Where am I posting, and what are we doing in this handbasket?
As the number of bloggers increased from the mid 90s onwards, we saw a massive evolution in the market. At first, people stuck to a single vertical, a single platform onto which they put all of their writing output, and RSS existed to help readers pull all of that writing output into a single interface so that they could read it. That was the expected means of presentation.
It worked really well for the time because there was not nearly as much competition at any level: where the content could be hosted, what the sorts of content that could be hosted looked like, and promotion was relatively straightforward thanks to the lack of places where people could actually be exposed to new work.
Looking back on it now, it all seems so simple. At the time, it was a hot mess. In reality, without tools like Google Reader, none of us who were really seriously into both producing and consuming blogs could have had a significant reach or ability to produce.
Now things are different – really different. There are a multitude of blogging front ends and blogging back ends. There are even more short form content microblogging platforms than there ever were blogging platforms (including Facebook and Google+ which target short and very short form content, and Twitter/Gab which really target that microform content of very little more than a single sentence or three, all the way up to platforms like Medium and Steemit which do best at the upper range of short to well into longform).
By the way, if you're not thinking of the current crop of popular social media networks as effective microblogging platforms, you are missing how many people are using them. Sure, they are largely filled with personal messages and missives, pushed hard to the limit by carrying messages with only a single graphical payload, but all of that is blogging as it has always been done.
Seriously, check the Wayback Machine if you don't believe me while a lot of the blogs that gathered mainstream interest over the years were the long form and particularly the journalistically longform variety, many of the most successful that continue today focused on extremely short content, giving rise the original term microblogging. Instapundit, for example, is of that original class. Thinking about the "mainstream" social media winners as blogging platforms of one sort or another is actually quite helpful.
This provides creators a certain problem and a number of questions.
- How do you get your content in front of the people who will most likely care about it? Ultimately, that's the biggest question and everything else hangs beneath it.
- Where is that audience?
- How do I go about making content and getting it in front of those people?
I have been a member of online society since before there was a web, and an early adopter of blogging as a means of communication within many of the communities that I have been part of, and I have a few thoughts on these matters. Hopefully they will be of use to you.
Where should I put my content?
This used to be the big question with a bullet, which is why it is at the top of this list.
However, it is no longer the big question.
The Case of History
Oh, it's important – but not because of accessibility or discoverability, which is why we used to ask that question. It does no good to blog extensively, daily, or even every other day like myself, unless you have an audience who is looking to consume it. Once upon a time, those audiences had to go deliberately to your website so that they could see new content, they got absolutely no updates as to when that content was put up (until someone pioneered the brilliant idea of creating an email list and sending out a email notification every time something got put on the blog; you can imagine how annoying that could be), and it was all very much focused around going and seeing. Discoverability was largely a function of getting a mention from someone else's blog directly – which is why Google's PageRank, the algorithm by which they decide the value of a given link, is structured as it is. More links talking about you equated to likely better authority.
And then RSS dropped in, which untied the reader from having to go to multiple points of source and instead created a single source which could be interpreted, and Google Reader came along to do that interpreting – making the experience of reading blogs much easier and faster, quite frankly. Notifications were immediate (or very close), you only went to your reading app to read all of the blogs, and discovery became much more structured around being discovered by search as well as links from other people's blogs.
The Travelling Sack of Today
Today, even a casual assessment demonstrates the difference in the landscape.
There are considerably fewer specifically-described blogging platforms being used with any significant breadth compared to the early 90s. WordPress, Blogger, Medium, maybe Ghost – those are where you see a massive amount of coverage of writers who still maintain that single vertical idea of the early 90s. In reality, the platforms differ on interface, on hosting – but not particularly on real elemental experience. You write a block of text, perhaps you illustrate it with some pictures or line art, on a good day you structure it with headings, and then you post it to the site for people to read.
Medium is a hybrid there and it really belongs with Steemit when it comes to talking about blogging platforms, because both of them have a reward economy attached to them, and that can make a real difference in deciding what you want to blog on. Medium has their subscription service which, in theory, is supposed to pay into a certain class of posterior who have effectively paid for access to their vanity press, and Steemit – well, most of you know what's going on there – but for those who are coming from outside, it's a blogging platform where, after registration which can take a while, you can earn cryptocurrency from other people who like your content. Both of them have a relatively limited organic reach, but that organic reach is wholly the source of any income that you will see from the platform because both of them require active registration in order to reward someone for their work.
