I tried to keep my Healthy Recipes blog anonymous, but I’m too darn proud of it! I *have* to share it here. It basically chronicles my journey from high-fat, low-fiber recipes (those that I have published here over the years) to wholesome recipes that are still very tasty.
Here it is – my new baby 
(Click on the screen shot to get to the blog):
It happens a lot. I surf the Web, land on a charming little blog with an amazing post, a yummy recipe, or a beautiful photo. I read the blog post, thinking, “Wow, this is good stuff,” then glance at the blog’s Alexa rank, always available to me via the handy Alexa toolbar.
Hmm. Not a lot of traffic at all. But it’s such a great blog! That’s a shame.
I then click on “Home” and go the blog’s home page, where, in eight cases out of ten, I realize that the last blog post was posted many months ago.
The blog is dying.
It makes me sad, because I’m a huge believer in blogs. I love that they enable each and every one of us to become a publisher. No need to jump through the impossible hoops of the publishing industry. No need to survive tens or hundreds of rejection letters. If you want to write, to publish your thoughts, your ideas, your stories, your recipes or your photos, you can go ahead and do it – with the push of a button.
Sure, the very fact that it’s so easy means that there are a lot of crappy blogs out there. But that’s what Google is for, right? Google makes sure we almost always get the high quality results and avoid the low-quality junk. And if we land on a blog following a link – a recommendation in essence – from another blog, chances are it will be at the very least decent.
But there’s one little secret that nobody tells you. You typically discover it only after you start your blog.
It’s easy in a way – especially if you like to write. But it’s hard, because there’s a difference between publishing something, and being read. There’s a difference between putting your thoughts out there, and having people read them and respond to them. And when you blog, unless you work extremely hard at promoting your blog, and/or unless unusually lucky, you will publish – but you will not be read. And that’s difficult and frustrating, so much so that the vast majority of blogs (research tells us) do not survive past the first three months – and that’s OK, I don’t care about that.
What I care about is the good blogs, the high-quality blogs that for some reason – often simple lack of marketing by the owner – have died or are dying.
I just visited such a blog. The blog post I landed on was a recipe for a cake – but it was so much more than a recipe. The author is a great writer. Her writing style is warm, flowing, easy. I am a busy person, but I found myself wanting to read more, to get to know her. Of course, when I headed to the blog’s home page, I saw that the last post was written in February.
I know what happened. I understand. She’s a mom, she has young kids. Her blog was a lot of work but she never got anything tangible out of it – certainly no income. A very small readership. It just doesn’t make sense to keep investing so much (in terms of time and emotions) in something when the return on the investment is so small.
I get it. Still, it makes me sad to see a good blog die.
Culture has been getting faster and shallower for hundreds of years, says Seth Godin, and encourages us to have meaningful conversations with a smaller number of people and to create thoughtful content instead of trying to get that shallow, meaningless “wow” from thousands – or from millions.
I agree – I think anyone would agree – that meaningful, long-term conversations and relationships are more important and have a higher value – to the individual and to the culture – than quick, drive-by, “wow”-type interactions, but as a blogger I have to say that the temptation is huge.
After all, if you’re not Seth Godin – if you’re a non-celebrity person who produces high quality content for a small group of fans, at some point it becomes frustrating. If you can’t get lots of people to read your words, what value do they have? If I write something shallow and meaningless such as this, and it goes viral on Stumbleupon and gets 100,000 page views in one day, and then I write something deep and meaningful and it gets 1,000 page views, which piece is more important? Which made a bigger difference?
And then there’s the question of money of course – people need to make a living and most would love to make a nice living – so if the deep, thoughtful piece does not make me money but the shallow crap does – it becomes a tough choice.
This blog is an interesting experiment, becuase it is my space so I get to do whatever I want here. I sometimes go with shallow crap, sometimes with deep thoughts and sometimes with something in between. While I sometimes look at the shallow posts that I produce and tell myself “I can’t believe you just wrote this,” I can also tell you that when I write something deeper and it does not go viral on social media and relatively few people read it, I feel disappointed.
When you’re a new blogger, one of the first pieces of advice you hear is that people on the Internet don’t read – they scan – and that you should write short posts with lots of bullets, numbers and lists. They tell you to highlight the important lines and to add a pretty picture. The assumption is that long = tedious and that no one these days has the time, the attention span or the number of live brain cells required to read and process long articles, however thought-provoking or culture-changing they may be.
