Why Busy Bloggers Need an Offline Editor
A busy blogger’s best friend is an offline editor. Trust me when I tell you it will make your life more simple. My weapon of choice is Windows Live Writer. As someone who juggles dozens of blogs for several clients, I’m here to tell you your productivity will increase once you download one of these puppies With an offline editor you can:
- Use the same dashboard for each of your blogs without having to leave the page. Simply use the drop down menu to switch to a new blog.
- Post ahead of time. When I can, I blog a week’s worth of posts at one time and just let ‘er drip.
- Use the WYSIWYG template in the same manner in which you’d use a word processor.
- Post video and go back in and edit without screwing up the code.
- Have more image placement, sizing and design options.
- Post offline when you don’t have access to the Internet and set up your post to publish at another time.
As I said above, I like Windows Live Writer. It’s open all day on my desk top and put it to good use. Other choices are Blog Desk and for Mac users, Mars Edit. It’s been so long since I logged into some of my WordPress dashes I actually lost the password, it’s that helpful.
Do you use a offline editor? If so, which one and why?
Where I Blog
As Deb posted yesterday, one of our networks is having a “Where we blog” theme happening. Since I’m feeling all icky, and am headed to bed, my slacker post for the day will be to send you off to see my blogging space.
You could also tell me where you blog, that would be cool.
Where I Work
At my network blog, Simply Thrifty, we’re having a Where I work promotion. Want to see where I work? Check it out…
Should You Take Advantage of A Media Circus?
I hate when bloggers jump on every single media circus that comes along. It may be smart SEO but to me it looks spammy and needy.
What’s ironic is I posted the words “Hannah Montana” in a post yesterday. However, I had written the post on the weekend and had no clue about the whole Vanity Fair vs. Miley circus that was about to break, honestly, she was the only teen star I could think of when I wrote the post on Saturday. But the whole day I felt like a sell-out.
I work for some clients who urge me to jump on each and every media circus that breaks but I usually don’t. It’s one thing I just don’t do as a blogger. This is partly due to my total non-interest in celebrity events, and most of these media circuses seem to involve celebrities, but more importantly, it has to do with the fact that the topics I blog simply don’t relate. I could make them relate - I’ve done it before, it’s not hard; but again, I think it looks kind of lame.
I expect that if you cover certain kid topics, celebrity topics, or scandal topics that I’d see the whole Miley issue on your blog yesterday. Perhaps several times yesterday, but come on, if you blog about cars or house building, how weird is it going to look to write about this topic? Even if you find a killer slant, it’s going to look completely obvious.
To me, clients pushing hot topics daily is a reasonable request, I get the whole page view issue. If it really relates, sure I’ll post about it, but overall, to me, this is one of the major downsides of problogging. It’s also likely what makes me a less decent employee than some other bloggers, but I guess I’d rather post about the topic I was hired to blog about.
What do you think? Or rather what do you do? Do you jump on each and every media circus that comes to town, or skip it if it doesn’t relate?
Oh, btw, if you’re interested in jumping on events and would like to attempt to make it somewhat less obvious read this post at Performacing - it’s a decent take on this issue.
List Post Winners to be Announced this Week
I know you’re waiting on the edge of your seat. We’ll announce our list post winners by the end of your week. Thanks for you patience!
- Deb
When a Client Crosses the Line
Years ago when I was an editorial assistant I worked for a very high maintenance publisher. She expected me to come in at the crack of dawn and work until all hours of the night. She called me Sunday mornings at 8 and Wednesday nights at 3:00 AM. When I told her she was crossing a line she told me I was welcome to clean out my desk. So I did. I left publishing for the incredibly boring world of accounting, and though I missed the fun of working in an editorial office, I knew I could go home and not have to wonder if I should pretend I’m not home every time the phone rings.
