

2007-06-17T23:22:00.000-07:00

I don't believe in writer's block. Writing can come easy or hard, but if you have the chops, it always comes.

Think about newspaper editors and copyeditors, often working under intense pressure -- some studies of stress rank those jobs up there with air-traffic controlling. When it's time to roll the presses, editors always find a way to write that impossible headline. (With minute-to-minute online newspapering, the stakes are even higher.)

Writing is a craft as well as an art. If you know a basic set of tricks and prompts, you'll always be able to bypass mental barriers.

Here are some ways to get the words flowing:

1. Think back on successful techniques or devices you've used in the past. One of them might jump-start your current project. Stealing from yourself is not stealing, just recycling.

2. Somewhere there's a rule against beginning a story with a quote. Nonsense. It's just that quotes from real life usually aren't strong enough to grab the reader right away. If you do have one in your notes that works, run with it. But don't turn to Bartlett's, that's hack 99% of the time. Unless it's Satchell Paige.

3. Take a nap, go for a hike, call up a friend, listen to some music. If you don't have to meet an immediate deadline, why struggle? Let your subconscious earn its pay. It's a great way of sneaking up on a solution. This, of course, can work against you (see:procrastination).

4. Start writing in the middle. Type in the quotes and the background info, anything to get words flowing. At some point, it'll feel right to move to the top and do the glamour work.

5. Tell your friends about the material. I do this all the time before writing DVD reviews. I hear myself revising the material as I talk with different people. Everyone does this while telling a story over and over; the trick is to pay attention and exploit the synergy. Wish I'd learned this one a lot sooner.

6. Pick up a good book in the style of writing you're using. Examine the pacing, the structure, whatever you're struggling with.

7. When all else fails, grind. Pound out the words and then rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. When writing comes effortlessly, it's a gift. We don't get presents every day.

True or false: Traffic is good

2007-06-16T00:36:00.000-07:00

Did you know there's a new social media site that's fun, quick and sure to bring in the traffic?

Truemors operates off the basic form of "Did you know that ... (plug in a rumor or fact)" with a link to your content. A cross between Digg, Twitter, that sort of thing. Low-fi, built for about 12 grand on WordPress.

My Truemor item today was "Did you know one of Jack Nicholson's best movies is almost unknown in the United States?" The other day, "Did you know the year's worst-reviewed movie is the week's best-selling DVD?" They worked pretty well, especially the Nicholson item.

Decades of writing blurbs makes this a drive-by for me, a minute or less of work. Then I can stare at the traffic stats for a while, effectively putting off less-pleasant tasks.

Read more about the project in this interview with Truemors founder Guy Kawasaki.

Blog posts: How long is too long?

2007-06-14T14:48:00.000-07:00

Darren Rowse, the guy who writes ProBlogger, takes a reader question today, basically, "Is it better to mix up the length of posts or should I just keep them short."

His short answer:

I believe a blog can be successful based around both short and long posts. ... I think the key is to develop a rhythm in the style and focus of your blogging so that readers come expecting to get what you offer them.

Rowse gives some advice I've seen several times: If your blog is relatively new, you want some cornerstone articles that give people robust, useful content -- and a good idea of where you're coming from. In list form if possible. Then link to those articles as an ongoing reader resource. Here's another good take on initial posts from Dosh Dosh, whose blog/email/RSS I highly recommend for anyone wanting to make money writing on the Web.

My first post on my first blog, DVD Spin Doctor, was a roundup of the year's top 10 DVDs. Good content for that blog, mostly in list form. My new readers could tell immediately if we were a match.

The comment string on Darren's article about the length of posts is a must-read as well. I agree with the gent who says don't worry about it -- the key concerns are the quality of the post's headline and lead (first sentences). The way it's always been in publishing. See you shortly.

Hottest headlines for the Digg boys

2007-06-12T21:06:00.000-07:00

Writing headlines that succeed in the traditional sense is tough enough -- they have to make sense, attract readers and index the content. With blogs, you also have to accommodate the search engines, headline-only links and RSS. Now, another challenge comes from the wildly successful social media sites that point to content elsewhere.

