LISTEN TO NICK WILSON DISCUSS HOW TO PRODUCE KILLER BLOGS HERE
The Writing Show (WS): This is Paula B. When Web logs first got going, they resembled personal diaries more than anything else. Now that blogs have become high art and commerce, we decided to seek out a professional blogger to explain the dos and don’ts of this exciting world.
Welcome to the Writing Show, where writing is always the story. I’m Paula B, here with my guest today, Nick Wilson. Nick Wilson is one of the owners of Performancing.com, a home for professional bloggers. Nick ran the Threadwatch.org blog, and has been involved one way or another with Web publishing since around 2000. He lives in Denmark with his wife and daughter. Welcome to The Writing Show, Nick.
Nick Wilson (NW): Thank you very much, Paula. It’s nice to be here, and thank you for having me on.
WS: My pleasure. I am so excited about talking with you because blogging is such a huge phenomenon, first of all, and secondly because Performancing is doing such a compelling job of talking about what blogging is and how you can make money from it, and how you should do it. Can you tell us what Performancing is?
NW: Performancing is a community site. We wrote on the About page, and I guess it pretty much stands, that our aim is to provide a place for those that wish to make money from blogging to come and talk to their peers, to participate in a community of professional bloggers. So we can learn from each other. I mean, there’s nothing that we can’t discuss on Performancing. If it’s to do with blogging and it’s to do with making money from blogging, then we want to know about it and we want to talk about it and we want to talk about it with people that are interested in earning some money from something we all love doing.
WS: Let’s talk about blogging in all its various aspects. For example, is there a standard format for blog entries?
NW: No. I think it’s very much up to the individual. I think that’s part of the beauty of blogs, lots of different styles of blogging. There’s link blogging. There’s article writing, which is more the style of Performancing. Then there’s commentary on the news of the day on whatever your particular subject is. Product blogging, business blogging. Lots and lots of different styles. I think that the common factor is that blogging’s a conversation and however you start that conversation, the value’s in the comments and the trackback and the links that you give out to your audience. The distributed conversation, if you like.
WS: Do you think it matters how often you post?
NW: Yeah, I do. I think some people can get away with very little. Some people have to post a lot. It depends very much on your target audience. And I think most blogs have one thing in common right at the beginning, and that’s that a high post frequency for at least the first month, maybe six weeks to two months, is a good thing to build some momentum. It’s not always true. If you’re very, very famous or you have some kind of background, then just the fact that you are going to write to a blog can gain you a lot of readers. But for most of us near-mortals, gaining a lot of readers in the beginning, gaining a kind of critical mass at the start of a new blog is pretty important. And the only real way to do that is to blog often, blog well, and to keep it up, keep it going. It’s a hard slog getting a good site off the ground.
WS: And you actually did advertising to get your site going. Is that right?
NW: We’ve done some advertising. We’ve had hits and misses with it. We did some advertising on Technorati. We have advertised on Boing Boing, which for your readers that aren’t aware of it is probably, I think it’s the most popular blog. It’s certainly way up there in the top 20, probably top 5. And we did some advertising on AdWords, Google AdWords, on various blogging sites. And we did some with B5 Media, a blog network that we are personally friendly with the owners, Darren Rouse, Duncan Riley, and Jeremy Wright. Yeah, we did a bit. Some of it was much better than others. But all of it was relatively valuable, if only in the learning curve for us. But we’d never done this before. We’d always as individuals, Performancing is a group blog, but as individuals we had always started our blogs off the hard way, without any advertising. And to start a blog off with some advertising is interesting. The most value we’re getting probably is from Technorati because our audience is pretty wide, and so is the Technorati audience.
WS: Would you recommend advertising for other bloggers? What have you learned from this particular experience?
NW: I’ve learned the value of tracking and really monitoring your advertising, mostly because we failed miserably in that regard, which was entirely my fault for not having a particular switch switched on on the server. We picked that up and we’ve been able to evaluate our advertising since, but in the first few weeks, we just didn’t really have much data to tell us what was working and what wasn’t.
