Apostol Apostolov

Every day I skim through a thou­sand and a half blog posts via Google Reader, lik­ing and shar­ing close to a hun­dred with peo­ple who fol­low my social activ­i­ties. I’d not say I read them all end to end but I read enough to stay lose an hour or so of my day and stay on the cut­ting edge of IT. Recently how­ever, facts and news have taken back­seat as I started to ana­lyze what makes pop­u­lar blogs tick, feed and — of course! — monetize.

The fol­low­ing, con­tin­u­ously expanded list of blog­ging advise is what I’ve come up with. I did not dare to look at the viral spread of blog­ging advice and mar­ket­ing tips offered at var­i­ous web­sites because too often they come cookie-​​cut and dry, or sim­ply do not mesh with the shift­ing real­ity of blog­ging in a social media con­trolled Inter­net envi­ron­ment. If you find me wrong on a sub­ject, I wel­come you to leave a com­ment and you might see your own expe­ri­ences, advice and ideas for expan­sion added up as I update this blog post over the com­ing weeks.

1. Blog Original

News are ubiqutous. There are already enough flag­ship blogs, like the bunch owned by Weblog Inc., that cover news with extreme effi­ciency that smaller blogs can­not cope with. Some site out there will always have the first scoop, will get review units where you don’t, or lives a mile away from the Sil­i­con Val­ley where things actu­ally hap­pen. The blog space is already divided among the biggest play­ers and if you aren’t going to join them, at least don’t waste your time fight­ing them.

What a new blog site has to offer must be more than a rehash or cur­rent events. It is the orig­i­nal con­tent that mat­ters. If you are going to cover news, don’t empha­size the news but empha­size your own analy­sis and com­men­taries. If some­one wants to know about what lat­est web­cam comes from Log­itech they will visit Engad­get. If some­one wants to know just how did that Log­itech cam change your life because sud­denly girls can see you in HD, they will come to your blog. If you are good at writ­ing, you can write seri­al­ized books via blog for­mat or you can even role­play a fic­tional char­ac­ter who is blog­ging in a fic­tional envi­ron­ment. Any­thing goes as long as it is original!

How does it apply to me? I may not blog too fre­quently as I used to in the past, but I vow to blog orig­i­nal. No blog­posts will be a quick take on events with­out some sort of per­sonal take and analy­sis, or in case of local events — actu­ally try­ing to be there, take pic­tures or inter­view peo­ple. I will attempt to cover expe­ri­ences with social media and per­sonal elec­tron­ics rather than cover press releases. I will offer buy­ing advice where pos­si­ble. And just for the heck of it, I will pour some cre­ative juice in a new form of inter­ac­tive col­lab­o­ra­tive blog game, start­ing in October.

2. Blog Bold

Inter­net is a poluted media to write in. If you try to stay fair, objec­tive and polit­i­cally cor­rect about issues, events and peo­ple, chances are hun­dreds of web­sites are, too. In order to raise above the crowd, your voice must be louder and harder, and hit where it hurts! So write bold! Choose your blog post titles and con­tent the way they would cap­ture atten­tion and pro­voke a reac­tion from your vis­i­tors. Don’t be afraid to use a harsh lan­guage, pro­voka­tive metaphors, state­ments so wild you might not even agree with your­self. Be pas­sion­ate about it and you will infect oth­ers with your enthu­si­asm. You can either ride the cur­rent trends coin­ing on the mass approval, or you can stand as a devil’s advo­cate and give peo­ple some­thing to think about and quite often, some­one to hate. And while we all long for approval and love, hate can be a pow­er­ful seller (for an eye open­ing pre­sen­ta­tion of “hate psy­chol­ogy” refer to “Blood­thirsty Bitches and Pious Pimps of Power ” by Gerry Spence).