It’s happening again. I have a client who likes to call me at 6:00 PM when my family is eating, at 7:30 PM when I’m putting my son to bed and other times she feels appropriate because she knows I’ll be home. I have caller ID and will not answer the phones at this time. I’m not being petty, but it’s my experience if you don’t tell clients the office closes at a certain point they’ll be calling you at midnight.
Set Boundaries
No one wants to lose a client but if a client isn’t respectful of my family time, I don’t want to work for her anymore. Freelance doesn’t mean open all night. It’s important to establish boundaries.
- Tell clients the best time to call. Strongly suggest they call during these times only.
- If they’re in a different time zone, or calling at your convenience isn’t working for them, set up a mutually agreed upon time to talk.
- If they’re calling too much or at inappropriate times, let them know it’s not going to fly - but be nice.
- Suggest they email requests and changes and only call when it’s really important.
Pain in the Butt Clients
I don’t have many pain in the butt clients at all. Most leave me alone and I never hear from them until the job is done or it’s time to pay me. With the networks I do have regular communication with my editors but that’s usually through the network forum or chats. My pain in the butt client emails constantly for very silly reasons. For instance, she doesn’t know a thing about blogging so she feels her bloggers don’t either. The thing is she hired a bunch of experienced bloggers because she doesn’t have clue. Every week brings step by step instructions on how to use Stumble Upon or how to write a blog post. Plus she’s always changing the dates of my posts around so Monday’s post appears on Wednesday and Friday’s post appears Tuesday. There’s no reason for this, except maybe boredom. She loves to change my headlines and subheads too. I could live with all this. It annoys me, but I can live with it. Once she started calling all the time at dinner time I started getting a little angry.
Nip it in the Bud
If you’re letting your clients take over your life you must stop it immediately! Today it’s a phone call at dinner time, tomorrow it’s like you’re working for Anna Wintour Amanda Priestly. If you offer a pain in the butt client a line, she will indeed cross it. Once that happens things can only get worse.
Blogging Challenge: Who Are You Actually Blogging For?
The feed question Deb posed the other day made me wonder - as a paid blogger, who am I most responsible to? Deb asked if bloggers should shorten their feeds to please readers. It seems like many people do think that whatever readers want readers should get. But what readers want is not always what benefits my client and myself.
In the world of blogging you have some choices about who to blog for - you may be blogging for one, two, or all three choices.
- Yourself
- Readers
- Clients
You may have a clear idea about why you blog. Back in the day before I ever knew about blogging for clients; I blogged for myself. I blogged because I loved to read other blogs and because I liked writing. I never put ads on blogs or pushed for traffic. I surfed blogs, left comments, and gathered readers organically, but it was honestly all about me and my words. I wanted to say stuff and I did. That’s why I first had a blog. At some point, I naturally transitioned into writing posts that not only I would like, but that I knew my group of readers would like as well.
Then along comes paid blogging. I landed one paid blogging gig, found it more suitable to my personality than magazine and copy writing, and I quit most other writing jobs, taking on mainly blog gigs. Now that I’m a paid blogger – who do I blog for exactly? Where does my responsibility start and stop?
As a paid blogger:
I’m blogging for myself, because I make money that pays my bills. Blogging directly benefits my life, my son’s care and keep, and our well being (i.e we get to eat). Also, I love my job, so I’m likely blogging for my own happiness as well.
I’m blogging for readers because I’m providing information, entertainment, news, what have you. For readers interested in my topics, I give them something they need, want, or enjoy.
I’m blogging for clients who have hired me to promote something, be it an idea or product. My clients want me to entertain and inform readers and appeal to advertisers. They also want me to get lots of page views.
Sometimes I’ve had clients directly order me to do something that I know darn well is not in my reader’s best interest. Like write seven posts a day, blog about some lame topic that no one will like, or they want me to write keyword heavy – to the point that a blog post looks all spammy.
Blogging is not the only profession that faces issues like this. It was the same when I wrote business copy, it was the same when I worked as a social worker, it’s the same for my friend who teaches high school. There’s always a circle – the boss vs. employee vs. person receiving the service.
