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39 minutes
. This is an important blog post, because it makes a prediction. A prediction about the future of blogging; a platform actively used by over 181 million people (Nielsen data for October 2011). Not only will you learn why I think most blogging advice is dated and ineffective, but I’ll also reveal where I believe this entire industry is heading, so you can stay ahead of the competition.
This is not only an important post, but also the longest I have ever written. It’s more like a mini-eBook, without the price tag. Don’t let its lack of cost make you doubt the value here though. I will at least sell you on what you’re about to learn:
- A weird tip I personally received from Google’s Matt Cutts which increased my ViperChill search rankings
- What Gawker does once per week to double their traffic figures. That’s going from two million to four million uniques per day
- Why the Daily Mail recently surpassed the New York Times as the number #1 newspaper website in the world
- How Mashable crushed TechCrunch on traffic numbers (even though they used to be the underdog)
- Why the successful ‘make money online’ blogs of the past have now faded into obscurity
- The number one reason Leo Babauta dominated the personal development industry in two months
- What Steve Kamb did to build a six-figure blog in the overly saturated health niche
- Why feed counts mean absolutely nothing (and never really have)
- Which Huffington Post articles attract 3X more clicks than any other
- Why the Verge was one of the fastest growing blog launches in history
…and most importantly, how this all helps me to make a prediction about what it now takes to build highly profitable blogs.
Due to the length of this post, I could have given this information away as a product and sold it for a lot of money. The reason I didn’t sell this is because I want more feedback. It’s public, and you can comment. I hope when you reach the end you’ll let me know your thoughts.
In a room full of 100 people there will statistically be at least two active bloggers. Multiply that by ten of fifteen times if you live in Europe or America. I think it’s a shame that an industry which affects so many people gets so little self-analysis and even fewer people trying to uncover where it’s heading.
As mentioned, this is a long article. You might want to bookmark it and come back to it later. If you only ever read one blog post on this entire website in full, make it this one. Hopefully the length will deter your competitors from reading it, because there are a number of insights here which I have no doubt will give you an edge.
There are three reasons why this analysis includes so much information. The first is that some people trust what I have to say, and because they trust it, they follow it. I’m not going to make any claims about what I think is happening without doing a ton of research.
The second is because this affects a lot of people. I can’t just be immersed in the tech and marketing fields and claim I’ve figured it all out. Though, these industries are generally ahead of the curve that others follow, as you’ll soon see. We are closing in on having 200 million active bloggers online, so I want my advice to be relevant and useful for people in the majority of industries. That’s a lot of exceptions I have to consider.
The third reason is because this is ViperChill, and despite the strange rise in how many people are telling me my blog posts are too long, there’s at least one person that is really glad I’m about to go into such detail.
Whoever you are, it’s nice to meet you. You’ll soon learn why writing this post was actually a huge contradiction to everything I’m about to preach. But there’s a reason…
Why I Had to Do This
I’ll get the obvious one out of the way first and say that, honestly, I did a lot of this for myself. Though I really want you to get value from this article, it’s creation wasn’t entirely selfless. I have a very open schedule for the rest of 2012 and, simply, I want to spend a large part of that continuing to grow the readership of this blog.
Social networks are growing at record-breaking speeds. Brand new blogs like The Verge are being flooded with more traffic than those that have been around for the best part of a decade. For the first time ever, more time is being spent on Apps than it is on the internet.
Every single day I take notes about the big changes that are happening online, but I very rarely look at how they might affect my own businesses. This is my attempt to change that. There are more quotes, examples and data excerpts in this post than any other I have written. Some of it was gathered 12 months ago, some in the last 12 days. Now it’s time to link it all together.
A lot has changed from the days when Digg was the only share button people used on their posts and – besides going directly to a website – RSS was the most common way to consume blog content.
Now, bloggers have access to trending analytics data so they can predict which hot topics they should be writing about next. Newspaper websites like the Daily Mail automatically rearrange the content on their homepage based on how many people are clicking on which articles.
Bloggers are packaging their content in different formats like podcasts, video and infographics to reach a wider audience. The magazine industry is crumbling. Partly due to how accessible content is online, and partly because we can now pick which author we want to cover our favourite, hyper-targeted interests.
Change is one of the reasons I love this industry, and it’s only going to continue. I want to know how this is likely to affect my own endeavours.
The final reason I have put so much work into this topic is because of a simple truth: People do not have the time to read your content. They really don’t. We’re busier than ever, have shorter attention spans and more people in our entire history own websites they want us to visit.
How many marketing bloggers do you think wrote something today hoping that you’ll read it. 5,000? 50,000? I don’t know, but it’s a lot. If you did nothing but attempt to read all of the marketing content that is published today, you wouldn’t be finished this year. In other words, it’s no longer enough to be part of the top 1%. You have to be in the top 0.1%.
Before I start to overload your brain with data and ideas, there are just two last things I want to say. The first is that this guide is really for people looking to make money from blogs over the long-term. It’s a guide on building sites which withstand any search, social or platform changes.
If you rely on getting masses of search traffic through some Google Hot Trends stalking or scrape half of your content from other blogs, I’m afraid I can’t help you. If on the other hand you have legitimate value to offer your industry, this guide will make sure you get noticed.
The second is that this post really is best read in full, no matter what your tendencies are to skim. I’ve tried to plant little ‘Aha’ moments throughout the content here as the relevant research points them out to me. There isn’t a huge climax at the end of the post where I unravel tons of “secrets”.
Though I’ve come to my own conclusions, I’ve included enough information to help you form your own ideas as well if you aren’t satisfied with mine. Ready?
Why The Daily Mail Became the World’s Most Visited Newspaper Website
The Daily Mail’s website, the online alternative to the British newspaper that was first published in 1896, covers all things news, gossip and viral online. They produce the kind of content you won’t always like to admit you enjoy reading. I’m actually hesitant to link directly to them because you might not get any work done today; that’s how enticing some of their stories are. http://DailyMail.co.uk is the URL.
The quality of their work is generally quite poor. You’ll find a typo on every visit, image captions often talk about the wrong people, and authors in the Entertainment section don’t even get their names put next to the content they create. Probably due to the nature of what they’re having to say just for clicks. It’s unlikely you would see any of these things on the New York Times.
Many headlines will come with a strong opinion that most Mail Online readers love to complain about. They spike reader emotions, and people keep coming back for that.
One thing the Daily Mail do that I haven’t seen anyone else pick up on is basically what I call ‘article clustering’. It’s a tactic that allows them to create viral, meaty content faster than ever before, despite what SEO and readership implications it may have.
Article clustering is basically this: They write a huge piece on a hot news item, and constantly use that same information whenever they cover the story again. For example, they might write a detailed piece about the Royal Wedding, and then later they’ll write a story specifically about the dress that was worn. They’ll then take 50-75% of the content from the original article and simply paste it into the new one.
This enables them to write long stories on the same topic — just taken from a different angle. Increasing their pageviews and improving the ‘quality’ of the article if you’ve just landed on their website (and didn’t read the other related news).
I could do this on ViperChill and make each of my stories seem incredible to new readers. For example I could have shared the Matt Cutts blog ranking tip I’m about to reveal in a separate post, then copied 90% of my WordPress SEO article, slapped it on the end and then hit publish. First time visitors would be blown away by this huge, in-depth content and yet it wouldn’t take me more than 20 minutes to put together.
It probably wouldn’t be good for search, but Google makes up a tiny percent of my traffic. It also wouldn’t be good for regular readers seeing the same content again, which is mostly why I don’t do it, but if I blogged more frequently then it’s actually something I would consider testing.
As Ruud Hein points out over at Search Engine People, their homepage is also huge. To be exact, it’s 22,000 (!) pixels long. That’s more than five times the length of the New York Times homepage at 3,900 pixels. The aim is to get you opening as many stories as possible, increasing their pageviews, clicking on ads and hopefully reading their paid ‘Advertorials’ which blend into their regular sidebar.
From a traffic standpoint, what they’re doing is amazing. From a business point of view though, despite the huge growth the website is seeing, things aren’t going to plan. According to this piece in the New Yorker, the Mail Online brought in twenty-five million dollars last year, but still didn’t produce a profit.
They attract one of the lowest forms of website visitor in my opinion – someone looking for a quick ‘gossip hit’ – and, not unlike Facebook with their billions of pageviews, they’re doing all they can to figure out how to monetise that. The last I heard, the Huffington Post with over 30 million unique visitors and 1.2 billion pageviews per month weren’t making a profit either.
If you look at the work they’re producing and picture dozens of people sitting in front of large rectangle desks churning out articles as quick as they can, you’d be right.
Their situation isn’t too dissimilar to…
The Reason that Mashable ‘Beat’ TechCrunch
TechCrunch and Mashable are two of the most influential tech blogs; both covering a vast majority of the news happening in the start-up and social media world.
To my knowledge, TechCrunch became the first ever blog to reach 1 million subscribers – something they proudly displayed via their Feedburner chicklet. Though both sites have been around since 2005, TechCrunch quickly established itself as the industry leader, with founder Michael Arrington’s personal rants and opinions gaining attention around Silicon Valley and beyond.
It also helped that Arrington had a large number of connections which resulted in just as many scoops, meaning TechCrunch were often the first to report big industry stories. Google’s $1bn+ acquisition of Youtube is one such example which helped to cement their authority and place at the top.
In the last couple of years though, that’s changed. Mashable – still trailing far behind TechCrunch in feed subscriber numbers – began to overtake them in traffic figures. This transition happened most notably in parallel with the rise of Twitter and Facebook as platforms to share content.
Mashable adapted their content to the social media space and started publishing more articles than ever before; not unlike what the Daily Mail has done with the online version of their publication. If you want to find ’21 Angry Birds Toys’ or ’55 Online Apps to Make you More Productive’, Mashable is there for you.
On the Daily Muse profile of Mashable, a member of their team – Brian – has the following job description:
“He keeps Mashable on top of everything viral. That’s right, it’s his job to find out find what videos, memes, and stories are hot right now, and make sure Mashable readers see them first.”
TechCrunch, on the other hand, didn’t fully adopt this strategy. They quickly fell behind Mashable on all social media platforms, with their established (and far larger) RSS readership just not enough to counteract the changing internet landscape. Their site is still huge, of course, but a new leader in the industry emerged.
I prefer to stick with data rather than personal opinion, but I will say that I’m a much bigger fan of TechCrunch than I have ever been of Mashable. In fact, their list posts are the least likely thing I’m going to click on if I ever see them on Twitter. I really love the tech space and prefer industry insider details and unhindered rants over ’11 Steps on How to Install an iPhone App’.
I’m not alone either. MG Siegler, one of the most notable TechCrunch writers (now part-time) would constantly take stabs at the Mashable team and the content strategy that they employ. He himself preferring to focus on his rankings over on TechMeme rather than tweets. Sadly for MG, Twitter and Facebook are far bigger platforms.
His rants were actually rather ironic, since he contributed a lot to TechCrunch’s ‘viral bait’ strategy, refreshing us all on his “people will no longer use computer mice” theory he seemed to post every few months. He also contributed to what I call padding, which is now popular on news websites. An Apple event that could normally be covered in one or two blog posts will be turned into five or ten, purely for pageviews.
More recently, TechCrunch was sold to AOL for $25m. Michael Arrington left, as did their CEO Heather and a bunch of their well-known writing team. Rumours have been circulating for a while now that CNN are looking to purchase Mashable for around $200m. That’s a phenomenal difference for a site that was the underdog for years, and a huge testimony to founder Pete Cashmore for noticing a trend and capitalising on it.
According to a recent post by Arrington, things aren’t looking so good at his old company:
“He [the new CEO] has to get page views up, which have declined by around 50% since I departed last year (with Siegler singlehandedly the majority of the loss). TechCrunch has never cared much about page views. But AOL cares a lot about page views. So TechCrunch needs to start caring about page views too.”
In a recent interview, SEO guru Aaron Wall pointed out how interesting it was that TechCrunch have actually lost so much traffic when you consider their other statistics. Think about this for a second; they have tons of authority, millions of backlinks, huge Google PR, and a previously incredible audience size. None of that enough to stop their numbers falling.
In this social landscape, the story now matters far more than the brand…
“Yesterday, TechCrunch saw record traffic thanks to a few stories on [Steve] Jobs. These posts brought in more readers than any scoop we’ve ever had, any major product review we’ve ever posted, even more than any Apple keynote we’ve ever covered. And our stories were just a few of the thousands upon thousands out there.”
News sites like this – besides doing things like conferences and sponsored posts – have to largely rely on advertising to generate revenue. Since increasing pageviews is the main way to increase income via that channel, why wouldn’t they be writing multiple posts for what could be said in one? Why wouldn’t Mashable keep writing more of the same content that people are sharing in the thousands?
It’s Happening Everywhere
I don’t know if you can still call The Huffington Post a blog, but they somehow still hold the title of being #1 over at Technorati. A former writer shared some interesting insights with Capital New York:
“What we were doing was not journalism. It was taking original content from other sources and rewriting headlines in a way that would give liberals a justification to be indignant about current events. It was also to find what is generally called ‘weird news,’ and also entertainment stories, like a Lindsay Lohan nipple slip, which consistently attracted three times more clicks than any political story.”
I’m not sure what it says about the future of society when we seem to care far more about celebrities than we do about the people governing and making the changes which affect our entire world. Reason aside, people do. And no matter how much criticism Huff Po’ gets for ‘stealing’ content and including little original reporting in lots of stories, it works.
The regular person wants to click on the kind of content they’re creating. And like the Daily Mail, their site is highly optimised to help people get their fix. Huff Po’s strategy works to the tune of almost $300m, thanks to an acquisition by AOL. Who, coincidentally, are betting their entire company on this model with the ownership of TechCrunch, TMZ, Engadget and other well known web properties.
A while ago someone pointed out to me an article on Yahoo News that had received 14,000 comments within 4 hours of going live — there are over 20,000 right now. That’s more comments than I’ve had on this blog in two years of running it. You might expect that the story covered important world news like a natural disaster or a political debate that everyone is chiming in on, but it didn’t.
Instead, it was just 300 words, accompanied by a picture of Jersey Shore’s ‘Snooki’ without any make-up on. Seriously, that was it. The ‘I don’t want to live on this planet anymore’ meme comes to mind. Speaking of memes, the rise of certain websites also seems to mimic this trend. Pinterest, 9Gag, QuickMeme and TinyChat all cater to people looking to fill the gaps in their day and they’re growing at an incredible rate.
The Reddit homepage which was once home to interesting debates on world topics is now more dominated by IMGUR links than ever before. The community choose the ‘news’, and that’s just what the community want to see.
Before I get into how this affects us as bloggers (yes, even if you’re not covering the news or planning to write a dozen posts per day) I want to highlight one final example, Gawker Media. The parent company behind popular blogs like LifeHacker, Jezebel (gossip), Kotaku (gaming) and Gawker (tech / viral news).
Gawker editor A.J Daulerio started an experiment where, each day, a member of their writing team would be responsible for bringing more of this viral, clickbait traffic to the site. The aim purely being to write things they think will generate a lot of pageviews. Andrew Phelps over at Nieman Lab decided to do some research into how this affected their traffic levels, since Gawker publicly show analytics figures for each post.
“On their assigned pageview-duty days, Gawker writers produced a cumulative 72 posts — about 14 posts per writer per day. On their off-duty days — and remember, each had four off days for every “on” day — the same writers cumulatively produced 34, or about 1.3 posts per writer per day.
Those 72 pageview-duty posts produced a combined 3,956,977 pageviews (as of the days I captured data, Friday 3/9 and Monday 3/12), a mean of 54,958 pageviews per post. The 34 off-duty posts produced 2,037,263 pageviews, a mean of 59,920 pageviews per post.”
In other words, this ‘traffic whoring’ strategy worked. Doubling content production resulted in almost double the pageviews. One of the most popular posts was simply an image of a Chinese goat, and nothing more, attracting over 46,000 views. The most popular post in their collection of sites was published on Jezebel, which displayed a photo of Whitney Houston’s coffin, bringing in over 300,000 new visitors to the Gawker network.
People liking celebrity gossip and weird stories isn’t entirely new, but how this landscape and what generates traffic has totally changed the content strategy of big media lends for some interesting insights.
What This Means for Us
Though it may be sad to see the general web leaning towards the kind of content that Mail Online publishes, quality still matters. The Daily Mail website reportedly brought in $25m revenue in 2011. The New York Times? $200m. Audience numbers aren’t everything. Even in the product world we can see this with Apple ‘only’ holding a 9% share of the smartphone industry, yet they’re bringing in 78% (!) of the profits.
I don’t know if the Mail Online will eventually make a profit, but they’re definitely hoping so. I can’t help but think of them as the Walmart of the internet. The only way people can compete is to be cheaper (create more viral content each day) or different (no ads, faster site, cooler brand, etc).
If you’re looking to start a news website, or at least a niche website which plans on pumping out a lot of content each day, then I wish you the best of luck. There’s a really funny model that I see in the tech world that you can use to your advantage. Whenever there’s a big news story either:
- Agree with it and provide more facts
- Disagree and put-down a high profile news breaker
- Make a prediction based on the news event
- Interview someone related to the story
You might lose a little piece of your soul doing this each day, but you’ll definitely get more clicks.
After this post I’m going to be spending some time finishing off the final elements of my Blogging Case Study website, which launched at the end of last year. I haven’t really talked about it much here, but we (myself, Andrea & the Guardian Newspaper) received some amazing results with this project.
We helped animals to get adopted that previously couldn’t find a home. A painter in England made over $1,000 in his first month online by turning his skills into an information product which he then promoted on his brand new blog. Andrea launched her first digital product, created a competition which received hundreds of entries and was recently interviewed on Freelance Switch, a blog with over 50,000 subscribers.
People arranged meet-ups and made friends passionate about the same topics. One blogger quickly reached almost 200,000 pageviews in just a few weeks using only a fraction of the concepts that were shared. We quoted a woman in Germany in the final issue of our newspaper column who had given us some feedback during the updates. She sent Andrea an email saying how shocked and delighted she was to be featured, attaching a photo (right) of herself and her children holding the newspaper to go with it.
That is the reason I spend so much time trying to create actionable value, and this article is very much a continuation of that. I want to read thousands more of those success stories.
This article is for the ‘little guy’. People like me, and you, who aren’t looking to become content robots, but are instead really passionate about their specific industry and want to build a large audience of like-minded people. Even though we aren’t looking to mimic the strategy of these content machines, we can learn a lot of things from them.
As I mentioned earlier, I’ve tried to plant a lot of little insights throughout this post to get you thinking, rather than having some brilliant one-liner at the end which will make you more viral than Old Spice Guy. For example when I tell you that the Daily Mail’s homepage is ridiculously long, you might think about whether showing more posts on your blog before pagination kicks in would keep people on your site for longer.
I increased the number of posts that I show on ViperChill from 7 to 25 as an experiment over the last three weeks and looked at how it affected my bounce rate and pageviews. I noticed that when my site was slower because it has to load more information (and I had little Amazon S3 support and no caching plugins), those stats changed for the worst. But, speeding up the site and having more content on display? Well, let’s just say I have been in no rush to show only seven posts again.
Maybe you’ll now try adding enticing graphics to your sidebar to get people clicking on your other articles. Maybe you’ll start experimenting with more provocative headlines to see if they help your content get noticed. Maybe you’ll think about different ways to package your knowledge in a way that gets people talking. Maybe you’ll see if the article clustering concept has room in your own content strategy.
For me personally, this research and data really cemented a belief I’ve had for a long time. My conclusion being that this blog post – from an audience growth point of view – was a terrible idea. Do you know how many hit posts I could have created just from this one article?
I could have written:
- The Secret Matt Cutts Told Me Which Improved my Google Rankings
- Why Mashable Beat TechCrunch
- Why The Verge Was One of the Fastest Blog Launches in History
- How Steve Kamb Created a Six-Figure Fitness Blog
And so on and so on. When I cover why the likes of John Chow and Shoemoney have lost some of their authority in the last few years, I could have made that a separate post too. “How to Make Sure You Don’t End up like the Ex-A-List Bloggers” could have been a pretty popular article.
I really wish that wasn’t the case. I wish the people spending days on their articles for the New York Times wouldn’t lose their traffic to someone copying the meat of their story and wrapping it in a better headline. I wish that people cared more about politics and the world we live in than celebrity nipples or make-up-free Snooki. I wish one longer post that I love to write could generate as much traffic as five articles created from it.
But I can’t change that, I can only look at how I deal with it once I have the knowledge.
The Only Way to Future-Proof your Blogging Efforts
One thing that has been clear to me throughout writing this post and doing more research than I would like to admit, is the constant. With so much change, surely there has to be something that isn’t going to disappear any time soon. Well, there is, and that’s people.
I strongly believe that no matter what it is you’re really passionate about and covering, there’s someone else out there who cares as much about it as you. In fact, there are thousands if not millions of people out there who want to read your content; you just haven’t reached them yet.
It’s important to keep this in mind mostly because of how much the rest of the web and other traffic-generation platforms are changing.
Let’s start with search. Do you know what the hot topics were when I was first getting involved in SEO? People were putting huge importance on the keywords in meta data and creating crafty subdomains for different phrases because Google were giving them so much credit in the search results. If anyone is still stressing the value of those tactics these days, find another SEO blog to read.
There was also tons of discussion on ‘fresh content’. We were so used to company and personal websites being static before the likes of blogging came along, that ‘fresh’ content was deemed just what the search engines were looking for to increase your rankings. I started playing around with something called Magpie RSS so I could hack together a way to import my latest blog posts into the sidebar of my static homepage. Every time I wrote an article, my homepage would change a few minutes later.
Once I had finished, people on the biggest SEO forum at the time were telling me how good it was that Google would see that my site had changed since their last crawl, even if it was just one text link in my sidebar. Besides acquiring links, that was one of the top tactics people recommended. It makes me laugh thinking about it now.
With things like the Panda update and the many other Google changes we have to keep up with, worrying too much about search engines tweaks is rarely your best strategy. After all, there are a ton of them, “Just last year we launched over 500 changes to our algorithm so by some count we change our algorithm almost every day, almost twice over” – Amit Singhal, Google
“There are almost always a set of motivating searches and these searches are not performing as well as we’d like. Ranking engineers then come up with a hypothesis about what signal, what data could we integrate into our algorithm.” – Scott Huffman, Google
To further prove how difficult it is to keep up with every minor search ranking detail, let me tell you about that ‘tip-off’ I received from Google’s Matt Cutts which brought back a large number of my ViperChill search rankings to the number one spot.
When writing another ridiculously long article, I did a quick Google search for one of my blog posts so that I could link to it. “ViperChill Superblog” was the query, something I should have ranked first for since this is my domain and Superblog was used in the title of one of my articles. Yet, I was 4th. Ranked behind three spammy sites doing nothing but quoting a line or two of my article and then linking to me. They had done this for millions of sites and judging by their Alexa rank, it was working really really well.