And now we come to the more complicated side of things with Facebook, Google+, Tumblr and the like. (I only leave out Instagram because it is significantly canted toward almost totally image content, but if that is the kind of work that you want to do, as a medium for reaching your audience – you need to be there. We'll talk more about that later.)
Neither Facebook nor Google+ are really good for longform content. Twitter is worst of all. They don't deal with any kind of markup at all, nor embedding images in the body of a textual piece, nor section headings, or any of the other things that you would want for building an interesting "article" in many senses. They focus entirely on short and short-to-medium form content, and in the case of Twitter truly microform content.
And yet – that's what people want. They succeed because they have a massive network effect. Getting involved is extremely low friction, and you probably already know several people on the platform. It's very easy to find things that you might find interesting, including people and sources. Search is fast and near trivial. Getting your own content onto the platform is as frictionless as anyone can come up with a way to make it, to the point where Subject/Topic lines have been removed from the basic interaction, and for the most part folksonomic tagging has been moved into the body of the text with hashtags.
So they all represent huge audiences who are willing to look at a lot of content coming by in front of them and form their own communities of people who are excited about specific topics (via Communities on Google+ and Pages on Facebook).
But what does that mean?
It really means that you are living in the freest time in human history when it comes to deciding where you want to host your blog.
Because it really doesn't matter.
Your decision-making process should be based purely on where it feels best for you to do the kind of work that you want to do.
Do you want to create microblogging content with links that you make only a few sentences of commentary on but think of yourself as a curator for other people? You might want to be on Twitter or Gab, and choose between them depending on your general inclination to politics and social signaling.
Is the content that you want to create personal or do you want to build a community which takes that as a core topic and writes short pieces or questions about that topic? You are probably best off doing something on Facebook if you want the massive network effect or on Google+ if you want the better Community management tools.
Do you want to do longform content, with multiple links, structured presentation, the ability to embed images – the whole 9 yards? Traditionally, the answer would be WordPress or Blogger, but these days I don't see any reason that you would want to create a singular brand imprint on one of those when you can use the far better interface and potential for reward of Medium, which has an absolutely glorious and wonderful editing experience, along with the ability to have commentary attached specifically in the sidebar of every article, or Steemit, which allows you to put content into the system via very easy to use markdown, and has the potential to reward you with a cryptocurrency that, with enough work, you can actually turn into real money.
It doesn't really matter where you host your blog, because what you will be doing is having a social media presence everywhere that you can and spreading your posts wherever you can.
Where are they looking for you at?
This is the most important question that you can ask yourself. Nothing else about the process of blogging and creating content online is as important as this question.
Some people will tell you that as professional Search Engine Optimization people, they know best and can optimize your content for awesome discoverability and as long as you follow their formula, you are going to make money.
I'm here today to tell you that those people are full of bullshit. If someone comes to you and says that they are a search engine optimization expert, run the other way. Make sure that you keep your hand on your pocket so that you know if your wallet has been removed as you turn.
There is absolutely a good way to structure your content so that it can be searched for via most of the big search engines more easily.
- The use of keywords in your HTML (which has largely become a nonissue because folksonomic tagging in the body of a blog post is way more useful),
- The use of good structure and headers,
- Picking links to content which have descriptive names – and getting people who referred your content via links to do the same…
All of these are good things to do. But they're are things that you should be doing anyway, things that you should have been taught to do on day two of learning how to make webpages, and stuff that you really don't need to worry about if you are writing quality content.
Now, you need to know one thing:
Who is your audience?
Once you've established that, where do they hang out?
Who are your audience?
I'm going to assume at this point that you are writing about something, creating about something, that you feel passionate about. The first thing that I always ask someone who asks me "how do I get into blogging?" is "what do you care about?" If the answer is "making money," I go direct them to a more profitable line of work like ditch digging or prostitution; something that people actually want.