As a social worker, I’d fight my boss aggressively if I thought a choice they wanted was not in the best interest of a youth. However, sometimes I’d lose. When you get right down to it, your boss tends to have the final say. In some cases I’ve left jobs when a boss decided to do something I’m dead set against, in other cases I’ve stuck it out. It depends on the severity of the decision my boss makes.
As a paid blogger, I believe that readers should come pretty high on the totem pole; without readers, you don’t have blogs. But if I continually make a scene and go against my client’s wants and needs, then I’d have to find a new line of work. With blogging, like with any job, you make choices. In my case, my choice is to try to balance what’s in everyone’s best interest - my clients, my readers, and my own. Pleasing everyone when it comes to blogs is not an easy task; as I think the comments on Deb’s post showed.
If you blog for a client, blog for pay, my question to you is: how do you find balance in paid blogging? How do you keep everyone happy, when sometimes what’s best for one person in the blog circle may not be what’s best for another?
Hear it from Jennifer’s Co-blogger
Jennifer did a great job covering the pros and cons of having a co-blogger, so I won’t add much in that area, but how does it feel to join an established blog as a co-blogger?
Arriving at an established blog with an overall theme you didn’t pick can be a strange experience, maybe a bit like moving into an already-decorated apartment. Plus, I was very aware that Tree Hugging Family was Jennifer’s creation from the beginning. I didn’t want to stomp on that, but I had to find a way to add my stamp as well.
No worries though. It became apparent pretty quickly that Jennifer didn’t really care if I added new categories or new weekly features and discussed topics she didn’t cover before. Besides getting the post count and traffic up, that’s exactly why she asked me to join. She wanted a new perspective, just not one that was crazy different from the existing theme and tone of the blog. And since she’d been reading my other blog, she knew my writing meshed with her own.
If you join an existing blog, you may not know at first exactly what different qualities you’ll bring, but this is something that will naturally develop as you post. And, as Jennifer mentioned, the different perspective for your readers is one of the pros of having a co-blogger. Jennifer and I think a lot alike. Sometimes it’s scary. But we’re actually very different. I live in on the other side of the US with a cat in an apartment. So, while Jennifer can write about her home gardening adventures with her son, I can write about greening my cat and apartment I share with Michael, my husband.
There are many questions that will gradually surface when you have a co-blogger.
At first, I never moderated comments on Jennifer’s posts. I assumed she didn’t want me to do that. Turns out she didn’t care as long as I didn’t let any angry “you’re crazy for believing in global warming” comments go up. Plus, we don’t want 10,000 pings on a contest post. Once a few basic guidelines were established, we could moderate each other’s comments as they came up. If there’s ever anything I think she needs to see, I’ll e-mail her about it.
At first I thought that maybe we should discuss ahead of time what topics we were going to blog on so we didn’t have duplicates. But I decided to wait and see how it would work. Coordinating each post would be kind of a pain since I sometimes come up with a topic at 1 am and have the post written within the hour. As it turns out, our topic is broad enough that Jennifer and I very rarely plan posts on the same topic for the same day. I think we wrote on the exact same topic one time since February, and the posts weren’t so similar that one had to be deleted.
But don’t we coordinate some things? Sure, and maybe that’s one of the small cons of having a co-blogger since it takes some of your time to coordinate. If there’s a channel-wide post that needs to go up, we’ll discuss who does it. We also try to look at the times that the upcoming posts are scheduled so we can spread them throughout the day. And we take turns changing up the poll. We discuss sponsors for contests and overall goals for the blog. Sometimes I clean out the spam folder and sometimes Jennifer does it, but this isn’t something we discuss. The relationship reminds me a lot of having a roommate.
If you’ve ever had a roommate you’d know that there are times when maybe one of you does more of the cleaning or shopping, etc. And that’s fine. Co-blogging isn’t a competition any more than having a roommate is. There will be times when one of you posts more on a given day or week than the other one. If the co-blogging relationship is good, there shouldn’t be any guilt or hard feelings. It’s teamwork.
