Project Page:  Crafting a Meaningful Blog

Between the start of October 2010 and then end of March 2011 I am running a project on my blog, I'm gearing all my writing to a theme - Crafting Meaningful Blogs.  I have been trying to learn about blogging to further my business interests but found, increasingly, that I was interested in how blogs worked, how the Internet works, how monetization of blogs, design of blogs, promotion of blogs (SEO, social media, and the like) all work. 

I'm a nuts and bolts kind of guy - when I got interested in computers, I asked my mother-in-law's boyfriend for all his old computers and took them apart.  When I'm out in nature, I watch longer, I study specific aspects.  I was one of those guys who got straight As in Math at school and loved science and sucked at everything else.  I like details, I like understanding. 

And in the midst of all that, as I visit many blogs looking at what they say, how they operate, how they treat their readers, it started to occur to me - so much of what people write is rather shallow.  Worse, some blogs are basically using almost manipulative tactics to get you to read, join, click or buy. 

And then, on the flip side there are blogs by really amazing organizations or individuals that you just can't find, or can't read in Firefox or something like that.  As someone with a deep interest in nature, I'm often really disappointed by the websites/blogs of conservation NGOs and research orgs.  They have the depth, but lack everything else. 

So, my project is simply an exploration in finding that middle path - how do you blog, put your blog out there and maybe (if you want) make money from it, without becoming a part of the noise. 

This may change while I work through this project, but here are the things that I think would be a focus for me:

  1. Integrity - If you use a content generating service, why on earth do you have a blog.  To make money???? Why on earth is anyone going to spend their money (or their mindless clicks) on your ads when the content you have isn't even your own.  My take on it is that making money with a blog is really hard and usually takes an extra helping of integrity. Money aside - are you being real?
  2. Design - You don't need to be a hotshot, but please don't let the thing bleep and blink at me! [ Unless you can do this].  I'm not an expert, but I have a lot to say about how to tweak at your CSS or HTML to make things look at least good.  There are also those in the CSS/design crowd who have blogs/websites that are so amazing that you could print it out, stick it in a picture frame and hang it on the wall.  But you don't read anything they have to say.  Being artistic is okay if all you want to do is display art.  If you want people to read, it is actually a whole lot easier to attain, and even I can help you towards that. 
  3. Content - You need some stuff that is somewhat cool to read.  It goes like this - someone friends me on Blogcatalog and I think, "how nice, I own them a visit to their blog". Open it in the browser - bit slow, I make coffee or tweet about the weather, come back.  Ah, it has a minor infection of internet-rash (widgets, animations, stuff), but I manage to find their blog post, wrapped around some big block of Adsense.  Ah, got it, lets read - I owe it to them, they are m-y--f-r-i-e-n-d, right? 
    I'm thinking I should leave a nice comment - but this post just isn't up my alley, on to the next, the next, and five posts down I read a title that I can in some way relate to, leave a comment just to show that I was nice enough to honor their request to visit.
    Thank goodness I got it over and done with. 
    Of course, I don't do that any more - usually I just close the tab, and tweet about the weather again. 
    Maybe becoming the next hotshot is rocket science, but you can certainly do better than the example above.  If you blog, write something that some other human might actually want to read.
  4. Promotion - You are awesome, but you are so cool you couldn't go and comment on other blogs, tweet, make friends share your stuff, and promote your content.  You are so Noble, all alone under your rock.  I bet you want someone to read your stuff - and I have some significant thoughts on how to do this in a way that gains you readers but still keeps you from being an, excuse the word (it's my blog) an asshole. 
  5. SEO - Kind of the same as above, but for someone like me, I like SEO - it feels like science, I can measure stuff and make evaluations and think to myself that I am doing something useful.  Actually SEO really is mainly to do with promotion and content, save your math skills for your programming your blog back-end. 
  6. Contribution - I'll talk a lot about this, and hope you'll chime in.  I said "meaningful blog", and if meaning is what you are after, this is the side of things that you will be all excited about.  But, heavy-halo-Noble one, who knows that you wrote a five page analysis of the icecaps, and actually took a rubber ducky around breaking ice to make your analysis when nobody is reading your blog? 
    Well, you already know what I'm going to say - you need good SEO, promotion and content to get the job done.  I have a lot of local (Namibian) NGOs in mind with this.  In that way, I hope that one of my contributions from the project is actually that I can feed some of what comes out of it back into these organizations that I have come to learn from and respect over the years. 
  7. And money - I can tell you some of what doesn't work, I see nothing wrong with making money from your blog if you are doing it in all the right ways.  We'll talk a bit about things like conversion rate and various ways to monetize your website/blog. 

Did I miss something - just let me know. 

Share

Are you keen on the project - and do you want to contribute.  One simple way is to promote it - with a simple Tweet (or your favorite social media service on the web), or to put a link to it on your blog. 

Share

I'm going to use the twitter hashtag "#blog_craft" to promote my own posts on twitter, feel free to use it as well to promote either posts from here, ideas you have about meaningful blogs or anybody else's posts that you think may be useful to the conversation on Twitter. 

If you do decided to link to it from your website, please link to this page - I plan to keep this up long after I have done with the project.

Contribute

There are a number of ways that you can contribute - some of them are super easy. 

  • If you feel the project is fun, worthwhile or interesting, or if you think something of what I have said is interesting, please share it through social media and bookmarking sites. 
  • Comment - let me know what you think, give me some new ideas, let me know how you feel about what I say.  If you really think the post is nice and you just want to say 'nice post', hey, if you mean it, say it.  If you think it sucks, well please give me some more detail, and if you think I suck big time, please back up your comments with some good info so that we can all learn from it. 
    That is a great deal of the point of doing this - I want to learn as much as you do. 
  • Guest post - do some ideas just come flying into your head when you think of this stuff?  Dying to share it with me and the readers of this blog?  Please write me a guest post.  I'll screen it, no profanity (or carefully used anyway), no porn (dang), no violence, and nothing about your grandmother's peaches.  If it is on topic and well written, it is good for me. I write everything in HTML so if you already have it all in <p> and <ul> tags, that is super, if not then please just send me a plain text file (ending with .txt, .html or .htm).  For images, please send me the exact license agreement and who to credit.  Please don't send more than one image per post unless you have a seriously good reason and crop images down to a max of 500px width. 
  • Post on your blog and link back to here - let me know what you want to post, I'll drop by and have a look afterwords.  If you are super cool, you could even send me a early version for me to edit or comment on ahead of time. 
  • Post on your blog without a link back - same as above, but without linking back to the project - basically - I hope that the project stimulates some discussion and if it gets bigger than my humble blog and this little project, give it wings…

Contents

 

Thank you for visiting

This is my personal blog, but I try to write things that you may find interesting or useful.  I'm currently working on a six month long project digging into the elements that make a blog meaningful. For more on that, visit MEANINGFUL BLOG PROJECT page. 

You may want to know a little about me personally, so start at the about page. 

If you find some of what is here interesting, or you want to follow the project through, why not subscribe.

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