One of my favourite bold blog­gers is Peter Stoykov (a.k.a. Lon­gan­lon), owner of Kaka Cuuka blog (in Bul­gar­ian). Peter Stoykov has a great sense for pro­voka­tive issues — his blog is updated about 4 times a week with var­i­ous issues about lifestyle, soci­ety, eco­nom­ics and pol­i­tics. His blog rarely goes into lengthy tirades or pro­vides use­ful infor­ma­tion to its vis­i­tors, and it doesn’t have to! Because his witty, sar­cas­tic writ­ing and devil’s advo­cate stand­point chal­lenges his vis­i­tors to com­ment back on issues such as why gay mar­riage should be ille­gal by law; why domes­tic abuse remains a com­mon thing; why stray dogs ought to be shot. You don’t have to agree with Peter to be drawn into a com­ment­ing tor­rent on his blog — and each of his blog posts counts between 50 and 90 com­ments alone. This is blog­ging bold, at its best. 

How does it apply to me? I won’t hold back punches when it comes to blog­ging. While the sub­jects my blog is about to cover won’t have much of a ground for pro­voka­tive blog­ging, expect objec­tive jour­nal­ism to be the first to walk the plank and I will try to chal­lenge my read­er­ship with pro­voka­tive sub­jects and advice. You don’t have to agree. But you are expected to read them.

3. Blog Now, Plan Ahead

Your search vis­i­tors are more impor­tant than your faith­ful read­er­ship. Such state­ment runs con­trary to com­mon belief than your most loyal fans are who mat­ter most, but I have dis­cov­ered that search vis­i­tors are more likely to mon­e­tize via adver­tis­ing than read­ers who grow accus­tomed to receiv­ing your com­ment via RSS or social net­work­ing (Friend­feed, Net­worked Blogs for Face­book, etc.) Loyal read­ers are inter­ested in fre­quent updates of your blog. They tend to value higher a blog capa­ble of enter­tain­ing their needs cou­ple times a day (thus, the pop­u­lar­ity of news blogs) and pro­duc­ing up to date infor­ma­tion about a sub­ject as soon as it becomes avail­able. For your local read­ers, infor­ma­tion must be pro­vided into bite-​​sized blog posts, as soon as pos­si­ble. This is blog­ging as we know it. Alas, my expe­ri­ences show that loyal read­ers are the trick­i­est kind to mon­e­tize as RSS read­ers and sim­i­lar ser­vices does not pro­vide proper mon­e­ti­za­tion of your con­tent. It seems to me, 80% of your work is prob­a­bly going to wield you 20% of recognition. 

Your search vis­i­tors how­ever are of a dif­fer­ent kind, They are look­ing on infor­ma­tion of a sub­ject and thus are likely to be impressed by as thor­ough and expan­sive infor­ma­tion pre­served in a sin­gle place. No, your blog does not con­sti­tute for a sin­gle place given that nobody is going to waste their time to search using your site’s cus­tom engine as they will return to Google and try again. For search vis­i­tors best way to pro­vide infor­ma­tion is on a sin­gle page, prop­erly struc­tured into sec­tions with a table of con­tents where pos­si­ble. If you have ever used Wikipedia you should already rec­og­nize the use­ful­ness of wealth of infor­ma­tion prop­erly struc­tured. Another prime exam­ple of seach vis­i­tor tar­get­ting is a ser­vice called Squidoo, which allows users to build highly mon­e­tized pages on var­i­ous sub­jects. You can tar­get search vis­i­tors by plan­ning your con­tent ahead — while you are free to post daily updates always con­sider com­bin­ing all infor­ma­tion on a sub­ject in a sin­gle page, care­fully mon­e­tiz­ing with adver­tis­ing and affil­i­ates and then spike its pop­u­lar­ity via ser­vices like Digg. Wealth of con­tent will always be rec­og­nized and respected by vis­i­tors if not by qual­ity, then quantity. 

How does it apply to me? Often I will pro­vide con­tin­u­ous cov­er­age to cer­tain sub­jects such as my favourite mobile phones, media play­ers, cam­eras and what­not. While I will be pub­lish­ing mul­ti­ple, fairly short posts on a sub­ject, I will always do so with a mas­sive arti­cle in mind that will con­nect all the infor­ma­tion in a sin­gle, struc­tured page. That page will be highly mon­e­tized and will be sub­mit­ted to pop­u­lar­ity boost ser­vices such as Digg​.com for fun and profit.