And since I’m comparing co-blogging to having a roommate, I might as well go on and say that being able to choose your co-blogger probably works best. The roommates I had in college that weren’t my choices are the ones that didn’t last long. To me, it’s important that you actually like your co-blogger. Otherwise, you may end up resenting sharing your space. So, while it’s possible that a network editor may choose a co-blogger for you, I’d say you might be better off if you had a say as well.
There’s no way to know if a co-blogging relationship will work until you try it. But what I thought was cool is that Jennifer was really upfront about what she wanted in a co-blogger. And that’s good since goals must mesh. If one of you is working overtime to build traffic and the other is humdrum about the blog, it’s not going to work. Goals should be discussed and agreed upon before setting out on the co-blogging adventure.
Another pro I should probably mention is that it can be easier to get your foot in the door at a network by first coming on board as a co-blogger. Starting a new blog can be a big investment for a network, but adding a co-blogger to an existing blog isn’t much of a risk for them. Plus, since joining in February as a co-blogger on Tree Hugging Family, I’ve also gained a new blog of my own at b5media, Junk Creation. Someone was leaving and I was able to take over.
So, what was I most nervous about? Maybe it was wondering if traffic would increase enough to justify the co-blogging relationship. It’s not really something I worry about, but at the same time I was happy when traffic did increase. If it didn’t, would it make sense to share the pay on a network blog? You do share the work, so it could make sense, but most likely not. However, traffic usually increases quite a bit with co-blogging, and that’s been the case at Tree Hugging Family.
In case you can’t tell, I’ve been really happy with my co-blogging adventure.
Are you thinking about becoming a co-blogger?
You can visit Peggy at Tree Hugging Family, Junk Creation and Light Green Stairs.
Discuss…Full vs. Partial Feeds: What’s Best for a Network Blog?
Yesterday one of our commentators mentioned he wouldn’t visit our blog if we continued to shorten our feed. The truth is, we don’t shorten our feed, we shorten the post. There are steps we can take to shorten the post and leave our feed intact, but I haven’t been able to get it to work properly with this particular blog. We like to shorten our posts because they make the front page look tidy, but not at the expense of our readers. So what do we do?
The Benefits of Shortening Your Feed
The argument over whether or not to shorten feeds is ongoing in the blogosphere. Many bloggers like a shortened feed because scrapers and content thieves can’t carry the whole post. Plus page views and revenue are up among many bloggers who have a shorter feed.
Why Many Bloggers Don’t Shorten their Feeds
The problem is, many blog readers don’t want to have to click to read more. If they can’t read the whole post in their feed readers, they move on. I personally don’t get this. I feel if content is good, people will click..how much trouble can it be? But, as usual, I’m in the minority.
Should Network Bloggers Shorten Posts?
Most network bloggers use short feeds because they get more pageviews when readers click through to read the entire post. Since many are paid a base plus traffic bonuses, it’s in their best interest to get their readers to come to the blog rather than read feeds. Moreover, I’m of the opinion that people who visit the blog will be more likely to participate in the conversation and you’re better able to build up your community.
Because network bloggers are paid a set fee by someone else instead of their own blogs’ revenue, I feel they have to do what they can to bring in traffic. Especially since it’s their livelihood. The problem is, your readers want full feeds. So what do you do?
First of all, the decision to publish a full or partial feed is ultimately up to the network. About.com only publishes partial feeds and they have very good traffic. Other networks keep a full feed. When you hit the “more” feature to cut your post, you’re cutting the feed too. Try this…take one week and post only full posts/full feeds. Take another week and “more” your posts. Is there a difference in traffic? If so, is it a big difference? Do people complain? As a network blogger you have to do what brings your blog the most traffic, and the higher paycheck without alienating too many readers.
