ZsoltBalla.com » uncreative blogging

The 40-second checklist to see if your next post is worth writing it

Zsolt Balla — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 21:46:05 +0000

This article is a part of the Uncreative Blogging series, providing you with tips on how to Get creativity out of the way of your success. If you like what you read, subscribe my RSS feed to stay tuned, because there is more to follow.

Most bloggers will agree that, a relatively low number of posts generate the vast majority of their blog’s traffic. How easy and simple it would be, if only you could see which posts will become these traffic generators before actually writing them (and especially before writing all the rest, that later prove to be useless).

I’m pretty sure that you have quite a lot of topics in your head that you are planning to write blogposts on. This easy-to-use checklist helps you determine whether they are worth the effort of writing them. This list, of course, cannot guarantee success, but it can provide you with solid guidelines for providing value for your readers that can result long term high, quality traffic (significantly different from the traffic you receive when you ask your friends to digg your article).

Is it useful?

It’s a real no-brainer by now, and you have heard it gazillion times: if you are running a professional blog, the value you give your reader is measured in usefulness. There are several ways to provide useful information, just to list a couple:

Inform your readers about something they’ve never heard of
Write a post that shows your readers how to do something
Write a post that shows your readers how to do something they frequently do in a way they’ve never tried (and in a way that is supposedly better or easier than their old methods)
Write a plan that they can act upon
Share your experiences (positive or negative), and add a step-by-step guide that can be repeated

Of course there are a number of other ways to be useful, too. But you have to find a way to serve your reader with usefulness. If the topic you’re thinking of is not like that: don’t bother.

Is it striking?

The phenomenon that makes articles or blogposts go viral is the “Wow factor”. If your piece (or at least a part of it) makes your reader say: Shoot, I should have thought of that before he did, the reader will most definitely forward the article to his or her friends (or digg it, stumble it, youname it…).

While most “how-to-go-viral” guides will focus only on the post’s title (due to the harmful practice of Digg users of digging articles without actually reading them first), I think the Wow factor can be placed inside the article, too. But it has to be there, somewhere.

Is it a dupe?

I should have asked whether it is unique, but I haven’t.

This is because at times dupes can appear very unique for the first sight.

In fact, dupes can be different from word-by-word, copypasted articles. I don’t consider an article unique, if it’s:

An article rewritten from another article
An article recompiled from various sources
An article without any new information in it

Unfortunately, most of the “27 ways to do thisorthat” type articles, you see out there are dupes. These lists can still be useful, but I think a blogpost or article is worth writing only if it has something in it, that hasn’t ever been written down by anyone before.

To cut a long story short, there are only three things that can make a blogpost unique:

If the question it asks is new
If the answer it gives to the question is new (regardless of whether the question is new in itself)
If its approach is new

If someone is trying to sell you something, that none of the above, as new, he’s trying to make a fool of you.

An obvoius rule here is Googleing your subject in the research phase (ie: before you start writing it) and searching major social bookmarking sites, like Digg or Delicious for duplicates, exactly as Digg would do if you submitted an article. If the subject has already been covered, you have two options:

Forget it
Think of a very different approach

If you decide to go for the second option, make sure you include the link of the original article in your post, and reflect on it in a few words (saying how great that article is, although you disagree with it etc). This way your readers will know that you haven’t plagarized the original post, but you have additional (or different)thoughts on the subject.

Are you any good in it?

The most common mistake I see in the blogosphere is covering topics that the author knows nothing about. Some bloggers seem to think that reading three posts on a certain subject will make him or her professional enough to write a fourth one, while posing as an expert.

It is both lame and transparent.

If you are not an expert, you don’t have to pretend you are. If you have no clue on the subject you are planning to cover, I suggest you to drop it. But if you insist on covering it anyway, you still have a couple of options:

Report on your personal experiences as you begin to have them
Ask your readers’ opinions
Try to implement some of the how-to-s out there in the subject, and report on what happens in reality

All of these options are better than pretending that you master a subject if you don’t.

Is it witty?

Usefulness is king, but your readers will always appreciate a good laugh. Probably they will share it with their friends, too.

Would you give it thumbs up?

I mean you surely would, since you were the one to come up with the subject in the first place. But if you just hit the Stumble! button, and arrived to a blog you’d never seen before. Put your hand on your heart. Would you?

(Photo by Chaparral [Kendra])

This article is a part of the Uncreative Blogging series, providing you with tips on how to Get creativity out of the way of your success.