So I think that’s important, but to go back to what you were saying, would I recommend it, then, I think so, yes. Again, it depends on your goals. How much money do you have to spend on advertising? And out of that advertising, what do you need in order to make that a success. To some people, that’s going to be purely readership. It’s going to be Bloglines subscribers, RSS subscribers. It’s going to be signups for an email newsletter. It’s going to be the amounts of daily hits you’re getting on the site. For others it’s going to be how much of those hits you’re getting on the site is going back out through AdSense, through some other form of contextual advertising. Perhaps an affiliate link. Perhaps as one of our guys, one of our main authors, Chris Garrett recently blogged about, perhaps you run a shop on your blog and you sell a specific product. Maybe an electronic product. Maybe a tangible product. Maybe you sell chairs. Perhaps it’s how many chairs you sell. The normal rules of advertising apply for blogs. There’s nothing really different. You have to work out what it is you want and what is going to make that advertising a success for you and do the math.
WS: Have you done much viral advertising? Non-paid but word of mouth?
NW: If you mean word of mouth in terms of blogging, then sure. We’ve done a lot of emailing, we’ve done a lot of…we’ve posted specifically with the intention of hitting some of the viral sites with content that would be good for those sites, such as del.icio.us, which was recently bought by Yahoo. Such as Boing Boing. Never made it onto Boing Boing, but we got invited back door: we bought some advertising. But yeah, we’ve done what we can with that. We don’t spend a huge deal of time thinking how can we make this post viral. We post probably four times a day now. In the beginning we were posting maybe eight times a day. And not every post is a 100% winner. [If] We have one or two posts a day which are really, really excellent then we’re pretty happy. And we post to del.icio.us, the appropriate categories. If we see somebody else has put them on digg.com, then we all have accounts. We’ll go and vote for our own stuff, no problem. There are some things we do, but we don’t spend a great deal of time on it. Most of our effort is in simple blogging. Blogging well, blogging on really good solid subjects and trying to provide something that at the end of the day has real value for the guys that are coming here, and the girls that are coming here, and checking out what we do. And if they like it, they’ll link to it. They’ll post it in their del.icio.us bookmarks. They’ll “digg” it on digg.com. Today we broke into tech.meliarandom.com, which is a relatively new Web site. Well, it isn’t a new Web site. As I understand it, it’s an older Web site, but it’s been revamped. It’s certainly got a new lease of life. Being on there has done us no end of good today. Lots and lots of links for an interview we did with Matt Putt of Google. There’s lots and lots of viral stuff we do, but we don’t specifically go out on a daily basis and create that stuff. Just now and again.
WS: Let’s talk about some of the dos and don’ts of blogging. First of all, I know it’s hard to make a general rule, but what do you think makes a blog compelling?
NW: I think the easiest way to answer that, to use the “get out” answer, I think, is to produce remarkable content, to steal Seth Godin’s famous thing, that you should be remarkable. And you can be remarkable in lots of different ways. With us, I like to think that we’re remarkable in that our posts are in depth for the most part. There are some short posts. There are some very short posts occasionally. But most of our posts are pretty in-depth, and they’re kind of technical, kind of tutorial-like. With other sites you can be remarkable by getting to the news first, by being well-informed, by being known as a source that provides news on a particular topic pretty much first, the first person to blog that news. Other sites, other blogs can be remarkable through all manner of things: the intelligence of the writer, what they have to say. I don’t read any political blogs, but I have looked at them. And with something like a political blog, you need to say something that appeals to a particular set. And if you have some intelligent, interesting commentary on the political news of the day, then that’s going to make you remarkable. To go right back to where I started, to sum it up, you just have to be interesting. There’s no quick formula, there’s no automatic formula for this. You can’t sit there and just post links. You can’t sit there and just the political news of the day. You can’t sit there and rewrite tutorials from other Web sites, for example, or just link to them. You have to have some personality, make it interesting, and make your posts remarkable.
WS: Do you think that means that you have to be a good writer in the classical sense of good writing?
NW: No. No. Definitely not. I’m a dreadful writer.
