Why I Blog: It’s about Brand, not Bread

The most common question I get asked about in terms of why I blog is whether I make any money off of it.   The short answer is NO. I don’t even try.  I run no ads because for me, blogging is 100% about building my brand, codifying and propagating a perspective and connecting with like minds.

Did I know that these would be my goals when I started blogging?  Sort of.  Did I have any sense that three years after starting my blog, The Network Garden, I would have written 200 article-length posts, and that blogging would be the single smartest thing that I have done for myself over the past half-decade?  No, I had no sense. 

So in the spirit of giving back, the goal of this post is to share a little pattern recognition about what I have I learned, both from blogging and from participating in the distributed conversation pool that is the blogosphere.

Let me start at the start.  I am a believer that if you want to get into a space, you just need to start doing “something” in it. 

So when I decided to focus my energies on the digital media space, the first thing that I did was to create a blog, and made a commitment to growing it.   Eat my own dog food, so to speak.

Growing it meant a few things.  One it meant the decision to focus on a few specific categories; namely, digital media, active investing and life coaching.

Two, it meant committing to a discipline of regular posting, which in my case, means making a concerted effort to do 1-3 posts a WEEK and 1-3 twitter tweet (shout outs) a DAY.

On top of this, I have developed a well-formed methodology for plugging into the blogosphere to find posts of interest that are both comment-worthy and related to posts that I have already written.

Let me explain.  I use commenting as a kind of breadcrumb strategy, whereby I reference conclusions from a past article of mine related to the post that I am commenting on, and then link back to my article in the comment.  While not all blogs are supportive of this, most are, and this approach generates a lot of activity for me on my blog.

Also, I limit the blogs that I pay primary attention to to the handful of links that visibly fit within my bookmarks bar (~10 sites).  Given the limited ‘shelf space’ on the bookmarks bar, I replace a link if I find either that I am not compelled to comment on any of their posts over a fairly short time period OR if my comments with links back to articles of mine don’t generate visitors to my blog. 

That way, tracked bloggers are always being tested based on how they satisfy two criteria.  One, engaging my personal interests; and two, satisfying my goals to grow my audience.

As a secondary source, I use Google News and Techmeme to find popular story waves that I can get in front of when the activity generated by sites on my browser bar ebbs. 

This combination of focusing on a few primary sites and using two aggregator sites as secondary funnels, ensures that I maintain a real-time picture of popular storylines while limiting my engagement to a manageable flow of information.

In terms of advertising the existence of my blog and specific posts that I have written, beyond the use of commenting, I do a couple of things that have proven effective. 

One is that I use Microsoft Entourage’s random signature function to create a library of signatures that reference and link back to specific posts. 

This has been a surprisingly effective way for me to connect specific recipients with specific posts in a non-intrusive fashion, and most importantly, it works.  I generate a lot of clicks from this approach.

I have also modified the structure of my individual posts so that most posts have references to other 'related posts' that I have written so that a visitor reading one post is more likely to end up reading two or three of them.  To be clear, I do this manually, as TypePad (my blogging solution of choice) has no automated way to suggest related posts.

Also, lest anyone conclude that once you write a post, it is “done” and cast in stone, please note that as I discovered the effectiveness of adding related links to posts, I simply went back in 'edit mode' to past popular posts and added related links to them as well.  In digital online-land, nothing is ever cast in stone. 

The related links approach has literally changed the game for me in terms of the click flow that subscribers to my RSS feed (via Feedburner) now take. 

Whereas in the past, I always had more views on the feed page than actual click-throughs to specific articles, now it is pretty much inverted.  I almost always have more click-throughs than views, suggesting that a person clicks to read one post then gets sucked into a couple additional ones, which obviously satisfies my goals to have a deeper connection with my audience.

These days, I think that there exists a sort of triangulation process that people go through when they encounter you on the web.  Some find a post of yours via a Google search on a topic or key word string, which then leads them to search on your name, which then leads them to your LinkedIn profile page or your comments on another bloggers’s post.  The triangle, thus is your blog on one axis, your profile on another and your comments on the last axis.

Given this, I make sure that my LinkedIn Profile is both current and narrowly focused on my specific expertise and interests versus trying to be all things to all people (see Narrow Net below). 

Links to my LinkedIn profile are, in turn, integrated into my blog, my profile in the DISQUS commenting system and other key services that I belong to.

Similarly, anyone I encounter in face-to-face meetings and online I invite to join my LinkedIn network, which has expanded the reach of my contact network.  A friend of mine at a New York Times subsidiary clued me into the logic of being 'promiscuous' in contact networks but prude in social networks (where maintenance of intimacy is important, especially for vertically focused social nets), and I have found this approach effective.

Finally, to extend my footprint online, I have done a fair bit of guest columns on services like GigaOm and iMedia, as well as maintaining a techie focused blog at O’Reilly, a publisher of books, events and online resources for programmers.

In terms of other best practices, I have heard fairly consistently from people that I respect that you should commit to a daily post if you can find a way to do so, as that trains your audience to check in today, tomorrow and the day after that versus just intermittently. 

Given the length of my posts and the fact that this is an adjunct to my real profession – i.e., being an entrepreneur – I have not mustered this type of frequency, as I am fearful of sacrificing quality for quantity.  That said, it is a goal of mine.

