Planning and blogging are not often mentioned in the same sentence, but making a great blog is a lot easier if you’re working from a solid plan. Here’s a recent Argo webinar where we explored content planning on three levels – weekly, monthly and long-term:
content planning
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Blogger-rhythms: How to pace yourself
Picking up where yesterday’s post left off, I want to talk about the blogger’s pattern. This is where Robin’s insights about stock and flow really come into play. I think the most essential rhythmic prowess great bloggers develop is the ability to balance these two types of content.
We often talk about finding a rhythm, as though it’s something that’ll happen to you, or something you’ll discover. Just as often, I tend to think a good, sustainable, audience-rewarding pace truly is developed - planned, practiced and polished. Marathon runners don’t “find” their race-winning strides – they set goals and work towards them.
I think a helpful way to approach that goal-setting is by setting goals and organizing workflow on a daily cycle, a weekly cycle, and for the medium-to-long term. I’ll talk about each of these.
The daily cycle
Image courtesy of Flickr user Socceraholic.
There are a couple things to keep in mind about planning for the daily rhythm of the blog:
First, you never want to start your day with an empty slate. Knowing that you’ll start off with a daily link roundup every morning is one easy way to get your engine going. It’s also important to augment that with something meaty, ready to polish and post shortly after your computer wakes up. Previously, I shared Ernest Hemingway’s trick of writing some of his best material late in the day and stopping just as he was on a roll. I think it’s a great idea to end each afternoon by completing 90 percent of a post you’ll finish and publish in the morning. I also think it’s smart to head into each week knowing the original, enterprise pieces you intend to publish each day, news permitting.
Second, make sure you’re addressing each of your overlapping communities with something every day. Remember when I wrote about planning content around your audience needs? To continue the example I laid out in that post, let’s say your topic reaches (1) an audience of people employed in relevant industries, (2) a law/policy audience, (3) a scientific/scholarly audience, and (4) a lay audience mostly interested in the cultural impact of the subject. Make sure that each day, you’re offering at least one post of interest to each audience. You’ve got many types of posts you can employ to hit that target. Switch ‘em up.
Lastly, strive to publish an attention-getter at least once a day. This is a post that you think will be spread around your community, original reporting and cogent analysis that will hook in a broader audience, garnering links on Twitter and Facebook and commentary from other sites. We’re actually building content promotion positions for these featured posts into the site. Lists and guides and explainers will be some of your best friends here, as will any scoops you can develop or news you can break. This will tie into your weekly planning (and it will take planning).
The weekly cycle
Image courtesy of Flickr user Wild_Honey_Pie☂
Set aside some time every week to plan for the following week. This is when you can develop ideas for those attention-getters that will earn you regular exposure to a wider and wider potential crowd. As you plan your banner ideas for each week, think about how to hook different segments of your community. For example, in a typical week, you might plan on developing two featured posts for your business audience, a couple for your law/policy and academic audiences, and another few explainers or analyses or stories that bring in the lay audience.
Of course, the cycles of a particular beat are likely to intersect with your content planning at the weekly level. There are probably regular meetings, briefings, newsletters or document releases that relate to your beat, so you can set up the appropriate live-chats and follow-up posts as necessary.
From week to week, different stories are going to really seize the attention of your crowd, and it’s important to pursue these doggedly and elevate the level of attention you pay them (to whatever degree makes journalistic sense). Sometimes you’ll know when these are coming down the pike (e.g. your legislature is set to vote on a hot-button law). But often, these types of stories are tied to the news – so you can’t necessarily plan for specific stories to take root, but you can be attuned to them when they appear. Make sure to keep them front-and-center for the week, if not longer, altering your weekly content planning if necessary to report new dimensions to the story, write some authoritative explainers and guides, and query your crowd for their insights.
At least once a week, you should be aiming to develop an attention-getter post that can really shine. Don’t neglect your ability to set an agenda and follow up on it. If you think a post is going to make a splash, follow it up early and often with posts that add dimension and enlarge the story. Find ways to relate the story to each of your audiences with different posts.
The medium- to long-term
Image courtesy of Flickr user CIMMYT.
Your daily and weekly planning for the site will keep it flowing, but what will really make it sing is the arc – the long-term vision that will tell your readers you’re taking them somewhere. You’re not just writing a blog, you’re writing something like a book. It’s important not to lose site of that.