WS: No you’re not.
NW: I’m certainly not a good writer. I can’t even spell. It’s true. And people keep PMing me. I had a wonderful…all the forms on Performancing.com come direct to me, and we had one from Anonymous the other day, a guy called Anonymous. It’s a shame about that. The subject line was “Nick W’s spelling.” And there was this long tirade of semi-polite abuse about my spelling. So no, I don’t think you have to have classic writing skills, but I think you have to be conversational. I think you have to be approachable. Does that make sense?
WS: yes.
NW: I think it does. I think it does. I think you have to make people feel that they should comment, that they can comment, that commenting is a good thing to do on your site. Commenting goes hand-in-hand with links. It’s the same thing. If people feel compelled to comment on your blog, they will feel compelled to link to your blog. If they feel compelled to link and you get links, then you get traffic. Search engine traffic follows that. I won’t go into that sort of algorithmic detail about how search engines work, but essentially it’s all down to links. The more you can distribute that conversation, the more you can turn your commentary or your points into a focal point of conversation on a particular topic, the better you’re going to do. And you don’t really need to be a great writer to do that. You just need to have something to say, and you need to be able to say it reasonably well.
WS: I’d like to talk about comments because they’re so important, and there are so many different types of comments. What is the best way, do you think, to handle comments? Now obviously some people are going to be thoughtful and intelligent and some people are going to be provocative, and I’m sure you get them all. How do you approach commenters? Do you delete comments that are off track? Do you nicely say to the person, “Could you please stay on topic?” What do you do?
NW: We take it on a case-by-case basis. If it’s really wild and out there, particularly if it just makes no sense whatsoever, then sure, we’ll delete it. If we’re just getting into an area that we’d rather not see the thread go down, then we’ll try and put that thread back on topic in the thread itself. Sometimes we might send a message to a member. I think you have to play it by ear. You need to have this line in the sand. You need to have this idea of what you’re going to stand and what you’re going to accept and what you’re not going to accept and you really do have to have that line. But you also need to be just a little bit flexible, particularly with longtime members, with people that come back week after week and comment on one thread or another, or people who come back every day and comment on one thread or another. You have to take it on a case-by-case basis. Some people deserve just a little bit more leeway. And rather than editing or interfering with their comment in any way, you might want to send them an email and just ask them very kindly if they would mind not doing XYZ, whatever it was that’s causing you some concern. If, however, you have Joe Wacko come in and you’re talking about monetizing blogs with AdSense and somebody’s posting about how he saw a picture of the Virgin Mary in his porridge that morning, you can feel free to delete that, and if you’re feeling really kind, you can send him a little note saying you deleted it. I think you just need to play it by ear.
WS: Would you ever have to block somebody?
NW: Oh yeah. Yeah that happens. Not very often, I’m glad to say. But it does happen. It happened more on my last blog because it was a very different style and a different audience. But yeah, sure. If somebody won’t toe the line on your blog, if somebody consistently does stuff that you have in your policy, if somebody consistently goes against what you want to talk about, and you’ve had the conversation, perhaps countless times, then yeah. Absolutely. We’ll block people. I think you have to think of the majority, not the individual. You have to think of the health of the community as opposed to the health of one member, of one person.
WS: Obviously it’s a very subjective thing that you have to just do with trial and error.
NW: Yeah. It’s really tough to answer. Like I say, it’s an absolutely case-by-case basis. You can’t look at that in any other way on a blog. You really have to judge it on each individual case. Fortunately it doesn’t happen that much. The easiest way to deal with this kind of thing is to set the example. If you’re blogging, you should be commenting as well. You should be part of that conversation, not just a conversation starter. You should be involved in it. And the style that you post in and the track that you take the thread in, most members will see that and will follow suit, will post about the topic as opposed to going wildly off on a tangent. And like I said, when they do, on a case-by-case basis, either email, private message, deal with it in the thread, or in extreme cases, delete it.
WS: I found that comment very interesting because you specifically said on Performancing that you should be involved in commenting in your own comment stream. And there are so many blogs where that doesn’t happen. I find that very valuable.