Keep in Mind…
There are a bunch of people who absolutely refuse to visit a blog offering a shortened feed. It doesn’t matter if your blog is great and your content is the best ever. It’s a matte of principal for them. They want to stay on their feed reader and never stray. Decide what is most important to you and your blog. To “more” your posts, making them prettier and bringing in more traffic, or to leave them whole and cater to everyone - even though it might mean scrapers will steal your content and you’ll have less traffic.
Let’s put it to a discussion here. Why do you use a full or shortened feed…and does it make a difference when you visit a blog? I’d also love to hear from those who run blog networks - what is best for the network blogger?
Discuss…
Balancing Post Count
Reader comment / question:
“It annoys me when a blog has 15 or 20 posts a day. To me, it feels like the friend who forwards 15 chain emails a day and also sends 2 or 3 personal emails… I won’t name names, but I subscribe to a couple of blogs that do this. When I get too far behind in reading the posts in my reader, the first thing I do is go to those blogs and mark all their posts as read without reading them. I also tend to skim their posts more often than other blogs because more often than not there is only one or two good quality posts a day from those blogs and a whole lot of stuff that is uninteresting. The blogs I am thinking of all have many co-bloggers and appear to be network blogs.
Do you think there is a point where a blog posts too much in one day? If so, do you think this is usually a function of having too many co-bloggers? Of not exerting enough editorial control? Of…?”
What I think:
First this is a really good question, but I wonder why you’d have blogs in your feed that offer “a whole lot of stuff that is uninteresting” - that sounds dull. I’d delete blogs like that. Not knowing the background of the blogs I can’t say why they offer dull content. It could be too many bloggers, or bloggers who don’t know the topic well, or it could be any number of things. Their editor may be telling them what to write, or the bloggers hate their topic so they write garbage just to get posts out of the way. One way to know for sure is to ask - most blogs have contact pages. Jot off a quick email that says, you’d like to keep them in your feed but…
I don’t think a blog’s interest factor has to do with post count, because every post has the potential to be interesting. For example, The Blog Herald and Performacing both sometimes post often in one day, and I find the posts interesting enough to read; or I at least skim them all. There are other blogs that post much more than these two, like many celebrity blogs - for the people who like celebrity blogs, a lot of posts are a bonus. For someone like me, it would be torture to have them in my feed.
I think it’s more what the bloggers bring to the blog then the actual number of posts. They bring lots o’ junk, well, you end up with a junky blog. If they bring seven or two nicely done posts a day, you still end up with a nice useful blog either way.
Post count in general:
There’s a downside to too few posts. I’m currently working for a network that wants one post a day at each of their blogs, and in some cases less. I’ll be shocked if this blog network grows at even a normal pace. With one exception, I’ve never seen a blog grow well on less than two posts a day.
While I don’t think the number of posts alone can ruin a blog, I do think there is one potential downside to too many posts. Once you get past six posts a day, it’s hard to follow a blog. If a blog is hard to follow, it seems unlikely that you’ll connect with your readers. I like when I can easily keep up with a blog. For me personally that’s about five posts tops.
Post count is variable though. You have to find the perfect balance for each blog you write. Most blogs I write for seem to have a traffic cut-off, as in traffic stalls once you get past a certain number of posts a day. That number, in my experience is four or five posts per day. If you consistently receive the same amount of traffic when you write four posts or seven posts, then why write seven unless you have something magnificent to say? You can save it for tomorrow.
Good post content - no matter the post count:
I think that as long as you follow the “So what” rule that I wrote about at FWJ, then you’ll be fine. Some bloggers really can write endlessly and interestingly about a topic, some can’t. But that’s dependent on the blog’s topic, and the blogger’s knowledge base. If you’re only churning out mindless posts for the sake of a higher post count, and not because you actually have something to say, you’re not going to keep a good reader base for long. People do want to read something interesting at your blog.
I think we should open this question up though. Maybe a blog does look way worse to folks if there are too many posts.
What do you think everyone? “Do you think there is a point where a blog posts too much in one day?” If so, why do you think this is?
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