I performed another ‘viperchill [blog post]’ query, and the same result occurred. I tweeted that I found it funny how people still think crappy websites can’t rank, and included a link to the search results. I received a personal reply from Google’s head of web-spam, Matt, who asked me if, when a blog posts goes live, I ping certain services.
If you’re wondering what that is, basically it’s something that I think of as so little and irrelevant that I cannot believe it was questioned. If you log into your WordPress Admin area and go to Settings > Writing, you’ll see a list of ‘services’ that you can ping (alert) whenever a new article of yours goes live. It’s something I set up years ago and have never touched or thought about since.
Though I wasn’t pinging the services Matt asked me about, I was pinging a few with a foreign domain extension that he had mentioned and a lot of others, so I decided to remove all but a couple of them from my list. A few days later and my rankings were back where they should be. How crazy is it that some behind the scenes WordPress setting was costing me search rankings for my own brand name? Even crazier is that I would have never, ever figured this out on my own, and Matt’s personal attention is not exactly scalable.
Maybe one of my smarter readers has some logical explanation for this, but it reminded me how little I want my businesses to ever rely on search traffic. Even though this is over four years old, I have a feeling that things like linking to the wrong domains is also costing people rankings, but you just haven’t realised it.
It’s not just search that’s changing. Recent changes to Facebook fan pages made it so that you can no longer set a default landing page where you can offer welcome information or get people to subscribe to your site. Something that myself and others have spent a lot of time on. Even if you do get a huge audience on their platform, a November article on TechCrunch highlighted the fact that links posted by large brands on Facebook have a 0.14% CTR. That’s 1 click per 1,000 fans. Or, just 1,000 clicks if you have a page with one million fans.
The launch of Google+ and record growth of sites like Pinterest are giving us even more places where we should be spending our time online. The best takeaway I can see from all of this is to focus on who is on the heart of it all: The people who are going to become loyal passionate followers and how to best interact with them, so you’re not relying on pageviews or specific rankings to turn blogging into a profitable business.
I’m not at all saying you should be abandoning these services, but this does lead nicely into my next prediction…
The Importance of Having an Email List is Only Going to Increase
I’ve been a huge advocate of bloggers using email lists, writing multiple posts on the subject. The benefits of having a list have been well documented, but let me refresh you on the basics:
- You can ‘test’ different message text, subject lines and subscriber entry points to maximise conversions
- You can create your own tailored follow-up sequence and send messages on set dates and times which can be fully automated
- Subscribers only get the content you want them to see, and not necessarily your blog posts (or all of them)
- You can keep your value for a specific, loyal audience if you want, rather than having to share everything publicly
When I first started writing about this topic over a year ago, I noticed a reader of this site tweet about how everyone is talking about attaching an email list to a blog. I think it was more likely the case that just the people they follow were talking about it, showing a deceiving popularity. Kind of like how if you saw five people tomorrow wearing the same bright green sneakers, you might think there’s a huge luminous footwear trend emerging. Unbeknownst to you, there was a shop down the street trying to clear their stock and were selling them for a dollar.
I still think that most bloggers haven’t caught on to this, but in time it’s going to change. The suggestion of having an email list sucks for people who aren’t offering value to their audience. That’s because people are generally really picky about what they will allow to come to them via this channel, and a loyal reader can quickly discard you if what you produce is no longer relevant to them.
Skipping tweets or Facebook updates isn’t such a big deal.
Before being acquired by Google for $100m, Feedburner dominated the controlling of blog RSS feeds by showing bloggers how many people were subscribing to their site, and from which services. The numbers are pretty deceiving though. I’ll be the first to admit that although my chicklet shows 22,000+ subscribed RSS readers, there’s no way that 22,000 people are actually following it.
I’ll bet my blog that the same goes for any other site which proudly displays their count. With an email based audience, you can produce far more stats, and they’re far more accurate.
You don’t have to be some computer whizz-kid to take advantage of the benefits that email marketing provides either. Andrea of Butterflyist was more than happy to acknowledge her technical limitations when we started the Case Study project. Now she’s easily able to analyse the subject lines of the emails she’s sending to see which one gets her more opens.
Once her list is bigger she can also take advantage of smaller tests, like sending 10% of her audience one subject line and then 10% of her audience another. Then using the winning line to email the other 80% in order to get more people reading her content.
Recently, popular internet marketer Ryan Deiss sent out an email to his list about my product, OptinSkin. Ryan is someone who has made millions of dollars in the Forex industry and beyond, and brought us hundreds of new customers in just a couple of days.
In the mail he sent out, he said “One of the single biggest assets I have in my business
is my email list. If you took away everything I had in business but left me with my email list, I could be back in business the very same day by making an offer to that list.”
He couldn’t say that about Twitter followers, Facebook fans or how many people are waiting to re-pin him on Pinterest. It’s just not the same.
Speaking of OptinSkin, I was honoured to see that New York Times bestselling author Ramit Sethi recently purchased a copy of the software. I’ve been a big fan of his for a long time now so quickly offered to refund his purchase but keep his license active, which he politely declined.
When I checked out his homepage, I really wasn’t surprised to see that its entire focus is now based on one thing. You guessed it: collecting emails.
When I was giving my friend Diggy advice on his new direction with a Forex site, we checked out the blog of Timothy Sykes who has been known to be pulling in upwards of $80,000 per month from his web presence in the niche. He too has now dedicated his entire homepage to collecting emails.
Neil Patel, who has consulted for eBay, Amazon, TechCrunch and other large web-based companies has completely changed the design of his sidebar and post footer to cater for this trend as well.
I didn’t come up with the idea for OptinSkin six months ago with the aim of building it and then trying to convince everyone that they should be doing all they can to collect email addresses. I built it because people should be doing all they can to collect email addresses.
That being said, it’s not for everyone. Even Pete Cashmore doesn’t want to receive every Mashable article in his inbox; they just produce too much content. They can offer a daily summary of their stories like other news services, and while many have a good uptake for this, people generally want to read news as it’s happening. Not a day later. Further proven by how popular they are on social networks where, again, unwanted information is easier to skip.
Email gives us “little guys” a chance to have highly personal interactions with our readers, and that’s an advantage we’ll always have over big media.
Design Matters More Than It Ever Has
One thing I really tried to stress when running the Blogging Case Study is that the design of your blog is more important now than it has ever been. The way your site looks is a huge factor which determines whether people stick around for more than a few seconds to check out what you have to say.
It is not and never will be as important as the content you’re producing, but it’s something I think the majority of bloggers overlook. A good enough design is not good enough.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure you can find a successful blog that is ugly. They’ve either been ugly for a really long time when other sites in their industry were ugly too, or you found an exception. We’re 181 million strong, so that shouldn’t be a total surprise.
Markus Frind of PlentyofFish was always someone people looked to whenever the ‘build a good looking website’ argument comes up. His hugely popular dating site looked terrible compared to his competitors. Looked terrible. Even he eventually caved in and redesigned the site to give it a more modern feel.
Steve Pavlina, who has been pulling in five-figures from his blog every month for years now has been rocking the same basic design for just as long. He would often comment on how he has no desire to make any changes. A few months ago he changed his header, modernised his sidebar and added more emphasis on social sharing; something he had never done before.
I’m not saying you have to produce something worthy of winning design contests, but if you’re aiming to be one of the top sites in your industry, then please, look like one of the top sites in your industry.
Think Beyond the Blog
One of the main reasons that WordPress is the most popular choice of blogging software out there is because of how open and customisable it is. If you have an idea or want a certain feature, there’s a good chance that someone has already discussed or created a plugin for exactly what you’re looking to do.
You can take a plain, default site and turn it into the most beautiful, technically complex but minimal blog of your dreams. The first customisations made by most people include caching, SEO and comment subscription plugins, to name a few. But there’s so much more that we can do.
The core aspects of blogging are so simple. You publish posts and they appear on your homepage in reverse chronological order. People can leave comments, and they can subscribe to your updates via RSS. Now, for your industry, please look at how you can take that further. You can find a programmer to do pretty much anything you could ever think of, if it hasn’t been released already, so there’s no reason to think small on this one. After all, the big guys are doing something.
Mashable spent months working on ‘Mashable Follow’, a feature which allows their readers just to subscribe to certain categories. It’s used by a large part of their audience, since some topics have thousands of ‘followers’, and it gives the Mashable team a better idea of the content that their audience want to read about.
There have been over 140 million comments left on the Huffington Post, and they’ve taken advantage of that by totally overwriting their comment system, creating badges for specific types of users and implementing advanced, automated spam checking controls. Regular visitors love showing off their status and accumulating new “rewards”.
Venture Beat and The Next Web in the tech space add a little white share bar to the top of their website that never leaves your screen when you scroll down far enough. It’s annoying as hell, and I personally hate things that move with my mouse. But with the kind of traffic they get on a daily basis, I’m sure they could see within a few hours whether their audience are using it. Who cares whether I like it or not? It clearly works.
Or what about Neiman Lab. Start reading a random article and you’ll notice that within a few seconds, their sidebar does something pretty damn cool. It fades away to a low opacity, and puts more focus on the content for people who are clearly immersed in what they’re reading.
The homepage of Copyblogger went from your typical blog format to, surprise surprise, focusing heavily on collecting emails, and then showing blog posts which you can navigate with a cool slider.
I’ve tried to do little things like that here and there. Like when I added testimonials to my ViperChill sidebar and found that it had a positive affect on my subscriber numbers. Anyone can talk big about themselves, but it’s different when you have big brands saying positive things about you. Or even the little stats in the bottom right of my footer, showing how many posts, comments and followers I have around the web. They’re just little details, but I really think that they make a difference.
I once saw a cool feature on a site which showed you how far you were away from certain members of their team. For example, right now there are three people working with me on ViperChill (mostly OptinSkin). I could map where they are, and then when you come to my website I could have a little line of text which shows you which member of the team you’re closest to based on your I.P. address, and even show you an approximate distance.
If you come to this site and there’s a message in the sidebar telling you “Welcome! You’re only 10km away from our lead programmer, Graeme”, that’s going to have a small but more than likely positive affect on whether you stick around and see what the website is about.
Why leave it to the ‘big guys’ to be experimenting with all of these ideas? Now really is the time to start thinking beyond the blog.
This Has to Be Your Thing
Though a lot of this article is about looking at where things are heading and what we can learn from the documented success stories out there, not everything I tell you is going to be new. Sometimes I’ve just had a point made clear to me over and over again that I think it’s necessary to reiterate it once more.
It doesn’t matter whether I’ve helped cultivate a blogging success or I’ve read about it on some other site, every single one seems to follow the same pattern: The people behind them really love what they’re doing. Or in other words, I haven’t had a single success sent to my inbox where the person involved slaved away and hated every minute of the process.
I guess even if I had, you can’t really call it a success.
If you have a blog in an industry you do not love reading about, talking about and learning more about, then you’re probably going to fail. I don’t care about any automated exceptions or even my own example of getting 1 million search visitors in three months. If you do not love this, then to save you time later down the road, just do something else.
I should probably back this up with a few examples.
Many of you will be aware of Adam Baker of Man vs Debt as he’s someone I’ve mentioned a few times on this blog. Adam makes a very good income helping people to reduce the junk and debt in their lives through his website, and he has one hell of a fun time doing it. I’ve came across almost as many finance blogs as I have those on marketing, but Adam shines through a saturated industry because he’s different.
Not only does his give a shit about his readers, but he thinks outside the box. When everyone else is following their usual strategies pumping out the same old content, he’s leaving his wife and kids at home to travel around the US in an RV to shoot a documentary on living an unscripted life. It could be the most expensive failed project he has undertaken yet, or he might just end up with tens of thousands of people paying for his work.
Whatever happens, you can be sure he wont be regretting the process in-between.
Or what about Marshall? I can only describe Marshall as a “nerdy genius”, and one of the best writers in the tech space. Mr. Kirkpatrick is an ex-TechCrunch writer now over at ReadWriteWeb. He knows more about what is happening in the tech world than anyone who will ever read this article. Why? Because, like Adam, he really loves his topic.
Marshall was hired by TechCrunch after constantly finding hot news stories before anyone else. His RSS and news reading set-up is so comprehensive that he knows when certain venture capitalists leave blog comments anywhere on the web. He knows when some guy who worked for Apple sometime on some side project or something makes a tweet that might give a heads up on what they’re working on next.
He knows the instant Larry Page finally makes an update on this G+ thing he’s supposed to be “betting the company” on.
Matthew Inman is another good example. You might know Matthew by his internet alter-ego, The Oatmeal. With his millions of unique visitors per month to funny and seemingly random comic drawings, you may be mistaken for thinking that Matt got lucky, and anyone with a bit of experience in Adobe Illustrator can replicate what he does. I’ve watched a few people try.
What’s missing from the equation isn’t better drawing skills or funnier ideas or a “huge brand” to compete against but – you guessed it – this is Matt’s thing. Matt is the former CTO of SEOmoz, that company I recently highlighted making over one million dollars per month offering SEO software as a service.
Before software, they worked with clients, and one of Matt’s specialities was creating viral content that would drive thousands of links to their websites. He had so much success that he left SEOmoz and went on to partner with a dating website, Mingle2. Again he used his viral bait skills coupled with excellent programming and design ability to flood the site with traffic and make it a huge, albeit temporary success.
One look at the Oatmeal and you’ll know he continued with his winning performance. He isn’t thinking “hurrr durr I want to draw comics and be like that Oatmeal dude”. He’s dicking around with his notepad drawing designs all day based on what he knows people like to share.
The guys from iFixit flew to Australia on the day that the latest iPad came out so they could get it before their American competitors and give their audience the juicy details first. When six-figure fitness blogger Steve Kamb is travelling around the world, keeping fit never leaves his mind.
Aaron Wall consistently makes well over $50,000/m from his SEOBook forums, yet he’s still writing posts, browsing the web on his topic and researching the latest algorithm changes. In his words from a recent interview, “I write in part to make my thoughts more concrete and to get feedback. As much as anything else the site is a list of notes to myself.”
I wrote the introduction to this post before I saw his answers so I was surprised to see how eerily similar his words were to my own.
Or finally, what about Michael Arrington after selling his beloved TechCrunch to AOL for $25m. I really have no idea how much money he was personally left with after taxes and sharing the wealth with his team, but let’s just place a plausible guess and say that he’s sitting on 15 million. Fifteen MILLION dollars was not enough to get him to stop writing about startups. Probably because he didn’t start with the intention of cashing out.
How’s that for a “love test”. Would you still keep producing content if you had 15 million in the bank?
You can fake the passion, but it’s impossible to force.
How Not to End Up Like the Ex-A-List Bloggers
If I’m looking at what the future holds for bloggers, it makes sense to look at the people who were once at the top of their industry but have lost some of the authority they once had. My best examples come from the make money online niche, purely because it’s something I spent a lot of time immersed in when I was much younger.
At the time, John Chow and Shoemoney were really the A-List bloggers in this space. Everyone read them, everyone talked about them, and people visited their sites in the hundreds of thousands. John’s popularity was helped by his monthly updates showing how much money he was making from teaching people how to make money. Although it’s a weird thing to show off, his numbers were inspiring to say the least. Especially when you watched him go from his first few thousand dollars in a month to regularly pulling in close to $40K.
Shoemoney also owes a lot of his fame to revealing how much money he makes. His $120,000+ Adsense check for one month is the most viewed image on his entire site, and something that really got the blogosphere talking.
There was a time when each of their posts would receive hundreds of comments, links and attention from other blogs. But for the most part, those days have gone. Comments are down, traffic looks to be down, and I would be amazed if they have even a fraction of the true RSS audience that they used to have.
I’m not saying they’ve fallen off their path to be a douche. I have massive respect for both of them, and from reading Shoemoney’s blog enough I’m 99.98% sure he doesn’t care whether people read his site or not. Some of his articles on affiliate marketing are part of the reason I am where I am today, and I love his rants, no matter how rare they may be. These days though he’s resorted to asking people whether they would look at Mark Zuckerberg’s junk if they were standing next to him at a urinal, so his content focus has definitely changed.
And that’s really the main reason they’ve lost the authority and the audience they once had. It’s because they no longer produce enough valuable information that their audience wants to read about. After John’s blog had seemingly started to decline he posted a huge guide to making money on Clickbank which received hundreds of comments. Many of them telling him how much they wanted to read more posts like this, and it’s why they follow him.
For whatever reason, it was a one-off return to his old style.
As with the case for TechCrunch, your brand does not matter like it used to. People share the story that brand is producing, and if those “stories” are no longer relevant to your audience, then they’ll quickly go elsewhere to find what they’re looking for. Especially when it’s now so easy to find alternatives.
You can have all the passion in the world, but it means nothing if you aren’t telling your readers something new.
“But, even though bloggers are selfless, blog readers are selfish. They (we) really have very little choice when you think about it. We are selfish because we only have a little bit of time and there’s too much to read. So, as a result, we are very strict about what’s on our shortlist. We are merciless in deleting a blog from our reader if the blogger posts too often about stuff that’s not relevant to us. We are always hovering over the mouse button, ready to flee a site at a moment’s notice.
Boingboing.net is one of the most popular blogs online, and for good reason. It’s funny and interesting and everyone else reads it, so I do too. But when I get to my blog reader and there are 125 new posts, well, you pause for a moment and decide whether it’s worth keeping up. One day, it might not be.” – Seth Godin
Many of you know about the personal development blog that I used to own, PluginID. After I sold it for a mid-five-figure fee, it has been sold on again multiple times. Now, the site is pretty much a failure. Gone are the days where it was receiving dozens of links on a weekly basis and held top rankings for highly popular search terms.
The person who bought the site from me sold it on after just a few months, making a tidy profit from his investment. I had agreed to help the new, new owner take the site to the next level at no cost. I noticed they had stopped using the same image style in posts, didn’t reply to commenters and the content that was being pumped out was pretty generic.
I spent hours of my time giving advice on what to do next via Skype, with lots of simple but important things to work on. Not a single thing was ever done. The content focus changed and now articles were covering Jesus and praying more than they were on how to take your life to the next level.
These days, even my custom branded design has been replaced by a basic theme, and the content being produced is just…meh. It doesn’t matter that it was once receiving hundreds of thousands of pageviews, had loyal readers who would comment on every post and had 7,000+ RSS subscribers.
Once the content value disappeared, so did the audience.
Filler is Dead. Long Live Explosive Content
By explosive, I mean that what you’re producing needs to have an impact. It needs to spread. It needs to have some real, shareable power to it. You know when you put a full stop suddenly in a sentence and it just ends so abruptly? That. Kind. Of. Power.
Content does not always mean words, of course. My friend who owns Freshome gets hundreds of thousands of unique visitors per month and makes thousands of dollars from the mostly image based content he and his team are producing. It has an impact on his readers, they want to share it with their friends and it’s exactly the kind of content that people come to his site for. It’s explosive.
I can’t emphasise enough how your content is everything to your blogging success, especially in a time where people are more critical than ever of where and how they spend their time online.
One of my best litmus tests for knowing whether an article is going to be well received is if you’re really excited to hit publish. If you know that your ideal visitor is going to really get something from what you’re producing. While writing this article I would randomly run back to my computer during arbitrary tasks just to write down notes and ideas that came to me because I didn’t want to forget them.
That’s the kind of passion which leads to explosive content. Or maybe I’m wrong, and a 12,000 word article is pushing things a little bit ;].
But there’s more to it than that, isn’t there? I mean, I could go and steal that photo of Snooki from Yahoo news and there’s a good chance I’ll get a ton of shares on my post. It will be “explosive”. If I keep doing that though, it’s going to be really difficult to sell a premium WordPress plugin down the road.
The ads on the Daily Mail that I can see right now are for Snickers bars and face creams. The ads on the New York Times? Chevrolet and Gucci.
More than content just having a viral aspect to it, it has to be relevant to your niche, and lead to your preferred conversion. If you don’t know what you’re hoping visitors are going to do on your site and how you plan on monetising your traffic, then stop reading for a few minutes and start writing down some notes.
A great example of relevant, viral content that is likely to lead to product conversions comes via Benny over at Fluent in 3 months. He produced a very clever article on why he has no desire to ever live in America, which received over 1,700 comments, 11K likes, 157,000 views from StumbleUpon and resulted in a huge corner of the web finding out about his language learning products.
The important part wasn’t just his headline, but that he had real solid reasons to back up what he was saying. It created a ton of controversy, and definitely separates him from other blogs in his industry who are too scared or too unimaginative to stray from the norm.
Tim Ferris is a great example of someone who regularly produces explosive content, too. You may think that he got some great head start because of the success of his Four Hour Workweek book, but he’s said on numerous occasions that his blog “did more for his book than the book ever did for the blog.”
Content Strategy
It’s not just about the content you’re writing either. How often you’re publishing matters too. If Gawker Media’s pageview hunting tactics continue to work, you can be sure that they’re going to keep producing content in such huge volume.
This is one section where I can’t really give you a specific answer, since it depends so much on the kind of content you’re creating and how difficult it is to consume. Going back to my Freshome example, since the ‘meat’ of their content is graphic focused, you can go through ten posts in a minute or two just by scrolling your mouse wheel. It would take a lot more time and attention to get through ten ViperChill articles.
Even in the same industries producing the same kind of media, there are totally different posting schedules you can employ. Take for example the strategy for one of my competitors, Problogger. Note that when I say competitor I simply mean they are competing for the same eyeballs in this space and I think their audiences would enjoy my content. I don’t have Darren’s face printed out on my dartboard — that spot is reserved for an ex-girlfriend (I kid!).
When I go all out on a post on guest blogging I don’t really expect to write about it again. I’ve covered all I need to say. My ‘competitors’ like to look at things from another angle. I’ll admit there is more I probably could have said about guest posting, so how many posts would it take to cover all angles? Two or three? Maybe five if you’re pushing it.
There are fifty-two posts on Problogger about guest blogging. 52! Though it’s over a longer timeframe, that’s a lot of writing on one topic. If I wrote 52 articles on guest posting, every other article in the last two years would have been on the subject. The sad fact (for me) is that my blog would probably have grown faster if I was closer to their side of the scale rather than my own.
Reason being is that every thing you produce has the potential to bring in more visitors from search, social media and your current audience. I would love to tell you that things are going to change, and writing content as infrequently as I do is the next big thing, but I really don’t see that happening anytime soon.
I do however see people making even more clear cut decisions about who they’ll allow to interrupt them with new information. Think about that.
The Growth We’re Looking For
The final piece of the blogging puzzle, as many of you will know, is consistency. Everything else is irrelevant if you aren’t sticking to the plan. Consistent posting (or lack of it) has been a big hurdle to the growth of my site. I have no complaints about the audience we have here (and you’re all ridiculously good-looking) but there’s no doubt I would be talking to a lot more people if my posts had been closer together.
I’m sure you’ve heard about the success of Angry Birds which has pulled in over $100m for its creators, Rovio. What you might not know is that it was their 50th game. How’s that for consistent dedication?