The other area that I am assessing is participating in the LinkedIn Answers service as a way of more formally cultivating a knowledge network.  I will update this post when I find the time to play with, and reach some conclusions.

So netting it out, blogging, first and foremost, has made me a better writer, a crisper communicator and a clearer thinker.

It’s the old chicken and pigs analogy.  Once you click "publish," you have real skin in the game.  The good news is that you can iterate after the fact but I do my best to get the first go around right, as that keeps me honest about whether I am hitting the mark with my target audience.

Secondly, from my posts, people – even total strangers – feel that they know me the first time I meet them.  This means that we can start dialog at a higher level, and I have found that it is easier to build a thread around a specific post. 

No less important is that I have instant credibility since virtually everyone does a Google search on you before they connect.  Not bad for first impressions fodder.

Related posts:

1. Breadcrumbs and Conversations: social media and how it works explained.
2. The Narrow Net Strategy: career path strategies to be your target audience's bullseye by being narrow and deep versus wide and shallow.
3. The Social Map is all about Me (guest column on GigaOM): on connecting the dots between ones posts, comments, tweets, discussion threads, diggs, profiles and the like.
4. Channel Me and the Rules of New Media: old media versus new media rules and how they shape branding.

Comments

[Greg]

Mark:

I find one of the most under appreciated Google properties is Google alerts. There's all kinds of ways to use this to stay in front of the wave.

[Mark Sigal]

Hey Greg,

So how do you specifically use alerts? It would seem that even a topic like "iphone sdk" would generate a fair bit of daily alerts so I have instead used a phrase like that to create a google news filter so can eyeball as part of news page.

Let me know what works for you.

Mark

[Greg]

All of the Google search magic is available for Google alerts. So, you can use linkto: and site: in your google alerts. I use google alerts to tell me when new links to my sites (and my competitors' sites) have been made. I google alert my name (blush), and the names of the projects I work on (with some domain-specific limiters). If you are getting too many hits, you need to narrow down your interest -- are you really interested in all iphone apps? Or just some subset?

[Mark Sigal]

Thanks for the tip, Greg. Candidly, I did not realize the breadth of functionality with Google alerts, and will invest some time in that one.

Specific to the iPhone SDK, because it is in pre-launch there is no obvious formulaic filter for determining stories of interest since 90% are identical and the 10% that are interesting to me are based on narratives that are more of the discover/stumble upon variety.

Once it launches in a few weeks, the storylines will start to become more clear, lending themselves to more pre-defined queries.

Mark

[John "Z-Bo" Zabroski]

It's definitely true that the Brand is huge and you get the chance to connect to like minds... or if you're even luckier you get the chance to connect with people who are not like you but are smarter than you are.

Case in point: Jeff Atwood of CodingHorror.com. Personally, I think Jeff's blog is more style than substance, but he's now good friends with Joel Spolsky... one of the first serious software engineering bloggers and amazing businessman. If Jeff never blogged, he'd never have the opportunity to co-host a podcast with Joel. Quite frankly, I don't like Jeff's presence on the podcast and think he often tries rephrasing Joel's keen insights. However, the fact of the matter is Jeff is a friend of Joel, and I am not a friend of Joel, so I'm a bit jealous. :-)

I've always said my goal in life is to meet as many cool people as possible. To borrow a famous religious quote, "Use your money to make friends."

[Mark Sigal]

Thanks for the note, John. It's a sad fact of life that pedigree and connections matter, but they are not absolutes, just as brand creation is not a quick fix, just add water type of exercise.

I look at it as: I am becoming by becoming, practicing a discipline with each post, and comment to others' posts that I make, laying breadcrumbs far and wide, some of which will bring my audience/target constituency back to my doorstep, or me to theirs.

It's an earnest pursuit based on a serious attempt to deploy skillful means

Mark

[John "Z-Bo" Zabroski]

I don't mind that connections matter. What I feel stinks is bloggers who become widely read for pointing out the obvious, or repeating something they read in a book. The problem is that they are mostly parroting something they've read somewhere else, e.g. they're just "reporting". I remember Ken Jarvis once said that he felt the best blogs told a the same story from multiple angles. In this vein, I find readers of tech blogs tend to settle for shallower insight than readers of business blogs.

Probably the main reason I read Jeff Atwood's blog is for the comments. Jeff tends to miss the big picture a lot, and that happens when you post as often as he does. He emphasizes quality, not quantity, probably because he just likes to rant. Can't really blame him, but I have a strong desire to see people do better and become wiser with experience.

A good example of this is a blog post you may or may not be able to relate to, depending on your level of technical expertise. Jeff had a blog post titled, "Maybe Normalizing Isn't Normal" where he presented a false dilemma. The readers seemed to buy into it, judging by the comments I skimmed on digg, reddit, etc. It's funny, but I was the only person to point out that Jeff's "sample database schema for a generic social networking site" example lacked database fields for timestamping information. I found this bizarre, because what social networking site isn't oriented around chronological streams of information?

I'm not underestimating Jeff, either. It is very clear he reads a lot and he sees more to his job than just churning out code. And through writing, Jeff has lifted himself up into a much higher position in life. I just wish he would write less now that he's got wider readership, and spend more time honing his craft.

[John "Z-Bo" Zabroski]

Er, I meant to say "he emphasizes quantity, not quality".