Don’t miss the upcoming pieces of this series. Subscribe to my RSS feed, or follow me on Twitter!
Did you like this article? Share it at the social bookmarking site of your choice!
Care to disagree? Please leave a comment!

Uncreative Blogging: How to get creativity out of the way of your success?

Zsolt Balla — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 20:29:49 +0000

Note: This post is the introduction of a series of articles covering uncreative ways of making your blog (or online business) successful. If you like what you read, subscribe my RSS feed to stay tuned, because there is more to follow.

Do you consider yourself creative? I sure do.

If you are anything like me, you are always full of brilliant ideas, and these ideas seem to come faster, one after the other, than they could be accomplished. If you are anything like me, you take a piece of paper and a pen, and write those ideas down, so that you don’t have to keep them in mind, and also to make sure that they are not forgotten. And if you are anything like me, you have at least three notebooks (the analogue ones) full of these ideas, many of which you will never achieve.

I have a creative job (I’m an editor and a journalist, beside managing the newspaper I write for), and I started both my personal blog and this one, to write a piece of my creativity out of me, then, after a while, I noticed something.

And if you’re anything like me, that’s bad news for you, too.

Your blog’s success, and your personal success as a blogger has nothing to do with creativity. In fact, for reasons that I will unravel in another post, your creativity can be the greatest hurdle and threat to your blog’s success.

Let me explain!

Of course, it used to be different back in the old days. Around 2000, blogging in itself was a groundbreaking, creative phenomenon. The very idea of publishing by a click of your mouse and writing articles on anything that was on your mind for millions to read (potentially) was a revolution and a frenzy of creativity. But although it does not appear too remote on a historic scale, times have changed a lot since those early days.

Blogging, by today, has evolved into a fully-fledged business model . I think I’m not far off the mark guessing that I’m not the first one telling you this, and part of the reason you started blogging was (apart from getting rid of your overflowing creativity, of course), that you’ve heard about this business model.

While finding, exploring and building up a business model is one of the most creative tasks I can imagine, once the big work is done, and the model is working, creativity becomes secondary, if not less important than that.

Think about the subtlety of McDonald’s’ business model, and the enormous work its founder, Ray Kroc has achieved. Still, if you ask your former classmates, who ended up working for McDonald’s, creativity is not likely to be among the first qualities they will highlight describing their jobs. But even if you consider the ultimate source of creativity in the corporate world: Google. Their founders and employees had to be extremely creative to make it what it is now, but once the AdSense system is all set, you just buy and sell based on a certain algorithm, exactly as you’d do at a traditional shop or market. Without any creativity, whatsoever.

Blogging is no different. It’s business model, of course, is still very young, and is undergoing a constant maturation. But the changes that took place in the recent years already rewrote the rules that draw a line between successful blogs and those that will never make it.

And while the process of writing may still remain a creative activity (within strict limits, as I’ll tell you later in details), whether people will actually find and read what you wrote (ie. your blog’s success) has nothing to do with creativity. If you write for yourself, for your close friends, as a part of a therapy or you are simply having fun writing, it may even be fine for you.

But if you’re chipping in to the business section of the blogosphere, your blog’s traffic is a much more important measurement of its success than the amount or the quality of its content. Coherence between the two, obviously exists. But there’s no easier way to put it than this:

Low quality content + Low traffic = Unsuccessful blog
High quality content + Low traffic = Unsuccessful blog
Low quality content + High traffic = Successful blog(?)
High quality content + High traffic = Successful blog

While many will argue whether combination #3 can be called a success (in fact, it’s a very rare combination, and I firmly believe that high quality content is a prerequisite of sustainable, high quality traffic), one thing is for sure: creativity in itself will never take you to #4.

Even when it comes to using your creativity to drive traffic to your blog or website: you may have brilliant ideas or tiny tricks or secrets that have never been used before: but the big picture will more likely be defined by how you utilize those techniques that you didn’t have to find out, because they are echoed all across the blogosphere.

In this upcoming series of blogposts (I have written down at least 50 topics to cover by now, so the series is likely to last all year), I will show you how to fend off the temptation of your creativity, and focus on what you really want: making your blog successful.

Don’t miss the upcoming pieces of this series. Subscribe to my RSS feed, or follow me on Twitter!
Did you like this article? Share it at the social bookmarking site of your choice!
Care to disagree? Please leave a comment!