Com­ing Next: Blog Visu­ally with a style of your own, Blog Apart and never fear to update your posts, Blog Inter­ac­tively because your vis­i­tors deserve more than a com­ment reply, and Blog for Profit because mon­e­ti­za­tion is why we blog (or do we?)

While a book’s nar­riv­a­tive rarely ever launches into breath-​​taking action with­out a proper intro­duc­tion, a blog rarely dives into the Inter­net foray with a short wel­come. Or as Word­press promptly puts it, Hello World! Apos​to​lA​pos​tolov​.com is live, or re:live based on the fact it has launched a year ago as a futile attempt to get me back into blog­ging. Back in 2001 – 2004 I have been very active in the first wave of Bul­gar­ian blog­gers with my old blog Rayn​er​Ape​.com focus­ing on a mix of social media and inter­net news, gam­ing, gad­gets and some per­sonal issues in between. The need to fun­nel it back on a proper web­site has been grow­ing ever since. Finally, it has reached the point where last year I started Apos​to​lA​pos​tolov​.com as a self-​​branding blog for gam­ing and tech­nol­ogy analy­sis. It was a futile attempt, being too busy and too dis­tracted to put myself into the writ­ing rout­line of a blog­ger. This year, prior giv­ing up on blog­ging entirely, I am putting yet another strong effort to restart Apos​to​lA​pos​tolov​.com. The blog will be ori­ented towards both tech­nol­ogy and social media issues and cater to the inter­na­tional crowd.

Until mid-​​September, Apos​to​lA​pos​tolov​.com will be pub­lish­ing cou­ple pre-​​launch arti­cles cov­er­ing my expe­ri­ences with con­fig­ur­ing and fine-​​tuning a mod­ern social media blog. As I keep tweak­ing and hack­ing a fairly vanilla Word­press instal­la­tion with tons of exten­sions and social ser­vices, I expect it to grow into a mon­ster of a blog, at least interface-​​wise. I am cur­rently exper­i­ment­ing (update: unsuc­cess­fully!) with WPML for language-​​specific front pages and aside from few minor (update: major!) annoy­ing issues with trans­lat­ing themes for each spe­cific lan­guage, it seems to be doing a mar­velous (update: so-​​so) job. Stock com­ment­ing is thrown out of the win­dow as I will be using Dis­qus v2 (in prepa­ra­tion of v3, which can be seen demon­strated on this speedy video) for your social spread of com­ments all over Twit­ter, Face­book and more. You already must be feel­ing Disqus-​​love from other blogs, so I oblige. Social ser­vices jug­ger­naut Twit­ter is rep­re­sented by Tweet­board, a twitter-​​based pseudo-​​forum for shar­ing your opin­ion about pages and the site as a whole. Just pull on the green col­ored over­lay on the left edge of the browser screen to leave your “Tyke wuz h3r3!” tweet. Links of com­pa­nies, prod­ucts, Twit­ter accounts and such are pret­ti­fied by Apture, their ser­vice is an amaz­ing media search tool that inte­grates tightly into Word­press. And SEO is a hot topic every­where on Inter­net, I con­cur, so I am bas­ing it on Head­Space SEO plu­gin and I will be prob­a­bly giv­ing it a ded­i­cated post in the com­ing days.

P.S.: Shit hap­pens. Pri­or­i­ties do change. Days after launch­ing Apos​to​lA​pos​tolov​.com in the wild with a dual home pages cater­ing to both inter­na­tional and local Bul­gar­ian read­ers, due to Word­press plu­gin incom­pat­i­bil­i­ties and real­is­tic writ­ing sched­ules I had to give up one of the two in order for the other to func­tion. So I have decided to work on a pro­fes­sional face with a blog sup­ported in Eng­lish as a gam­ing and tech­nol­ogy analy­sis and buy­ing advice blog. Whether I made the right choice, it’ll show up rather soon.