Think about the long-term rhythm of your site. How often are you making a splash on your topic? On a monthly or semi-monthly basis, you should be thinking about how to create the solid, informative, high-level content that will get maximum pickup in your community – your equivalents of the Sunday A1 front-pager. We chose topics for Argo that would be “locally focused, but nationally resonant.” I expect that “national resonance” to be strongest in your long-term planning, where your biggest, most important pieces are conceived and developed.
They say long-form narrative doesn’t work well on the Web, but there are a number of ways to deliver big Web stories that will be popular: comprehensive guides to hot-button issues, deep investigative narratives, analytical pieces that lay out a major trend or idea, crowdsourced packages of the most influential people in the topical domain. The key is to imagine the final packages in advance, then break them down into components you can produce as part of your daily workflow. You recognize this advice: package, repackage, repeat.
Done well, the daily rhythm of your blog feeds your long-term strategy, and your long-term planning drives your daily activity. Invariably, though, you’ll find yourself wrapped up in day-to-day matters, devoting less and less attention to the longer-term stuff. That’s OK. I promise not to let you stray too far from the bigger picture.
Blogger-rhythms: how to develop your blog’s pace
STOP: Before you read this post, I’d like to ask you to read my co-blogger Robin’s mini-treatise on the concept of “stock and flow.”
Photo courtesy of Flickr user Maurese Polizio.
OK, now that you’re back, let’s talk about the rhythm of the blog.
I like to think about this rhythm in two dimensions: 1) audience patterns and 2) blogger patterns. I’ll talk about them in that order:
I. Audience patterns
Any Web editor with an eye on her stats knows that there are ebbs and flows in her users’ attention. Digital news editors tend to see a prominent spike first thing in the morning, as their users are rising for work and getting booted up for the day, another spike toward the lunch hour, perhaps a mild crest in the mid-afternoon, and some post-work, early-evening traffic to cap off the day. Widen the lens a bit, and you find that traffic tends to surge during the work week and settle over the weekends.
I’ve heard evidence that these patterns are evening out a little as people’s Web reading habits migrate to phones and other devices, allowing them to sneak in some surfing while they’re waiting in line for a mid-morning coffee or waiting for dinner to cook. Also, Twitter and Facebook are often up in the background as folks work at their computers, making it likelier than ever that a post might go viral in the middle of the day. And these patterns shift, of course, according to the location, focus and demographic of the site. Traffic to the arts and entertainment site I launched in Minnesota started to rise as the weekend drew closer, often hitting its peak on Friday in the late afternoon.
Whatever the rhythm of your crowd might be, you’ll discover that one exists, and it’s typically a good idea to accommodate that rhythm, to some extent. On newsier blogs, it’s standard practice to try to have some good meaty posts ready to go when your first users fire up the site in the morning – typically including a morning link roundup. Many bloggers indulge their crowd’s loopier side as the lunch hour approaches, posting fun YouTube videos or opening up threads for free discussion. In the afternoon, people often surf around for quick, digestible info-nuggets, an impulse bloggers often satisfy with more quick-hit content – following up a morning link with an excerpt and some additional insight, writing a few grafs on an interesting news development that day, calling to the crowd to share information that will be processed into a post later in the week, etc.
What’s important is to pay attention. Once you start to acquire an audience, observe their appetites. Note times and days when you achieve reactions you like. Test out earlier and earlier post times for a morning link roundup and see if you detect an uptick worth shifting your day.
Coming tomorrow: The blogger’s pattern.
Building a network
Image courtesy of Flickr user formula photo.
Like any beat reporter, a beat-blogger’s social network – her universe of sources, colleagues and other contacts – is a vital component of her work. On the Web, this network becomes more explicit, more public and even more immensely valuable. And for Argo, it composes a key part of the scaffolding the blogger should build at the outset of her pursuit.
I’d start with Twitter. It’s one of the fastest, most effective mechanisms for encountering news and links around a topic, and it has the potential to be a key driver of engagement with the site. A valuable Twitter feed will be filled with voices from every corner of the beat – key organizations, experts, activists, officials, reporters and others. I’d use Twitter lists to help organize these accounts into the roles they occupy. Well before the site is launched, the blogger can also interact with her network on Twitter, setting aside a little time every day to discover and share the best links on her subject. It should be a goal to build a robust Twitter following by launch, and the best way to do that is by consistently sharing interesting, useful links and commentary.
Then I’d move on to Google Reader (or another RSS reader) and set up my feeds, pulling in links from the various subdomains on the beat. I like to organize my feeds both by subject and priority – my “rock stars” folder is the first one I check every morning. Anyway, I’ll post about RSS management tactics later. The point is – a blogger’s feed reader should be the ultimate beat-focused newspaper, a daily gold mine of information for the truly topic-obsessed. Set it up early and keep it well-groomed.