So if you’ve read all these words, and you are still with me (unlikely since this post is turning out to be almost 500 words long, is not bulleted or numbered and does not discuss a celebrity), I would love to hear your thoughts:
If you produce or market content, are you going for the wow factor, or do you insist on being authentic, even if it means your audience will always be small? And if you’re a reader, do you find yourself gravitating towards titles such as “Kim Kardashian Tweets Bikini Pics” while ignoring deeper titles that lack the wow factor?
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Loved this comment: “If the wow stuff can get people to come, some of them might be also into the deeper stuff you write. Some of the people that only read shallow stuff might have a moment of weakness and accidentally start looking at the deeper posts and be converted into philosophers, so you never know. South Park has lots of fart jokes but there are also sharp social commentaries in many episodes. The wow might bring the crowd and attention, but maybe it will make some of them think. Then maybe, the shallow stuff has value that way.” Kelvin Kao, Puppet Kaos.
You sure learn a thing or two (or ten) after blogging for two years. These are my best blog tips and observations:
1. Many bloggers have an ‘ulterior motive,’ so to speak. While there are definitely lots of bloggers who blog as a pure hobby or to simply journal their thoughts, many others are hoping to make money from their blog – enough money to quit their day job. Some are hoping to become famous, to land a book deal, or to become experts in their field and land speaking engagements or their dream job.
I loved Brabara Swafford’s honesty in her post Our Blogs, Our Babies – Criticism Hurts, “I know many bloggers (including myself) would like to make a passive income from their blogs.”
2. Making money blogging – real money that would enable you to quit your job – is nearly impossible. It can happen, and it does happen, but in terms of how likely it is to happen to YOU, the odds are overwhelmingly against it.
3. Making money blogging is slightly more likely if you can start a large number of highly optimized niche blogs. This requires a lot of hard work and results are not guaranteed. You need to find niches that have a lot of Google searches, yet are not too competitive. They should also be about things that people would want to buy – otherwise monetizing would be hard.
Next step: start niche blogs covering those topics, fill them with unique, high-quality content that would be useful to readers, highly optimize your blogs for search engines, obtain legitimate backlinks to those blogs (this is the hardest part – easier if you create high quality content that people actually WANT to link to), and – once they’re indexed and appear high enough on the SERPs (search engine results pages) to send you decent traffic – monetize them with ads.
It’s a painfully slow process but if you do it right, and are willing to work hard for many months without seeing immediate results, it can work. You probably won’t make millions, but you can make decent passive income from niche blogs.
4. Starting a non-niche, unoptimized blog, where you share your thoughts with the world and allow your personality to shine through, CAN eventually get you to blogging super-stardom, in which case you will get millions of monthly page views and make good money from ads, from affiliate links or from speaking engagements. But you need to have an extremely unique voice sprinkled with a dash of luck and perfect timing, in order for that to happen.
We are all very special, each of us in her own unique way, but the vast majority of us will never become celebrity bloggers. That’s OK: there are other ways to make money blogging. But to avoid wasting time, it’s important to be realistic right from the start.
5. Your non-niche blog can be very successful and have a large following and you still won’t make enough money from it to quit your day job. You need serious traffic for that – at least 250,000 monthly page views. For the vast majority of bloggers, this is an unattainable number.
6. Correct linking is important. When I started out blogging, I used to link to other bloggers using their first names. It took me a while to learn that these links have little value. When you read something you like by another blogger, and decide to link to them, try to see if you can figure out what keyword they are trying to rank for in search engines, and link using that keyword as your link’s anchor text.
For example, if I link to my friend Davina using her first name, search engines will know to rank her high in the SERPs for “Davina” which is not very helpful. But if I link to her as a life coach, this tells search engines to rank her higher for that phrase. Since Davina is an excellent, down-to-earth, affordable life coach, I am happy to help her rank better in search engines for this term, because people who search for a life coach SHOULD be able to find her.
If you’re not sure about a blogger’s keyword, you can often find it in their blog’s Title Tag. It’s usually OK to link to a post’s title, by the way. Seasoned bloggers always optimize their titles.
7. The companies that want you to review their product or want to place their ad on your sidebar? If you have less than a quarter million monthly page views, they’re buying page rank from you, not ad space. Try telling them that you want to include a “no-follow” tag when you link to them, and you’ll see how quickly they evaporate. Google seriously frowns upon selling page rank, so you should think long and hard if what they offer to pay you is worth the Google wrath.
