Kent Newsome on technology, music and life

6/03/2006


The Swift Way to Blog Stardom

Seth Godin has a wonderfully satirical post today that provides 56 tips to increase your blog traffic.

Among my favorites:

11. Don't write about your cat, your boyfriend or your kids.
13. Write about your kids.

10. Encourage your readers to help you manipulate the technorati.

19. Do email interviews with the well-known.

21. Use photos. Salacious ones are best.

31. Write about stuff that appeals to the majority of current blog readers--like gadgets and web 2.0.

37. Keep tweaking your template to make it include every conceivable bell or whistle.

15. Be sycophantic. Share linklove and expect some back.
44. Don't interrupt your writing with a lot of links.

This is good stuff.

The point is that there is no recipe you can follow to ensure a popular blog. All you can do is write hard, try to write well, join in the conversations and wait.

I am a songwriter, and have been for many years. There is a camp within the songwriting community who believe that writing a song is like baking a cake. You put the right ingredients in, mix it up and bake it for the specified length of time and, presto, you'll have a good song.

Of course when you listen to excellent songs by Bruce Springsteen or Van Morrison or Bob Dylan, you quickly notice that many of their songs ignore many of the so called rules. I've had people who claim to be songwriters tell me all the reasons why some of my songs that have been recorded by more that one artist will never get cut. Normally, I just let them go on, without telling them about the cuts, because the purpose of that conversation is for them to talk, not for me to hear. I know that, more times than not, their strict adherence to the songwriting recipe will keep them from the experimentation that can lead to great art.

Recipes are fine for science. Blogs and songs are not science. They are art. And while there are some basic principles you can follow to make better art, good art is what people who see it like.

It's the same way with blogs.

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Posted by Kent @ 6/03/2006 11:39:00 AM | Permalink

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4 Comment(s):

"The point is that there is no recipe you can follow to ensure a popular blog. All you can do is write hard, try to write well, join in the conversations and wait."

Nonsense. His post is making humor out of juxtaposing fragments, which is funny, but hardly means there are no recipes. There are *several* recipes - you can be an A-lister's pet, you can be an A-lister's critic, you can be a *professional* pundit and ignore the lower-level linking games, etc.

All that means is that there's (a few?) different recipes - not NO recipes.

By Blogger Seth Finkelstein, at 6/03/2006 3:29 PM  
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At what point does a bunch of recipes for a popular blog equate to no recipe (singular) for a popular blog?

Being a A-Lister's pet isn't a cake you can bake- it's a cake that someone else bakes for you.

Being an A-Lister's critic is a writing style, not a recipe. I know a lot of blogs that do the critic thing without getting a lot of traffic.

Steve Gillmor has a recipe for being arrogant and using needlessly long words, but I don't even consider his writing, the way he wants to develop it, to be a blog.

I just don't think you can add a bunch of ingredients/approaches to your blog, mix it up and, presto, get a ton of constant traffic.

By Blogger Kent, at 6/03/2006 5:01 PM  
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Simple: When no patterns or structure can be drawn. That's clearly not the case. It's very silly, verging on misleading evangelism, if the argument is that if there is more than one and only one recipe, no conclusions can be drawn, it's all a mismash, nothing can be said.

The idea is not that all followers of a recipe WILL succeed - that clearly can't be true, by numbers. Rather, that success often can be traced to certain recipes (not the same thing - if you want to be elected President of the US, you MUST raise a huge amount of money. If you raise a huge amount of money, it doesn't follow that you WILL be elected President of the US).

By Blogger Seth Finkelstein, at 6/03/2006 6:47 PM  
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There are many recipes, and new ones written and tested daily.

By Blogger Phil Wolff, at 6/03/2006 9:21 PM  
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