Content

The first pillar of my daily action on the Web is content. Although the Web has seen a growing shift away from content to community, I still believe

that content is king. Communities based around common interests fall flat unless they have the content there for people to gravitate around. Facebook groups, for example, dominate because of the wealth of content they offer: the posts, links, videos, and other media people create within that group. Without the content, the group wouldn’t exist.

Content is the single biggest plank in my social-Web philosophy. When I
began to blog on MySpace, I had a small following of about 30 people. Over
time, I saw that the more I wrote, the more people spread the word about
my writing, and I realized that more content basically equaled a larger audi-
ence for my work. I examined other successful bloggers and found that one
of the common threads between all of them was the amount of content that
they were putting out — successful bloggers tended to post multiple times
per week. I decided that I needed to focus on putting out more content, and
you should, too.
However, content for the sake of content isn’t necessarily in your best interests. To ensure that you provide the best content possible, make sure that you do these three things:
✦ Focus your content. People expect tailored content. I found this fact out
the hard way when I began to increase the number of blog posts I wrote
and posted. I’d write about anything, and sometimes I’d post on topics
that weren’t necessarily the reason people were coming to read my blog.
One day, I’d post my musings on the latest pop harlot, and I’d follow it
up with a long piece on our current foreign policy in North Korea — and
I’d lose a significant number of subscribers because there was no focus
to my writing. People wanted to read my blog for certain reasons, and
they wanted content tailored to what they expected. The most success-
ful bloggers have a narrow focus, and they write for a niche.
When Problogger.net author Darren Rowse, an authority on professional
blogging, first began blogging, he tried a wide-ranging approach but
discovered it didn’t work. “My blog had four main themes and differ-
ent readers resonated differently with each one. A few readers shared
my diverse interests in all four areas, but most came to my blog to read
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about one of the (or at most a couple of) topics. A number of regular Book V
loyal readers became disillusioned with my eclectic approach to blog- Chapter 1
ging and gave up coming.”
The need to write to a tightly honed niche was something I had to discover the hard way. I decided to stick to comedy because it allowed me to cover and talk about a wide variety of subjects. Also, people knew what they were coming for and what to expect from me.
✦ Have a voice that people want to hear. While I progressed with writing,
I also figured out how important voice is. People didn’t care about the
mechanics of the writing as much as they cared about the voice. Although
my grammar and spelling weren’t always perfect, readers would only
rarely call me out on those kinds of mistakes; readers never told me that
they found my blog hard to read or that the occasional mistakes annoyed
them. If I caught and corrected a grammar error after a posting and made
a note of it, people would usually respond that they weren’t coming to
read my postings for my grammar. I wasn’t alone. Other bloggers, espe-
cially ones who post large amounts of content, often have typos and
errors in their posts. Tucker Max, one of the most popular comedy blog-
gers, switches between past and present tense often — a grammar no-no.
He’s aware of this problem and doesn’t care, but neither do his readers.
Max knows that he’s developing his own style: “I know, I know. The
whole concept of tense in speech has always given me problems. In
undergrad and law school, I never really took any creative writing or
English courses; it was pretty much all econ, law, history, etc, so some
of the basic things that most writers get right, I fail. Of course I could
learn tenses, but I have never really made an effort to get it right for a
reason: I want to write in my own voice, regardless of whether or not it
is “correct” grammar or not. By switching tenses, I write the way I speak,
and by alternating between past and present I put the reader into the
story, instead of just recounting it.”
Tucker says that the only time people complain about his grammar
mistakes is when users want to argue about the content of his blog.
They use the grammar mistakes as a plank in their attack. However, this attempt to belittle him hasn’t slowed his growth or success. His voice, after all, is what has made him successful.
✦ Present your content well. The actual look of your presentation matters
greatly. Adding images, for example, enhances your posts in a number of
ways, including
• Giving posts a visual point of interest
• Grabbing attention (really making your RSS feed readers stop and read)
• Drawing people’s eyes down beyond the first few lines of a post
• Illustrating examples

362 Understanding the Three C’s of the Social Web
• Giving your blog a more personal touch
• Engaging the emotions and senses of readers
• Giving posts a professional feel, which can lead to an air of authority
In my early blogs, I often wrote long, poorly formatted postings, and
people didn’t comment or interact with my content: not because of the
length of those postings, per se, but because of the way that I displayed
them, as long paragraphs of endless text. Over time, I realized that pic-
tures, highlighted words, bullet points, and other such tricks give the
reader’s eye a break and can make your postings more attractive and
more professional looking.
All these blog elements are extremely important on the social Web. People want to read and view information that they find interesting, that’s well presented, and that’s specific to their needs. Make sure you consider all these facets of a blog when you create content for your blog.