Introduction
In the same way you do not have to be a professional driver to drive, you no longer have to be a professional publisher to publish … News can break into the public consciousness without the traditional press weighing in.
—Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody
So you want to be a blogger?
No problem. There’s plenty of room at the table: this table circles the globe.
A year after his 2008 book, Shirky, one of the leading thinkers of the Digital Revolution, reminded a TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Talk audience we are in an age in which “consumers are now producers.” Seven years later, this once revolutionary idea is so commonplace as to be almost pedestrian. Remarkable.
“The moment we’re living through,” Shirky told his audience—and the 1.4 million people who have viewed the talk online—has seen “the largest increase in expressive capability in human history.”
Join the conversation. But accept the responsibility and expect the hard work it takes to do so well. Like anyone else, you can break news, comment on news, share news, tell stories, offer insight. Pull up any of an ever-growing list of free programs on your computer, and you can be your own publisher this afternoon; blog software is that easy and that ubiquitous.
There is, however, one small obstacle. Well, maybe not so small. When you hang out your shingle that reads “Blogger,” you can expect a whole lot of competition. In 1999, one researcher tallied the number of blogs on the Internet and came up with 23. Twelve years later, the company NM Incite was tracking 181 million blogs worldwide when it gave up counting. In April 2013, the marketing blogger Eric Pangburn looked through company press releases and found the reported number of bloggers using Tumblr, WordPress, LiveJournal, Weebly, and Blogster totaled 240 million—and he couldn’t find any data on the number of users from the popular platforms Blogger, Blogsome, and Posterous, which host tens of millions more.
All of these bloggers are straining to be heard or seen or read. Drawing readers, viewers, or listeners to your new blog—and sustaining its focus and quality—is going to be a lot harder than getting it up and running.
This book is designed to help you with all three, to give you skills and strategies to get started, to sustain your work, and to seek out a robust audience.
We’d like to urge you from the outset to enter your new blogging enterprise with the right mindset. Come to blogging with a desire to share a passion or area of expertise, not an expectation to strike it rich (very few do). Or, to use an historical analogy, keep in mind that a lot more gold prospectors who moved to California and Alaska in the nineteenth century found great new homesteads instead of the mother lode.
Blogging, too, allows you to build not only a homestead, but your own neighborhood, occasionally as quickly as those mining towns sprouted up but typically much more slowly. It’s a way of connecting with old friends and finding new ones, tapping into existing com munities and assembling your own. Blogging offers much more. It can help you gather your thoughts. It can improve your skills and your ease as a researcher, reporter, writer, and storyteller. And it’s great fun.
If you’re good and smart and persistent, it also can—can, but not necessarily will—become a way of making a living or supplementing one. We’d advise, however, that you don’t start with that expectation, and that, even if it’s your ultimate goal, you keep your day job until your blog starts attracting audience and, ultimately, ads. We’d also advise you that, dreams aside, you probably shouldn’t set your sights too high, especially for that first blog post. Let’s face it: it’s not going to go viral. Readers won’t rush to leave comments. You’re not going to get an invitation to The View. Not yet anyway.
Like most things, becoming a successful blogger takes practice, hard work, and craft. It demands finding a niche, developing a strategy, using media and social media well, and finding a compelling voice and something fresh to say. It requires patience, persistence and a bit of luck to draw that first ad, a bit of recognition or, ever so occasionally, a book contract. Success in blogging typically follows the tortoise, not the hare. It means moving forward, slowly and steadily, learning, experimenting, engaging others, and, to whatever extent you like, playing around with words and images as you go.
One early and prolific blogger is Barry Ritholtz, chief investment officer of Ritholtz Wealth Management, who began his blog, The Big Picture, in 2003. Nearly 12 years later, on September 27, 2014, he wrote an entry under the headline “What I’ve learned after 30,000 posts.” And no, that number is not a typo. Here is a bit of what he learned. We suspect you will learn something quite similar.
After more than a decade of getting up before the crack of dawn to write a daily journal about all things financial, here is what I’ve learned:
Writing is a good way to figure out what you think.
The act of putting pen to paper, or in my case, spilling pixels on a screen, requires thought … Often, I have no idea what I thought about a subject until I begin to write about it. Once you research an idea, you begin to develop a perspective. Writing about anything in public, often in real time, has helped fashion my views …
Writing is a good way to become a better writer (so is reading).
When I started the blog, one goal was to become a better writer. After more than a dozen years spending an hour a day writing—and another hour a day reading outstanding writing from others—your skills begin to improve. It is an old joke that it only takes a decade or so to become an overnight sensation.
As you get started with your blog, this book is meant to offer a mix of practical advice and inspiration. Look at it and use it as a blogger’s guide, not a career guide. We hope it will give you the tools to blog well, effectively, and ethically, to find and build a niche that brings you followers and satisfaction. One author of this book, Jerry Lanson, has made a few dollars blogging. The other author, Mark Leccese, has declined to accept pay from the outlets that have published his blogs because he is a media critic and wants to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest. Both of us came to blogging after significant careers as journalists. Neither of us have retired from our primary careers as journalism professors. We’ve kept those day jobs, and it’s a good thing. We’re not famous. Our words don’t go viral, though sometimes they’re well read.
Still, we blog. We do so because we love to tell stories and craft what we hope are well-conceived and supported opinions, because we have a passion and some expertise for the subjects we share with others, because we love to communicate something with (we hope) substance and style, because we enjoy the give-and-take with our audiences. So will you.
On the pages that follow, we’ll also be sharing the experiences and stories of other bloggers, amateur and professional, all of whom we’ve asked to share their insights. You’ll get tips on how to determine the best niche, where to find stories, how to write them, how to choose a platform or plug-in, how to build a brand, how to craft headlines that draw an audience, and how to find a voice that makes your writing distinctive (and more importantly, truly yours). Above all, perhaps, you’ll learn of the triumphs and tribulations of being your own publisher, calling your own shots. This role is at the heart of the new world of consumer as producer. With it comes the joy and the responsibility to communicate with an audience not once in a while, not only when the spirit moves you, but on a consistent basis. It’s a discipline that builds thinking and writing muscles alike, just as Ritholtz says.
Both of us have taken satisfaction from giving readers insight and information they might not have gotten from their customary news outlets. We’ve tried in our work to draw connections between events and ideas in the news and, sometimes, simply tried to make those in our audience smile. We have contributed to the conversation that is the blogosphere, shared perspectives, and perhaps given readers new insights on politics, the media, culture, travel, family life, and more.
To blog regularly is to learn about the world and yourself, to meet new acquaintances, and to share exchanges with your audience. It’s an opportunity that plays a significant role in setting the twenty-first-century agenda.
In the end, your ability to embrace that sense of sharing stories and of entering a community’s conversation as your own boss will do more to propel you toward bigger success than anything else.
Turn the page. Join us on the blogger’s journey, an adventure that at times can take you across continents and to new insights without stirring from your keyboard—and we surely encourage you to do such stirring with regularity.