NW: Yeah, it annoys me, personally. It really annoys me. In fact, it gets me mad. When I go to somebody’s blog and I take the time to comment on something, particularly when I ask a question, nobody replies. Geez, I came to your blog, you don’t have any comments on this thread. In fact, I’m the only person, or maybe there’s two of us that are actually taking the time. We’ve read what you have to say. We’re interested in what you have to say. So interested, in fact, that I’ve got up out of my slouch, got to the keyboard, and typed a paragraph or two and asked you a question, and you’re not going to respond to me. Thanks very much for that. I’ll be going. And you’ll be going off of my RSS. It’s counterproductive to start a conversation and not participate in that conversation.
WS: Very good point. I learned a lot from you there. I have to thank you for that.
NW: You’re welcome.
WS: I believe that I read one of your posts where you were talking about community, and you said that you thought that most blogs fail at community.
NW: I do.
WS: Yeah, I wanted to know more about that.
NW: Well, going back to what I said earlier, I don’t seem to see a lot of this talked about. I saw something interesting the other day, and I can’t remember where, unfortunately. But I was involved in a discussion somewhere about community on blogs. And one of the things I think is missing isn’t anything philosophical or anything particularly complicated. It’s mechanical. It’s technical. It’s just a way for people to track recent comments. I like the way that forums work, that Internet forums work, where you have a recent post list, and sometimes it’s called the active list or hot topics list, where you hit the link, and you’re given a whole list of threads, list of posts, but ordered by the last comment. So you can track the conversations really easily. I mean comment RSS is all very nice, but for me at least, it’s completely impractical. Tracking the conversations on a blog and having a page dedicated to that really helps you get into stuff. I mean we’ve got threads going, and on previous sites I’ve done and on some current sites I’m involved with, not related to this, we’ve got threads that have been going for months. You know, just because somebody’s posted on it a month after you posted it doesn’t make their comment any less relevant. And it’s a very easy way for you and for members to get in there and see what that person has to say and respond to it so the conversation continues. I think that’s the important thing, and I think blogs miss out on this. They miss out on it in a big way. I think forums are somewhat shunned in the blogosphere as old school, you know, maybe as not really Web 1.0, but it couldn’t be given some label like that. They’re a little bit looked down on, but I think we can learn a lot from Internet forums. And where we can learn most is from that recent post link. It think that’s really key to a good community is having that link on the site and enabling people to track conversations over time.
WS: Do you use custom software for yours or do you use a package because I know you have that on your site.
NW: Yeah, we use Drupal. Drupal.org. And it’s straight out of the box. We did make a custom theme for it. We had a couple of very clever chaps build us a theme for the site, but it’s, essentially it’s just drupal.org. It’s a fairly well-known content management system that’s increasingly used for blogs these days. And it’s straight out of the box–very little customization done to it at all.
WS: What about some of the other popular programs that people are using? I use Wordpress, and I’m quite frustrated with it, I must say, but besides Wordpress there’s Blogger and there’s LiveJournal—is that the one?
NW: Yeah. LiveJournal.
WS: What do you think of some of these other packages?
NW: Well, what kind of blog are we talking about? I mean, horses for courses, I think here, Paula.
WS: Well, as far as being able to do some of the features you just mentioned to highlight the recent posts, for example I don’t know if there’s a way to do that in Wordpress, but if there is, I haven’t seen it.
NW: I’m probably not the best person to ask. I wouldn’t necessarily say I’m a creature of habit, I think my wife would disagree, but I haven’t used anything but Drupal since like 2003 because it’s just everything I need. And I know it really well. I am using Wordpress on a personal blog. Unfortunately I cannot find a decent designer for love nor money, so it’s taking me an eternity to design it myself. So I have looked into that a little bit, and I believe there is a plug-in for that. I’m not 100%. The best one is Drupal, I believe, because they have that built right in. You only need to enable the tracker module in the administration pages. It’s already built in. It’s right in there for you. I can’t say I know a great deal about it, I’m afraid, because I don’t use much else—only a little bit of Wordpress.