A man named Satoshi Tajiri was obsessed with playing and developing video games from a young age, always trying to reverse-engineer other peoples work so he could see how they did what they did, and how he could make better games. Though he had success with a number of the projects he worked on, there was just one game, one idea, that he really wanted to make.
He was so obsessed with it that it took him six years to put together, forcing him into near bankruptcy while living with his father, a Nissan car salesman. Eventually, he released his dream project via Nintendo, and I think it’s fair to say that it did pretty well. You’ve heard of Pokemon, right?
A lot of you reading this right now came from Twitter. It took them years to convince you to create an account. The founder of OMGpop had just laid off a large portion of his staff and had $1,800 left in the bank when they released Draw Something two months ago. It became the fastest selling download in the history of Apple’s App store before they sold to Zynga for $180m. Oh, and he hired those staff back and gave them stock options just hours before the deal closed.
ViperChill was a huge failure in the blogging sense when I started it back at 16. I had no comments, about 30 subscribers and nobody gave a damn about what I was publishing. My passion for the industry fueled my consistency, and finally, 6 years later after relaunching the site, it’s doing slightly better than that.
It’s not just about doing what you’re doing already and staying consistent with that though. I had to make changes to my approach, and so do you. With enough testing, you’ll find out what really works for you, and then stick with that.
Leo Babauta did this brilliantly when he first started his website, ZenHabits. Digg was the biggest social news site on the web and everyone wanted to be on their homepage. He hit it once, and then again, and again with list post after list post. His strategy worked, and he took it for all he could, quickly growing to over 28,000 subscribers in just 6 months of launching his blog. He might not have social share buttons on his blog anymore, but you can be sure there was a big Digg button on those past articles.
Collis Ta’eed of PSD Tuts did the exact same thing. He dominated Digg, got picked up by everyone else and didn’t just continue the strategy on one site, but expanded it across a huge network. He’s now sitting on some enviable monthly revenue figures.
Danny Sullivan is pretty much the ‘father’ of search news, first building and selling the popular Search Engine Watch, and now running the hugely successful Search Engine Land and SMX conference series. He is so good at turning his passion into a business that last year his company made the Inc 5,000 list, reporting over $3m in revenue.
He brought brilliant people on his team like Barry Schwartz and Matt McGee who love the industry so much that they would keep writing about it for free. This is his thing, and he has stuck to it for a really long time. He’s so involved in his industry that he was invited to Google’s headquarters so that they could show him that Bing were “stealing” Google search results, meaning he got to break the biggest search story of 2011 which the whole web was seemingly talking about.
One of the bullet points in the introduction promised to reveal more about how Steve Kamb had turned Nerd Fitness into such a huge success. Well, it fits into this section and finishes this post perfectly.
“When I started my site, I spent the first nine months writing five short, generic articles a week because I thought that was what was required to build an audience. I spent all of that time writing the wrong stuff, but I needed that time to learn exactly what DIDN’T work. Eventually I realized that I needed to make a change, so I switched to far longer, in-depth, more-researched articles full of nerdy personality that attracted the right kind of passionate reader. It was the constant analysis and desire to improve that lead me to try different styles and types of articles until I found a method that worked for me AND resonated with my target audience.
Since then, it’s been two articles a week, every week, for the past 2.5 years..two articles every week, even while traveling the world or going off the grid, that tackle a new subject, explore a nerdy analogy, or solve a problem in a unique, enjoyable way. Persistence kept me going during the slow months…but intelligent persistence taught me that changes needed to be made in order to be successful in growing the blog, community, and business.”
Finally, I just wanted to say thanks to everyone who patiently waited for this post after I had talked about it a few weeks ago. Hopefully you can see why it took me so long, and hopefully it was worth the wait.
P.S. If there are any publishers reading this, there’s another 20,000 words that I can say on this topic (I haven’t even started on mobile). I can see the “How a P.S. In a Blog Post Landed Me a Book Deal” headlines already ;). Just a crazy idea to make life interesting…
Update: I’m blown away by how much feedback and attention this post is getting. I just wanted to thank everyone who has taken the time to leave a comment. Though I can’t get back to every single one, I do read them all (since I have to approve them) and it’s much appreciated!
Oh, and Seth Godin emailed me to say he still reads Boing Boing.
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Woah!! That must be your longest post ever Glen! Thanks a lot, I’ve added it to InstaPaper right away so I’ll have a read tonight 🙂 I bet it’s going to be worthwhile!
Hah, yes. It’s almost double the longest post I’ve shared here 🙂
I hope so…enjoy!
Damn you Glen.
My scrolling finger is now sore with arthritis. Expect a call from my totally competent lawyer.
I’m going to read this again before commenting properly.
Congrats bro. Amazing.
Tyrant.
You can help me make the next one really short.
TMI? 😉
Post with over 12000 words. But I have read whole text. Thank you.
11998 words 😀
This is insane Glen.. This post is the same size of my Danish blog, in words..
I just ordered a huge Coffee.. Let’s get to it!
One of the longest post on Viperchill.
Never seen a post inspire so many comments from people saying they are going to read it! A lot of food for thought. Thank you.
okay what’s instapaper?
Glen – lovely post. Reading your new blog posts remind me of when I get a new book – I don’t just open it right away, but I wait until I have a cup of coffee and a lot of uninterrupted time so I can really delve into it.
But yes also very inspiring and most importantly… confirming to me that I’m in the right direction. I prefer posting longer, more detailed but less frequent content, and those are the kinds of blogs that I really follow with a lot of attention. It’s interesting just because so many people say not to do it, post every day, etc… but it’s just not in me to do that.
Same! This post deserves that. This is one of the best and most informative posts I have ever read, Glen. I completely agree with your predictions and statements about the inevitable future of blogging.
Just skimmed it through and it looks interesting. I’ll sit down later tonight and read it. I can already sense though that this will result in a tone of links and discussions.
I can live without the links, but looking forward to the discussion 🙂
Appreciate the comment!
Whoa! This is huge man. I’ve never read such a long post ever in my entire blogging carrier. Before reading your post I’d an idea that my friend Onibalusi has the ability to write such long content but reading you I got to know another talented person who has the ability to provide such a great content for us.
It took me hours to read the complete article. And few couple of minutes to make me understand if I’m reading is what actually I’m learning it.
I’m going to follow this blog now to get such an awesome content in future too.
This could be your longest post to date! Getting my coffee and snacks ready for this one.
Hah. Apologise to your boss for me Cryssie
Glen, at last! I was waiting this post for a long time as you mentioned about it on facebook and twitter. And finally I can see it. I ran through and it looks really interesting. I have to go to my lectures now, but it seems that i won’t be listening to my teacher, but will be reading this article 🙂
Thanks bro!
Though I might be a college-droupout, education first 😉
The post will still be here…
I see this is going incredible…
This comment was posted about 20 minutes ago, but I’ve already received 10 visitors coming to my site only from this comment alone. This is a visitor every 2 minutes.
it seems that this post is receiving really lots of traffic.
Guys, keep coming here! 😀
Hah. Yeah, comments here tend to get a lot of clicks. I can see it all happening live in analytics 🙂
Funnily, the majority of the audience here are still asleep.
Amazing post Glen and something I will have to come back to several times to fully take on board your thoughts and tips. Keep up the great work.
Thanks Andy!
Awesome to see you over here 🙂
1) Put this up as an essay on the kindle and see what happens. Could be a fun experiment.
2) Someone should give you a book deal. I’m a trend spotter – the type of person that is immersed in this industry for fun, even though I’m making bugger all money. Any book you make would be highly useful and would sell a lot of the niche audience. Not NYT bestseller, but pretty strong in the tech/social media demographic. You wouldn’t have wanky b2b theories – you’d have really relevant, strong and applicable stuff.
🙂 This post makes me sad about what I missed out on by leaving the industry for a year. But it also makes me excited about the potential of content marketing
Hey Jade,
Good to see you here. That’s a pretty good idea, I’ll look into it.
If I write a book, like anything else, it would probably take up my life. Based on that, I would want to shoot for NYT status, even if it’s unlikely 😉
Are you coming back?
Totally am 🙂 I just feel.. like a freakin’ newbie again. In one way, it’s awesome. In another way, the blind optimism is gone and is replaced by the need to make ends meet instead of creating something awesome. It’s a challenging balance – but damn, I missed it.
If you ever do write that book.. lemme know how I can help 🙂 And outsourcing something to put on the kindle isn’t time consuming or expensive, but it allows you to see how information spreads differently on Amazon.
Haha, thanks man! Finally! 🙂 It was a bit overdue! 🙂 I’ll save it and will read it as soon as have time. Hope it will help with my decision. 🙂
I’m glad you commented so you can save me that email 😉
I hope so. Thanks!
Just read the entire thing, I love the analysis and noticed the same things. I just wished you developed a bit more overall, its a bit short ;).
Hah, thanks Gael!
Then find me a publisher 😉
Thanks Glen for being so passionate about blogging. As you say: persistence is the key.
1. Every blogger needs to ask himself: how is he going to measure success? If you rely on ad revenue, then you have to maximize eye balls – page views. If you rely on product revenue, then you have to maximize page views * conversions.
You can’t adopt a Mashable type strategy of writing dozens of new posts everyday if your goal is to maximize product revenue. Your users will face crazy information overload. Your conversion rates will drop.
2. In the long run, products always earn more revenue than ads. Copyblogger is a great example of focusing heavily on products.
3. You’ve got to do what Edison did. Edison had 2 goals. Have a minor invention every 10 days. Have a major invention every 6 months. Thats how he filed 1093 patents! Thats what you have to do. 2 awesome posts per week. But once every month or every quarter – come up with a epic post. Something like what you have published today :p
4. And to scale things, adopt what SEOMoz is doing. Build a place like YouMoz where your readers can share their knowledge. And pick up the best of that information and publish it on the main blog. That way, you have the best of both the worlds. Your website becomes huge with content. But you don’t overwhelm your readers and drop your conversion rates.
Hey Glen-
It’s crazy how the pull of blog stats makes a blogger want to stray from the passion articles.
When I started writing The Minimalist Path, no defunct, I was following in Leo Babauta’s footsteps in trying to get as many eyes on the page as possible. It wasn’t until I switched to in-depth, quality, and fewer articles that I truly saw the readers start connecting (and spending!!!) more.
Yet, time and time again, I find myself straying from the quality post to writing 5 short posts for stats.
Thanks for this in depth post. It just reiterates that one can get a ton of shares and tweets of an article, but to really be successful in the minor leagues of blogging, you need to connect with passionate readers for the long-haul success.
Thanks Glen!
David Damron
Become a Beast
Hit it on the nose with a hammer 🙂
Thanks for the comment David!
Glen,
This is a loooooooooong post. I had to skip through it to get some stuffs and i will be back later to read it. I love the way you represent those guys with pic and also how buoyant you are talking direct about former A-list bloggers.
Sheyi
I will print this mini e-book out today called your post, 🙂 and read it. It basically is like a free book you have written. Thank you for the tips. I will try to reduce the number of ping services I use. I remember reading about how great it is to use more ping services as this will expand your writing to more of the world. However, maybe less is more in this case.
Also I do agree with your statement that content does not always mean words. There are many cases of people who are creative with images or other things and they get the visits to their site because of their originality. Matt Inman comes to mind (a lot of Matts on the web do well, Matt Cutts, Matt Mullenweg).
The thing about projecting into the future, is there are some many variables.
I wish I could have a clearer vision where the web and blogging is going in the future. I think it is only ignorance like Plato said, is the only real wrong in life (OK basically he said that, not exactly). But if you could have a glimpse of the web in the future, and it is accurate you would be a millionaire in six months and could do great things for the world.
I do not know if anyone could ever predict it, I mean I still think of the web in the 1990s and my friend in 2001 telling me the web is over and starting a website is a waste of time as it will only be a few large companies by 2005, yeah right.
Hey Mark,
It’s definitely not easy, and I’m sure something else will come along and we’ll say “why didn’t I think of that”. It always seems like there’s no huge angle or niche missing, and then something like Pinterest comes along.
Appreciate your thoughts!
I’ve seen so many bloggers fade away either because they’ve made money, or because they’ve not made money. The made money ones tend to stop writing to focus on “more important” stuff and delegate the actual writing to either guest posts or paid writers. I usually drop the site about then because it generally become generic and boring – and that’s not just in the make money online niche.
The trick with pinging that Matt Cutts is recommending is that something to do with “fat pinging” where you ping the entire content of a post not just the headline?
Lol, Lis! If he ‘fat pings’ this blog post he might kill the ping service he uses because of ‘overfeeding’ it 😉
“I do however see people making even more clear cut decisions about who they’ll allow to interrupt them with new information”
I think it is the most important part of the whole post. Although on the other hand, as a blogger, one has to write. I do not blame Darren that he wrote 52 posts on guest blogging – each provides a different angle (well, almost).
I understand that your posting is rather unconventional: writing up huge, definitive guides, and that made you famous. That’s great. But I think it cannot be done in every niche. Not to mention that posting frequently is necessary when one is starting out. This is just my 2c. Thanks for the post!
Darren didn’t write most of those posts 😉 A lot of them were written by guest posters – telling people how to write a guest post. I know, because I’m one of them. It all gets rather meta
Shoo! I read that whole article in detail. Great headline – that really got me as I’m planning on turning my whole business around this year and going in a completely new (and scary) direction.
I’ve just given away a load of clients and am working on a video course which is going to be structured around an email list only. I would love to know more about the pinging services you mentioned, I see wordpress defaults to pingomatic, and they give a list of others you can add, but I know absolutely nothing about this, so don’t want to risk putting info in that shouldn’t be there.
Glad you mentioned that design is an important feature. As a web designer myself, if a blog is ugly, I don’t even bother, don’t really care what the content has to offer if I can’t stand to look at it. Same applies to every aspect of my life (I’m kind of a snob like that). I even signed up with a more expensive car insurance company because the email I received with my quotation was damn pretty compared to the rest of the scanned in PDF crap I’d received from numerous others.
And you’re completely right about people not wanting to be interrupted with new information, and that consistency is key. I’ve done a lot of unsubscribing lately, as the reason I signed up with those particular blogs, has gone way off the radar and the stuff coming through is of absolutely no relevance to me. I admit I even once hit the ‘report spam’ button in gmail to a blog I actually subscribed too… that’s how crap his info was.
Right, I need to get some fresh air now, my eyes are burning!
Thanks for the valuable info Glen!
Hey Shannon.
Let me just congratulate you on giving away some of your clients. This is one of the most important but overlooked steps in business.
We all know the saying that 1% of your clients take up 99% of your time and only earn you 5% of your income. Getting rid of the bad ones is important.
But that car insurance thing… that’s crazy! Ha ha.
Tyrant
Hey Glen, great article. Thanks for totally messing up my day’s schedule.
Am I the only one to be slightly saddened by the movement towards more numerous and thinner posting? I know I should back that up by saying the ones with the most passion and best content will usually win, but still, shunting out post after post has diluted the quality.
And, Glen, what couple of pinging services did Matt Cutts recommend you put in Update Services?
Thanks again 🙂
Thanks Rob. Sorry about that 😉
I had actually wrote more about that in the post, but I cut out a lot of content before publishing that I thought were ‘rambling’. I don’t really like it either. But that can only be good for high-quality, niche sites. I think there are a few less seats at the top now 🙂
He didn’t recommend any, but I’ve just pasted his Tweet in a comment. I would just make sure you have Technorati & Google blogsearch
Thanks for the reply. You’re right about less seats at the top. More bloggers, more sites, more pages. Still, more readers as well, hopefully! I guess if our readerships are increasing, however slowly, we should be glad. 🙂
I’m going to limit my pinging services to these three:
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
And see how it goes. Cheers.
Glad I was rewarded for scrolling through the comments (after reading every word of that epic post).. that ping service list was exactly the information I was looking for. Thanks.
Thanks for the list Rob! I also read through the whole post looking for the ‘right’ ping list. I’ll be interested to see if it makes a difference, but if it works for Glen then I’m sure it will work for others.
Hey Rob,
As I read your comment, I was hoping someone would actually post a list of suggested services, and lone and behold, you did it! Thanks mate!
Up until now I have only used the pingomatic service, which I think comes with WordPress by default, but I have always wondered what other services I should add. I appreciate you shedding some light on this…
B
The promise of the Matt Cutts tip made me read the whole article and the comments. Reduce the ping list, eh? Technorati and Google associated pings safe. Check. Thanks and congrats on your epic comment rate.
Obviously the ‘pinning tip’ Matt Cutts gave you sparked my interest 😉 I am like you, I have set up my list of services to ping long time ago and never checked back on them again. Did Matt say anything about which kind of services to ping / not to ping? I also have problems to understand why that would effect your search rankings unless the pings alert scrappers that scrap your new content and outrank you???
Hey Syb,
Here is Matt’s tweet.
Google Blogsearch & Technorati are really just the main ones to ‘worry’ about 🙂
You’re kidding me. Matt Cutts says don’t ping Google Blogsearch?? Doesn’t he work for Google?
I meant, those are the ones I would make sure you include 🙂
Wow. What a great post. I don’t have time to go into all of it right now but I couldn’t wait for tonight before diving in to ferret out the Matt Cutts tip. Ha. I bet i was not alone in doing that.
Interesting that the one he mentioned is one I had connected to as a plug in for one of my blogs a while ago. Never really thought about it again after that. But the tweet doesn’t say that that ping service is good or bad.
Your take away from that then was to remove a bunch of pinging services other than Technorati and Google blog and your site popped back up again?
I will be returning to go through this whole post later tonight and I agree with you. It is an important post and it will need time to go through properly. Thank you for taking the time to go into such depth and detail.
Hah, that made me laugh!
Yep, a couple of days after I removed those services, I was back ranking against all the spammy sites again. I checked with Scroogle.org and many friends around the world to check the rankings too. Same before and after results 🙂
You’re very welcome! Thanks for the comment 🙂
The other thing the google folks (including Matt Cutts) recommend is to do “fat pings” to pubsubhubbub which is google’s service. There’s a pubsubhubbub plugin for wordpress which will do it for you.
Fat pings send the whole post and so establish your authorship with google before a scraper can get it.
Ian
Brilliant post Glen. You wrote this post just as I was about to launch my own blog which is due tomorrow. I honestly don’t know what to expect from it but I know it will be an interesting ride for sure. I think the most crucial thing to keep in mind which is something I learned is to have patience and faith that it will all work out. Many beginning bloggers fail for that very reason. And so I have developed enough gusto to keep it going despite the doubts and limiting beliefs that will no doubt come along the way. Wish me luck 🙂
Hey Onder,
Hopefully it will start you off on the right track.
Good luck!
Glen, you wrote above “I checked with Scroogle.org ” how could you have done that as Scroogle is dead since months????
Look at the date on Matt’s tweet 🙂
Rofl, took you a while to write this monster post 😉
Hi Glen,
The thing you describe in this long, high-quality-as-ever-post happens in all type of media. We can speak about television, printed magazines, radio, blogging – whatever you want: Content always matters.
It happens since Gutenberg has printed his first book. Only media with unique high-quality-content survived the competition for a longer time. All other ones died quickly after the first few years. The type of media didn´t matter.
As long as you´ll try to deliver us your outraging posts, deep insights and personal opinions ViperChill will be successfull. Keep on going.
Cheers
Markus
Omg its a huge report,i forgot lots of things when moving forward. i will read it again, i just finished half. Longest post ever seen. 🙂
I’m totally with you there, that was a lot to take in. It’s rare a post is so long it has its own table of contents.
Great post though, this one is going to take a while to digest fully.
Amazing post Glen. We have to wait long time for your one blog but waiting isworty for us.
Thanks a lot for this superb and long Article :).
Thanks
Very nice, thanks Glen. Got me thinking to start the day.
Re “sticking with it”, I suspect there’s a certain element of developing a positive addiction to what you’re doing. Like, you can’t help but research and post and connect with people on topic X.
Totally unrelated, but I think you would like the new documentary, “Marley”, if you can find it where you are. Puts in perspective how Bob Marley focused and obsessed on exploding his message into the world. Check it out.
Pierre
I was reassured by reading this that I’m on the right track. Thank you!
…or we’re both on the wrong track 😉
No problem. Thanks for the comment, Tara!
Wow. I spent 2 full hours to read through this article, back and forth and again to make sure I understand every point you want to make. And I can say this 2 hours definitely worth it, than the numerous posts about ‘blogging advices’ or ‘blogging tips’ elsewhere.
I have been following Viperchill for more than a year, and even though I know you won’t blog every day or every week, I still came back once in a while to look out for new articles. I somehow just cannot forget about Viperchill, even though it does not appear regularly on my FB or Twitter feed. Thank you Glen for putting so much effort to get us coming back, again and again.
Of course now, like what you always like to tell us, is to act on what you have shared. ACTION is what differentiates the readers here. Bye for now. Thank you so much again!!
dn
Excellent post.
One thing I have noticed about certain sites is that, even though they have tons of content, the site looks great and the headlines are eye catching is that the material is simply filler. It’s downright unreadable. You can forget it 6 seconds after you read it. And they always seem to have new posts daily but you never care to read them when you run across them in your RSS.
Hi Glen, you stated:
Though I wasn’t pinging the services Matt asked me about, I was pinging a few with a foreign domain extension that he had mentioned and a lot of others, so I decided to remove all but a couple of them from my list. A few days later and my rankings were back where they should be.
—
Can I ask which services you’ve got in that box.
Simon
Hey Simon,
I was wrong, it was actually just a ‘weird’ URL. I’ve included a link in bold a few comments up from this.
I don’t have anything there right now (I thought I had left in Technorati & Google Blogsearch) which are the only main ones I assume matter – if at all.
Hi Glen, usually the on WP has there as default is:
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
I read all the comments above but couldn’t see the link you mentioned.
Can I confirm you’ve removed all the other services and just added two in there?
Would it be a pain for you to just paste the exact links in here..
Thanks so much.
Checking out optinskin right now.. looks good.
Glen, that’s really weird because pubsubhubbub is a Google service! See http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/wiki/RssFeeds
I read the tweet as Matt saying that you should be pinging it, not that you should avoid it.
Excellent post covering a huge amount – lots to dip back into 🙂
Thanks
Sick post dude, really awesome. I hope it gets you a loooooot of traffic!!
Interesting insights.
I think you’ve articulated what a lot of people have been feeling. Personally, I’ve seen a tremendous shift over the past few months that I believe is starting to come to a head. Likewise, I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to look between the lines at what’s been going on.
Here’s what I’ve noticed:
1. Google’s pissed a lot of people off, and those who live and die by the internet have started to get fed up. While the SEO gang have always been somewhat adversarial, in the past when you got slapped by the big G, you figured out a way to get back in. The cat and mouse game has become more like Russian roulette, and its hard to pull the trigger.
Robert Greene (The 48 Laws of Power Guy) wrote an interesting novella/article back in 2010 comparing Google to Napoleon. Then, he compared them to a young French Revolution Napoleon—agile and strategic. We’ll see if they go the way of Waterloo.