8. If you’re fairly good at writing, and can optimize posts for search engines and shamelessly promote yourself, a relatively easy way to make money blogging is to blog for others. I’ve been doing it since November 2008, and in 2009 I was able to earn a decent income from my freelance work despite the recession – still not enough to fully support my family, but enough to make a difference in our family’s finances.
9. Unimportant numbers: the number of comments you get on your posts; your number of subscribers. Important numbers: How much money you make each year from your blogging activities; how many hours you put into your blog. And of course there’s your level of enjoyment and satisfaction – blogging does provide a wonderful creative outlet and many bloggers enjoy it regardless of income.
10. Possibly the most important lesson I’ve learned over the past two years: when you publish a blog, criticism WILL follow. Unless you write the most mundane, boring, politically correct blog (but then why write it and why would anyone want to read it?) a blog is about voicing your opinions and providing commentary. Not everyone is going to like what you have to say and that’s OK. You do need to prepare yourself for the fact that criticism on the Internet is often extremely harsh – people allow themselves to attack others in ways they would never do in person. That’s because they are hypocrites and cowards, so you can just ignore them – especially if they attack you anonymously. When faced with such criticism, keep your cool, stay polite, and remember that the more vicious the attack, the more miserable the person behind it likely is. Personally, I’ve learned to just feel sorry for them.
Also, when you receive hate email, DON’T OPEN IT. Delete it permanently right away, and mark it as spam, so that future correspondence from that person will not even reach your inbox. You can usually tell that an email is hateful from the title – definitely from the first line. It’s tempting to keep reading, for sure, but it’s a waste of time and it’s toxic. So just delete it. This is my only criticism of Heather Armstrong’s “monetizing the hate” web page which is otherwise brilliant – it means she’s reading those blog posts and comments and emails, and I think she shouldn’t.
Before I wrap this up, I wanted to say something about the apparent disdain that some bloggers have towards bloggers who “blog for money.”
I blog for money. I love blogging for money. I love the challenge of getting my clients’ websites to rank better in the SERPs. I love the challenge of getting my own posts to rank high for my chosen keywords. I love building and strengthening my clients’ brands with high quality blogs and with vibrant social media accounts. I love the fact that I made enough money from the ads on this blog and from freelance blogging last year to make a real difference in my family’s finances. But I also love writing, and I love my readers, and I enjoy interacting with them (with you!)
I may not be a “pure” blogger, but I am a damn good blogger and I am very proud of my career changes, which I’ve accomplished all by myself, from a miserable lawyer, to a happy-yet-somewhat-bored stay at home mom, to an extremely busy and fulfilled professional blogger.
Can you offer any more blog tips?
Photo by John Loo
A woman tweets about her miscarriage as it happens, while she’s in a board meeting.
A mother tweets about her toddler drowning in their home’s pool, less than 30 minutes after she calls 911.
Mothers live-tweeting their birth.
Celebrity couples flirting with each other via Twitter.
A man tweets as he (supposedly) sits on the toilet.
Where do we place the limits? How much is too much? While the two first examples of tweets resulted in serious criticism and uproar, the next two are considered fairly acceptable, and the last tweet is -well – just plain ridiculous.
Do you use Twitter? How do you feel about Twitter overexposure? Does it bother you? How much do you share on your own Twitter account, or on any other social media platform?
A friend recently commented that my writing on this blog seems “detached.” That I don’t really share myself and my life here but choose “safe” and write about general topics, news, etc.
Two years ago, when I just started blogging, I would have taken it as an insult, as a way of saying I’m not a good blogger (whatever that is). But my priorities have shifted over the last year, and whereas I used to proudly call myself a “mommyblogger,” I now (as many of you know) call myself a “blogger for hire.”
Blogging for my clients is easy. I get to do what I love (write) and what I know and excel at (SEO). I am never expected to share my own life, although I am expected to be personal and have a strong voice – even companies don’t want “dry.” I bring my clients results in the form of better search engine rankings and more qualified leads, and I get paid for my efforts. I love every minute of it.
Personal blogging is hard.
I still maintain this blog because I love it. After all these months, I still cherish the ability to sit down and write about whatever I want to and have it published, and – if properly optimized and linked to – viewed by hundreds, and sometimes thousands of people. I love blogging, breathe blogging, and believe it is here to stay.
What I let go of is the notion that I could write about my own life in a way that would make people want to read about it. Few people have that ability. Most of us lead fairly boring lives, and writing about our boring lives is, well, boring. Reading about it is even more boring.
