MamaBlogga

I received an email the other day with some very good questions and observations about blogging. Because I thought other people probably had the same questions, and because I wanted to get more than just my take on the answers (and also because my email reply bounced!), I’ve decided to respond here.

I need to post more.

Not necessarily. Sometimes posting frequently can help to maintain your audience—but sometimes posting frequently overwhelms them or turns them off. It’s better to have a regular posting schedule, and in general I’d advise a minimum of one post a week.

I have concerns about my blog causing issues in my professional life and I feel this detracts from the quality of my posts.

I’ll be honest—this has happened before. Being dismissed from your job because of your blog is called being “Dooced” because that’s what happened to the author of the popular blog Dooce, Heather B. Armstrong.

However, this happens so infrequently that it’s almost always news when it does happen. Generally, the only things that you need to be worried about blogging about in respect to keeping your job would be blogging about your work itself, including your coworkers. Don’t do that, even anonymously.

If the concern is about your personal brand or reputation, that’s a little different. Are potential clients going to be repulsed because you have a mommy blog or a religious blog or a political blog? Perhaps. And perhaps each of us should ponder whether the people that turn away from us for having a blog—or having opinions and beliefs—are the kind of people we need to do business with anyway.

I want my posts to be meaningful. I don’t just want to talk for the sake of talking. How do I do this and keep an audience?

I’m going to assume you’re not saying that I’m talking just for the sake of talking (although this month, since I’m trying to do NaBloPoMo, it probably seems that way!) .

I don’t think that meaningful posts and keeping an audience should be or even are mutually exclusive. Usually, the only people that I care to read about what their kids are doing ad nauseam are people who I know in real life. Most of the blogs I subscribe to I read because the author at least occasionally makes meaningful posts. Those posts are what keeps me coming back—and I really hope that MamaBlogga readers get something out of my more meaningful posts, too.

I tend to think pretty deeply and over-analyze my writing. How do I keep this from holding me back?

Thinking deeply shouldn’t keep you from writing (unless you get so lost in thought that you can’t find your way back )—but over-analyzing your writing can stop you dead in your tracks whether you’re writing a novel, a blog post, or an email.

Almost all writers have to make a conscious effort to ignore the harsh inner critic while writing (sometimes outlining a post or an argument can help with that, too). The inner critic can be useful when we go back and edit—but not if you’re so hard on yourself that you end up deleting everything.

Is there a place on the web for this kind of meaningful content?

I hope so! While MamaBlogga chronicles the adventures of raising my family, its real “purpose” is to help other moms (and me) find the fulfillment that society tries to tell us being “just a mom” can’t give.

In the end, though, it’s the readers that decide whether or not it’s meaningful, of course. There’s room on the web for everyone to voice their thoughts, though. Even if you’re your only reader, I think you accomplish something by publishing your thoughts..

How do you get people interested enough to comment and why should they care about what I have to say?

I’ve written about encouraging comments before, and I still think one of the best ways to encourage comments is to end with a question—usually “what do you think?” or “how have you seen this in your life?”.

Another great idea I read about a long time ago (so long ago I can’t remember when don’t remember who said it!) is to not “finish” your post. The reasoning behind this advice was that if you tie up all the loose ends and present a neat, tidy package of an essay, there’s no room left for your readers to contribute. But if you don’t have all the answers, your readers have a role to play in your blog, and it becomes less of a soap box and more of a collaborative community.

As for why your readers should care—again, in the end, that’s up to them. I like to believe (and would be happy if anyone would like to validate this!) that people subscribe to “meaningful” blogs because something they’ve read resonates with them, and they’d like to see more of that.

And as with every time I talk about “success” for a blog, it’s important to note, too, that blogging success means different things to different people&mdahs;and we each have to set our own blogging goals to define our own success. Some goals, such as reaching people’s hearts, are not as easy to measure (but if I’ve done that before and you’d like to speak up now, please do!).

I know we have some great bloggers among us, and I’d love to hear any thoughts on anything above. What makes you subscribe to a blog? What makes a blog “meaningful”? Can a blog be meaningful and successful? Why does it seem that people don’t comment on “meaningful” blogs as much?

Some of you know that in my “day” job, I’m an Internet marketing blogger. Occasionally, I come across something cool enough in my line of work that I have to share it with you here.

Last week, a Google-watching blog, Google Blogoscoped, reported this week on features coming up for Blogger—and a lot of them are pretty cool. Like other beta features (a search box, future posting), they’re currently available on the Blogger Draft site.