2. Consistency is the way to crush it online. Consistency can mean whatever you want it to mean, so long as it stays the same.
I’ve been doing a lot of tracking in the YouTube space, and I’ve found for most successful YouTubers, it’s the daily vlogging that brings them the most traffic. Even Jenna Marbles, while not vlogging daily like a Shay Carl, Charles Trippy, or Ray William Johnson she puts out a new video every Wednesday.
While you’d certainly get more pageviews (and possibly more traffic) if you were to do shorter posts more frequently, the USP of this blog is that posts are less frequent, but when they do come, you’d clear your schedule.
Same goes for design. I’m biased as a design nerd, so I do believe a strong design is an asset, but not at the expense of consistent. Steve Pavilina, has had basically the same design for as long as I can remember. I think it would be a mistake to do a major re-haul to that site.
Similar thing happened with dreammoods, a popular dream dictionary site. Not too long ago, they changed the logo and added a different navigation. People got pissed. They now have a link to the old layout.
3. Popular Does Not Equal Profit.
This is something I feel a lot of bloggers get wrong. I know your friend Pat Flynn’s motto is “be everywhere,” but I am willing to bet he could increase his revenue if he took to fewer platforms.
Sure, where there’s traffic there’s money, but it’s no secret that you can run banner ads on some very popular sites for a few hundred a month, whereas a solo ad in even an email list that gets 1/10th the viewership can cost 10 times as much.
Well, thanks Glen for getting me all riled up. Jerk…
Hey man.
I think the thing about good design only works if it fosters a community. If something else causes people to become part of a group then the design only matters a small amount and visa versa.
Great comment.
Tyrant
This was huge. And very informative. A Seth Godin feel with the “remarkable content” avenue for sure, but you positioned it differently and have a lot of examples to back up your stance.
Really appreciate this.
Thanks for the comment Anthony!
Interesting how everyone picked up on the ping point. Mention Google, and a name like Matt Cutts and anyone with a website is instantly turned on!
I think (!) the ping urls Glen is referring to are (though in 2009 Technorati claimed they removed their ping services…):
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/rpc2
Though you will notice in the comment, he didn’t press save and seems not to have any in there at the moment…
Hope this helps
Here is Matt’s tweet: https://twitter.com/#!/mattcutts/statuses/141740906750545921
I’m still none the wiser as to what’s meant to be in the box.
Any chance of simply just listing what you do now have so we can simply cut and paste to our blogs?
Simon, try these:
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
I I posted the links above, just copy and paste those. I would personally leave out pingomatic.
An excellent post with many things I’ve been saying for years:
– Don’t rely on Google for everything.
– Don’t chase pageviews
– Focus on subscribers.
The more I read the more I become totally confused. I run one of the top 5 blogs in my niche but struggle to make it number 1 and I seem to have hit a Plateau I cannot break through. I like short sharp value packed posts… I like long in-depth posts… I see value in both! I seem to struggle in making a decision in how to improve, which way to turn, I am spending more time reading about what to do than doing it. Agh!!!!
Hi Jamie.
I clicked your name to take a look at your blog and (hopefully) offer some tips but the link is broken!
Any ideas?
You touch on some very cool points there mate.. like you pretty much always do 🙂
I have to say that I am a bit worried about the “fluff” taking over the internet.
Don’t get me wrong, I like to spend a few minutes on lamebook.com and textsfromlastnight.com but I am trying to take your example and providing quality content and see where that takes me..
JohnChow and Shoe.. yeah.. read some of their stuff but don’t like their style as much and JC’s in particular. Shoe is pretty funny and alright with some of his stuff.. but doesn’t always resonate.
In the past few days / weeks Google is really playing with their rankings as my rankings are bouncing all over the place while before they were pretty steady, so it also shows that Google doesn’t always know what and how to rank certain “fluff” sites..
Anyway.. lots to reflect and think about on 🙂
Interesting post. Are you sure you included enough info, though? 😉
None of this is a surprise to anybody paying attention to the medium. Basically, blogging as a medium is going through the same adjustments that traditional media does. We’re dealing with short attention spans, information saturation, and even centralization (as you see sites being bought by big corporations).
I think the two big points out of this that others can take is:
(1) Remember that we’re dealing with PEOPLE. Do what you do online with that understanding rather just pursuing mass eyeballs and pixels on an analytics graph. You don’t need to connect with millions of people to be successful. If you have a good relationship with even a (relatively) small crowd, you’ll do fine.
(2) Think outside the box. As long as one remains solely focused on a blog, they’ll be cutting themselves off at the knees. Email, podcasting, videos – all of it – is very important stuff. We live in an attention economy, and you need to cast a wide net now-days and know HOW to capture and then KEEP attention.
And I’ll add one more before I go back to what I was doing. 🙂
Approach blogging as a business if you want it to take off. Identify the real PRODUCT of your blog (what is the point of it?), then break that down into the sub-products – the things that have to take place for that primary end product to come about. From there, divide out your activity among ALL those things. Examples: communication, promotion, production, quality control, etc. Think of these like organizational departments, and run your business in that way. Doesn’t really matter if you’re trying to make money or not, you need to run it that way.
… the days of just writing posts, hitting Publish, and expecting it to work – are over.
It took me almost 2 hours to read this article, this is what people call “Quality Content” ? I have to read one more time to write my opinions on this…will get back soon.
If it takes you two hours to read and you want to read it again, then that’s what you call quality content I guess 😉
I love the way you set this up Glenn. I only paid enough attention to click and see what it was, and your intro did a great job of MAKING me read all 12,000 words.
I agree with David Risley though too, it’s no longer just about the blog. It shouldn’t have been to begin with. If you want to make money with a blog you need a business. A business that needs to be paying attention to what the industry is doing.
I still think it’s crazy how “blogging” is such a thing when truly it’s just a website with the newest content at the top. My geeky html designing self 10 years ago would think all of this talk about blogging is nuts. 😉
So I can’t wait to see what the next 10 years will be. (Anyone read the Singularity by Ray Kurzweil?) 😉
what i got from this post is “what ever your niche write it in viral manner”
Good thing I used my notepad from the start to remember some stuff for later, some really insightful thoughts closely related to my niche so thanks Glen! That unordered list really spiked my interest since it had real examples to show observations from.
By the way, you should make this a yearly type of post, “a state of blogosphere” or something 🙂
I was actually expecting to read more on The Verge and their success , it’s a great example on how a brand new site can compete even today with likes of Engadget, Techcrunch and similar strong brands… Everyone working in this kind of niche, news focus, IMO should follow Polygon.com during the launch.
About page optimization for page views and lower bounce rates I had some great success with Gravity.com and I think this technology (not necessary same company) will be used a lot more on various sites, not just on big ones like Daily Mail. Mashable follow is a good (try) but doesn’t do it for me since I miss out a lot of stories that actually interest me…
One more thing, I know you like long posts but I’m sure all regular readers like to read your thoughts on things that interest us all so I wouldn’t mind shorter, frequent posts from time to time when you feel you have something interesting to share..!
Hey Matej,
Yes, I had actually meant to remove that bullet point. I’ll cover it more in a very near update, so thanks for the heads up on that.
Totally get your last point; something I’ve been thinking about also, but we’ll see. Thanks!
Thanks. I’m sending this to my Kindle to read at my leisure. I posted a link in the LINKEDIN BLOGGERS group that I co-moderate on Linkedin. WIll be back with comments.
Hey Dennis,
Really appreciate the share. Thank you!
ViperChill is doing it right, even if you don’t have the traffic or subscriber count of a more prolific blog. Sometimes I need a post to link for one subject or another. Most blogs just post too much, and think too little about how they’re improving on the last post about the same subject.
I end up wasting time trying to figure out which of ten similar posts to link with a site like Copyblogger. I usually skip it and link to something here, or another blog that focuses on value instead of quantity.
I think over the long view you’ll do better than all the blogs that post daily, because you focus on providing the most value in the fewest posts. I’ll always prefer VC’s one great post on keyword research over trying to pick between ten so-so posts on another blog.
This should be more appropriately titled:
“A Complete Education On Blogging and Most Things Interwebby”
I learned a ton. Thanks for your time and research for putting this together!
You’re welcome Todd,
Thanks for taking the time to comment!
Glen.
You are the future of blogging!
I have 2 pages of notes, will be reading this again tomorrow to make sure I didn’t miss anything. I love opt-in skin BTW!
Dude, inspiring work. I’m very aware of physical surroundings and spotting real world opportunities, never really in a digital scope, I think this post (and opening links to figure out what you were on about) has triggered my mind to pick up on the subtleties of the content I allow myself to consume. Good job P.S. All those typos prove you’re still human
Excellent advice! Thank you so much for writing this!
This is the first blog post of yours I’ve ever read… I’m now off to read more 🙂
This one was long!
Enjoyed it and learned a lot. Wish my exams weren’t going on. I want to implement lot of things that I learned right now but exams………..
Just give me your competitors’ IP addresses and i’ll block them for you until exams are over 😉
Good luck!
“How’s that for a “love test”. Would you still keep producing content if you had 15 million in the bank?”
If I had enough money to “retire,” I would spend more time 1) writing, 2) teaching, and 3) playing my fiddle. Money is nice, and makes life easier, but it’s not a substitute for living.
Now, back to reading the rest of this incredibly long article…
Hey Howard,
It’s awesome that you have your answer figured out. I would still be doing pretty much what I’m doing right now, just with a couple more properties so it’s easier to move around 😉
Enjoy…
Excellent article and thanks for sharing! I must admit I was intimidated by the length, but this inspired me to look at kindlefeeder.com to pick up your blog (for free) on my Kindle.
Now I can read your stuff offline and when commuting, as well as other blogs.
Just need to assimilate all the content and think how I can use it! I love the way you take a step back and really consider your industry – working smarter, not harder.
Wow! For a noobie blogger like me, this post is full of tons of information. I’ve already digested a lot of it, but have more to mull over. I definitely think you deserve a book deal, because I would be the first in line to read you expound on this even further. Thanks for taking the time to share, challenge and give all the bloggers a heads up.
Thanks Carrie! If you have any connections… 😉
You’re very welcome. Thanks for leaving a comment
I was actually looking forward to reading more about ‘The Verge’. I am sure you forgot about writing why it saw such a tremendous growth.
I think you forgot to mention about Shoemoney and John Chow…
Not only is their content declining at an insane rate, but it feels like they are just giant sellouts now. Every single e-mail from them is just trying to funnel a way into your wallet or to promote something or someone who most likely is trying to sell something.
In fact, for the pure controversy of the whole thing, let’s dissect his newsletter from today. My comments are in parentheses:
To: Tim Priest
Subject: I need your help please. (<- Blatent attempt to pick a high CTR subject line that is overly hyped)
"Hi Tim,
My friend Ed Lau (<–Who is that?) of EdEats.com (<–Bolded of course.) is one of 12 finalist (out of over 1,500) in a competition to find a new Richmond food blogger (<–why do I care about food blogging?). The winning blogger will get to eat out at a new Richmond restaurant everyday for 365 days and blog about it!
Ed needs you (<–typo) help to get to the final three. Please head over to the Toursim Richmond Facebook page and vote for Ed Eats. The candidate who receives the most votes will automatically earn a free pass to the final three.
Vote for Ed Eats (<–Call to action spam 1. Cloaked URL)
Vote for Ed Eats (<–Call to action spam 2. Same cloaked url.)
I know Ed will do great in the final interviews, but he can't do that if he can't get into the final three, so let's get him there!
Vote for Ed Eats (<–Call to action spam 3. Same cloaked URL)
You can vote once every 24 hours so please keep vote <(–another typo. Is John even writing this?) everyday and tells (<–typo) your friends to vote as well. Thanks for your help!
John"
To make it worse, I'm getting this kind of SPAM from John almost every single day. The only reason I stay subscribed is to keep my head in the game on how and what he is promoting, not because it actually gives me any type of value whatsoever.
Nice post overall Glen – I wish there was more detail about the Pinging service problem you learned about from Matt Cutts and why it's even an issue just so we could have a better understanding of it from an SEO perspective.
Dude,
I’m sure you found a way to use telepathy and take ideas out my head. I completely agree with most of what you said about the future of blogging. This is how I see it (sort of what you said):
If people are going to have there blog as a business, they must think of it in terms of a business. The actual blog is just the landing platform. The real business (the asset) is the email list, after all that’s where the money comes from.
Keep your juicy content for the email list. They are the ones who have kindly giving you their email. When you send them email – MAKE SURE it’s actionable information. Information that they know will work, and are helping them get to their goals.
If you give someone 9 actionable pieces of advice and each one helps them, then when you offer a product they know it will help them get even closer to their goals. Then you can give them another X amount of actionable advice.
The goal here is actually improving their life (why they are on your blog). You do this well. I always take away great information.
So what is the blog? The blog is the platform in which you try to get people into your asset (the list). Of course the content must be great and tempt the reader into the list, but you need to keep all the great stuff for the people who give you their email.
I personally think 1 week maximum is enough. I like to read a lot of blogs, but I won’t read any everyday. As more blogs pop up, it’s important to post less so everyone will get a share of the visitors. You could keep people away from other blogs, but you might also find they stay away from yours.
I use opt-in skin, which is very cool you came out with it by the way, because everyone is going to need to improve their conversion rate.
Another thing I agree with is the look of some blogs. Some people don’t even put in the effort, in design or writing. That’s gonna have to change.
So yeah, they’re my views. Lets hope for a change and people start to deliver content that will change peoples lives, rather that write fluff.
Cheers
I made it all the way through!
And thanks for the compliment. I do feel rather ridiculously good looking today (I kid).
I’ve picked up 3-4 things that I’m going to try out, and I’m sure more ideas will come as I mull it over.
Thanks for this post Glenn. I agree that this important juncture for bloggers who earn money from their efforts blogging, and if a culture of excellence can be maintained, so much the better for everyone.
As for sinking into mediocrity, I think that its a shame that the mass of society can be so banal!
Huge respect and thanks to you. You’re putting out a lot of good energy into the world so may it come back to you 100 times over.
Glen,
I’m one of those rare people who loves and anticipates the next epic length Viperchill post. Just got done reading it all and I’m SO glad there are people out there like you with the best of intentions for your community. And that’s what I truly believe you think of what you’ve created here…as a community and not an audience.
I got a ton out of this post but sadly I don’t think sharing it with most of my friends will entice them to read it. I can just hear them now. “It’s too long” and “Where are all the pictures to break up the walls of text?”
Thanks for continuing to create insightful and forward looking stuff for us. Good to know your 2012 schedule is somewhat clean so you can do it more!
I rarely read something that takes me 15 minutes to read but this post was great.
First time comment, long time reader.
I love your detailed long post’s Glen, makes a change from the shorter posts.
I have not fully read this yet but I will be doing so.
This post is going to be a huge hit, possibly getting over 1000 comments 🙂
I will be back later to write a more detailed comment Glen, that is if you don’t mind of coarse?
Bobby Thomas
Glen, awesome post! Your content is extremely thorough and always contains details I love to read about! Keep it up!
Daaaamn Glen, you’ve done it again. So many nuggets of gold in your post. I think it’s awesome that you have the balls to go out and call the chowmeister and shoemoney “ex-a-listers.” I discovered them two years ago when they were already on their decline and couldn’t figure out the hype around them.
Despite your untraditional post lengths and consistent blogging schedule, you’ve really developed your own loyal ViperChill tribe. I feel like we’re all dying to know what’s going on with you and what your next blog post will be like, and you never seem to disappoint.
Anyways, it’s my first time commenting here and just wanted to let you know you got a die-hard fan over here. Thanks Glen.
Wow. Worth every word!
Thank you for sharing your thoughts here; and please do not ever decide to post pictures of Snooki; I will have to unsubscribe… 🙂
You are one of the few remaining bloggers that I subscribe to – as you do provide relevant-to-me information; with no additional garbage baggage included.
I LOVE that you write great long posts – I am a reader, in search of information, and you break things down and offer insights that I find extremely useful.
Don’t change (too much, anyways!) your give-all attitude; I believe that those who do provide more than asked for will always have a more sustainable base of readers/customers than those of the flash in the pan variety. For example – I don’t read Daily Mail, and I certainly would not trust them enough to buy anything they were selling, or anything they even recommended – to me, they are a classic example of a waste-of-time garbage site. Life is way too short!!
My question: What specific ping services did you winnow your list down to – ie the ‘bad’ extensions?
Thanks again!!
Pam
Dude, seriousely you must be exhausted:D
But damn good article!
Speaking of optin skin, ive mailed your support desk, could you give me a reply its quite urgent.
Magnificent post!
Glenn I remember when you were 16 and had the dub sites lol. Wow man good stuff. I really needed this post for a new project I am starting. Thanks!
Epic post Glen… just started reading your content a couple weeks ago based on advice from this dude name Pat… I can see right away how your blog is different and value you provide to your readers. Very inpiring! Keep it up!
Holy.Kamoly. Like a ton of others, skimmed thru and about to read fully. Will say this – I have noticed a TON more websites with an email list optin as part of the header design in the last 6 months than ever before. It’s the new trend, and I can see why. Just funny how everyone starts jumping that bandwagon all at the same time. Oh wait .. I’m planning to as well .. 😉
On another note, I’m curious if anyone knows – has there been a change in the Alexa algorithm again? I’ve noticed an insane amount of traffic and #s jump for my site + a few others I follow and nothing seems out of the ordinary.
Anyhoo, as far as writing infreq as not being the next big thing, you’ve got to keep your soul intact and believe that whenever you write, people (like me!) drop everything and run to read because you always kick ass and deliver value.
Who cares how everyone else is doing it if it isn’s aligned with you and your style. Your life, YOUR way, my man! Right then. Thanks a bunch and high fives! xo, Tia
Fantastic post – they would have loved this post in my technical writing class (where they strip down a 10 page theory into 2 paragraphs)!
My blog doesn’t ping google, only the default pingomatic server, yet I still get a google alert within a couple hours of my post. Here is my question:
Is it more beneficial (from a traffic standpoint) to ping as many credible services as you can, or avoid unknown ping services?
I really appreciate that you wrote this post… I’ve been re-focusing ideas, how I read online, and why to write material. You resonated with those reasons and more. Thanks Glen. – David
Awesome article, Glen!
One of the most important “take aways” for me is the fact that genuine passion and interest can’t be faked. Lack thereof is probably the single and most common reason for failure online.
I think fewer people would have “shiny object syndrome” if they truly pursued what they love. (And people would likely be much happier!)
You’ve given me pause to think seriously about some of the projects I have online. I’m realizing it’s time to shed a few to make more room for what I truly care about. (Quality vs Quantity) (:
Like others above, I’ll be re-reading this one. It’s definitely a keeper, and resonates.
Thank you!
Just when I think I’m over pursuing some changes to my own blogging, you bring me right back down to earth.
Funny thing is, you don’t describe the future so much as just the reality of present blogging. I reckon that’s even better than pretending to be a sage.
Great work once again!
Wow. That is a pretty intense post.
I really resonated with why people were ditching blogs, because that is why I stopped following a lot of people over time, and today only actively follow 3 blogs. I want quality, something that helps me learn, or do something better.
It is also pretty interesting to consider what net profit is actually linked to. Mass page views is not the key that many feel like it is.
I am just getting the feel for the most important things on my own projects: people, and providing real value. I know that this will help me to ultimately do what I want (and help other people do what they want ironically…).
Thanks for the post, I was surprised that it took me 87 minutes to read and digest!
I really liked the way you boldly criticized the Old A – Listers.
Subscribe to John Chow’s Email Newsletter and see (or realize), how he is just selling out (or trying to sell) his (Affiliated) stuffs in each of his emails. Same goes in his Blog Posts.
Now, on the other side, Glen or Pat Flyn’s Newsletter follows a completely different strategy. They are Constantly (Glen is less frequent, though) creating and providing their best stuffs (Content) in their newsletter. Pat Flynn’s ‘Non Aggressive’ Newsletter is just the real deal.
Now, Let me speak about Problogger (No, Glen, that is not your competitor; you are far ahead 🙂
Problogger should change its name to GuestBlogger :p There are more (a lot more) Guest posts by other bloggers than there are posts by Darren. Moreover, lack of social presence ensures its dark future.
For the 52 posts thing that you (Glen) mentioned, I would like to add something in Darren’s Favour. I know you beleive in giving everything out in one go (like in your Guest Posting post) but the lengthy articles might not suit every reader (however, I just love those posts).
Most people are short of time, Some are afraid of Reading those Epics, while others are not able to engulf everything in one go. I know your 1 post per month type of schedule favours posting long articles, but it also sometimes take you away from our thoughts (for the time there is no post or email from your side). On the contrary, Problogger is always filled with new content (Though those are just guest posts, but still those sometimes impart value). Moreover, its in a way, good for hi Organic Traffic. Your 1 post on guest posting, definitely gets a lot of traffic from Google; but Darren’s 52 posts, definitely gets a way tfar more organic traffic. Because those posts have more chances of appearing in google for a lot more related keywords and LSIs than your one single post. Good for Darren, Not so good for his readers.
The leader here, again, would be Pat Flynn, not because of his more frequent posting and 3 posts/week schedule, but because of his ‘being everywhere’ model. Look him around on his social profiles. He is quite regular in posting updates there. He is also quite regular in mailing out useful stuff in his newsletter. That made him stay in my head most of the time.
However, you are still far, far ahead from those old school A – Listers that have lost their interest in their popular blogs.
I will always wish to see you here, posting such Mind Blowing and detailed posts.
Regards,
Garish Wasil
All I can say is WOW. I’m re-starting a blog that I loved to do but deleted out of frustration. Wish I had this info way back when.
I’ve been pouring over your blog entry, following the links for more details, and making notes on my discoveries for HOURS. Now for a short break to enjoy a slice of fantastic pizza and the real work starts – implementing everything you said!
Even your “honorable mentions” taught me something. I’ve been struggling with the decision to make the website mobile responsive or to use the “pretty” header I commissioned an artist to make for me that can only be fully appreciated on computer screens and ipads in the landscape position. The solution? Accept the importance of mobile browsing and get on with it!
I sincerely appreciate your willingness to give such powerful information (here and at Blogging Case Study) for free when you could very easily have sold it as an ebook. Kudos!
Amazing post. So much for what I thought I was going work on today on my blog! Worth the 45 minutes I ended up spending reading it. Figuring out how to get this blogging thing to work has been a challenge. Okay, it has become an obsession and thanks for feeding it.
That was one of the best posts you’ve ever written.
The thing about a post this long is that conversation in the comments feels a little like climbing a mountain. I mean I don’t even know where to start, I’m exhausted from just reading it (in a good way) let alone to try and evoke any kind of an intelligent response.
So I’m going to touch on one point:
I wanted to punch the air and scream ‘EXACTLY!’ when you spoke about the shoddy, pathetic 250 word mashable articles that I have loathed for a very long time.