But it’s not just that. It’s also that despite having a blog, which is obviously a very public forum, I’m a very private person. There are things going on in my life, I am going through life stages and making some important decisions and none of it is unique of course, it’s the stuff we all go through, but when I find myself wondering if I should write about it here, my overwhelming reaction is “No way! This stuff is private!” I guess I just don’t have it in me – the ability to do this deep personal sharing that people expect when they read a personal blog.
Of course, there’s also the issue of SEO. I love SEO and enjoy the challenge of optimizing a blog post and getting it to rank well in search engines. Naturally, posts such as “Watching My Children” or “I Suck at Personal Blogging” are harder to optimize (in fact, I don’t optimize them at all) than posts such as “Worst Christmas Gifts.” So when writing a deeply personal post, a big part of the fun and satisfaction that I get from blogging is just not there.
So I share thoughts and observations, and it’s all done in a tone that’s a little detached and maybe a little dry, and I’m losing some readers who loved reading more personal stuff in the past, when I still forced myself to share, and I’m gaining other readers who like the thoughts and observations and the general tone of this blog, and probably a few who are curious about my writing career and want to follow it, and the thing is, it doesn’t really matter, because I have no choice.
I'm Vered DeLeeuw, a blogger for hire and a social media consultant. My social media campaigns increase brand awareness and loyalty, improve search engine rankings and drive targeted traffic to my clients' websites. Momgrind is my personal blog.
Closing Comments
by MomGrind
Any blogger will tell you that the decision to remove comments from her blog was not an easy one. After all, comments are included in all blogging platforms, and most people assume that what separates blogs from magazines is the two-way conversation.
It’s true, of course. Social media is characterized by an easy access to all, and by a free, two-way conversation. But there’s this well-kept secret that many bloggers discover only after they’ve been blogging for a while: the two-way conversation on blogs can be aggressive, fake, and incredibly time-consuming. It can get so bad that it actually takes away from the joy of writing and makes you feel as if you had lost control of your own blog.
Here’s what three wise men have to say about why they decided to turn off comments on their blogs:
“I feel compelled to clarify or to answer every objection or to point out every flaw in reasoning… it takes way too much of my time to even think about them, never mind curate them… [and] it permanently changes the way I write. Instead of writing for everyone, I find myself writing in anticipation of the commenters,” says Seth Godin, capturing what many seasoned bloggers eventually come to realize – that our blogs are our creative outlets, the places where we go to share our thoughts and opinions with the world – not the places where we want to argue and fight with the many anonymous visitors who vehemently, violently disagree with us.
Adds Merlin Mann, “I’ve loved so many of the comments [here]… but, for an endless number of reasons that you’ve probably seen for yourself across the web, the quality and care of visitor contributions everywhere has hit what I truly hope is rock bottom. Stupid, venal, ignorant, self-linking comments from people who couldn’t be troubled to actually read the article. Angry forum posts full of personal attacks… nonsense tagging, meta-commenting, ass-kissing, trolling… Please. It’s nuts and it’s pointless and it’s really cynical on the part of almost every publisher that allows that crap to go on. “Conversation,” like “friend,” is a word that has a meaning to human beings with faces and brains. I will not abuse it as code for the surplus page views produced by someone with an afternoon to kill. 43 Folders is now, once again, about what *I* have to say about things… If you have comments about what I say here, post about it on your own blog.”
And Leo Babauta says, “I truly loved comments here. I love hearing from readers, and it was my opinion that the comments often held better tips than the posts themselves. So why did I turn off comments? There was too much comment spam, resulting in huge headaches for me. And the tiny minority of legitimate comments were mostly bloggers trying to get noticed. People can still give me feedback via Twitter, and if I don’t always respond I do listen. Getting rid of comments has been regrettable, but they don’t scale, and it has brought peace to my life.”
So I am closing comments on this blog. I am torn about this – I actually lost sleep last night thinking about it and trying to reach a final decision. But I am doing it, because I am fed up with aggressive, mean comments that are affecting my writing and my mood. You don’t even see these comments – I have been moderating comments heavily for the past year or so – but even if I don’t publish them, I still see them.
Three years into blogging, I am also tired of the “comment on my blog, and I’ll comment on yours” game that many of us bloggers (myself included!) play. I still want to write, and I plan to continue writing here even if not as regularly as before, but I won’t do it with potential comments in mind. I’ll do it because I’m a writer, and writers have a deep, nearly uncontrollable need to write, and to be read. The conversation can take place on Facebook, on Twitter, and on readers’ own blogs.
Got comments? Feel free to post them on your blog.