Anyone who's been "dugg" on one of these SM sites can tell you of the dramatic traffic spikes. The name of the game is getting the headline and blurb to generate momentum for your story once it's swept up in the flood of content. Don't be afraid to juice up either one when submitting stories to SM sites.

The target audience on Digg consists mostly of young tech-savvy males. That's why cheesecake photos shoot to the top of the Digg list while far better content just sits there. Tough room. On Netscape and Reddit the readers trend older but a gotcha head works for them, too.

I've found that customizing headlines for Digg can really pay off. When reviewing the "Casino Royale" DVD I used a straightforward label head on my review, and created another post just for the SM sites: "Bond girl face-off: Who was the hottest?" Not false advertising, just salesmanship -- the DVD asks the Bond girls to pick a No. 1 from their ranks.

Question heads seem to do well on the SM sites. Hot girls, definitely. My head wouldn't have the same pop if it revealed the result, as in "Honor Blackmun named top Bond girl." In any event, the traffic poured in big-time.

I brought this up so I could show off my latest social-media-friendly head, which pointed to a review of John Wayne's "True Grit" DVD. The video extras talked about how that great young actress in the film gave the Duke a hard time onscreen and off. She was from Sherman Oaks.

My social-media head: "John Wayne's butt kicked by Valley girl." Worked like free whisky in a forlorn saloon.

Blogs and reporters: making news

2007-06-09T12:31:00.000-07:00

I started out in blogs a couple of years back, building a trio of them at the Hollywood Reporter. The first was Risky Business, written by our star film reporter, Anne Thompson.

(The others were Reel Pop and Past Deadline. They're still rocking.)

Anne embraced the medium and Risky soon became one of the top Hollywood blogs. She appeared at my office door every 15 minutes wanting to try this and do that. One of those things was live blogging from news events, which wasn't done much in big media at the time. She went to San Diego's ComicCon convention and posted all weekend long, with live photography.

Anne's blogging over at Variety these days, via Thompson on Hollywood. She just did an item about her experiences in live blogging and how blogs can serve reporters when the big stories break.

I have long believed that live-blogging is where media coverage is going. It's about posting a story online as fast as possible, then adding reporting, context, analysis. ... More and more, breaking news goes up on blogs and online immediately. There is no room for lag time. Bragging rights go to the online first break.

How to wake up to better writing

2007-06-07T20:57:00.000-07:00

As I write this, it's 8:57 p.m.

Great writers write in the mornings. This is one habit successful authors cite over and over. Ernest Hemingway, for example, would awaken early, shake off the hangover and head for the cabin in the back of his Key West home. He wrote, standing up and facing north, until noon. Then it was quitting time, off for some deep-sea fishing or a favored seat at Joe's Bar.

A lot of writers I know dream about their latest projects, sometimes waking up to good ideas. I've come up with content in my sleep many times. Especially leads, the first few sentences of a story. When I have to pound out some copy, often the heavy lifting comes at night -- basic story structure, addition of quotes and such -- but I almost never send the text for publication before giving it the first-thing-in-the-morning rewrite.

Nature gives you a creative sweet spot. Use it. As a bonus, there's the coffee to fuel all that brilliance.

Social media and the tale of '300'

2007-06-05T11:25:00.000-07:00

Everyone wants exposure for their blogs via "social media." Being seriously Dugg on the news-sharing site Digg is quite the rush, for example.

My DVD blog was among the first to report on the boxoffice for "300" the morning after the film debuted. Before long, my post become ground zero for Diggers' comments on that wildly anticipated film. Once the "300" story link made the top 10 lists (in entertainment, then the home page), the traffic meter went into overdrive and kept spinning for days. (I still get page views off all the comments attached to that piece.)

Digg's tech-savvy audience appears to be "blind" to Google links, but I did sell quite a few Spartan-related books and DVDs via contextual links to Amazon.