In addition to RSS feeds from some sites, there might be other places on the Web – especially discussion forums – that it makes more sense to visit than subscribe to. A custom start page offers a convenient way to navigate to these sites daily or weekly.
Given that imagery will be such an important element of our sites, I’d also look for people on sites such as Flickr and YouTube creating work that we might want to use on our sites. I’d recommend doing a Creative Commons search for tags related to the topic on Flickr and contact photographers producing compelling work licensed for reuse, complimenting them on their photography and asking how they prefer to be credited if we reuse any of their images.
Depending on the beat, a range of other social network possibilities might come into play. Are there robust Facebook groups related to the topic? Mailing lists? Ning networks?
None of this stuff allows us to set-it-and-forget-it. RSS subscriptions, Twitter accounts and other social outputs have to be maintained over time. But we can take the first, most important steps early in the life of the beat.
How writing a blog is like writing a book
Chris Anderson blogged his book The Long Tail into a blockbuster. Flickr image courtesy of user Pop!Tech.
Peruse the New York Times Bestseller List for nonfiction at any moment, and you’ll find several familiar archetypes – celebrity or politician autobiographies, self-help tomes, partisan political mind-candy packaged as cultural commentary, and a smattering of works from popular historians and magazine authors. In recent years, though, you might have noticed a new vanguard taking up more and more space on the list – the blogger-turned-author. (Looking at the list right now, I’d count 4 of the top 35 titles as being blog-driven projects – Dan Pink, Nouriel Roubini, Jen Lancaster, and Simon Johnson / James Kwak.)
The blog-to-book-deal pathway is now so well-trod that there are entire blogs devoted to dreaming up snarky blog-to-book ideas. But there are several reasons these two great tastes taste so great together:
A table of contents is like a taxonomy.
A key part of any nonfiction book proposal is the description of how the book will be organized. Often, even plot-driven books become mostly thematic in their organization. For example, Jonathan Alter’s book The Promise – about President Obama’s first year in office – hews very loosely to a chronological thread from inauguration to the 2010 State of the Union. But if you look at the book’s chapters, they’re all about topics – Cabinet selection, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Rahm Emanuel, the financial crisis, health care reform, Afghanistan and Iraq, etc.
Planning for a nonfiction blog requires similar thinking about what themes and topics you’ll hit on regularly. Like a draft table of contents, the taxonomy helps you determine the scope and emphasis of your site.
Compelling books and blogs often employ a core narrative engine – a unifying objective, big idea, mystery, or argument.
This is what I call the quest. At its most basic, the narrative engine is a gimmick – the author plans to cook all the recipes in Julia Child’s most famous cookbook, or read every entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Done deftly, it transforms messy, pattern-defying reality into a vivid and graspable narrative.
Michael Lewis’ The Big Short lays out the fundamentals behind the financial crisis by focusing on the story of the small club of individuals who made their fortunes betting against the housing market. That framework, while narrow, is flexible enough to allow Lewis to touch on diverse contributors to the crisis – regulatory failures, market failures, foreign investment, individual irresponsibility and fraud – without overwhelming his readers.
Of all the highly-regarded economists qualified to comment about the causes behind the crisis, Simon Johnson might be among the most prominent. He’s appeared all over public media – Fresh Air, This American Life, Bill Moyers’ Journal – and has been ubiquitous in news stories about the disaster. I’m convinced Johnson’s hit blog, The Baseline Scenario, is a key reason he’s become such a key source. And I’m further convinced that what makes the blog really sing is its unifying argument – about the peril of allowing banks to become and remain “too big to fail.” In post after post, and in book chapter after book chapter, Johnson and Kwak explain all the little ways in which megabanks pose the potential to distort our financial and political systems to the point where disastrous crashes become inevitable.
Successful authors tend to write every day.
This is the most consistent detail I recognize in authors’ stories about their processes. They force themselves to write almost every day. Writing creates its own inertia. When you start putting words on a page, and plunge ahead with it no matter what comes, you tend to end up with better material than if you hem and haw over every word. When Chip Scanlan taught reporting and writing at the Poynter Institute, his most constant piece of advice to writers was, “Lower your standards.” Get your words out there before they have the chance to logjam your mind. Then refine.