If their answer is "I want to talk to people about this thing that I really care about," then we have somewhere to go. Because if one person cares about something passionately enough to want to talk to people about it, to write about it, then odds are there are people who want to hear about it and who want to talk about it as well – though probably not at as great length.
As someone who wants to blog, your job – even more than actually blogging, in some senses – is to find that audience. Odds are that you already know where that audience is because you are already involved in online communities which center around your passion. Those are the people who care. Those are the people who will come back every time you have an update, and if they are able to, they will reward you for giving them what they want – whether that be financially or emotionally.
You need to know who they are.
If you can't identify who your audience is upfront, I have a little exercise that I like to go through.
Sit down, close your eyes, and imagine sitting across the table from someone in your community or in the community you imagine should exist, and they are ready – right now – to hear you talk. You don't have to explain why they should listen to you, you don't have to explain what the subject is, they are ready to hear you talk.
Now open your eyes and write down a list of traits about that person who is sitting across the table from you.
- How old are they?
- What are they look like?
- Where were they before they sat down at this table?
- Where are they going after they hear what you have to say?
- What other things are they into?
- Will they be back tomorrow?
Once you have this list of traits, you know who you're talking to. When you sit down to write, think about that person and that they are right there, waiting to hear what you have to say, but they have other things going on in their life and you want to be an important part of this moment.
It's kind of terrifying, isn't it? You've gone from imagining "an audience" to imagining "another person who you need to talk to." That was really a phase transition for me; once I could really nail down who that person was, I felt like I had things that I wanted to tell them specifically. As people. It really changed the way that I approached my work.
(If you give this little exercise a try, I would be very interested in hearing about your audience and who it is on the other side of the table from you.)
Where do they hang out?
Now that you've seen them, you know your audience. Now that you know your audience, you need to think about where they hang out.
This should be relatively easy, because it should be a place that you also hang out. Where did you get into the community of people who are interested in the things that you want to write about? That's where you start.
When you write something, make sure that you share the fact that you wrote something with the community that inspired you to write about it. If it's about videogames, make sure that you post a link to the thing that you have created about videogames in the fora that you hang out in where you talk about videogames. If you make a video about cryptocurrency, don't post it in the fora where you hang out to talk about videogames – post it where you got excited about cryptocurrency.
This is a surprisingly hard idea for new bloggers to wrap their heads around, because the assumption is that everyone else is like you and shares your interests. Hopefully if you went through our guided visualization exercise, you have come to the conclusion that your audience is not necessarily like you and they don't necessarily share all of your interests – they share one. You want to give them what they care about.
So go to those forums, go to those Google+ Communities, go to those Facebook Pages, go to the comments section on content that is like yours and, when it's appropriate, talk about the stuff that you have created which is like or inspired by their work. Everyone loves to hear about how they made a difference to someone else who is a creator.
But don't go to shove your content down their throat.
If you just show up at a community and start dropping links, it doesn't matter how good your content is, you are an outsider. You have no ties to that community. All you've done is walk in and throw your meat on the table, and there are very few people who are into that sort of thing. This is another mistake that I see fledgling bloggers make, and it hurts me every time.
The difference between spam and content is the act of setting expectation. That is what cuts right through to the core.
If you are engaged with me in a conversation, then it's cool when you tell me about the stuff that you've done that I'll be interested in. If you walk up to me and push a flyer in my hand that says, "I wrote all this stuff, it's really cool," I really don't care. I don't know you. We have no relationship.
Internalizing that message is part of understanding where your audience hangs out, not just locationally or logically but emotionally. You need to be part of your audience, in a very real sense. You need to be on the other side of that table. You are not alone at that table and neither are they.
And for the record, I am going to say outright, yes – I am advising you to be a bit of a slut when it comes to enjoying content about your passion. It doesn't matter where it is. It can be on Google+, it can be on Facebook, it can be on Tumblr, the community can be anywhere and it just doesn't matter as long as you are a part of that community.
Find your community. Find your people.
What if I'm into lots of stuff?
Sometimes you just have to accept it – you are into a lot of stuff. You have a myriad of interests, all of which have a real calling to you, they ignite your passion, and you want to write about all of them. You want to make that happen. You want to pull everything together.