Heady stuff, but hard to repeat. Bloggers often try chumming traffic with "Digg bait" -- top 10 lists of "hottest" this or that are always, well, hot -- but content seems to work out best when you just worry about pleasing your audience.

Digg is always cited when "social media" comes up, same with My Space, but the definition of SM always seems a bit fuzzy. (Same with Web 2.0, but let's skip that one for now.) Does social media mean user-generated content? So is Amazon a giant social media site in addition to a retail giant?

Joe Marchese, an Online Spin writer over on Media Post, offers this in today's piece about "Defining Social Media":

What many of us are defining as social media today are actually just technologies specifically architected to facilitate people’s natural tendencies to seek out, share and discuss media content. Think about it. How is MySpace (a) social medium? I would certainly say that MySpace is the largest and most influential social media platform of our time, but it doesn’t create media (at least not for most of it). ...

Eventually all media will be social media in the most literal definition. This will have serious implications for media companies and advertisers alike, so it is important that we are not dismissing social media as the user-generated portion of the Internet.

Blog links: Getting it right

2007-06-02T18:25:00.001-07:00

Andy Beard needs a nap. The guy is seriously cranky -- and ready to take on all blog writers who misuse links and screw up Web protocol.

Andy writes a solid blog about niche marketing, covering search engines, affiliate ads, social media and the like. I've been getting his email for a few weeks and recommend it.

Here's a good point from his lengthy post about bad links:

I frequently see things like "Andy Beard wrote a great post on XYZ" and the link would be with my name to the home page. That link might be useful for a couple of days, but then the blog post will be buried in my archives. Permalinks on blogs are there for a reason… use them!

Doing the dooce

2007-06-01T14:46:00.000-07:00

Whenever I mention blogging to people over, say, 40, the reaction often boils down to: "Why would I want to read some kid go on about his boring life?" Blogging has a rotten rep in the halls of the ancients, no doubt about it.

With something like 40 million blogs out there, the universe encompasses all sorts of weighty content: business, politics, science, culture. The dull-but-important are duly represented.

True, there are millions of people who burn their bandwidth blogging about the everyday -- their families, friends, dogs. The text inevitably accompanied by baby pictures and vacation shots. Grandma's a big fan. Who can blame her.

But here's the thing. Some of those folks actually pull it off. Some of these downhome sites are terrific. No doubt you have a few favorites.

Right now, I'd rather be reading the collected works of one Heather B. Armstrong than 99% of the stuff on Huffington. She's a web designer turned blogger, recently moved to Salt Lake City. Her site is deliciously written and adorned with some choice everyday photography. And she's a real smartass.

Step this way for dooce.com

(thanks to Marla for the tip)

Quality time with Strunk and White

2007-05-31T21:30:00.000-07:00

"The Elements of Style" dates back to 1918. Its authors, William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, left this life knowing nothing of the Internet. The book's tone is often preachy and a lot of its advice is outdated. It is the only book on the English language anyone really needs.

"The little book," or "Strunk and White," has come through four editions. White ("Charlotte's Web") was one of Strunk's students and a big fan of the professor's privately published handbook, so he made a deal to recast it for the public in the late 1950s. This, basically, is the version that all writers and English majors know. The last revision was done in 1999 by an anonymous editor who took out all the non-PC stuff.

I've always kept a copy near my desk, rereading it every year or so (it takes maybe an hour and a half). When my daughter first took to writing, I bought her a copy. As a journalism professor, I made the kids read it before I started cleaning up their spelling, grammar, usage.

You have to pick and choose what applies these days. I wouldn't advise bloggers to heed these rules: "Place yourself in the background. Do not affect a breezy manner. Prefer the standard to the offbeat." But all of us need to remember these: "Write in a way that comes naturally. Use figures of speech sparingly. Revise and rewrite."

Observing this golden rule -- "Do not overwrite" -- I am outta here. Happy reading.

Speaking of SEO for blogs ...