The latest features, ranked by order of coolness (IMO):

• Comments form embeddedable below the post. Can you believe it? Soon (well, now if you want to switch to Blogger Draft) even Blogger blogs can have the comment form right on the post page, rather than a “Post a comment” link. Google Blogoscoped explains how to get this feature on Blogger Draft now: go “to Settings -> Comments, and in the Comment Form Placement segment check the “Embedded below post” box. Click Save Settings to approve.”
• Integration into Google Webmaster tools. A link in the Dashboard takes you to Google Webmaster Tools. Now, you may not be familiar with Webmaster Tools (and if not, let me know and I’ll be happy to write about it!). The short story here is that Webmaster Tools helps you to interface directly with Google to see any problems with your site in the search engine index, to see keywords people use to find your blog in search results, and to see their click data (though I still recommend using a separate analytics package like Google Analytics). If you don’t want your blog listed in search engines, this isn’t really as useful .
• Exporting and importing your blog. Not only will this make it WAY easy to backup your blog regularly, it may also make it easy to move to a new blogging platform if you so choose. Posts, comments, etc. will be downloadable as XML files. This is under Settings, as Import blog and Export blog.
• A new post editor with new image handling. Google says, “When you upload an image to the new post editor it will appear as a thumbnail in the image dialog box. That way, you can upload several images at once, and then add them into your post at your convenience.” Very nice.
• Star ratings. Personally, I don’t find this one as interesting, but it could definitely be useful for getting feedback from your readers on what kinds of posts they like. It adds a five-star rating system and readers can rate the post. You can then see the average rating for each of your posts. This feature is under Layouts, at Edit at your Blog Posts element. Select the Show Star Ratings box.

If you don’t want to switch between regular Blogger and Draft, you can now also make the Blogger Draft site your default dashboard. But if you don’t mind switching, you can make these changes in Blogger Draft now and still post from regular Blogger with the changes intact.

If you always want to stay on top of new beta-stage features for Blogger, head on over to the Blogger in Draft blog and you’ll always be in the know!

Do you read a blog that you love to see their posts about gardening, but could care less about their posts about dog grooming? You (or the blogger) can remedy this problem by offering category feeds, or RSS feeds (What’s RSS again?) of individual categories on a blog.

Most of us already know how to use categories on blogs—we use them on our own blogs to break the content up by major subject; we use them on other people’s blogs to learn what they write about, to navigate their content and to find posts on a particular subject.

The general convention for most blogs is “Categories” are the larger topics of the blog and “Tags” cover narrower topics or subtopics. Blogger, of course, just has to be different and use “Labels,” which usually seem to function as both categories and tags, since they don’t give you any other option.

By creating category feeds, you allow your readers to pick and choose which topics they want to read about. This could be good for you—you get to target readers who are most interested in this area of your blog, while not risking losing them because of the stuff that they’re not so interested in.

Creating Label Feeds in Blogger

from Blogger Design

To create a label-based feed on Blogger, the feed address is:

http://YOURBLOGNAMEHERE.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/YOURLABELNAME

Obviously, you’ll have to change the blog name and the label name to match what your blog. This will give you the address of an RSS or Atom feed that you can offer to your readers. Note that label and category feeds can be burned with FeedBurner.

Creating Category Feeds in WordPress.com and WordPress.org

For once, it doesn’t make any difference whether you’re using a self-hosted or WP-hosted flavor of WordPress. To create a category-based feed with WordPress, the feed address is:
http://YOURBLOGADDRESS.com/CATEGORY/feed/ (or http://YOURBLOGADDRESS.wordpress.com/).

You’ll have to change the blog address and the category name, but appending /feed/ to any category page (or, incidentally, any tag page, too) automatically gives the address for the RSS feed. (Want Atom? add /feed/atom/ instead.)

Once again, category feeds can be burned with FeedBurner.

Creating Category Feeds in TypePad

As I generally like to say, TypePad, being evil, makes this difficult—or at least relatively more difficult than the other standard platforms. However, if you can create a new index template as part of an Advanced Template Set (does that cost extra?), then you can create a category feed.

The full instructions are available from Six Apart, and require you to cut . . . and paste (can you believe it?!) and change the listed category to whichever category you’re looking for. Follow the directions carefully, and your feed will be at the address you specified when you created the new index template.

And, one more time, category feeds can be burned with FeedBurner.