WS: Let’s explore a little bit the difference between, say, professional and non-professional or commercial and non-commercial blogs. First of all, do you think there should be a difference between the way they’re done?
NW: Yeah, sure. I mean, if we’re talking…in what area?
WS: People who want people to actually come and read their blogs. Let’s just make that a criterion, whether it’s professional or non-professional.
NW: Well, let’s define “professional” first because sometimes I think it rubs people up the wrong way a little bit. I use it in the terms of do you get paid for it or not. We’re not trying to say that a non-professional blog is rubbish or it’s second class, just that your goal isn’t money, your goal isn’t to make money for your blog. I think with professional vs. non-professional blogs, such as amateur blogs, you’ve got a lot more scope with a personal blog, with a non-professional blog. My sister runs a blog, my mum runs a blog. And with their sites, I want to hear about their businesses. I want to hear about what interests them, sure, but I also want to hear what happened this morning with my sister’s little girl. I want to hear who she was talking to down the pub the other night. And I think you can post that kind of stuff, and you can get into all kinds of things that you’re interested in in a personal blog. But with a professional blog, you’re somewhat tied to a topic. It may be a quite broad topic area, but you are kind of tied to that topic if you want some modicum of success.
WS: Let’s say you have a very popular non-commercial blog. You have lots of people who come and talk there and come and read you. But you’re not making any money from it and you’d like to. Do you think that it’s a given that if you switch over, you do the same subjects, you’re the same personality, now you want to make money from it, you have eyeballs…is it a given that you will make some money? Maybe that’s not a fair question.
NW: No, it’s reasonably fair. It’s perhaps not easy to answer, but I think it’s quite fair. It’s a difficult one.
WS: I guess the question is, “Do eyeballs equal money?”
NW: Yeah, well it’s all so general though, isn’t it? I mean you can’t put a black and white answer on that. But in general, you can monetize anything. Anything can be monetized to a certain extent. But the question really is whether or not you can do it well enough to justify eating up space with advertising or losing credibility with affliliate links as certain types, not all types, but certain types of blogs that’ll happen if you start affiliate-linking your links. Yeah, you have to weigh the pros and cons.
But yeah, let’s say you have a really popular personal blog on a niche topic. To monetize that, I would do it in stages. First of all, I’d set out by talking to the people that were coming daily and tell them what I was planning. “I’m going to be doing this.” I wouldn’t ask them if I can do this. I’d tell them, “I’m going to be doing this. Here’s your chance to talk to me about that and help me work out how best to do that.” I find that if you involve a community with the monetization and how to make it like a…You have this community. You might as well tap that community for its knowledge and ask your friends how best to do this. You can have a great conversation on that, for a start. We did this with Threadwatch.org, and there were naysayers, of course. But for the most part, we had some of the best conversations on that weblog in the year that I ran it ever, on the monetization of Threadwatch. And we did all kinds of things, and it was always successful to an extent, but it was never a huge success. But we did have fun doing it, and I found that the community helped a lot, really helped. We put affiliate links—ouch! That went out the door. That never even got past the gate. But we had some advertising threads, where we would have an advertiser give away something of geniuine value to the audience that they could discuss and they could comment on the advertising thread. And they went down a storm.
The only problem there really was the advertisers themselves. Advertisers I think are very scared of advertisements that allow comments. It’s uncharted territory, and what if someone says something bad? I view that as a marketing opportunity. If somebody says something bad about you, then that’s an opportunity for you to go in and show that you can fix the problem, argue the other side, and generally be cool about it in whatever the problem is. If somebody has a broken XYZ, whatever the product may be, then be seen to go into the comments and say, “You know, if you send me an email, I’m going to fix that for you right now.” What better advertisement for a company than to have a problem show up and to be seen to fix it immediately? If somebody comes in and says, “I don’t like your product because of XYZ,” no problem. “You might like this product instead.” Recommend a competitor. Be seen to be a nice company. It’s a good opportunity for companies. But they’re a little bit afraid of that, so it didn’t go down so well.