Perhaps though as you are criticising Mashable for putting out lower standard journalism, it might make sense to remove them from your footer?.. Just a thought.
that was defiantly an eye opener. and a long article, but great information. I like how you used John chow and Jeremy as a example.. to have follow them for a long time… and john chow blog no longer has any value.. most of his post are about food and paid reviews. I miss reading those clickbank articles…
and I bet he stop showing off her monthly income cause his probably not making that much anymore.
Glen I Hate You !
I was starting to watch a movie, and minutes before I was taking a look to my Google Plus Stream.
And you know what?
I HAD to read all your post+ ALL the comments and tomorrow will implement the tip about the ping services(I had like one hundred listed).
And I HAD to write this comment with my iPhone(I don’t want to go to pc, I am sitted on my sofa)…
So you understand how I feel, the movie is already started since 47 minutes!!!!
This is the longest post I have ever read completely.
And I am happy to be between the ones I read it.
What I have learned?
Think outside the box.
Thanks for share this inspiring post, Glen!
P.S.: You own me a movie… 🙂
Post like this couldn’t have been written by anyone who doesn’t love what he is doing.
Follow your passion and your readers will follow you.
I think I should terminate all my online business attempts 🙂
Cheers.
Please don’t think this weird. But when I got to the part about the nipple slip and your comment about the future of mankind, my eyes misted and I was hooked emotionally. I have these same thoughts. I find some of these news and celebrity sites disturbing, not because of what they say but because this is what so many want to the exclusion of all other. The Yahoo news site increasingly shows 60% or more celebrity “news” at the top of the page. The real news is buried.
But, as you say, we don’t have to do what they do but we do need to learn some lessons and you have given me a lot to think about. Where are the Gucci ads here?
Richard
Not weird at all, Richard. I was actually sitting with a friend when I approved this and read it out to him. I actually never check Yahoo news so it’s equally interesting and sad to see that’s the case.
I appreciate the feedback 🙂
Hey Glen, excellent post. You’ve truly inspired me.
Your comments section is almost as long as your gargantuan post! It’s made me reconsider my own blogging habits and… really given me some good ammunition as to what strategies I’m going to employ in the future. 🙂 I might even start that one blog I’ve been thinking about…
Thanks again, sir. Your work is deeply appreciated.
Huge post ! And full of insights !
That was inspiring… Definitely. Thanks a lot for your work and all the research !
It seems the most attention is being paid to how looooong this post was.
Imagine reading a book?????
Ahhh, the attention span of internet ants!!
Interesting and informative post. Write the book….I’ll read it.
Hey Glen, what a comprehensive literary masterpiece!
I’ve still got fond memories of your epic post on productivity – and I then thought that was long. Little did I know… 😉
I have to say I enjoyed your carefully crafted Aha-moments just as much as your well-researched industry insights.
I found David Risley’s comment very helpful, too.
Without having read all the comments – has nobody pointed out the cool “moving mouse” photo yet?! Can’t blame them, I was truly absorbed in your story, too.
Thanks for not splitting this post into 5 more search traffic chasing sub posts and for replying to so many comments – come to think of it – at nearly 90 comments this is epic in itself!
Fingers crossed with your book deal 😉
Sandra
Long… but well worth the time it took to read. I even learned a few things I can use in my own blogs… always a good thing.
Thanks Glen!
whew…I finished the article! Now, where’s my prize, Glen? 🙂
Excellent advice and insight…I will keep in mind your advice and will try to implement them.
What was the problem with pinging exactly? Can you elaborate?
This took you how long? What a gift.
Thanks Glen (yet again!) – will have to catch up on your work with Andrea now.
Love the peanut people; or are they kidneys?
They are ‘beans’ 😉
Thanks for the comment!
You can source your very own human beans on Fiverr:
http://fiverr.com/mrevilhairday/do-a-very-special-bean-caricature-of-you
3D beans are fun and won’t leave you gassy:
http://fiverr.com/pendave/turn-your-special-2d-bean-caricature-from-mrevilhairday-gig-to-3d-style
Have fun, everyone!
Absolutely amazing article, once again – keep doing what you do dude, it changes lives
Glen, I just finished and am looking at the clock nervously.My schedule is derailed. ikes ; ) Your post is helpful and encouraging. Written with care, worthy of the time, and building trust and loyalty. I wish you the greatest success.
Awesome article. The only reason I keep reading your stuff, as I’m not a blogger but am involved in the tech world, is because I get the impression that you would write for fun even if it did not pay out. Passion is key to content, at least from the viewpoint of someone who loves to read relevant information that does not involve the failed lives of celebrities.
Great post, great content, and most of all a huge heap of fire that fuels your pen, or keyboard most likely. And the email list is gold, it’s the only way I would ever read these blogs. I never search for the content that you post, but I almost always read due to your emails. Keep it up!
Great post, I was thinking about why those sites you were pinging may have been outranking you. Obviously without seeing the SERPs I can’t be sure but here’s my guess:
These sites scraped and possibly somewhat edited your content automatically when you pinged them, auto-published an article and got it crawled by Google before you did. Google places priority on the first site it crawls and then subsequent sites it crawls for the same article, this is based on the principal that the first article they crawl is likely to be the original.
By stopping the pinging they would have crawled your site first, removing any duplicate content issues and thus restoring your ranking.
It could of course be something else, but its something I have personally seen happen to a number of sites.
Very interesting material. From my experience, you are right on the money in many ways. I’ve eliminated from my inbox 99% of what I allow in regularly. I care about one thing: valuable content, accurate, cleanly and economically expressed. No hot air, no sermonizing, no fluff. Content can be long–it can be a long essay–as long as it is solid. I also care for the references my valued emails send me–they are careful and thoughtful people.
I only have a few precious hours a day for the web, so I avoid all sites that promise info overload. I’ve just decided I don’t care for anything except for what I really care about. There’s just no time, and there’s too much else to life to squander it to the garrulous nonsense that fills the web.
I’m human–I do have time for a few less serious things. I can spare some time for a funny animation sequence (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxPuyrfHA3o) or read a couple of jokes friends send. But it is very limited. There’s family, work, errands, the great outdoors, and just plain loafing and dreaming and resting a little, or perhaps actually thinking over some serious stuff you’ve read, rather than letting the terrible accelerating machine our civilization has become literally grind you into a thousand fragments in its gearworks. This world forces you to be superficial, to glide over everything, to acquire ADD. It tries to turn you into a sort of half-mad voyeur, a hopeless dilettante, as if you have to see everything and try everything. Too many sites are just garbage, very low-brow distraction (like the nip slips you mention) or outright decadence, aimed at the LCD and at over-tired vacuous minds without real lives and community.
Genius, Glen! Your excellent analysis held my attention to the very end of this epic post. It’s encouraging for me that you think highly valuable and useful content is the key to long-term blogging success, as I make every post aim to solve a real reader problem. I’ve also been as I’ve been building my blog’s email list from day 1.
As valuable as the stuff on Problogger and others are (I’ve certainly learned a lot there), I’ve noticed that the posts start to get a bit repetitive after a while.
Great post! I saw it in my email and immediately read it start to finish. You make great points about content and passion. Sometimes it’s hard to see the ‘junk’ that goes viral but I try to mix fun viral type information with the important stuff. For example, one of my most popular posts was The Most Frugal Celebrities. That continues to get some good traffic and much of it sticks because it’s still related to finance. Thanks for all the good information!
WOOOOOOOOOW!!!!! If this doesn’t increase your PR then nothing will!!! AWESOME post and great reading, Hmmm, did you write all of it though?? Or outsource?! Either way You and your Viper Chill totally rock the planet 😀 Awesome work, keep it coming! 😉
I did write it all, but please, if you know anyone I could have outsourced it to, I would love to use them for a future post 😉
Two people come to mind,… J K Rowling OR Bill Gates Would have the zazz to write material like you do!!! Seriously Glen, you write KILER Content 😀
Hey you mite want to check out make money online key phrase!!! There’s a BLANK BLOG at number 2 slot!!! I’ve seen it all with Google now!!! What is going on with Google!…
A brilliant and insightful post full of blog related gems and words of wisdom. I loved that it was long and offered meaty content although I had to read it over several days. I’m addicted to Problogger but often come away from the guest posts feeling a little hungry, as if the main course might still be coming. Your post packed so much content that it had to be digested in small bites. With my own travel and lifestyle blog I veer between offering longer travel narratives and shorter list type posts and I’m finding that the longer in depth posts gain more traction – which I had previously thought went against all the rules of web style writing. I’m still learning but optimistically passionate. Thanks for your valuable research to produce ‘The future of blogging’.
Thanks for the extensive article, good work. I’m glad you discussed the importance of building a strong email list. It’s a great tool for a small fry marketer like me to compete against the big guys and a tactic I’ve used for years. The shotgun approach works for some but targeting the folks on my list brings me better results. Fish where the fish are.
Well done!
it’s the first time that I spend so much time to read an article online and after finishing it I can trully and honestly tell you Glen that you keep giving me inspiration by the side you critically see the things happen online accross the industry. Keep doing that mate..
This is most of the popular web:
“Much of our activity these days is nothing more than a cheap anesthetic to deaden the pain of an empty life.” – Unknown
Money doesn’t talk, it swears. –Bob Dylan
The future of civilization depends on our overcoming the meaninglessness and hopelessness that characterizes the thoughts of men today. –Albert Schweitzer
“This focus on money and power may do wonders in the marketplace, but it creates a tremendous crisis in our society. People who have spent all day learning how to sell themselves and to manipulate others are in no position to form lasting friendships or intimate relationships… Many Americans hunger for a different kind of society — one based on principles of caring, ethical and spiritual sensitivity, and communal solidarity. Their need for meaning is just as intense as their need for economic security.”– Michael Lerner
This IS a mini-book and a course well taken. When I first seen the size of it, I intended to bookmark it, but as I started reading, you really got me hooked. Of course I will bookmark it for later use because I cannot retain all the great information you have give me.
Right now, what I can immediately apply is more visuals. It is true that people don’t really read our entire blog post or article, but rather get more attracted to the visual side of things.
Oh boy Have I got a big to do list now!
I am grateful for your time and energy that you put into this post. It seems like tides are turning, but I like to be informed of what is yet to come.
I thank you,
Donna Merrill
Glen,
It’s been awhile since I’ve been here to read your posts but they are always so epic, I love it!
Regarding the pinging tip, I had no idea these could have an effect (positive or negative) on SERPs. I’ll try that list along with the pubsubhubbub plugin for WP. I’ve come across the latter before but never really gave it a go to see what would happen. Now it looks like the time.
Andre
Hey Andre,
According to Matt’s tweet, I’m pretty sure the subsubhubbub was the problem 🙂
Glad you liked the post!
Sorry I’m confused, are you meaning to say that pubsubhubbub was the problem as in don’t use it? Or as in the problem was that you *weren’t* using it, and when you added it you fixed the issue?
I was not pinging that service, but I was pinging one with a very similar name, which I removed from my ping list 🙂
Beautiful article. Couldn’t stop reading till the finish
These types of articles makes upcoming blogger like me to keep pushing ahead.
The following were highlights:
1. Passion always wins:
Your words “I strongly believe that no matter what it is you’re really passionate about and covering, there’s someone else out there who cares as much about it as you.” were inspiring.
2. Email list is way way better: since these are our true fans.
3.The real life examples of bloggers who succeeded wildly and how they did it, gives me confidence.
One Question
Is it possible to tell us what ping services you updated in Settings > Writing
As you said, I have to bookmark this post, it’s super long and I can’t read it finish in the first time. BTW, thanks for take your time to share this awesome post to us, Glen.
Hello Glen,
Well done for a well thought out post!
And I think I deserve some reward because from all comments I read I’m inclined to believe I am the only person that read this article on a first visit. Now how’s that for a loyal fan 🙂
Reading the article from beginning to the end took over two hours from my work tonight. I should have bookmarked it and came back to it but as busy as I am (preparing for a book launch and growing traffic and subscribers) I knew if I bookmarked it I might not be able to come back to it for sometime.
So I made the sacrifice (though the productive side of me can’t help cursing me for the set tasks I could have achieved with this time) to just read it at once.
It’s great information and analysis well put to remind bloggers who want to make or keep making a full time income blogging why they have to sit up and the need to focus on growing the biggest asset of their blog -their email list.
When I talk about you I often say how you stand out with your always detailed value packed long posts and how I don’t mind waiting months for a new post from you.
I have always believed that quality will always win over quantity. Though the more you write the more visitors that will find your site. But when you’re more concerned about offering value than just posting for the sake of it, your conversions will always be better which is why I always encourage my audience to only blog as often as they think they can deliver on.
But when doing this to make sure to be consistent with their posting schedule. If you want to post once a week, do your best to stick to it. If you want to post twice a month then stick with it and let your readers be aware of your posting schedule.
It’s been proving several times that traffic numbers can just be what it is, numbers. Like the difference a site selling for $25m and another for $200m. An average blog getting 1000/day traffic and making $500 and another getting half the visitors but making $1,500.
I’m online to help as many people as I can in any niche I find myself at any time, and then maximize income while doing that. So I’m more interested in quality than quantity. And I’ll rather get 500/day visitors and make $1500 than just be getting un-targeted traffic that doesn’t convert.
And as for ex A-list bloggers, I’ve never really been into the A list bloggers thing, even when they were so popular. And it’s not surprising to see them their success decline because your business success is often built around your customers (in this case your readers) and when you don’t treat your customers well you’ll lose them; especially when you have many competitors.
Shoemoney doesn’t really write about my any of interest so I can’t say anything about his content quality or readers satisfaction.
But I have never been a fan of John chow simply because the first contact I had with is work was just too ordinary. I downloaded his free ebook Make Money Online where he supposedly shared how he went from zero to $10,000 a month by blogging. And I expected to see some real practical lessons and tips but I was so disappointed with how generic the information contained in the book was that I never visited his site again.
I’ve never believed in self acclaimed A-list bloggers (or maybe fans named them so, but who cares). I am more interested in those I name A-list bloggers from how much value they offer.
And for me you and Pat of smartpassiveincome.com are the only A-list bloggers I have right now (I look forward to the day I’ll find another).
Pat’s honest desire to help is readers is just so inspiring and the fact that his nice 5 figure monthly income doesn’t stop him from replying to feedbacks from his readers just makes me admire him so much.
I’m a loyal fan of your blog which is why I’ll finally round up this comment by making a suggestion. I hope you don’t mistake it as one coming from a less passionate reader.
A wise man once said two much of everything is bad, which includes good things too.
I understand the need of wanting to offer more to completely help the readers because I do that too. But it’s necessary to know where to draw the line. Honestly this article was too long. Sitting down and reading every word I will be right to say some things could have been left out of it and it would still offer same value.
Even knowing how much value you always add from the beginning of your post to the end, at some point I was almost tempted to skip some part (and I hate to have to skip content that interests me!). That’s like pushing your readers to the limit.
It’s like what you said about change I think this is one area you might need to look into. If a post is realllllllly long break it into two or put it in a downloadable report.
While we want to always strive to give our readers as much information as we can, we also want to consider how readers feelings and their lack of time.
I always write long posts too even when I don’t intend to and I do this even with my newsletter. But recently while working on increasing conversion for my site it suddenly occurred to me that the length of my newsletter can be doing more harm than good.
No matter the value we offer it will make no difference if our readers just bookmark our content and forget to get to back to them. I’m still working hard on reducing the length of my newsletter. I find this hard because I always discuss real subject matter that can help the reader with every edition I publish. But at least I keep it at the back of my mind, that way some editions can come out a little shorter. Maybe you can do the same.
People who are really interested in your topic will always make the time to read your post.
Whether or not you reduce the length of your post I’ll keep reading it because of how well you cover each topic you address. But you don’t only add value with your content, you’re also adding value when you put readers feelings and situations into consideration when writing your content.
It’s official I spent over 3 hours on your site! Wow, please can someone keep reminding me never to check my emails before getting to the tasks for the day. Big, big, distraction!
But I did love the article and appreciate your efforts in putting it together. It took me about 2hrs 30mins to read it, so it probably took you weeks to put together.
Glen, this has been the best hour I have spent reading online ever (yes, I do read quite slowly)… and add on an extra hour for exploring all the great links and references you provided.
The Matt Cutts tip on Pinging sites, was a real eye opener, and in hindsight seems so obvious. Shot for that one mate!
Oh, and I love what Steve is doing with NerdFitness, which is another great find for me, and fits in well with a new Fitness and Health site I recently launched. I will definitely be paying attention to him…
Wow, I feel like I have just run a marathon… but it was all worth it. Thanks as always for your insights bud!
B
Hi Glen,
very interesting blog, a few things that opened my eyes, i don’t mind these long blogs, as long its containing useful information, i like your working full time on your blog as im preparing to ditch my job and work full time as a blogger and marketeer..
Anyway keep up yhe good work.
Cheers Terence
Thanks for the article.
It seems that you never post and then you post the blogging equivilent to War and Peace. And like that book your post has great insights.
It seems that quality content written with passion that gets readers( though may be scraped in the short term ) is in the long term, the future of blogging.
Hah…I guess I need the two-month break in between 😉
Thanks for the comment!
THANK YOUUU!!! 😛 lol had to take notes while I read this but I got through it all in one read 😛
Whoa mate!
This is the first 47000 word post I’ve read.
good job…………………shoot I should have been in bad like 3 hours ago 🙂
stiff content!
Akos
DAMN look at all these comments!
Engaging the reader much? HAHA
You never did share what the secret ping list that Matt C shared with you was…
Leif
I’ve posted it in a few of the comment replies. Scroll up..I made it bold 🙂
Hi Glen,
Wow. This post is awesome. I’m really glad you warned me about the length upfront. Hope you don’t mind if I ‘borrow’ that tactic for my longer posts–that comment alone intrigued me enough to make sure I read it when I had the time. I’m working on a how to on travel blogging article for my new website, paidwritehq.com. I’ll definitely have to include a link to this post as recommended reading. Eye-opening insights to where the future of blogging is headed. I’m glad I read it. Thanks!
Take care,
Rose Smith
How long was I on your site reading this article today?
The most important take away from this blog post is the delivery and the average reader doesn’t even realize it. The ‘filler’ that your rehash and repeat over and over again really grabs the readers attention. Yes, you give little tid bits of valuable research or insights on similar topics, but nothing that blows your socks off.
One could summarize this whole blog post in one sentence. Find your passion, BLOG about it, and capture email subscribers. Thats all. Oh yeah, and did you see all these super amazing products I created…..?
What people should really be doing is studying the approach and the delivery. Reading between the lines. This includes, how you market the article days before the post goes live, all the success stories that include your products.., which is normally lead by how you are not trying to sell anything, Overall it is a great strategy and you are killing it! Props.
Then here I am commenting.. The nobody. Well done. Please email me when your next post is ready or when that product is almost ready to be released.
You are not a nobody, Brad 🙂
Generally my motto is to write what I want to read, so in that sense I couldn’t have turned it into a one-liner, but I get what you’re saying.
Appreciate the feedback!
Hi Here is a great link from SEO Moz that outlines some of the backlinglinking NOT to do so ties in with what has been said in this great post.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/6-changes-every-seo-should-make-before-the-over-optimization-penalty-hits-whiteboard-friday
This is the most longest and amazing post I’ve ever read in my entire life! Glen, you just raised the bar, BIG TIME. Thank you, man!
Awesome post although it’s more like a collection of “things you probably didn’t pay attention to” rather than anything else.
“The money is in the list” is as old as the internet marketing. Writing “epic” content is nothing really new. Nip slips and 3 headed baby chickens always sold well and no, the humanity is not going to hell either. Wasn’t is Caesar who allegedly said “give them bread and circus”? Well, celebrity gossip is the 21st century version of circus but these things happened since the beginning of time.
Have passion and dedication for what you write? Again, pick any “learn how to blog” book and it’s there.
I’m not trying to take the wind out of this post’s sails (again, excellent observations and a few insightful tidbits) but … you know … I was still waiting until the end to read about the future of blogging 🙂 And yes, I did read it all, no skimming.
AWESOMEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!
Great post glen. the longest and the best of all. Idea was great, content was superb and what i liked is that: you shared everything in one post. you rock man.
I want your guide for my blog too. I’ll follow you. Do contact me. Please please please………
you have luck and audience. so no need to wish you luck. just go on. rock it.
I am currently studying for my English exam tommorow. Suddenly, I saw your email and opened this post. It took me 1 hour to read the whole post. The problem is not how many words you have put into this, but the value of your content. It shows people to focus on long-term strategies. I think it’s best advice to avoid further updates from Google or any other sources of traffic
Thank you so much Glen 🙂
You’re welcome Tho!
Thanks for the comment 🙂
Glenn,
I’m in the process of marketing a new e-Commerce blog and your site has been immensely helpful – thank you! I’ve been devouring your posts (including this one, wow) – and free guides – and they’ve been great. Seeing the “goodwill” you’ve banked (from me) by providing so much great information is an inspiration on how I can connect with my own future audience by providing great content.
If you’re willing to share, I’d love your opinion on monetizing a blog in the first year. Should I sell some content from the beginning (course, eBook, etc), or share EVERYTHING for free to build an audience as quickly as possible? I have a lot of experience / success in my niche and am confident I can offer a LOT of value, but I don’t want to tap my readers for money too soon…..
Again, thanks for providing a lot of value here on ViperChill and best of luck with OptinSkin!
— Follow-up —
Glen, NOT Glenn! Sorry about that! I’m still new around here…. 😉
Its interesting to note how top bloggers like timothysykes and copyblogger have changed their home page to focus on list building. Very very interesting!!!.
Thanks for this awesome, colossal post. I had to take a break in between to grab something to eat and recollect my thoughts before I sat down to read again. Wow!!
Somehow. Expected. More. Not in terms of words of course but content. Still decent read though but nothing that doesn’t come to your mind when thinking about it. But still nice how you compared all the important guys and their blogs.
However there is one thing I really don’t like (comments are about honesty, right?): You always write how you could have made more money out of your awesome long blog posts but you are not doing it because….well…you are not a jerk. Feels kinda like everybody here should be thankful that you are not a jerk like most others in the business who are trying to sell their ‘ideas’. Sad that we have to be thankful for that nowadays.
And seriously…the amazing head tip from Matt….about pinged services…actually he should kick your butt for Keywordstuffing 😉
Since I’m one of the few idiots who actually do have a degree in this online marketing / e-commerce field (yeah people, you can really study it – even though I wonder why I did it since everybody nowadays is in ‘internet marketing’) one thing that my professor told me when I wrote my thesis: Everybody can write a thousands words and hundreds of pages. If you’re going to do this, I’ll fail you. Get to the point, prove it and don’t wank around trying to sound smart and mysterious.
I know blogs don’t work like this. Just wish they would sometimes.
“I know blogs don’t work like this. Just wish they would sometimes.”
Ahh, but they do. That’s the great thing. There’s someone writing teeny tiny posts that sound like they would be more for you 🙂
Thanks for the comment
– G
Wow awesome post and tips you are right you could of packaged this up and sold it as a digital product. Great tips I liked the tip Matt Cutt’s gave you it was so simple but we often overlook the simplest of things.
