Ethan Hein's Blog

Whenever somebody comes to me and wants a web site, I suggest that I set them up with a blog instead. Even better, I suggest they start using a variety of blogs and blog-like platforms.

If you have a web presence of any kind for any reason, you need to be able to update it yourself, easily and frequently. Unless you know what HTML and FTP are, you can’t do that with a traditional site. However, you can easily learn to update your blog yourself, even if you’re a relative novice. You can do your updates from any computer in the world, and for the major blog platforms, you can even do them from a cell phone.

Why should you blog?

The biggest challenge with any web site is getting people to look at it. Blogs create a lot more avenues for people to discover you. Socially-oriented tools like Flickr and Twitter have built-in communities, people who are actively combing through them all the time. Put something up that’s relevant or useful to these people and you’ll find yourself getting lots of page views in no time.

A major benefit of blogging is search engine optimization. Google ranks your web site among its search results mostly based on the number of  links pointing to you. Links that you make yourself, pointing to yourself, count towards your Google ranking. Blogs automatically generate tons of internal links, especially if you take advantage of features like tags, random post widgets and the like. Take a look the right-most column of my blog to see examples. The more you post, the more links you make and the higher you climb in the Google rankings.

Blogs are also automatically searched by aggregators like Technorati and Digg. Users of those sites can search blogs by keyword. Getting featured on one of these sites can send you tons and tons of traffic in addition to raising your Google profile.

How should you blog?

I’m a natural writer and I love attention from strangers, so for me, blogging is a positive pleasure. However, you may not find it to be a natural addition to your routine, even after mastering the technical side. The key is to find a routine that works for you. Posts don’t need to be long-form prose. If you’re a personal trainer, write a fitness or nutrition tip of the day. If you’re a musician, post mp3s of stuff you’re working on and links to other musicians whose work you’re digging. If you’re a caterer, post recipes, wine pairings, praise or criticism of other caterers or restaurants. Whatever it is you’re writing about, post reactions to news and trends in your field.

Not every post needs to be totally on topic. Be human. Express the full range of your enthusiasms. Keep the focus on the reader rather than yourself. Find things on the web that others might find useful or entertaining and post them. The best strategy is to try to engage your readers in a conversation. Blogging is not advertising, though it may share some of the same goals. Advertising is one-way. Blogging should be two-way.

I follow a lot of hip-hop musicians on Twitter. The smart ones pose questions to their readers, and then re-post the best or funniest or most provocative responses. They get the maximum amount of fresh material with the least amount of effort.

Merlin Mann sums it up in a tweet:

If you’re a bigger organization or company, there’s a strong temptation to use a blog as a way to post press releases. This is counterproductive. People read blogs with an expectation of natural language written by an identifiable human. Straight-up PR belongs elsewhere on your web site.

Get ready for spam and negative comments. Spam is easy to filter – on WordPress, install Akismet and you’ll barely notice it. A few very clever spambots slip past the filter, but it’s no big deal to spot and delete robo-comments. Negative comments are more delicate. My policy is to approve them if they’re thoughtful and add something of value to the discussion. If the comment is just a rant or ad hominem attack, then I usually delete it.

What platform(s) should you use?

WordPress is the best blog platform in terms of robustness, fullness of feature set and extensibility. It’s all open-source and a lot of the niftiest stuff is free. If you don’t like the default look, there are plenty of free themes to choose from. In particular, I recommend this list of 20 free corporate WP themes. They say “corporate”, I say “attractively minimalist and easy on the eyes.” There are zillions of paid themes too, and you can hire a coder to customize any theme or build you one from scratch.

Much as I love WordPress, however, it can be daunting for beginners. For a gentler introduction to blogging, I recommend Tumblr, which is simple enough for any newbie to figure out but still has most of the key features you want in a blog.

For images, the best way to store, display and categorize them is Flickr. Once your images are in there, it’s easy to categorize and sort them, and redisplay them across a variety of other blogs and such. Also, Flickr is amazing for search engine optimization, and its built-in audience practically guarantees page views if your images are at all interesting.

Facebook is more complicated. On the one hand, the benefits are obvious. It’s enormous and growing all the time. Everyone and their mother is on it (literally, my mom has joined, as have most of my relatives.) But Facebook is a walled garden. Stuff that goes in there is somewhat inaccessible from elsewhere on the web. Paradoxically, it’s also a privacy nightmare. I use Facebook a lot, but I don’t recommend it as the sole basis for a social media outreach plan. I find it best to establish your central presence elsewhere and then stream your stuff into your Facebook page automatically.

Twitter is another source of strong feelings, pro and con. On this one, I’m unreservedly positive. Twitter is still very much taking shape, but it shows tremendous potential, and once you get the hang of it can be tremendously useful and powerful. From a writerly perspective, having to fit each post into the 140-character limit helps me with my conciseness, always a valuable skill to hone. Twitter is especially cell-phone-friendly, so you can be on there doing useful outreach while waiting for the bus or standing in line at the grocery store.

The real beauty is that once you have your various blogs set up, it’s easy to combine them together in various ways. You can have your Twitter posts appear automatically on your blog, as I do, or on your Facebook page, or on your main web site. You can have your blog posts automatically generate Twitter posts linking to them. You can post photos on Flickr and then have them appear in a variety of different slideshows or randomly chosen groupings or other nifty displays. Setting this up takes a matter of minutes for an experienced web coder.

Other tools

Steve Rubel and others rave about Posterous. It looks wonderfully simple and useful, though not as simple as Tumblr. I haven’t explored Posterous thoroughly but I like what I see.

For a while, my home page was basically just a wrapper  for Friendfeed, which automatically collects everything else I do on the web and streams it into one handly location. The geeks love Friendfeed, but it’s a bit overwhelming for readers. It was recently bought by Facebook, so who knows what lies in store for it.

One possible worst-case scenario for Friendfeed is the sad fate of Delicious, the once-mighty social bookmarking site. I love it, but unfortunately its owners at Yahoo don’t. If you do any kind of research or data-gathering on the web, Delicious is a fabulously useful tool, but Yahoo has neglected it and it isn’t anywhere near its full potential. I use it every day but I fear for its future.

A bunch of my friends use Blogger (alternately known as Blogspot.) Google bought this a while back and hasn’t taken it anywhere very exciting. It’s easy to get started with Blogger, but it’s not nearly as flexible or extensible as WordPress. The default layouts are ugly as sin and are hard to customize. If you want a beginner-friendly platform, you’re better off with Tumblr.

Anyway. Any other good recommendations out there for the social media novice? Let’s hear them.