But going back to the discussion, the community I think accepted the fact that we had to monetize better than me suddenly switching on ads because they were involved, because it was a group effort. It was always going to be my decision at the end of the day, but the community was given an opportunity to influence that decision, and they very much did. As I said, affiliate links were just an absolute no-no from day one because not so many people are against it, but enough people were against it. So I think that’s the way to go about it.
WS: That’s fascinating.
NW: It was. It really was. I mean it. Those were some of the best conversations we ever had at Threadwatch for me personally. Some of the most interesting conversations were involving the community in the monetization of itself.
WS: It seems like blogging has made a lot of things that were previously private public. People are exposing a lot about themselves, both in, say, personal blogs, and in more commercial types. What do you think about the whole privacy issue? Do you think that people are telling just about the right amount about themselves, too much, too little?
NW: I think people are people, aren’t they? I mean you must have been in a pub sometime, or maybe standing at a bus stop, and somebody says to you, “Hello” or something, and you make that fatal mistake of making eye contact or saying hi back. And the floodgates open, and you’re stuck there with what amounts to a raving lunatic pouring their life story out to you because you said hi. And that happens in the blogosphere too. You know, the world’s made up of mad, strange, lovely, and wonderful people. And that happens. Blogs give people a way to communicate, and they’ll do that in the fashion that’s comfortable for them. You’re going to get your loons. You’re going to get your weirdos, your crackpots, and your people that just make you feel a little bit uncomfortable with the amount of information they’re giving, as well as all the sane, normal, standard people. I don’t think it’s any big deal particularly. If I don’t like it, I won’t read it. I can turn a blog off. I can’t turn the lady at the bus stop off.
WS: What about for bloggers themselves who are considering giving out personal information? Do you think there’s any danger in that?
NW: Well I’ll tell you, if my daughter were a big older—she’s one—but if she were a teenager or worse, actually, a pre-teenager, if she was a young girl giving out personal information, I’d be very worried. I wouldn’t want her giving out addresses, phone numbers, IM details on her blog. Again, this isn’t anything specific to blogs. This is general common sense. There are strange people out there and people that prey on children and even that prey on adults. Let’s say we’re talking about ourselves rather than our children. I think just do what’s comfortable for you. It’s just common sense. If you’re happy with having your personal details out there and you feel safe doing that, then great for you. No problem. Personally, I’m quite happy having my address out there and quite happy having my phone number out there. But I wouldn’t necessarily be happy having…my daughter or my wife having personal details out there if I wasn’t around in the house and we lived in, say, a big city. We don’t. We live in the middle of absolutely nowhere in the country. I’m kind of torn on it, as you can hear. I’m contradicting myself in my answer. I’m not entirely sure, but I think it does boil down to your personal level of comfort and your personal level of how secure you need to be. I don’t think it’s any different for blogs than anything else.
WS: Say you’ve been posting pretty regularly and you want to take a vacation. Does it matter if you’re absent for a while? What should you do?
NW: Oh, Duncan Riley is the guy to ask about this over at Blog Herald because he posted something about this, and I didn’t read it. I saw the headline, and it was open on a tab, but I never got round to it. I think if you’re the only blogger, then it’s probably a good idea to let people know and go on your holiday, come back, and post like crazy for a week. I believe Duncan said that…was advocating taking your laptop and making sure you did minimal blogging whilst you were on holiday. And that’s kind of cool too. One of our main authors I mentioned earlier, Chris Garrett, is about to go off to Canada. And he’s taking his laptop, and he’s going to be doing some minimal posting, just keeping up for us while he’s away. So yeah, you can do one of two things. Personally, if it was a personal blog, I would be happy just saying, “I’m going on holiday. Be back in two weeks,” and coming back in two weeks. And I wouldn’t even bother to post furiously when I got back, on a personal blog. I would just pick up where I left off. If it was a commercial blog where I was getting income from that blog, I’d take a laptop. If I didn’t have one, I’d go and buy a damn laptop because I think that’s important. I don’t think bloggers really—commercial bloggers—really take a day off. I don’t think there’s any such thing.