That's good! That suggests that you are a well-rounded human being with talents and skills which span a broad swath. Bravo, you are a productive member of the community of Man.
But don't forget what we were just talking about. Think about the guy on the other side of the table. Are they really interested in everything that you are? Probably not. Will they take it well if you keep putting content that they don't care about in front of them? They absolutely will not. It is a magnificent, powerful turnoff to an audience to continue having things put in front of them that they're not interested in.
So don't do that.
I'm not saying don't write about that, because I would be a hypocrite of the highest order if I said so. I love to write about a relatively broad swath of topics, but I want to put each of those posts in front of people who are most likely to really enjoy them. I want other people to be as passionate about my topic as I am.
If your primary means of discovery is a "sipping from a fire hose"-like system, like Twitter or Medium, or Steemit, where content can only be subscribed to based on the creator and not a specific tag or a Community or some other organic content relationship exploration, you need to be careful about using the tools that exist on the platform so that people can easily discover your content.
Tagging is a must. A good set of tags is just as important as a good Title or Subject because it is one of the few ways that fire hose systems can be sliced and experienced in smaller, more coherent chunks. On some platforms, like Steemit as it stands, that's the best you can hope for. That is it. Some people will follow you and then stop following you because you wrote about something they're not interested in. That's okay, we want them to do that.
On a fire hose system, if you really want to break down your work to specifically target individual audiences and topics, you are going to need to make and maintain multiple accounts – and that's a real pain in the ass. There is no other way to put it.
Never underestimate the power of being involved in other people's work, and by that I mean not just things like collaboration or sharing a project – though if you can, definitely do that – but commenting on their work. Be a fixture in the community, and be known to the people who are doing the things in that community that you like. Don't be afraid to comment, don't be afraid to even be critical – as long as you do it with the respect of knowing who your audience is.
Every time that you engage with a piece of work that fuels your excitement and that engagement sparks something in someone else who is also excited, that's another person who is likely to enjoy your work and will actually take steps to seek it out.
Likewise, be attentive and active in the comment threads, wherever they may be, which talk about your work. You want to be in the middle of that communication, a part of that conversation, so that other people who are excited know that you are available inside that community. Your presence is key.
But as we've already talked about, the platform that you're blogging on is not necessarily where your audience is. It certainly not where most of your audience is. It's just where your posts and the conversation around them often are. (In actual fact, the conversation inspired by your work very well may be engaged in on an entirely different platform – and that's okay. Go to where your audience is.)
Don't be afraid of having multiple audiences. In fact, embrace it. Recognize that if you have multiple passions, each of those passions have other people who are equally as passionate about that one thing – and all of the other things in their lives. Be considerate of that.
As long as you follow the path we've already tried together, knowing who your audience is and knowing where they hang out, you should be able to target any individual post of yours to exactly the people who are most likely to care.
Where should I allocate my time?
Your time should be allocated wherever it needs to be in order to engage your audience.
Notice that I did not say "it needs to be in writing for your blog," because that's actually a relatively small part of developing a really good blog and reputation. It's important! You can't have a community which cares about your content, about your work, without actually producing your work – which is another mistake that I sometimes see fledgling bloggers forgetting. The work comes first in the development of the community which cares about your work.
But the community of people who are passionate about what you want to share exists before you want to share your stuff. That community is a community that you are part up, hopefully. It's a community where you have some ties, some people who know you, some engagement between you and everyone else. That's the ideal situation.
That's what you will be cultivating in the process of developing your blog. You want to strengthen your ties to the community. You want to have people desire to strengthen their ties to your work.
Your time allocation has to be smart. You need to spend time in the community. You need to spend time reading and interacting outside the context of your work. You need to be a presence, a person, someone that they can imagine sitting on the opposite side of the table from.
That means that you are going to spend a lot of time, every time you make a new piece, carrying it around to various community outposts and showing it to people.
- Posting links on fora.
- Maintaining your Twitter and Facebook accounts, despite how much you hate them as social media platforms.
- Finding communities built around your topic and spending enough time to get a feel for who they are and letting them get a feel for who you are.
- Replying to comments left on previous examples of your work.
