How to build an enormously popular and successful blog
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How to buildan enormously popular
and successful blogby Andrew Konoff
Saturday, 19 January, 13
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Warning!Participation enforced.Bad language ahead.
I’ll talk about philosophy.
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An overview1. It’s a process, not a guarantee
2. There are four and a half steps:
• define your goals.
• choose a focus.
• build a diverse content calendar.
• expand to a bigger audience.
• do some other shit that’s helpful.
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Stuff we won’t do
• Talk about platforms (e.g. Tumblr)
• Talk about specific topics (e.g. cats)
• Talk about media types (e.g. infographics, vlogs, podcasts)
• Care about haters
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Why listen to me?
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Why listen to me?
• I’m the marketing guy at GoInstant, and this is exactly what I’m doing there.
• I was the Saskatchewanderer. Ran a travel blog that had 173,000 unique visitors in four months, 45,000 YouTube views, and 2,000 Twitter followers.
• I’ll be using these as examples of what to do and what not to do.
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It’s a process...
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Not a guarantee
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Processes involve feedback
• Each step in this process generates outcomes, which we will measure.
• Some outcomes are better than others.
• If our metrics are well-chosen, the numbers show which outcomes are good.
• The numbers don’t matter if the metrics don’t measure your goals.
• If your goals suck, that’s another matter.
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Step 1: Pick your goals
• Ask yourself: what should your blog get you? How will you know you’ve succeeded?
• Money?
• Sales leads?
• Expert status?
• Laid?
• Text can do anything but write itself.
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Define your commitment.
• How much money and time and energy do you have?
• Our process involves prioritization, so don’t worry too much if you’re resource-poor.
• Mostly, ask this for your own sanity.
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Question time!
What’s your blogging goal? Do you have more than one?
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Step 2: Find your focus.
• It has two parts:
• Your thesis, argument, or insight.
• Your audience. Who is passionate about what you have to say?
• GoInstant: Customer experiences matter for business.
• Saskatchewanderer: Saskatchewan is full of cool shit.
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Focus Metrics:
• Forget about audience size. Care about engagement per reader.
• Lots of readers with little interest equals bad bad bad die die die
• Measure time on page, subscriptions, social shares, number of posts read per visit, comments, etc. etc.
• Engagement is the fundamental building block of every good blog, app, relationship.
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Focus Metrics:
• The proof of a growth opportunity: you want each post to generate a higher rate of marginal engagement.
• If I got 10 views last week, I want 12 next week, and 15 next week, and 20 next week.
• Marginal gains: +2, +3, +5. Up and to the right for the 2nd derivative.
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Focus Metrics:
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Question time!
What’s your blog’s focus? How’s your engagement? Is it a growth opportunity?
Does it accomplish your goals?
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Step 3: Build a content calendar
• The secret? Mix up these two axes:
• Audience: Niche <--> Broad
• Durability: Timely <--> Evergreen
• Take risks to really engage people. Some types of post are riskier than others.
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Step 3: Build a content calendar
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Content Cal Metrics
• Preliminary work: define blog categories for matrix quadrants.
• How many shares?
• How many views in the first day? After the first week?
• How much time on page?
• Then compare the categories.
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Question time!
Make a post idea per quadrant.Which work best for your audience?
Do some posts get more views later in their life?
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Step 4: Expand
• It’s time to build out your audience by expanding the focus of your blog:
• to add another highly engaged, closely related audience.
• to include a thesis that is consistent with your core focus’s thesis.
• Remember: focus = thesis + audience
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A lesson from Lakatos
Imre Lakatos is the coolest Hungarian philosopher of science ever.
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Research Programmes
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Same for blogs
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Same for blogs
• For GoInstant:
• core of “customer experience matters,” surrounded by “X matters for customer experiences.”
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Mistakes
• As the Saskatchewanderer:
• Saskatchewan is cool!
• After the Saskatchewanderer:
• All purpose travel writing! Please for the love of god hire me I’m unemployed actually I’ll write anything just c’mon please try
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Better idea
• If Saskatchewan has all this cool stuff, I can find other beautiful stuff in other unpopular Canadian destinations.
• Audience: broke ass Canucks.
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Expansion Metrics
• Exact same as focus.
• Are your readers highly engaged?
• Is this a real growth opportunity? Is the rate of growth itself increasing?
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Step 4.5: Everything else
• Get good at writing by fucking up constantly.
• Marketing matters.
• Market to your audiences. Test.
• Build relationships with other bloggers through guest blogs.
• SEO benefit is huge.
• Give a fuck about the technical parts of writing and of running a blog.
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Any questions?
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Thank you so much!
Share the presentation:http://bit.ly/bigbigblog
Follow me on Twitter:@andrewkonoff
and HAVE AN AWESOME PODCAMP!
Saturday, 19 January, 13