Offer great content, it will go viral, more backlinks, which = more money for you the blogger.
Thanks for sharing.
Before I say anything about this gargantuan post, I found the comments really interesting on a post like this.
Basically, many of the people leaving comments (particularly the first few) haven’t even read what you’ve written.
Of course, they’re full of promises to read it in the future, but will they?
Perhaps there’s a lesson to be learned there on who is actually reading all your stuff. Note, it may not be the most active and quick to respond commenters.
Or, maybe there’s a lesson to show that on a post that people predict is going to be popular, they’re thinking of themselves and self-promotion more than the content itself, and so they comment without even reading.
Anyway, I just thought that was interesting.
On the post itself, Glen, the insights you bring to someone who’s a content marketer, but not at the forefront of web trends and how people are digesting content, is very beneficial.
I can see this post having an effect on my future publications. It has confirmed what I’ve already been thinking.
You see, back in 2008, I made a real push to publish content that would hit the front page of DIgg.
You know what happened? I never made it. I came close a couple of times, but never actually got on the front page.
I was so disappointed each time. All the hard work to create a really good article, only to see it miss its goal.
But guess what. Some of those posts today are my biggest traffic pullers in Google.
While I never attained my goal of 30,000 Digg visits in a day, instead I get a consistant annual flow of seven figure traffic from Google.
My writing style changed when I stopped going after Digg traffic, and just started publishing. But, I think my writing lost something. I haven’t been putting the effort in that reaps the rewards of what I’ve known in the past.
Thanks for encouraging me to get my act together. As I’ve said, it’s something I’ve been thinking about, and this is the straw to break the camels back.
Thank you.
DUDE you are going viral !!!!
Friggen MIDAS touch man 🙂 🙂
Leif
Glen,
Yeah, I just finished reading this post word for word – it’s interesting, you caught my attention from start to finish. I wanted to know what happened to those former A-list bloggers, I wanted to read your view about dailymail and also how other sites are making money plus apple’s control on ipod revenue.
This is so lovely and I’ve gained a lot from it. The first thing is to know the type of audience you are writing for, shun out the best articles for them which will make them keep coming in.
Careless about Google search and concentrate on building a healthy e-mail list plus you must be good at e-mail marketing too. As a blogger, one should be everywhere as well. Social media and all means to connect with readers.
Posting frequently is good especially if it is a niche where a lot is been said about every seconds online and offline. If a particular topic has better ways of attacking it, it’s better one write more than 1 blog post on it.
Overall, viperchill has been a base for me every since i started blogging. Yourself and Pat Flynn are real good guys who kept me going and i’m happy to be your ffwer.
What’s the update on your million dollar website? When will you start accepting guest posts?
Sheyi
Firstly: thanks for all the work you put in to this 🙂
Secondly: I for one really appreciate that you deliver *all* the goods on each topic in a single post, and don’t recycle big chunks so that I have to pick out the additional useful stuff. As you say, there just aren’t enough hours in the day – but it’s a big shame that so much of the media, online and offline, is heading for the lowest common “traffic grab” denominator in this respect.
Thirdly: any chance you could share which Ping services you stuck with? I added a huge list to my WordPress settings on the advice of another blog article I read somewhere, and I bet some of the ones which are hampering your rankings are gonna be in there!
Hi Glenn,
I will have to put more time on reading this, but thanks for that pinging tip. You’re quite humble enough not to headline the fact that Matt Cutts personally replied to you (like others do).
I noticed this is your 2nd post that features a cinemagraph. I would just like to ask you if you pay for that thing or what. I mean, what are the copyright provisions for those images? I researched how to make one and I want to make one in the future to post on my site.
hey. wow.
i know word clouds are a relic of the blogging past, but here’s your 12k word post Wordleised
http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/5198629/Future_of_Blogging
I wish I could view this.
Which ones are the most common?
WOW!
Amazing blog post. I will definitely bookmark this and come back to this over and over again.
Kind regards,
Victoralexon
Thanks Victor,
Glad you liked it!
Wow Glen. A must read.
Definitely true though. I cannot read any of those gazillion blogs with 5 to 25 posts/updates each day. I do read all of your posts simply because they are packed with value and actionable content.
I guess what we are seeing here is the equivalent of blog spam (similar to email spam). Sign up to any IM guru and they bombard you with multiple offers in a day or at least one a day… now curation, news updates, etc. have taken on that form. It is tough to keep up with the number of posts they make in a day (with very little value) and its beginning to look like blog spam (if its a new term, I’ll gladly take credit).
Thanks for your long posts… crammed with lots of valuable content.
Hello
It’s the first time i read a long post as this one.
My finger is hurting me for scrolling all this time 😉 but it doesn’t matter, the post worth reading, sharing, bookmarking and re-reading.
Thank you Glen for all these rich information and insights.
Thanks Ossama!
Sorry about the finger 😉
Hey Glen,
Fantastic post as ever mate.
My real passion in life is writing songs and producing music and this caught my eye…
“My passion for the industry
fueled my consistency,
and finally………………….”
looks like your soul likes “spitting bars” in blog posts too!
Awesome as always my good man.
P.S – OptinSkin is a dream to work with 🙂
Danny
This was a really helpful post, Glen. Glad that there are people like you who place a greater emphasis on quality over crowd-pleaser posts that don’t actually add up to much. Of course, writing deep, lengthy posts could easily become a differentiator for Viper Chill 😉
Hello Glen
This is a masterpiece!
A must read for every internet marketer out there. I don’t know how I wasn’t aware of this amazing blog till today.
Count me as a person who always wanted to read this kind information and you reached me now.
Great thought,i like you write style. how long did it take you to write this content , these could easily be converted to PDF and sell WSO for $10.lol .
You remind me of grizbear of howtomakemoneyonline.-
Thanks for all these information.
Wow, this was something else. I guess I need to be glad I read fast so it only took me 15 minutes to read the whole thing.
Very interesting stuff as it pertains to content and A-listers. I write a lot of content and I’ve done two tests on two different blogs regarding it. On both I wrote at least one post a day for two weeks, just to see what would happen. On one blog my traffic went up about 20%; on the other traffic went down 15%, definitely unexpected. Since the topics are definitely different I think a big part about content and how much is what the content is about and the audience that reads it. If, like this post, it’s more entertaining while still being instructional, people will read and your audience grows. If, like my one blog that didn’t do well, it’s about a topic that’s a bit more, well, “business” related, that audience might not want too much content coming their way because it’s harder to digest, kind of like taking a class in college.
I wanted to comment on the A-listers as well. I’ve found myself pulling away, mainly because most of what they’re putting out are guest posts from others, and that stuff ends up not being all that compelling all that often. Someone probably needs to screen that stuff better because it pulls the quality of the entire site down and messes with the reader’s experience. I’m not naming names though, but you’ve hit a couple of them here.
Great stuff, and I’m glad so many people enjoyed it as I did.
Damn, it took me almost 24h to read this post. I had to find time here and there to finish.
Now I think I need to digest it before making any comment.
So you do still read the site. *Phew* 🙂
Yeah, I still read you. I’ve decided that from now on I will only read blog posts that are 11,000+ words. LOL
I have to say I was a little bit disappointed though. You didn’t say anything about curated content, which is a growing and profitable trend.
Keep typing so I can give a better reply…please? 🙂
Great post as usual glen!
I have a question. I read all the time about creating a blog in something that you are passionate about,and then create really good quality posts. Creating posts will not be a problem if you are really passionate about your subject. But i have a problem,for the life of me i can not think of one thing that i am that passionate about! I mean don’t get me wrong, i like doing lots of stuff, for example playing the guitar,playing video games,i like some gadgets and i like to keep fit and i am into positive thinking. Now here is where my problem is: i am average at best at everything i do!! so i feel that i do not have any advice or be able to teach another person on the things that i like. I can not even think i could write one article on the subjects that interest me, especially not great interesting content that people would want to read. So where does that leave people who do a lot of things but are masters at None?
@stephen: “i am average at best at everything i do!!”
That is probably not an accurate assessment. To be an “expert” you have only to have more knowledge about a particular subject than 95% of the general population. If you were to find yourself in a room with 500 people chosen at random, it is highly likely that you are better at *something* than anybody else in the room (the same thing is probably true of everyone else there).
I know of one highly successful Internet marketer who claims that if you have any interest at all in a subject, you can “become an expert in 7 days” by the 95% criteria. If there is anything that you have studied or practiced for over a year, that would typically put you in a 1% or higher category.
But if you obsess over comparing yourself to others in the same field, it’s easy to become discouraged. For instance, I have been a professional violinist for many years. In fact, that was my first W2 job, while I was still in high school, playing with the El Paso Symphony. I was concertmaster of the Baylor Summer Symphony the year after I graduated from high school, placing me in the top dozen or so teenage violinists in Texas that year. Yet there are probably over a dozen middle-school violinists today in the small north Texas city will better skill and technique than I had back then. I even have a few of them as my students! How can I teach a young violinist who can play better than I can? It’s because I’m a better teacher than I am a violinist.
It’s similar to the situation of the typical professional football coach. Probably not a single coach in the NFL today could survive a single game as a player. But that’s not their job.
I could get discouraged and give up. Or I can continue teaching violin lessons because it’s the one thing I have done (for money) that I enjoy more than anything else that I have done (for money, at least so far).
Whoa dude, tons of useful information in here. I actually made a few changes immediately after reading. As a noob to the blogging world this was a great read for me.
Awesome to hear, Justin
Thanks for the comment!
Thanks for this post Glen. A LOT for us to think about.
I know what you did here 🙂 Good luck, I hope you can find a publisher.
I noticed a lot of people will read the post later. I took the time to read it this morning because I’ve been waiting for it since you mentioned the first time in Facebook.
Some of my notes
When I read the Steve Jobs biography I remember of reading the negotiation between Steve Jobs and the newspaper because Apple doesn’t share the personal information of the subscribers and the newspaper wanted that information specially the email address. It makes you think how important the emails are.
About blog design and website design. We are in a time that to get a good design is very affordable. If people are in business and want to make money, putting couple of thousand dollars in a custom theme for their blog is an investment and it easy to justify. Even craigslist looking to hire a designer was news last week.
Moving Objects while scrolling. I noticed the trend of sidebars following the scrolling in the website a while back. I didn’t like the design in the beginning, but right now I’m running an experiment in some of my websites to see if there’s and improvement in conversions. If the big players are doing it, there’s probably a reason.
I really like the cartoons. I’m sure it will drive a lot of attention. It helps you differentiate from your normally white doll that people copied from you.
Finally, the most important part of the post. “That spot is reserved for an ex-girlfriend (I kid!).” You need to admit that you have one and that it makes you happy every time you hit an eye 😀
Great post glen, it really worth the wait. Now, I can’t wait to see if you get a book deal and read more about it.
I just wanted to say thank you for taking the time and great effort to write this. My takeaway is: create great content, pay attention to site design and have an email list.
Wow, great post Glen. Absolutely worth the read. Particularly enjoyed your comments on email lists – I’ve heard an increase in conversation about it from bloggers for some time. Cheers.
Glen,
On a day when I unsubscribed from close to 100 email lists (as part of a purge intended to leave me with a zero inbox), I decided to click through and read this. As usual, you didn’t disappoint.
There are so many takeaways for every web publisher in this article – not just bloggers.
I think as more and more people online start to wise up to the fact that they’d better choose their narrow down their “digital circle of trust” if they want to stay productive, your approach of “compendium” type articles will win out over the more search-friendly method you describe other successful bloggers and blogs using.
I find that I’m more intentionally attracted to the monograph type articles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monograph) when they come from a trusted and authentic source – which you are.
Thanks
I much rather make the time to read one loooong, knowledgable and caring article like yours than waste my time zapping through redundant trash…
As for frequency of posting, be sure that I look forward to and open your email notifications – they’re so rare they stick out 😉
Thank you!
Hah, I guess that is one way to look at it.
Thanks Maria!
Glen, the nicest thing I can say about this post is “Evernoted!”
The next nicest thing I can say is, “Damn, that is some thorough research.”
I don’t blog any more. But if I did, I would use this as a guide.
Cheers,
Mitch
Thanks Mitch,
Hopefully it didn’t use up too much of your Evernote quota 😉
I have a headache from reading this long post! Where’s the aspirin? 🙂
The Matt Cutt’s tip on pings, what is your specific ping list now? Care to share?
Hey Pashmina,
It has been mentioned a few times in the comments above 🙂
Wow huge post! Kudos for putting the effort in and covering so much, although in places I think you could of made it a little bit more concise.
Good observation about the trend of Mashable type posts. They might get more page views but your style is far better for creating an engaged audience.
I’d love to see more posts where you talk about general trends and observations in the industry!
Fantastic post, Glen! Saved it till now when I finally found the time to read it full.
Simply awesome! Thanks! And I’ll definetely keep an eye on you 😉
Best regards from Germany
Gordon
What timing. I was just looking at some of the same trends trying to put together some ideas for a community site I run. We’ve been experimenting with different publishing models (lots of short posts, in depth posts, etc) and I think you just about hit the nail on the head with your observations.
Thanks Bill!
You just got yourself a new follower! It’s a great article and very helpful as I am, voluntarily, working on and trying to develop certain blog (trying to overcome the obstacles you are talking about, but I see how they can be resolved therefore I am not losing my hopes just yet) therefore thanks for sharing 🙂 Plus, you mentioned Freshome.. I admit they are great… I keep getting bombarded on facebook with images from them! how to say it… they annoy you a bit but they please your eyeballs… nice images 🙂
P.S. I was getting very distracted during reading… kept on checking the examples, what made a few hour journey with your article… but so worth it!
After reading this and another similar article alluding to readers being cheap, I am now realizing why blogging is losing its luster for me: lack of authenticity. I started blogging (as a lot of other mothers do) to form connections with humans. What I’m finding is that the big blogs I followed at first I no longer follow because their money making schemes are too obvious now. I wish blogging could go back to being more intimate rather than now looking at a reader with a price attached to their head. Consumption has found it’s new market, and I’m choosing not to be a part of it.
Glen, this is some truly amazing (and thorough) content here about the current state (and future) of the blogospere. I really appreciate the long, detailed posts and that you continue to buck the current trend in blogging to just come up with those “32 Ways to Engage Twitter Followers” type posts. Your blog, among a handful of others, has really inspired me to begin down this blogging journey… Particularly the Cloud Blueprint video course… Can’t wait to see what you post next! 🙂
How enjoyable was the crazy tangent you’ve take me on today? I learned about tech news, oatmeal cartoons and who is crushing it out there. Honestly, this is a pillar article for anyone planning to start blogging. I’m more savvy now. Thank you.
Always enjoy reading your posts Glen. Great read.
Very informative and full of original content. I feel older and wiser…. definitely older!
I was hoping there might be a link at the bottom to a badge saying, “I survived a Viperchill post and lived to comment on it.” or something.
Well done.
Paul
I might make that for my birthday 😉
Appreciate the comment!
What an interesting article. Many thanks for all the effort Glen. To echo an earlier comment, it would be very useful to know which services Matt Cutts advised you to ping, but I guess that kind of information is what you work so hard to acquire. Loved the Guardian series by the way.
Damn Glan, I believe it’s more longer blog post I’ve ever read on the Net.
This post was like long journey without specified ending but itcame to end and gave me more courage to take an action.
Thanks a lot.
…And done. Epic post, learnt a lot. Yours is one of only 7 major blogs I follow as it never fails to provide value.
Wow! that was very long post. But it is very informative aside from internet business there is
also news and showbiz.
Glen,
Long and very interesting …so many nuggets to follow. i have changed my blog home page to have 25 posts instead of 10 .i will implement other ideas.
Quick tip….
i you want to enjoy this post and read it without skimming ,try reading in with a mobile device. Works very well for me….
Another post worthy of the time it took to read, Glenn! Even though I have no interest in being a professional blogger, I always find your thoughts and research stimulating and of practical value.
BTW…in case you care, I picked up on a couple of typos you might (or might not) want to fix:
“Multiply that by ten of fifteen times if you live in Europe or America” (you meant ten OR fifteen)
“How many marketing bloggers do you think wrote something today hoping that you’ll read it.”(should either have finished with a ? or a colon)
best,
c-
Wow Glenn that’s more like a thesis than a blog post 🙂 I had to print it out and it took me about 30 mins to read with a good cuppa (British) tea to hand…
Being myself a “veteran” of affiliate SEO internet marketing, I do buy into what you are saying. Gone are the days when you could publish pretty much anything, optimise it, get a few backlinks and then site back see the traffic coming in.
I think the main take-away here is that you need to be very very very good at producing the right content these days. If you don’t blow your audience away then you might as well go home, as it’s just gonna get lost in the mire that is the “other” 99.9% as you say above. More time should be spent on actually planning what you are going to write than writing it.
Take care
David
Glen, great job ! I read the whole thing…how many words did you say ? I appreciate the sharing of thoughts and ideas on the subject matter. As a loyal reader I often make sure to read your work when I can dedicate the time to it. There are three guys I spend my money and time with in this niche You, Pat, and Corbett. I do check in with Darren but you three are the ones I spend the most time with. Thanks
Unbelievably long article…!!!! but wonderful content…
I have read it once but printing it now to go through it again. Thanks bro for the in-depth analysis and the public share of the same….
Really useful content all through the site..
Keep up the great work, Glen.
-Vickram.
Wow. This post is spot on! I think that this really is the future of blogging. Email lists are huge, and help you to not rely on anyone, or anything, for your traffic and future prosperity. Keep up the great work!
Hi Glen great article thank you. My outtakes:
* Love the sentence about how readers will choose where they want to get content in time. I’ve been subscribing to various blogs as part of my research and generally within 3 mails they are trying to sell me something and within 5 mails the quality info slows down. It’s a small group who keep up a consistent quality of great content and posts.
* The Matt Google plugin discussions – thanks for the tips for newbies like myself!
* Yes – a blog is your online company – think of it as that, not just a pile of articles pulled together to help you rank in Google.
Thanks again!
Awesome Article Glen.
It took me a long time to read but it was very informative and well worth it.
It gave me a lot of motivation on what I am going to do in the near future.
All I can say is WOW! I love it. I’m a newbie Blogger who is still in the process of finding their “online voice”. LOL I just started Blogging in Dec ’11 and I am crazy inspired after reading this. I’ll have to save it and read it again but, I love where you went with this. There’s a lot of shifting about online going on now that the playing field has truly been leveled and the doors are open for any of us to reach out to our niche audience in a huge way. I’m so excited about this post, my imagination is going like a race car at the Long Beach Grand Prix. I don’t think I’ll get a good nights sleep but I feel very excited about the inspiration you’ve given me. Thank you, Dyane
Glen,
A super over-enthused high-five.
A swathe-cutting, honest slice of the best on-line comment regarding marketing and the state of the on-line content and media industry.
Not another give me $50 a month to find the secrets of something you already know about but are too focused on finding out what the secret is to remember what it is you have to read but you need to pay the money to find out the money making secrets. e-book that will solve your problems….
No and thankfully no horrific photo-shopped swiped stock photos and over use of exclamation marks!!! with the dear-god why comic sans font ( I mean people seriously)
Yes, we will have the popular culture as the main stay of public content you only have to look at teenage pop dominating the nations musical tastes and you are right on the mark with your walmart comments the single biggest magazine titles ‘women’s gossip titles’ there is varying levels of crudeness but the majority of it is crap spewed out in different colours shapes and fonts.
The only real way forward I think is consumers curating and allocating their time and attention to something other than “cats in cute/funny/improper situations or whatever next reality show is made and is in essence following playground fads and indeed the politics as the majority of views are to criticize and bitch about their condition and or appearance.
just look at how popular bebo was and the geographic areas it was mainly use in.
I’ve worked on many projects but always wanted to do my own thing that I have passion about but always seem to get distracted by real-life or squirrels… I can never tell but it somehow keeps me distracted enough from transferring my scribbles into digital type.
hmmm wonder what the going rate is for typing squirrels…(maybe ask the dailymail)
Longest blog post I’ve ever read but thank you Glen for all the excellent content you give out on this site and others! It is appreciated and I look forward to using Optin Skin soon.
Charles Marabella
Wow…I’ve never read anything that long in my life…but I read it, and it was great! Thanks a lot, I really learned a bunch.
Hi Glen,
I printed this stuff and have read it along the way, when I commute. The post just blown me away with your forecast back-up by the through research fact. Excellent as always, this is what Viperchill blog all about. We’ll Seth Godin emailed you that is something.
Cheers to you, and wish you more success!
Just finished reading this after picking it up over the last days. I was slightly sad for it to come to an end as it was a great read. Thanks Simon!
Don’t forget to take down the ping-plugin on your Bloggingcasestudy blog under the plugin section 😉
“The second is that this post really is best read in full, no matter what your tendencies are to skim” – did you put this bit in for me?! I have started reading in the bath, but am now too wrinkly so will need to get back later. But wow. Can’t wait.
A friend of mine, Issac, who read this post really insisted I have a look. But he warned me about the length but insisted it of how to article is very insightful. It has taken me a week to getting round to reading it and I must agree it needed me to brace myself and read because of its length.
One thing that I have gathered from this post is the importance of generating quality content. No matter how many times algorithms keep changing, epic content will always take the number one spot.
Haven’t read the comments, so maybe I’ll repeat some things mentioned. But the post was so long, so I guess few people really looked at the comment section for a read. 🙂
However, this was a great post, albeit slightly different from others out there I must add. But this really constitutes that evergreen content- content that will never lose it’s value, not for many years to come. And you really touched many important topics, as well as tackled some of them with good common sense. This is really a must read if one is considering the blogging road. Some things like the Google algorithm are changing constantly, but there are few other things that represent the constant in blogging. I’m on my very start with blogging compared to some other guys, but the picture you painted was, and now is even more embedded in my mind- How a blog should develop, how we should treat content, how we should treat readers, how should we treat concepts and ideas closely connected with blogging. I guess this post can do wonders for the startups in this field.
And it’s good to have that feel after reading this post that everything is going to pay off and work out once we start doing the right things in blogging. That is, if we are providing some value, are interesting in our own way, know how to approach the visitor and make him a potential reader for the long run… Doing our thing, things are going to be ok, at least that’s how I feel after reading this post. I believe that good content along with some basic SEO and some pretty basic entrepreneurial knowledge can do the trick. And cheesy stories and SPAM techniques are going to suffer more and more. People are starting to look for the good stuff once again, I believe.
Thanks for the time you spent writing this, it was a really, really great and enjoyable read. 🙂
I have been reading your posts for a while, and I think this is the best so far. Also, I really appreciate you not falling for low quality articles just to get clicks. Your in-depth posts really help a lot.
The more I read about this, it just seems that email marketing is the future. You cannot rely on SEO, social media or any fad that comes along. What helps you grow is the value you add for the people.