- Introducing people in the community to the work of other people who might be in the same community or on a different platform as part of a slightly different community who have things in common.
All of this takes time. A surprising amount of time. And I'll be honest, for a misanthropist like myself, it's not a lot of fun sometimes. I get around that by automating as much as I can. My posts to Facebook automatically gets sent to Twitter and Tumblr. My posts to Google+ often reuse some of the same text that I use in the summary for the Facebook post (albeit with some added, because Google+ is a much more pleasant environment when you have more than just a couple of sentences talking about the reason your sharing something with the community). I'll go off to the Two Hour Wargames' web fora and post links to after action reports over there, and engage in the conversations which are born and experienced over there.
Between using the tools available, keeping up with your own content and the conversations which sometimes surround it, and looking for more communities who share your passions in common – a lot of time is going to get sunk into doing things which is not writing for your blog.
It's even possible to get caught up in chasing the Dragon of Attention and get drawn away from the passion for blogging that you started with.
Some people will tell you that's a terrible thing.
I'm going to tell you that not everyone really wants to be a blogger or is cut out to be a blogger. Like any kind of writer, being a blogger is a hard, largely unforgiving, kind of nightmarish, often leads to drinking and emotional breakdown, type of pastime. Sometimes you start thinking that you want to really be a blogger – and then you realize that what you really have a passion for and enjoy is engaging with the community on a regular basis and creating content for that community on a much narrower basis.
That's okay. That's awesome! If you really enjoy spending time in the community, engaging in the society which surrounds your passion, I'm here to tell you that you don't have to be a blogger to be important in the community. You don't have to be a creator to be important in the community. It doesn't matter what that community is – if you are passionate about it, if it matters to your life, if it acts as a bridge between you and other people to come together and enjoy something, you are just as important as the creators in a community.
Don't let anyone tell you different.
Even if we creators do have egos the size of small moons by necessity.
Allocate your time to the things that will make your work and your fascination more pleasurable to you, and if you get your gratification from the community embracing your work – you need to allocate your time between making network and working that community successfully. Use your tools, understand that you will need to engage in outreach and contact, and think about your time accordingly.
I have been trying to maintain a one-day online, one day off writing schedule for significant posts to Steemit for a couple of months now, and I think it is paying off a little bit. The day off gives me time to do some reading, run some errands, connect with the community, reward people who I think are doing some amazing work, hang out with my roommates, play video games, pet the dog, kick the dog, torture random hobos that I kidnap off the street, and generally engage in having a life. That's how I am a allocating my time at the moment.
You have your own needs and life, and you have to find your own balance. I definitely suggest that you don't make the rookie mistake of spending every waking hour on your choice of platform, constantly involved in the community, constantly working on something, constantly keeping yourself fully immersed in this thing – because you will stop. You will burn out, you will get tired of it, you will have a personality conflict in the community, people will make bad decisions, you will make bad decisions – and you'll stop. You might put it down and never pick it back up.
That's one of the worst things to see, when somebody who has a real passion for things stops because that passion is just suffocated under too much stuff.
I know it's fun. I know that gratification is great. I know the attention is wonderful.
But it's not your life. Don't make it your life. Don't make it who you are, make it just one more thing you do.
Allocate your time to you, and if being a content creator is part of who you are – it's part of your life. But it's not all of your life.
TL;DR Management Version
Put your content on the platform which offers you the tools that you need to make it look and feel like you want. Keep in mind the length of that content, the way you deliver that content, and the fact that you are going to be sharing that content broadly.
Know who your audience is and where they hang out. Put your content in front of that audience specifically, while making sure that you are seen as a member of the community and not just someone trying to exploit the community.
Spend your time as much being a part of the community that you're passionate about as making content for that community. Always keep in mind that the community exists without you and will continue to exist without you. Make sure that you do your passions and that your passions don't do you.
Wrap-Up
That's it, the entirety of my theory of point of presence, the idea that you don't really have one. You have tools which allow you to reach out to a community and be part of it, but there is no one central place that represents you and what you do.
Platforms change. Systems crash. Data is lost.
Your presence is wherever your attention is. That is its singular point. Everything else is about being part of a community.
Now get out there and do your thing, Thing Ring!