Conclusion
This is, of course, an individual choice—but if your readers (or you as a reader) really want to, they can create these feeds (and even burn them in FeedBurner) themselves.

Please note that it would be wrong to “steal” another blog’s category feed and burn it, and especially to promote your burned version of the feed elsewhere on the Internet. I don’t think that any of you gentle readers would do that, but you never know what the Internets might bring in here.

More Works-for-me Wednesday

Last week, I gave some advice on RSS to mom bloggers. In that post, I advocated full RSS feeds as opposed to partial or summary feeds. I wasn’t trying to be less than candid nor was I trying to assume the attitude of “I’ve thought about it with my superior Internet marketing intellect, so don’t you worry your pretty little heads.” I was just trying to be brief, and in doing so I gave that topic short shrift (go figure).

So, let’s take a look at the myths about partial and full feeds. Yes, there are advantages to both—but I truly do feel, as I said before, that the advantages of full feeds outweigh the disadvantages.

The scarier myths about partial feeds
Partial feeds keep my content from getting stolen
If people really want to steal your content, they will. Scrapers don’t just attack RSS feeds. It may be slightly easier for them to get your content to come to them with RSS, but it’s also not hard to visit your site and cut and paste. Scrapers attack feeds, sites and even search engine results pages. When Lorelle on WordPress addressed the issue of stolen content, she said:

I didn’t say “if” someone steals your content. That was on purpose. With the glut of information on the Internet, it’s now a matter of “when” not “if”.

The first step in learning about what you can do when someone steals your content is to know that it will happen, so the more prepared and informed you are, the better your chances of prevention and having a plan in place when they steal. (read more from Lorelle)

Yes, it’s scary and dark, but the truth is that anything that is published—online or offline—can be stolen. Scrapers can use partial feeds just as easily—only then, it might be considered “fair use”—and, therefore, much harder to stop with the force of law.

There’s nothing you can do if your blog’s content gets stolen
There are always recourses; stealing blog content is against the law. First, put copyright notices on your blog and your feed. Next, look at Lorelle on WordPress’s post on what to do when someone steals your content. You can invoke the power of the law without a lawyer.

Also, for both of these issues, there are a few things that you can do to try to prevent and catch content theft (via). You do have to be vigilant, but I’d recommend checking up on this issue whether you publish full feeds or none at all.

Less scary myths, but things that bloggers must take into consideration
Partial feeds make people click through to see my site
We all want people to see our beauteous sites. We work hard on their design. FeedBurner CEO Rick Klau said a few weeks ago, “We’ve seen no evidence that excerpts on their own drive higher clickthroughs.” Speaking for myself, I’m far more likely to click on a well-written full post (whether to see or make comments, or to blog about it myself) than the first 40 words. For most bloggers, the first 40-100 words aren’t a hook; they’re a warm up.

It’s not asking that much for people to click through to read my post.
In marketing, we have to treasure every opportunity someone gives us to contact them. It’s illegal for us to “cold e-mail” people who haven’t given us their permission to contact them. People are very reluctant to hand over their private information—even just an e-mail address. Every subscription—RSS, e-mail or otherwise—must be regarded as hard-won. Somehow, you’ve instilled enough trust in that person that they’re willing to see more of what you have to say. You have to be careful how and when you ask them to do more.

Asking one of your precious subscribers to click through every time you post may seem like a small thing to you, but to me, a blog reader, it is not. I read more than 100 blogs every day; Google Reader tells me I’ve read nearly 4000 posts in the last 30 days. What if everyone expected me to click through to read their stories?

In the same post I just referenced, Rick Klau put it this way:

As people subscribe to feeds, they subscribe to more feeds. And that means they’re consuming more content, which means that each click out of the feed reader is taking the reader away from more content. In other words, feed reading is consumption oriented, not transactionally focused.

When someone subscribes to your blog, they are saying, “I like what you talk about; I’d like to read it at my convenience.” My convenience, personally, is reading it at the same time and the same place that I read all my other blogs. I’m not reading only what you have to say; I wouldn’t bother with a feed reader if I only wanted to know when you’ve posted something new.

It’s not “just one click” to a reader. To me as a reader, “one click” is the button I clicked when I subscribed to your blog. To ask me to click dozens, hundreds or thousands of times a month really is asking too much.

If you’re still not comfortable with full feeds, I might suggest writing an engaging post summary and posting that on your feed instead of whatever excerpt might come up. I’m really getting tired of reading excerpts that don’t even have enough words in them to make sense.