Blogging demands similar discipline. It requires a rigorous, regular pace, but that pace itself quickly makes you better. The journey from classic long-form reporter to true blogger-at-heart is reflected in posts like this, from James Fallows:
I thought this was — yet again — a “surprisingly” effective Big Speech by Obama, though with a very few revealing lapses. Will take my time on doing the Full Annotated Version tomorrow, ideally by early afternoon.
“Lowering your standards,” when applied to journalistic blogging, doesn’t mean shirking responsibility for what we post and tossing off unverified rumors on a whim. It means exposing our process at moments when we haven’t yet produced a refined result. It means writing posts that begin with, “I’m working on … ” and continue with, “but I’m struggling to …”
Ernest Hemingway often described a technique that strikes me as very bloggy. He actually concluded his writing for the day right as he was hitting his stride. That way, he could plant the seeds for some of his best ideas in the afternoon and reap the bounty the next morning, before he was truly warmed up.
Making a book and a site successful both require a flair for person-to-person marketing and promotion.
You’ve poured your heart into researching and writing a book. Years of missing deadlines, drafting and redrafting, getting coached, paring down extraneous beautiful passages like so many pieces of your soul – it all culminates in the publication of a book. And at last, you get to rest, right?
Heh.
The book release is the moment when some of the most grueling work comes in – traveling to city after city, conducting readings in whatever bookstore will have you, signing covers, doing interviews. When selling 20,000 copies can launch you onto national bestseller lists, it makes sense to target 100 potential buyers at a book-signing.
This is one of the key reasons successful blogs so often result in successful books. When publishers see hundreds of thousands (or even tens of thousands) of regular visitors on a site, they know that a solid percentage of that audience might convert to buyers upon release, propelling the book onto the charts before the author even practices her signature. The blog becomes a key part of the book’s promotion.
But getting people to the site in the first place is an exercise that can require as much devotion (if not as much travel) as the book tour. It means engaging key conversation-leaders on Twitter and on their own sites, like a hundred little bookstores, getting in front of 100 new potential users every chance you get.
The blogger’s repertoire
A blogger has a great many tools to choose from. Photo courtesy of Flickr user tashland
Next time you’re scrolling through Andrew Sullivan’s blog, take a moment to notice how much Sullivan and his merry band of link-droids vary up the pace. The blog alternates long posts with minute ones, highly visual posts with snippets of pure text, stacks of links and blockquotes with flowing columns of original thought.
This is among the most freeing elements of the blogging format: with no news hole to fill, you can adapt every post to the length and format it deserves. We’ve been dreaming up ways that our design can accommodate the blogger’s creativity in designing different types of posts for different occasions. Here’s a smattering of the types of posts we’ve come across:
The just-a-link: Thrifty as can be.
The link roundup: A way to signal that you’ve read everything relevant to your topic and selected only the highlights, so your reader doesn’t have to.
The list: Remember, numbering is narrative. If you want to make a variety of disparate points without wasting time on transitions, there’s no better choice.
The single quote: Dramatic, arresting, concise.
The quote roundup: For displaying a wealth of perspectives.
The Q&A: Got an interview with a string of compelling tidbits? Edit it lightly (and transparently) and post it all. You’ve got the space, your wonkier readers will love it, and you can always highlight snippets and provide analysis in follow-up posts.
The liveblog: I think every reporter should have the experience of liveblogging an event on their beat. Unlike the typical event, where you often have to walk in looking for a story angle to take away, the liveblog demands your full engagement with every minute of the proceedings. You have to pay attention and capture what’s going on, rather than trying to impose patterns on the event from the get-go. If users chime in during the liveblog, the mix of voices and perspectives can make for a more rollicking, informative experience than you could ever create on your own. When you wrap up your live coverage, you’ll have the best notes from the event, hands-down – perfect raw material for a good analysis post afterwards.
The call-to-action: One of the many benefits of taking the time to create a great community is that you can turn around and ask your crowd to produce some stellar content.
The single photo: What’s that they say about the worth of a picture?
The slideshow: If people love one photo, how much will they love a dozen?
Lest you think my obsession with content…
Lest you think my obsession with content planning and topic selection is my own personal hobby horse not actively espoused by bloggers out in the real world, here’s Social Media Examiner advocating much of the same advice.
The blogger’s first month
Flickr photo courtesy of user Joe Lanman.
It’s rare that a beat reporter for a daily news operation gets the luxury of having weeks before the first story has to be filed for the public. But that’s the lucky circumstance our Argo-bloggers will find themselves in. It’s our responsibility to help them use that time as productively as they can.