2007-05-30T14:10:00.000-07:00

This gem came in the morning email, courtesy of Aaron Goldman of Search Insider. It's a quote from the company's recent search summit, down in my home state of Florida.

SEO Demystified

"SEO is not doing one big thing right; it's doing two hundred little things right." -- Dan Perry, Cars.com.

For any of the marketers out there still thinking that there's a silver bullet for SEO, Dan told you to think again. And for those caught up in the SEO Rocket Science Debate of whether SEO is an art or a science or neither, one thing is certain -- it ain't easy to identify, prioritize, and execute two hundred things, no matter how little they are.

Search Insider is one of the better SEO-oriented sites. I recommend their newsletter for anyone interested in growing a blog, but as with any of these insider-tips services, you should give them a Hotmail or Yahoo email address to divert spam. Once you trust them, you can always change to your main account.

Good blog headlines make robots happy

2007-05-29T23:05:00.000-07:00

It's tough enough writing good headlines for readers. With blogs, you also need to be concerned about writing for search engines, a tough audience.

Basic newspaper headline style eliminates a lot of search-engine hostile words, such as "the" and "a" and "an." You'll probably find it easy to write heads that way after a lifetime of reading them. Cutting out the small words leaves more room for keywords, which tell the search bots a lot about your blog entry and your blog.

When possible, write blog headlines using one or two of the search terms targeted in your site SEO (search engine optimization) scheme. (You do have a plan, right?) Never let SEO get in the way of writing a headline that makes sense to humans, of course. The readers come first. Copyblogger explores the pros and cons in the post "Do keywords in post titles really matter?"

You should, of course, be using the site's targeted keywords whenever writing for blogs. Never hurts to boldface them, either.

Never play Scrabble with a headline writer

2007-05-29T21:22:00.000-07:00

Most of what you need to know about headlines can be found in this wry classic: "Man Bites Dog." Let's break it down.

"Man Bites Dog" is in the basic subject-verb-object form you learned in 9th grade English. It's always the easiest to understand. The construction is active and immediate, unlike the boring "Dog Bitten By Man." Sometimes the passive tense works better, usually when the person or thing doing the action is less important than what was done. As in, "Headless Body Found in Topless Bar." (Who found the head? Who cares.)

There are many other forms of heads (the printed ones, not the ones rolling around in bars). Sometimes a label headline works: "10 Ways to Bite a Dog" (a blog basic). Sometimes you forget the verb and jam: "Lions and TIgers and Bears, Oh My!" Then there are the cliches, such as the lazy-ass "said head": "President Said to Consider New Career." Yuck.

Headlines generally are written in what is called "present for past." Something was said a day ago, but you write it as "Jones says" not "Jones said."

The colon can be really helpful in cutting down words (tight space being the bane of copyeditors, who are really good at Scrabble). Like so -- "Best Headline Ever: 'Man Bites Dog' " (you've lost "written" and made it fit.) Or as shorthand attribution, as in "Ford to City: Drop Dead." I like dashes, they're dramatic when you want some punch -- got it?

The best advice I ever heard about news headline content is to pretend you're on a train leaving the station and have to tell a friend on the platform something urgent. You'll get right to the point.

It's simple, really

2007-05-27T19:52:00.000-07:00

There are quite a few ways pros can spot amateur writers. Spelling is not such a tell anymore, since software programs started doing the proofing for us. Anyone smart enough to blog is smart enough to run the spellcheck, right? But the checker usually passes over legitimate words, regardless of whether the usage is right.

Misspelling it's/its is a classic. I once worked for a hardass who promised copyeditors they would be canned on the spot for confusing it's/its. He was a weird guy, but no one ever got it wrong after hearing that speech. Since then, anyone I hired for an editing job heard about that editor and his rule. That worked, too.

Remember it this way: Its is the possessive. So the "it" keeps the "s" close, being possessive (no giggling please). It's, the contraction, is the other one. I always stop a nano-second and read that word back to myself, as "It is." No matter how long you've been writing, no matter how well you know the rule, your fingers are itching to get it wrong.