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?)

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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! ApostolApostolov.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 RaynerApe.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 ApostolApostolov.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 ApostolApostolov.com. The blog will be oriented towards both technology and social media issues and cater to the international crowd.

Until mid-September, ApostolApostolov.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 ApostolApostolov.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.

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