Over the next week, I’ll be writing more about the things I hope to see the blogger tackle in that time, but for now, let me summarize those tasks in four broad and overlapping buckets:
1. Content planning
This is probably the most important thing the blogger will do during the pre-launch period. We’ll need to nail down the key audiences we hope to reach (much of which will have been determined beforehand) and plan content accordingly. An important element of the content plan will be the long-term planning – developing the long-running stories that we’ll be returning to all throughout the first year of the blog. We’ll also want to engineer content at the ground level – reporting and producing some feature-length posts that we expect will be viral hooks for various audiences at launch. For a good chunk of the pre-launch period, the blogger should be producing a flow of regular daily content to populate the site, a sort of dress rehearsal for the live performance. And I hope every blogger takes the time during this stretch to conduct a photowalk of the beat, generating a solid repository of free-and-clear imagery that will be useful over time.
2. Network building
From the get-go, the blogger will want to begin pulling together the social media network that will be essential to story-finding and story promotion. This will mean finding the places and people on the Web to pull into the RSS reader, to promote content to, and to participate in conversations with. This network will be represented on the site in a number of ways, which leads me to the next component …
3. System setup
All the work the blogger does to plan content and build a network will be reflected somehow on the final site. An essential piece of the first 30 days of the blogger’s workflow will be using the platform we’ve built to populate the site. Content planning will play into the creation of topic pages through an admin interface that we’re developing. The network of sites and Twitter users the blogger finds relevant will be crawled for links that will be aggregated on our topic pages and elsewhere on the Argo site. Throughout this process, the blogger will be using the Argo platform, hopefully identifying any rough spots or workflow kinks that we can smooth out before showtime.
4. Orientation
It’s important that the bloggers get to know not only their beats, but also their stations. We want to empower them to take advantage of their station infrastructure, so we’ll have to give them a chance to get familiar with it. They should sit in on pertinent meetings, embed with reporters and producers, and procure access to any relevant internal mailing lists and collaboration sites. Before the bloggers are on board, the Argo editors should spend time thinking about the best ways to ensure that work being done for the site is taking advantage of work being done elsewhere at the station, and vice-versa.
I’ll write in more detail about all of these elements in the days to come. In the meantime, enjoy your Memorial Day weekends!
Dark secret of blogging #1: Package, repackage, repeat.
The exquisite life cycle of Lifehacker content is a marvel to behold. Take a typical Hive Five post. (The Hive Five is a weekly call-out to the LH audience for software recommendations.)
First, the editors will post a question, e.g. “What’s the best music discovery service?” Then they’ll synthesize the most common responses into a round-up, “Five best music discovery services,” and ask their users to vote for a favorite. They’ll tally the votes, and post again: “Best music discovery service!” A link-baity title like “Five best music discovery services” is sure to draw a lot of traffic, meaning it’ll get packaged up yet again, in the “Week’s most popular posts.” Finally, at the end of the year, it might get repacked one more time, into a “Best of the Hive Five” roundup.
This technique brings numerous dividends:
It promotes volume.
Just think about that for a moment. A really simple crowdsourcing moment gets turned into fodder for [potentially] five posts, each of which has the potential to pull in a slightly different audience. This sort of industrial efficiency is part of how Lifehacker supplies its endlessly popular gusher of content.
It synthesizes and reinforces.
Bloggers have long since gotten over the notion that their audiences follow every thing they publish. Most people don’t have enough time, and some key points slip through the cracks. By recombining these points into posts that can become more viral with each incarnation, a blogger helps ensure information is digested into general knowledge.
It extends reach.
This is a key point about the Lifehacker approach: Every time that post is re-packaged, it’s aimed at a wider audience segment. The initial call-out is targeted to the folks who come to the site daily, people invested enough in the Lifehacker community that they not only read the posts, they read and contribute comments. Then those comments are packaged up into a post for a slightly less attentive audience, synthesizing the responses of the original crowd into five digestible nuggets. They’re distilled one more time for the folks who want to cut straight to the point – What’s the best music discovery service out there? And finally, they’re repackaged for users who dip in occasionally to see what’s hot around the site. Sheer brilliance.
It’s how you juggle the demands of a devoted, info-hungry community with the needs of your semi- or irregular users. Package, repackage, repeat.
And of course, it’s not just about packaging your own content. Folks like Andrew Sullivan and Arianna Huffington (not to mention the Gawker crew) do a fantastic job of packaging key info-nuggets from other sources into bundles that probably draw more traffic than their component parts. The Mashables and Smashing Magazines of the world are built on a discipline of creating and re-combining content for different needs and different audiences.