Just one question about the pinging to other services? Does wordpress do this naturally? Is there a specific plug-in that pings to other websites? Or are you talking about a plug in that sends your links to multiple social media websites?
I read the whole article in one sitting. Took me well over 1.5 hours but I stuck to it because I wanted to absorb every paragraph as well as I could.
Great insights. While reading this, I found many many points that totally resonate with stuff I’ve got going on in my own MMO life.
You have provided me with valuable insights, Viper. I strongly feel this article will help me make money more efficiently in the future, because I can feel some ideas brewing in my head right now.
For this, I thank you.
P.S. If you’ve got ideas brewing like I do, do yourself a favor… write them down in an ever growing spreadsheet of MMO ideas. You’ll thank yourself for it later!
Hi Glen
Brilliant analysis of the state of blogging! Well, it took me over a week to get through (in bite sized chunks between real work) and I have to say that I really had to force myself away each time, and not allow myself to read it all in one sitting. You argue all your points very eloquently and convincingly. The core message seems to be “Produce great content about stuff you are passionate about, share it and make sure it’s easy for others to share. Make it so good that people want to subscribe so they never miss any of your stuff”. This is not just the future of successful blogging (or web publishing in general) but is also the best past and present strategy fro building an audience. Not always easy to convert your loyal followers into customers though. I’m looking forward to your 12000 word post on that topic 😉
There are people making a temporary killing churning out generic crud, and plenty in the queue ready to take their places in the SERPs when they get slapped. But the cream rises to the top, and the s*** sinks. Maybe just not fast enough though to save a lot of very good quality writes from perpetual obscurity. Here’s hoping they don’t give up, and find your blog post to keep them on the right path.
Regards,
Sal
I was finally able to finish this, Glen. As you said, I read every word. I don’t know if it’s worth leaving a comment since everyone has already said it all.
All I can say is thank you for this new book 🙂
It´s really amazing how you make me to read all of your long post! It´s not something bad, indeed I ask myself how you accomplish that. Even longer the post, there are more people reading it completely.
This post really has high value information in how we must be looking to the blogging industry.
Well, you’ve got at least one more loyal follower 🙂
I love your stuff man. It’s so rare to find someone genuinely offering so much value.
Wow Glen, that was a long read, but absolutely worth it. I don’t believe I have seen a blog post that long, and was able to keep my attemtion. Good Job!! I am curious about what pinging service Matt said to use and more importantly which ones not to use.,
Angelo
Glen, you never cease to amaze me with your lengthy posts and quality contained therein. You are the one person I’ve managed to follow since my start in IM and I continue to learn from your insights…!
Good Stuff!
Wow Glen… this article smashed my brain like a tidal wave !
Copied all the text to my Evernote app, and converted it all with my favorite text-to-audio app… I will listen to this repeatedly in the next 30 days… so many jewels…
Thanks again, so much… Dr. Q., 30 minutes from Austin…
It was a long post but worth the read. There is much to take away from this post and it will help anyone who is serious about making money from his or her blog.
Wow, that was a long read. I agree that you need to find a niche that you live and breathe.
Glen
Great post – my phone screamed and threw a tantrum when it got to the comments!
I have a hazy understanding of the technical stuff but the sentiment and ideas really got me thinking, I’ll have to read over and over.
I came to your work through the Guardian articles you did with Andrea. I haven’t put the tutorials into practice yet but I’m gonna start – I’m jobless at the moment and I have resurrected my blog (I’d given it up because I realised I couldn’t do churnposting), so now I’m going to use your how-tos as blogger’s rehab to turn it around. Earning from it would be great, though for now I want to get quality writing up for my audience of, me!
Daily Mail website – It’s so sticky, I can pull myself away, but I have a friend who spends hours on it,he hates the paper, but he’s addicted to the website. They do a good job at grabbing people’s attention, though how long that’ll last I don’t know – once you figure out it’s cut, paste, repeat – you know you’re getting ripped off before you even start reading.
Thanks again for the post – will have to work at implementing it s-l-o-w-l-y, lol.
Heres to good blogging, and ta for your genius
A
Glen. I’m probably repeating the other 200+ comments but I still need to give you props on this blog post. Great work. Love the analysis. Because of you I have more work (in a good way).
Now re-evaluating my blog strategies.
Long posts are always welcomed.
Also, looking forward to the next podcast. Keep it up! Woop woop!
Very nice post good Sir!
I couldn’t stop reading it until it was over and it’s 01:20 AM here 😀
Totally worth it!
I started a blog in specific niche and was very inspired at the time of making it. An year later I found out that I had to grind backlinks and stuff KWs for articles in some algorithmic way in order to get more SEO juice. The passionate content building quickly turned into a boring chore. Later when I found out some of the gurus I was promoting were kind of schemers, it washed my motivation down the drain.
Was thinking about starting another blog in a topic I’ve been hooked for more than 16 years, yet the whole internet marketing dynamic made me reconsider.
Your post among with some other I read recently, may change that 😉
Great article! Maybe you are about to start a new trend here.. 😉
“People do not have the time to read your content. They really don’t. We’re busier than ever, have shorter
attention spans and more people in our entire history own websites they want us to visit.”
So true so one of the answers is kwikpedia = twitter + wikipedia
Glen,
Your site is the slowest I have come across, is it because I use IE 8.0? It took me like half an hour to put a comment :).
Cheers
Although your blog post was long and detailed, I enjoyed reading it because you covered plenty of websites and bloggers who work I have read and keep coming back to through the years. I learned a few things about the industry as well.
I agree with what you said about how we have to change the way we produce content for our target audience. It is an interesting ride and one of improved quality in my opinion.
In the famous words of Gil Scot: I’m new here.
So apologies in advance.
I’m surprised it took me so long to end up at this blog.. anyways..
Why not self publish your book on Amazon (Kindle)?..
Nice article glen, I find myself reading every word of your posts as some kind of personal challenge. More than I can say for most authors… Ps. You were quite nice about pluginid considering the reality of it, that thing has become a true waste of server space 🙁
Thanks million for your articles! Specially for this one.
It took me a long morning and two coffees to get to the end and finished it but it is worthy of it.
And, about your question… Yes, I’d still continue bloggin’ on top of $15m, but from a different point of view, for sure.
This one like every post in Viperchill, makes me change my mind about the way a use to do things in my blogs. I’m about to publish a couple of blogs to test a technique you mention in one of your articles, but i rather wait until I read all of your posts.
Thanks again Glen.
Great article . Keep writing
Most of this article can be summarized in one line:
Extroverted vs. introverted
Blog style and author type will match audience type. Guess which one earns more per pageview.
Here is an excellent discussion of it.
So no, you’re not missing out.
I disagree. Introverted and Extroverted is not such a clear cut thing.
Both can act in the opposite way at different times.
I once heard it described as introverted people need time to themselves to ‘recharge’ and get their energy back, whereas extroverted people tend to get their energy from being around others. The thinker and the talker can both produce great content 🙂
Thanks for the comment though! Interesting…
“I once heard it described as introverted people need time to themselves to ‘recharge’ and get their energy back, whereas extroverted people tend to get their energy from being around others.”
Correct. The above observable phenomenon is caused by a fundamentally different neurological hardwiring that is genetically determined, and expressed as a different psychological locus of identity investment.
The fact that a dog can rear up and a human can crawl does not alter that one is quadrupedal and the other bipedal.
Wow! Yes it was long but worth it. I find it amazing how on-top-of the industry you are. I am in the signage industry and while I love writing I find it difficult sometimes to come up with genuinely interesting ideas that would appeal to the audience of our sign business site. I am endlessly interested in online marketing of all sort , but that isn’t the content readers are looking for on our sign site.
But this post along with others I have found there have got me thinking outside the box! I’m going to definitely implement many of the strategies outlines on this site.
Thanks for all the information you put out there! It’s appreciated : )
Woooooooaaaaaa, i must say this is one hell of a post.
I have not seen a post so valuable, insightful, provocative, mind-blowing etc as this. I must say Glen u rock.
Thanks for the post.
Cheers,
Mategyero.
Hey Glen,
My eyes are now very tired after reading, and reading, and reading this awesome post;)
I heard about you from a free report of yours I downloaded in the War Room and have to say it couldn’t have come at a better time. I’ve recently started a blog and some of the info. in the report is invaluable to me.
Consider me a new fan of VC:)
All the best,
Noel.
Dude, are you serious? This is f-ing sick. You are the man. I wish I had your skills mate. You rock and I love this post I sent it to all my writers and team. I hope they take it to heart. Seriously, if I could choose 1 partner it would be you. Way to go and keep up the amazing work.
JP
Wow, this really is a long article. I am still reading it. So far the Matt Cutts info stuck to me the most.
As has been stated, yes, this is a really long article! Thinking book, or at least, ebook. A lot of good research and assessment. I especially like the part where you say, “With so much change, surely there has to be something that isn’t going to disappear any time soon. Well, there is, and that’s people.” That is probably one of the most constant things. You give us a lot to think about. Thanks.
Thanks for the great post. Nice to see you put so much effort in 1 blogpost. It took me some time to read it all, but it was definitely worth it!
AMAZING post, not just because it was crazy long! Read all of it and totally agree! You are the KING of Killer content, we follow that model with valuable Free content, and it works!
Thanks for everything you do, the best in 2012!
This is a genius post and the most valuable I have ever encountered this month thanks dude I feel you!
I have a dream of building an internet empire I believe I can achieve that ! thank to all you inspiring posts works!
So many great examples in this piece but the one that put some spring in my step was that the creator of angry birds created 50 previous games before he created “the one”. So inspiring and really puts things in perspective. If you love it, keep at it, keep testing, keep trying. Needed this today:)
Very helpful information. It never hurts to be the first treading the new curve. Thanks for the great post!
Glen,
Another fantastic post, it took me over an hour to read but I did it…
Quick question have you used the 50-70% tactic in this post where you add in your old post at the end ?
Thank you so much for this post. I was actually taking notes (exposing my old-schoolness) as I read. You and Blog Tyrant have been so helpful to me already and I am so grateful for the information you took the time to put out there about blogging and its ever-changing platform. I love how you refer to the”little guy” throughout because I am definitely in that genre as I am just starting to learn about all of this and about to attempt to put it into practice! Thank you so much for doing the research and legwork for me. I feel like I have some more tools to succeed! And Optin Skin looks great! So brilliant!
Thanks so much,
Lindsay
I must say that was a great post. I think all too many bloggers just want to get in and out of a post as quickly as possible, so it is quite refreshing to read a worthwhile, thoughtful and thorough post for a change.
I am just starting on my blogging path so I am very grateful to inspirational people like yourself.
Thank you.
That was some post Glen! I have been reading your stuff for quite a while now and I am sure this post must be the longest you have written.
I agree content quality over quantity… however, curated content sites seem to be the next best thing and to be honest I have been a bit tempted of late, especially when I see the attention they get.
So your post is a breath of fresh air and as always offers many insights, that I must add, helps me examine and often reconsider my own online endeavours.
Thank you for going in-depth with this subject and the heads up with regard to the pinging sites.
Cheers
Linda
Hi Glen,
I have just finished reading your entire post and wow it was a lot of reading!
I am more motivated than ever to pursue my fresh adventure of blogging.
Thanks for sharing such a great information with us.
I really appreciate this post. I started blogging almost 10 years ago, sold a couple of big (in my world) sites a couple of years back and have been struggling to find my next project ever since.
I do blog regularly for a music industry blog but I’ve wanted to build something of my own as well.
However, even parttime blogging for Hypebot leaves me without the desire to chase daily news and pump out little bits of content for a blog of my own even though I’ve identified some great areas for that kind of blogging.
This post along with some other inputs, like my discovery that my in-depth posts on my current blog are getting extended visit duration and my recognition that I want to start writing longer pieces, is helping me to rethink my assumptions about how blogging can work.
Thanks. I needed that!
Wow this was a great post and really opened my eyes to the possibilities (not to mention what I am not doing right). Thanks for all the information. You rock out loud!
Question – is there a formula for titles and such that make blog posts a magnate for search engines and attract more viewers?
That is pure class, pure inspiration and a honest sharing of knowledge and expertise.
Not only have you managed to create a great and inspiring lifestyle, generating (probably a decent sum:)) money – you have also managed to create a site that helps and inspire other people. You help people become better and to realize their dreams. This must be even greater than seeing the $$$ bounce into your account 🙂 Quality content is getting more and more rare, and great to read an article that truly delivers and challenges the reader.
Keep up the great work.
All the best, Lars Riis
I e-mailed you when this post came out and I just need to also make a comment — just blown away by ViperChill and the content you consistently put out. I agree 100% about Chow and Shoe – my early favs, but now a shell of their former selves as they have moved on to focus on other things.
Keep up the great work!
JP
Glen,
Nice post! Long but in-depth…
What ping services do you now use? Nice tip by the way…
your work is great Glen and I wish you well in your endeavors… for some reason I did not get my original comment posted but in short.. keep on with those inspiring posts – they are very seriously inspiring and give me a goal.
I didn’t think the post was that long.
But the reason I don’t read here more often is that on a great blog, the comments are just as interesting as the articles. I’m sorry to have to say it, but that’s seldom the case here. Drooling fanboy accolades, while probably gratifying to the blogger, don’t offer much in the way of a meaningful response. I sometimes wonder if commenters gush because they think that’s what you want to hear or they just want the link and can’t think of anything else to say.
You’ve dropped a lot of names in this latest effort. I can’t help noting that when you received responses from the digirati, they contacted you directly rather than posting a comment. I’d have liked to see a Seth Godin entry.
It’s been said that Roger Ebert has the most committed commenters on the Internet; they leave detailed well-thought-out comments that further the discussion. That’s what I aspire to. I’m a long way from it yet.
Glen, it’s amazing article. Thanks to it I found some new, valuable websites for me. Thanks!
Amazing post, It took me about an hour and something to read everything 🙂
And I don’t know on what to comment first, but I will start on your opinions about blogging world.
I liked how you mentioned that we all need to change from time to time, the same old design and same old post headlines and posts are annoying. Everything you said about these bigger blogs is true, they are really the content robots. Those “Aha” moments were helpful :).
I’m also still amazed with Google bad search results after all these updates, it’s so bad to see that you got outranked on Google for viperchill superblog, that’s just showing that Google still didn’t found the better algorithm then from what Larry created in the early years.
For the end just want to say that I’m glad that someone finally wrote all these things and showed the reality, because some bloggers are just too much with their heads in the clouds.
Sorry for the long comment, but it’s your fault, the long post requires long comments 🙂
Perfect timing for me, started my blog on the 19th April this year, have just hit the 100 unique views and 209 unique page views.
Most of my views have been through twitter, I hope to continue growing through what I think is good content and smart but subtle marketing.
I have been thinking of setting up a email subscriber function on my wp site but not sure if my site is suited to it, any feedback would be welcome with this by anyone.
Oh, I have to say that this is the first time on the Viperchill site, I am glad I found it. You have a new reader.
Regards,
Ken.
Ken,
I would highly recommend you build an email list. Ask any blogger and they will tell you “I wish I started building a list from the beginning!” Even if you only send your content once every week or two, I would build it!
Good Luck and Congrats on the new blog!
The longest post I ever read and the best one on blogging.
I really like your long and in-depth writing style. I didn’t finish the post at a go but I took my own sweet time and came back for it again and again and again because of the quality.
Thanks man!
Joe
Wow! Glen! You are Great!
This is one of a kind blog post that every blogger out there must read.
Thanks for such an Insightfut post, I think I need to Call You “PROPHET GLEN!”
Hey Glen,
This was a really awesome post. I stumbled across your blog a few months back and have not been let down by any of your articles. You really are inspiration on how it should be done when it comes to blogging. Now you’ve got me all fired up with schemes of my own to take over the blogosphere :).
Hi Glen,
That’s really a long long post,the longest post ever I have read but that was really of some quality again. I wish you can write a post on a seo & marketing plan for a new site and a newbie that too in depth like this one.
An unbelievably helpful post, for someone who has been on a DIY approach to learning blogging. You are so right about the lack of up to date or effective information out there – so glad you are around and so willing to share – many thanks 🙂
It’s funny that on a quality blog post written by an author who is more about quality than about quantity, that the first comments are basically spam, just to be the first to react, and thus getting a lot of clicks to their site for the next 6 months.
Anyways. Glen, this is a very nice article that threats topics that I’ve been thinking about a long time. I think you made a pretty accurate analysis. Though, I’m even more interested about your view on mobile, since that market is becoming increasingly important and us bloggers will have to adapt a lot of our current ways to be noticed in a favorable way in the mobile market.
Great article Glen, I do not know how but you got me to read the whole 20,000 words. The article got me inspired to make content that changes people live.
Hi Glen, when using ViperBar and having the WordPress admin bar, it throws the ViperBar off, not being aligned with the top.
Issue is when you scroll down, then scroll back to the top, it looks like this (notice the white space):
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/256/image000se.png/
Great plugin by the way!
Hello Glenn,
I really needed some time to read you’re whole post. I now also realize that my favorite new site is using the same tactic. More text on their homepage, but not necessarily more added value. It takes me as long to skim for new articles as before. It appears that they also publish more short articles.
Anyway a very nice post! I was also a bit confused about that ‘ping service’ in wordpress. Do you happen to have more info on that?
Glen, the insight and depth you offer in this post is phenomenal.
What a refreshing look at the blog scene.
For the most part I agree, though you covered so much… lol.
One idea I’d like to touch on is what you were saying about The Daily Mail and lowest common denominator content.
It’s kinda… “always been that way”. The masses have always sought out “quick-fix” type stuff. Cheap thrills. etc., and that’s cool.
The answer is, like you said “building a like-minded audience”.
Lesson learned: build a list
Hey Glen,
My first time on your site and I am loving it.
This is a monster post, my eyes are hurting already but I found it really helpful.
I’ve seen some big marketers out there and their sites look like rubbish so I agree with you in regards to changing the design of sites especially if you’re one of the top marketers. I’d much rather look at a nice slickly designed site rather an early 90’s designed site (have you heard of SFI? Yeah, those type of sites..). And it’s important for your image/branding to look/be the best you can be since people/customers/subscribers will judge…
In regards to passion, I agree.. I would never be able to write long-term about something that I don’t have a real interest towards (like worm-breeding or carpet-layering … – are there such things?). Every task to do with that niche blog would be mundane, brain-kill and I’d end up hating my life. Like you said, you can’t force passion…
Thanks for sharing your insights and advice and a super post.
All the best,
Jas
Thank you for taking the time to write such an insightful post.
It may have been long – but well worth the time to read. And it has given me so much to think about …
Great points in this article. This definitely was a great read with several actionable items. I will have to get myself in gear for sure. Great post!
Off to create my action plan based on this.
Hi Glen,
I found you via A-List Blogging. Congratulations on being chosen Top 10 Blog for Bloggers 2012! Naturally I clicked on your blog link to check out what you’re all about, and I’m glad I did. 🙂 I read this post halfway through before I bookmarked it, and believe you me, I have a short attention span. (You know I blame the ‘Nets for that!) Lots of fascinating points here; you hit the nail on the head about Daily Mail (umm, yes, I do read it, embarrassingly so). I’ve started three blogs only to delete them all so next time I start a blog, I plan to keep it!
Thanks for doing this post for us, and continued good luck to you, Glen!
In regards the importance of web design , I think another perfect example of a god awful ugly BUT extremely popular/lucrative , is craigslist. Talk about being stuck in the early millennium….
Wow that took a minute! I really enjoyed reading your post. I am usually one of those guys who has the problem of stopping. By the time I was done I could easily say that it wasn’t long enough, or at least not all that long. So yes I was very happy to see that besides the 12,000 words here, there’s another 20,000 more. I say more power to you and keep up the great work my friend. I look forward to more (shorter) posts.
Vitaliy
American Freight Trucking, Inc.
I’m still reading the article, but I wanted to make sure I commented to tell you how much I love your site! I’ve been reading your posts for about 4 hours now and making changes to my own website. You have some some great suggestions and the fact that you are so young is amazing. I’m 23 and I’ll be lucky if I get 50 subscribers before the end of the year, but after finding your website I’m feeling more optimistic 😛 Thanks for all the great info!
Really an awesome post. This is one of the most awesome sports I have ever read. This post is definitely a valuable one for people like me. Because I was also a blogger in the same niche about 4 years ago. But to be frank I could really not make up to huge profits apart from profiting from flipping the blog for mere 3 figures. There were many a reasons for flipping, and obviously I was not so successfully in blogging for making money online. And this post taught me why. And the reason is the “difference” bloggers who are successful tend to be “unique” in some aspect or the other. And this post taught me that.
Congrats Glen,
Really a valuable post.
wow! very long and wonderful blog post and also the comment list. Must have taken some time write this article. Thanks for the hard work.
Glen – Somehow I managed to get through all 20,000 words . . . it wasn’t an accident — the post is extremely captivating and full of incredible advice. Thanks for the in-depth analysis of some of the most important destinations on the blogosphere.
You continue to outdo yourself. Well done.
Thanks for this man, couldn’t be any timelier. ….holy shit timelier is actually a word.
You get a high distinction for this well researched piece of work. 🙂
Also you’ve been a huge inspiration to me (esp your newest post.)
And happy birthday! (sorry)
Glen, Your insights and content hits the mark spot on here. I was interested in the services you mentioned that Matt let you know about. I’ve got a few blogs that I found a list of RSS pinging services on Warrior Forum and loaded them in. Now I’m not sure which if any RSS pinging services I should use. I researched it but can’t seem to find any more info on the issue.
Thanks for your legitimate commitment to creating awesome content.
I am sure Seth has google alert set up 😉 . Dude, I just wasted 1 hour (reading) + 30 mins (reflecting), NOT :). I can so relate to this content. Awesome stuff Glenn. This was probably the best read of the month. Thanks for doing what you are good at, cheers
Wow! Just what I needed! Thank you!
Very in depth article on the future of blogging lots of things to consider. I have always noticed that sensationalist news titles always result in greater visits than well researched and well written original articles.
Excellent. Do you have a tool to tell you how many of the people who commented before reading beyond the fold actually went back and finished the job?
*Deep Bow*
Hi Glen,
I have been a long time reader of your blog and in general have learned a lot. Needless to say, I did read this entire post as well as the comments. This is a post that actually requires studying not just reading. So that is what I will be doing over the next week. The one most visible gold nugget was the Matt Cutts information, but it seems to me that there are quite a number of less obvious, much smaller nuggets and those are the ones that I want to study up on. It may just be that there is a rough diamond or two hidden amongst the pebbles.
Many thanks
What a great comprehensive post. One thing I’ve neglected on my site is a newsletter and I feel this is something I will need to address immediately.
Fantastic – I was intending to skim this post before heading off to watch an episode of Game of Thrones but nope, 1 hour later and I was still glued to my computer screen 😉
Sounds great but future of blogging will be in danger if there are more strict website guidelines by Google as they are making it more and more difficult for small business to promote their blogs ..!