WS: What about having somebody do guest blogging for you while you’re on vacation?
NW: I wouldn’t like it myself. But yeah, it’s an option. Then you have all this weird stuff with working out how much to pay them. I wouldn’t like it myself, but yeah, sure, if you’re comfortable with the person who’s going to be blogging for you. Perhaps it’s a friend or a neighboring blogger. Why not?
WS: Last question. Probably unfair question.
NW: There you are!
WS: This one may be more unfair than the others.
NW: Go on then.
WS: Do you think blogging is a fad?
NW: Oh. If you asked me this a year ago, I would have said yes. Now, no, but I think that the term “blogging” and “blog” will be assimilated into the collective. I think that’s going to go away at some point. I’m not sure if that’s any point particularly soon. I do think it’s going to go away. I do think the idea of being able to comment, linking to other people, is really not particularly new to start with. We’ve just found critical mass with blogs, and you know, a name, a concept that we can all get behind and push for because we all enjoy it so much. But I think that’s going to change, and that’s going to become more normal. And blogs are going to mutate into…blogs are going to take on some of the characteristics of slightly more normal Web sites. More normal Web sites, whatever they may be, are going to take on some of the characteristics of blogs, i.e., e-comm sites are going to start—like Amazon, of course, and other forerunners with comments and reviews and so on and so forth—these sites are going to start allowing comments. They’re going to start linking to other reviews. They’re going to start having a…they’re going to start joining the conversation. And blogs are going to start selling products and integrating shopping carts and all kinds of other stuff, and we’re going to meet somewhere in the middle. And who knows what we’ll be calling that—Web 3 maybe. I don’t know.
WS: Very interesting to watch that.
NW: Yeah. For sure. Absolutely. I would have said it was a fad a year ago, but I don’t think I really understood blogs very well a year ago. I think people think that I’ve been in this longer than I have. My first blog was actually Threadwatch, which started about 15 months ago maybe. Something like that.
WS: Everything just moves so fast. You have to become an expert really quickly and stay up with everything.
NW: Oh, this is the beauty of RSS because you can be an instant expert pretty quick if you’re good at RSS. I mean we talk about this kind of thing in Performancing, getting to know a topic. You can go pick up your RSS feeds in various ways to do that, either searching on blog search engines for keywords or looking through blogrolls of blogs in your topic area and gather up a whole bagload of RSS feeds. Then you start weeding those out, sorting out the wheat from the chaff. And you end up, hopefully, with between a dozen and 50, depending on your, the level of interest in your topic, of on-topic blogs. Read those for a month, and yeah, you’re pretty much an expert. Unless you’re talking about nuclear science or something. But in general terms, you can be pretty up on something pretty quick.
WS: Yeah, it’s amazing. How about your URL, Nick?
NW: URL? It’s Performancing.com.
WS: Thank you so much for being with us today on The Writing Show. This has been absolutely fascinating, and I really hope you will come back for another show on monetizing your blog.
NW: I’d love to come back. I enjoyed it. Thanks.
WS: Be sure to let us know what you think of Nick Wilson’s interview, or any of our interviews, for that matter, for our new feature, Write to the Writing Show. I’ll be reading listener comments on the air. Email me at paula at compulsivecreative dot com.
Next time, we talk with Evo Terra, co-founder of the audiobooks site, Podiobooks.com and co-author of Podcasting for Dummies. Evo stops by to talk about how authors can promote their books by making audio recordings of them and releasing them as serials.
In two weeks, episode 3 of my sad story, How Not to Run an Online Bookstore. In episode 3, I explain how my husband and I financed our ill-starred online store.
I’d also like to invite you to dip into our archive, where you’ll find interviews with fascinating guests like book publicist Karen Villanueva, whom we interviewed in October of 2005. Karen explains what you should and shouldn’t do when publicizing your book and how to work with a publicist.
And please remember that new episodes of The Writing Show will now be posted on Tuesdays.
Thanks for listening to The Writing Show today. Don’t forget that our Web site is www.writingshow.com. I’m Paula B.