Search makes up a tiny percentage of the traffic to this blog…
Wow, I can’t believe I just read this whole post haha =P
Very informative and obviously well-researched. One of the things that stands out the most for me after having read it all is what you said about being excited to hit “Publish.” Every time I post something now, I’ll be asking myself whether I feel excited and if not, do I need to rethink this post?
Thanks for sharing, Glen 🙂
Thanks for sharing your research and thoughts. Lots of good info in here. I’ve read this post twice already in order for more of the info to sink in.
What a piece of information! It can’t be researched better than this. It’s long but at the same time it forced me to stick till the end.
Thanks for a learning day!
Thanks for the caring & effort to share all this
With us
Agreed. I think nowadays to be successful in blogging, we need contents that carry certain excitement which is your article must go viral. But beside a catchy headlines, we still need absolutely good content to continue attract the readers just like mashable is doing now.
Wow, that took me a long time to read! And every now and then (like when you mentioned the ping list), I wondered about my own blog and had to go check my own settings quickly, before proceeding to read your post… This made me use twice as much time to finish reading your post! LoL
Epic post! So much so that I’ve got nothing else to comment at the moment – you’ve covered it all! 😉
Takes really long to read, had to format it to PDF and put on Kindle.
I totally agree with the headlines – they are VERY important. Whenever I get a mailing from Mashable I see how ‘tricky’ they are with catchy headlines.
Many lessons to learn from this post, will read it again, soon.
Thanks VC!
Fantastic post. I have bookmarked not only this site but quite a few of the ones that you mention throughout the post. Yes it is long, but that suits my style. I have always been one who likes to get a lot of information for my click and I hate following an interesting title to find it contains less than 500 words of rehashed or spun words. I did a search yesterday … I can’t actually remember the topic, but the top 5 links on Google were spin articles or plain out re-posts of the original which I found somewhere on the second page in my search. I assume it was the original since it was dated before the others. How disappointing to find that this happens and probably more often than I am aware of. I search on Flippa regularly to see what is being sold and get depressed at the number of autoblog sites that are listed by the same people week in week out. They must make money out of it or why do it? But what of the poor beginner who somehow heard about Flippa and bought a blog in good faith thinking that they will make money out of it and not understanding that 1) there are hundreds of other sites out there all looking the same, with the same articles on them and 2) that you need to do more than buy a blog and have it installed to make money out of it.
How many of these new bloggers have started because they have been told that there is money to be made from home in the blogging field, yet fail miserably because they don’t realise how much they need to know about blogging, marketing, and writing; and that it can take years to become successful in blogging?
I know .. I originally learned about content from SBI, cut my teeth on blogging from ProBlogger and tried many forms and niches from death and dying, through work at home for mums (I actually loved writing the content for that) through a News/magazine type blog (my favorite one, but difficult to build up readership) through to my current site which makes me a couple of dollars a day in adsense. Not much in the scheme of things, but enough to spur me on to work harder and refine my ideas.
I copied this whole post to MS word so I could read through and highlight things I wanted to follow up on and read more about. Even in your comments section I found interesting snippets I wanted to follow up on.
So thank you for this great post. I would have paid for this information in eBook form (or Kindle since I love having great information available to me in my Kindle wherever i am).
Sorry it looks like my comment is trying to rival your post for length 🙂
Julia
this indeed is a very looooong article…………..
didn’t had the time to read it now………………..but i have bookmrked it…………..it seems intresting…:)
Thanks Glen for all these usefull infomations. I am at half of it and it is really good. I bookmarked it.
Good job Glen,,
The enormous size of the post is the reason of its popularity and comments you got here. Nice..
i never thought i would complete a very long post to the end but it was so interesting that i did
i agree with you on everything
i also predicted the fall of john show, i spend weeks checking his site only to find articles about his favorite food ,how his fans loved him….etc
i just didn’t find what i was looking for! the real content!!
This post is a gem. It’s my first time reading you… I’ll stick around. 🙂
Amazing article. It really pumps me up and gets me driven to improve on my blogging. I don’t do the same type of blogging, and am not looking to pursue money making in the same way; but this piece helped a lot. There is a lot of things I need to learn and study to be a successful writer and I’ve got lots of tips here. I’m definitely going to continue reading your blog due to this one piece. Great to meet you!
Fantastic article. I’ve been blogging for years and this has to be the most informative and most inspiring post I’ve read in a long time. I recently sold my second major blog and I’m brainstorming some ideas for my next project. You’ve gave me some good ideas for it.
Keep up the good work. :):)
Kevin
When I started reading I thought the article was filling out the entire page all the way to the bottom. I was pleased to discover all the comments.
I’m impressed you actually made me read all this. You’re a hugely talented writer. Especially good at making interesting intros to make your content seem important (not saying it’s not).
Also, I don’t usually leave comments.
Excellent post enjoyed reading it… this is a complete education thing on google
Very long post but powerful and the points are helpful. thanks for sharing
This I think was the first post I ever read on Viperchill and it is one of the post helpful posts on blogging I have EVER read. Thanks for inspiring your fellow blogger!
You know, I could have read a version of this post on another site’, and be finished reading it in approximately 10 seconds, taking away the cliche that ‘Content is King!’ I’m glad I read it here instead – I love settling down to a blog post that really strips down to its boxers/panties and wrestles with a topic.
I heard a lot of hype about you before I read this – unlike most hype, it’s kinda deserved 🙂
At the beginning of the article i felt like a two foot tall kid nervously forcing himself off the deep end of the pool… but as i read on my hand began scribbling frantically and by the end of the article i had a full page of insightful and hopefully useable information… a seemingly valuable commodity for someone looking to grow:)
PS: looks like you got one of my email addresses, a fair price to pay:)
I read this article at the same time as reading Ryan Holiday’s new book, and it helped me think of ways that I could ignore how negative part of the bloggersphere had become. Thanks for some great points Glen. I’d really be interested to hear you comment on any potential backlash from Ryan speaking out?
Solid piece of writing man!
I’m a believer in quality and transparency. I also think one should be proud of his/her work.
If the Daily Mail writers don’t have their names on those articles it’s because they’re kinda embarrassed about it…I guess. That’s not to be followed. It’s downright prostitution for pageviews. Silly.
Thank you for taking the time to write this. I enjoyed every single line.
Cheers from Europe!
I started off thinking I don’t like long sales letters. By the end I realized that perhaps I was missing something. It’s long sales letters that keep trying to hit me with a hammer I don’t like. Sales letters that seduce me into keeping reading are what I like.
Thanks for this, Glen. There are a number of lessons to be drawn here and some of them can be instantly applied. I’m off to do so.
You know, I’m a “newbie” in this blog business. As a matter of fact, right now I only have a domain name and hosting account.
I am so lucky to have people like you who care, not only about your readers, but also about people like me who are just starting out. I have learned so much from this post and I am so glad that I didn’t rush into things.
When I read your “warning” that this would be a long post, I just leaned back and relaxed with a tall iced coffee and took it all in.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Lizzie
Thanks!
This comment made my day 🙂
Just discovered your blog. Your insights are beautifully written.
You held my interest all the way to the end, and made me feel as though I was learning something valuable. Hard to do these days as so many blogs are written for all the wrong reasons.
Thanks for taking the time to write from the heart. 🙂
I started publishing an online magazine (not a blog) several years ago and was doing pretty good with the content and the income, but then I got burnt out and the site pretty much sat dormant for Oh Gosh… nearly 7 years. Oh sure, I’d post something here and there when the moment hit me, but I didn’t market it, I didn’t advertise, and I didn’t really promote it… unless you count a few article directory submissions.
So I guess you could say I am getting back into the swing of things, and trying to decide if it’s even where I want to be right now. Reading posts like yours inspire me… they remind me why I got online in the first place, and what I wanted to do with my site so long ago…
Thanks for that.
Being a dyslexic, I can’t believe I had spent 3 hours reading this. This was truly a very honest post. It just proves that there are people out there who are willing to read good content no matter how long the post is.
Having only read down to Why Mashable Beat Techcrunch so far, I want to leave my own prediction. Then I’ll read the rest of the post and comment again. What we need to do is take what we’ve learned to date and create geo-targeted niche group blogs because the best way to be the most recommended blog in YOUR niche is to provide the most RELEVANT information for your LOCAL audience.
With so many blogs in every niche most are commodities. Be the best home improvement blog in Chicago or the best night life blog in LA or the best Home Schooling blog for Dallas and you do two very important things:
1) You set yourself apart and become the blog local people WILL recommend.
2) You grow a LOCAL audience which makes your blog “the” place for related local businesses to advertise, get featured, or even put their own blog content. You position yourself where the money is.
I wrote more about why you want to be a big fish in your local pond instead of a tiny fish in the massive ocean of the blogosphere in the post I linked to this comment.
After I read the rest of this post we’ll both know whether my prediction coincides anywhere with yours. I’ll be back. 🙂
While I read this post I made notes. I thought you might want to see them so I’m sharing them here:
Google and other major search engines and sites like Facebook will intentionally take our traffic away – so move away from reliance on traffic from those sources.
Email lists, autoresponders and reminders are critical – but a challenge for most bloggers to implement – so we need to be helping each other learn to use advanced tools like Feedblitz which integrates email marketing with social media and is the best alternative to FeedBurner – which Google may be letting die an ugly death.
FeedBlitz allows you to create multiple feeds so your subscribers can receive just the content they want – by author or category – and get it any way they want it delivered.
What we see in social media and search engines is being massively manipulated – and most people will NEVER figure that out and they will be heavily influenced by what they are shown by those who control Google and major social networking sites.
Personally I intensely dislike anything that reveals my location because I – and many others – have dangerous stalkers in our pasts who are still looking for us. When your life may be at stake location-based anything ceases to be pleasant and is a cause for alarm. This affects far more people than most realize – and it is not only women who have crazed stalkers.
Bloggers like you – and Aaron Wall – and me – write, to paraphrase how Aaron put it, “to make thoughts more concrete and to get feedback. As much as anything else our sites are notes to ourselves.” Then we share what we have sorted out so that others may benefit.
When a site or community is sold and the founders move on the odds are it will decline – just as those you sold did. It is the wisdom and voice that matters – and that can’t be imitated and rarely can it be replaced. What created the value goes away and decline sets in.
Need to check out:
OptinSkin
Consider:
Importance of a Stronger Web design
Thanks for the post. I really need to read and link to more of your content more often. I’ll move you up in my reading list. You may notice trackbacks from various domains as I am writing more places these days and choose my own topics to cover.
This following quote from your excellent article has real resonance in my particular situation as an affiliate marketer.
“People do not have the time to read your content. They really don’t. We’re busier than ever, have shorter attention spans and more people in our entire history own websites they want us to visit.”
I’m told we have 8-15 seconds to rein in visitors so I am trying to balance my WP site with an eye catching opening, usually a product image, a link to the merchant, both text and image based, followed by good fresh content usually 300-400 words long.
Although I spend some time ensuring the content is good I wonder if ever it is read as if visitors want my product they will be encouraged enough by my opening to click through or alternatively quickly leave.
Stats show my bounce rate about 65% and time spent on the site approx 90 seconds, so probably the don’t pay too much attention to the content.
A bit sickening if true as I will have to continue writing good content that rarely gets read.
Great fun this eh!!!!
Enough of my moans your is a great thought provoking article.
Many thanks
Russ
Thanks for the time you put in to this article, gave me a whole lot of good ideas for my site!
Looking forward to every new post!
Took me more than an hour to read the whole post in one sitting. It was definitely worth my time and probably the longest article I ever read in my entire life.
Ummm.. Thats cool, i came to know that it needs hard work and skills as well, You post is great i know, but, truly saying i,m tired of seo, i have read a number of articles , followed them, but, i got no responce yet, will you please guide me? Okay.. i,ll surely follow you.
Regards.
What url was your blog pinging? Mine only has: http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
I have mentioned them quite a few times in the comments 🙂
Wow this was a mega post, which I have now only just skim read, but its a very interesting topic that I will read a bit later.
Well done on your blogging, it really is an inspiration to all.
Can’t believe I read the whole thing. Might need a Tums or something now. Good take on what really works and how to keep up with the changing blog world. Thanks.
I just visited your Blogging Case Study and it’s just amazing what you did. I mean it’s a book in blog format! Really cool.
Wow! This was indeed long but worth reading and being a blogger myself as well it captured my attention and I had to read the whole thing all over again to make sure that I am getting the whole picture correctly.
This was a great post, really puts blogging in its context
Hey Glen,
How much time you took to put this giant piece of Info ???
After reading this I felt,I dont need to read any blogging advice for next few days.
Congrats and I am waiting for your next article.
Great Post! I couldn’t stop reading it, even thou it was really long. But you make great points in it. My conclusion of this post is; “Do it your own way”. Don’t try to copy some other blog, take a look at the blogs that are successful and why they are successful. Than take some of thous ideas and try to incorporate them in to your own blog, but in your own way.
Thanks for great reading!
Glenn, thanks so much for writing this and sharing your insights with the community. I appreciate your commitment to valuable content and not link-baiting simply to gain page views and back trends. I agree this strategy is the way of the future, and you can’t buy people’s permission on what matters to them!
Take care,
Matt Ragland
No offence Glen but I need an eye test after reading that, loved it!
I am in your debt for taking the time and effort putting this post together (assuming it took longer than 20 mins), you literally save me hours if not days of reading rubbish.
It’s difficult picking up on one specific point as there are so many, for me I’ll take away that blogging is a vocation not a vacation.
All the best!
Rob
Glen —
This is an extremely intriguing post and made me think a lot about the future of the online news industry too.
I used to work at a startup that positioned themselves perfectly for this decline in physical news , to help them transition into the digital era and capitalize on that advertising. Scary time for the news industry in general.
And I’m with you that email lists are going to grow in importance — there’s obviously noise with email, but I don’t personally know of a better way to develop a connection and just “be different” unless you see people in person (which might be a great combination w/ online stuff).
Thanks for sharing your predictions
Yowzers — that took me forever to read, but I’m sure glad I did! Great thought-provoking article!
Great stuff Glen. Thank you for sharing.
And to make sure you know that a 12K word post was worth writing… this is the first time I’ve ever heard of you and your insight alone has turned me into a raving fan – in just one friggen page. I’m certain I will at some point give you some of my money and I’m guessing I’m not the only one.
Thanks again – Bill
Really an amazing article. This would really help newbies in getting a clear idea on what to focus and what not. I really enjoyed it. Thanks again!!
Read it, enjoyed it, shared it
I am proof of how guest blogging can bring you crazy-read-all-that-he-wrote fans! 🙂
Fantastic post. There are so many good site I didnt know existed. The post has given me a lot of new site to explore. It must mean something that these big bloggers have a very similar design.
I bet it’s going to be worthwhile!
Glen,
I am still in the process of reading all this but have come up with a quick question: what exactly are these “services” you “ping” to? I’m sure it is a newbie question (sorry) but have just started using wordpress and such. Clarification, please?
I greatly appreciate it! Awesome site, by the way! 🙂
-Sara
I had actually forgotten all about Shoemoney and Chow! I used to visit those sites and devour what was written. I agree that design is extremely important. Also, the technique of using information from previous articles is a common in the newspaper industry. At least, it was a common writing method. They called the rehashed info, “boilerplates”.
Hi Glen,
congratulations man. What a beautiful crafted post on the theme blogging and publishing for the average Joe and Jill.
Your perspective and honesty speak louder than the actual tips you give throughout this epic piece. i think really for everyone from newbie to advanced, you´ve covered it all.
I espcially love the setting your priority parts, although not explicitly mentioned, and putting passion on the drivers seat.
I had my aha-moments and lot to note down a lot on my way to better positioning. Most important you gave me peace of mind, that what I´m doing might not be perfect, but i´m failing forward while attempting to help my audience genuinely.
Ok, know have to go back and sharpen my blogging knifes. Keep doing what you´re doing and I hope one day to meet (and braii?) where I am born is where you at right now, while I´m close to where u were born right now!
Bill
That was an absolute pleasure to read, I can’t remember the last time I spent over an hour reading an artilce carefully and really enjoying it!
As you allude to in your article, content is getting churned out like fast food these days and we’re all in danger of turning into full time skimmers rather than inquisitive and engaged readers.
And it’s writers like you with posts like these that remind us of that. Quality over quantity at all times, a very inspiring article and so well written. Thank you.
Blogger’m 3 years ago here in Brazil and I’m still in the process of maturing, I have to confess that her article came at a perfect time, a time when I am making several changes to blogs to raise their professional level.
Thank you for dedicating so much time in research to produce this brilliant article. It took me an entire afternoon to read (between tasks of blogging), but earned and very worthwhile.
I do not know how I came to your blog, but I have come to stay. Hug! 🙂
Really useful information which I’m going to have to come back and read again.
Creating great content which is shareable is the key, as is finding the right niche – preferably one which can generate lots of traffic!
I think I’m going to write less and use more images 😉
Good stuff!
Cheers from Italy,
Alex
Great piece of writing. It takes almost one hour to read the whole post and learn several new things from the post. Thanks for the share.
Glen,
It is so strange how you find things online. I am currently creating a content site with videos teaching the techy side of online and was doing a little of research on “ping list”.
I knew I had the grand daddy of ping lists stored on my hard drive somewhere, but when I found it I thought I had better do some real research before I added that puppy to my new website.
So I ended up on Ann Hoffman’s blog where she wrote an article about how too much pinging can mark you as a spammer…In her article she linked to you…and that’s how I read your LONG article.
Thank you so much. This is just what I needed at the time I needed it.
I love the way you write…you are an inspiration to me. You have reminded me of the reason I want to create my site in the first place.
To help and inspire my readers. The money will come as long as I stay focused on my visitors and helping them…
I know there are tons of “How To” Videos out there…but I am not afraid because they are not doing the fantastic job I am going to do.
You also hammered home another point. Google traffic is great…but it needs to be an added bonus and not the determining factor of success.
You must focus very strongly on building a list…
Thank you so much
Deb Williams
As a newbie blogger, I find this information and the thoroughness and passion with which it was prepared to be useful, inspiring, and thought provoking. I am sure I will come back to this page many times to process and implement several of the suggestions.
THANK YOU!
Amazing article! Anyway I just wanted to comment about the 52 posts on problogger.net. OMG!
I like to write the article topic in full once, not 52 times! If that is not duplicated content I do not know what is? This kind of site bores me to death!
I have only just discovered this, a year late but it still rings incredibly true now. In fact shows how prescient you were when you wrote it. Actually, a year ago I wouldn’t have appreciated it as I didn’t have my blog then.
Do you have any plans at all to write an updated version? Would love to read your thoughts for the next 12 months and also – did you ever write that post on the impact of mobile?
Andrew
I didn’t, Andrew, but I’ll try to do an update in the near future 🙂
Thats really a great piece of writing.. Now the blogosphere is much more saturated as compared to its state 3-4 years ago..
I’ve just read that whole post and just have to say thanks. I think I may be spending the next little while reading a few more. I think your very last point about nerd fitness is the most relevant to me at the moment as I need to change how I blog I think.
Food for thought for sure. Thanks again for a great site!
Fantastic post.
I bet it’s going to be worthwhile!
To tell you the truth, when i landed on your blog, I didn’t expect much. After all there are plenty of webmarketing blogs, and most of them all say the same things…in 52 different articles. It’s actually the size of your articles that convinced me to read, that and the fact you answer to people who comment. Long in depth articles may not be what most people are looking for, but it’s what made me interested in your blog, and what will make me look forward to reading more of what you have to say on viper chill. I have always thought that a (relatively) small passionate audience is worth much more than a huge one you have no conection to.
I never reply to comments 😉
I hope your perspective has changed and you have stuck around…
Awesome post!
Did you do the graphics yourself? Loved ’em. 😉
I think a lot of businesses are starting to realize that it is not about just adding any old “content” to a blog. It has to have substance, personality and credibility and once those are satisfied people will share.
first i want to say thanks for detail write up. Actually i have one question about pinging that in most of the xml sitemap plugin have inbuilt feature to notify major search engine. So should we have to disable the feature in sitemap plugin for notification or leave it enabled with few proper pinglist which is inbuilt in wordpress . As i think that with both feature enabled, will create duplicate ping. i would love to hear your thought.
thanks
Wow, what an amazing post. It’s so long! These are great points that are still valid in today’s internet business.
Hi Glen,
I’d like to genuinely thank you for the amazing post, let alone all the wealth of information found on your blog.
This post has given me quite a bit of insight and has caused me think over my blogging strategies. I hope you keep up the good work. The fact that you are exactly my age and doing what I’ve been trying to do since I’ve been 18 is a huge inspiration to say the least.
Don’t stop the great work!
I’ve subscribed and look forward to more amazing content.
Sincerely,
Derek Moreau
[…] I have my own case studies to support the phenomenon, but Glen Allsop at Viperchill already prophesized this in April 2012 (an excellent read if you have a full hour to […]
Amazing article. This was worth every word. There is so much to think about, and I’m glad to have read the whole thing. It’s so true what you said about attention spans.
Glen, amazing post. I’m blown away by how much value and research you have shared for free here. Thank you. You, more than virtually anyone, walk the walk. Thanks!
Appreciate that, Jason!
Thank you for the info, very helpful. One of the things I would like to learn more about is how Google Ads for instance inadvertently display ads with grossly inappropriate content. A lyrics site I found in a search for a particular song I wanted to critique had x-rated language displayed and the advertisements showing were from Fortune 500 companies who I am quite sure would not approve of this association. Speaking of inappropriate advertising I’m not too crazy about your ‘got links’ image/ad?. Not sure where that originated from but It is disrespectful of women in my view. Thank you again for your information. All the best.
This is the Longest blog post i have ever read on a blog,And it worths.
I can’t even think about writing a article like this.
Brilliant post Glen, I believe in quality content however long. I love the reaction from others who struggle with long content only to realise that great content is worth every sentence. Thankyou looking forward to an update.
Meg
Damn Glen your content is fucking amazing!. I just had to leave a comment after reading this! Great insights and tips for everyone interesting in blogging and marketing.
I also wish there were more people interested in these kind of topics instead of the trash mainstream media spits out nowadays. But that’s probably not going to happen anytime soon :/. Saying you are generous by giving us this article for free would definately be an understatement.
You’re a great man Glen, thanks again!
Take care!
Simon
Thanks buddy, I really appreciate that!
Thanks for an article in depth. I like your informative, non-nonsense style of writing. Although long at times, you certainly know how to keep people interested. Well done!
I hope there comes a day when quality matters more than quantity. In the end, I think we are all better off with authenticity than with the flood of low-quality information.
I logically understand the importance of the email subscribes. Yet, somehow, I find it difficult to take it to the next level.
It’s hard to find educated people about this topic, however, you seem like you know what you’re talking about!
Thanks
Merely a smiling visitant here to share the love (:,
btw outstanding style and design .
Great article
Very clearly explanation of future of blogging
Thanks for sharing
It’s a long post, and helpful. I wonder if the owner of Buzzfeed,upworthy,distractify,viralnova have read the post!
This article is fantastic. Just fantastic.