by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig
Since 2009, I’ve been adding blogs to my RSS reader and curating and sharing the best content that I could find for writers. That content resides on the Writers Knowledge Base (which is a free and searchable resource for writers with over 30,000 links on it).
In that time, I’ve seen a lot of blog posts. A lot of things have puzzled me, delighted me, and frustrated me. Some of this is random but I’m sharing it in the hopes that it can help some writers here or that maybe I could hear y’all’s take on these things too. Am I the only one who’s seen or experienced this stuff?
White letters and black backgrounds hurt middle aged eyes. The number of sites…even professional publishing sites and highly-regarded authors…that use this theme is extraordinary. It’s difficult to fathom why anyone would want to risk alienating even a couple of potential readers by using this theme. Unfortunately, fellow mystery writers are especially fond of this theme. In my opinion, though, white on black isn’t mysterious…it’s painful. Because one blog’s content is ordinarily sound, I take the time to copy-paste it onto Word docs so that I can read it before curating it. But I regret the time it takes out of my day.
Tumblr posts aren’t fun to share. I have both a profound respect for the content on Tumblr and a profound dislike of Tumblr’s interface and platform. I can list a dozen examples of anonymous or semi-anonymous (first name only) writers there. This makes attributing credit for the writers’ work difficult… actually, I dislike LiveJournal for the same reasons. Hootlet doesn’t pick up blog titles there and I use Hootlet as a tool to share links. Google + won’t show any of Tumblr’s images because of some formatting glitch. It’s difficult to navigate within a site there. It would be wonderful if all these excellent writers would move to a more professional, better-formatted platform…perhaps one that showcases them, their writing, their names, and their covers.
Twitter traffic picks up over the holidays. I always schedule heavily during Easter, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, and Christmas, in particular. Are people lonely? Stressed from family visits? It seems they tend to turn to apps. This makes me a little sad. One year (2010 maybe?) I scheduled a break for myself on Twitter for much of December. My announcement was met by angry emails and DMs on Twitter… and not from folks who simply didn’t celebrate the holidays…from people who somehow relied on links as an important part of their day. The realization of the number of people who needed some form of distraction around that time of year has made me change my approach. Now I tweet more during the holidays.
Partial RSS feeds make reading blog posts much more time consuming and frustrating. And RSS feeds with poor titles and poor lead sentences mean that I don’t click over. Basically, if a reader is interested enough in our blog to subscribe to its feed, they’re saying that they’d like to read our content and would prefer to read it through an RSS feed reader (like Feedly). Creating an extra step is inconvenient for subscribers. If the worth of the content isn’t obvious, it’s too much of a time gamble to open it to skim it. Summary/partial views can be changed to full view through the WordPress admin window under settings/reading or through Feedburner). The only reason I can think of why a blogger might want a partial is if their site contains ads (because RSS means decreased page views). If we really want RSS subscribers to visit our site, we could give them incentives in our posts to drop by—by linking to other content on our site, for instance. Some people seem concerned that full views mean their content will be scraped by pirate sites. This may happen. But, to me, it’s worth the risk instead of potentially alienating subscribers. If you want the best of both worlds, “Partial RSS Feed vs. Full Feed” on the Blog Maven blog by Jeni Elliott has helpful suggestions at the end of the post.
Group bloggers and attribution. Many group bloggers may have no idea how they’re cheating themselves out of recognition or potential sales. Every week I’ll see a post on a group blog that has no byline and no link to the author’s online home base.
Repetitive Titles. Most popular title for blog posts I’ve seen: “What’s in a Name?” I’m trying to come up with an estimate and I want to say that I’ve seen at least a hundred or more blog posts with that title (all, obviously, on naming characters). Many blog post titles, in general, don’t adequately hook potential readers or hint at worthy content to follow.
Self pub may rule, but trad pub draws more eyeballs. Most popular tweets of the year…they’re always on agents. No matter what’s changed, no matter how independent the author population has become…agents still apparently have the power to fascinate somehow. I know that whenever I schedule a tweet with the word “agent” in it, the tweet will have the most click-through traffic for the day.
Blogs without author names are surprisingly frequent. There are many sites where the authors don’t provide their last names. To me, this seems to indicate the insecurity of so many writers. How will they sell their books when the time comes to sell? Maybe it’s best to pick a pen name and then have the full pen name on the site. After all, blogging is branding, ultimately, for many of us.
Disappearing blogs. An oddly recurring event—when a writer suddenly moves to another website or changes the design of their existing website…the site frequently goes dormant in two months. So exhausted with dealing with design or so intimidated by the professional appearance of their site that they can’t produce content for it any longer?
Some takeaways:
When creating a blog, consider readability as a factor for its design.
Consider the blogging platform itself and whether sharing content is easy for our readers. Consider whether attribution is even possible (is our name or pen name prominently displayed? Can a reader easily find us online…Twitter? Facebook? An email address?)
Consider allowing our RSS feed to include the entire text of the post instead of a portion. Or, if we only allow a portion to show, make sure our titles and the first couple of post sentences are stellar.
This, to me, is so important that I’m going to say it again, even though I’m repeating myself. If the purpose of the blog is for branding or as a platform, make sure your name or your pen name is easy to locate. A full name. Or a full pseudonym. Some sort of name.
When participating in a group blog or as a guest poster, make sure our contributions count. Put a short bio with links in the post footer or at least make sure we have a byline under the post title.
Consider using titles that accurately describe our content.
Have you noticed any of these issues online…or do you notice them but they don’t bother you much? Have you done any checkups on your blog to see if you could improve it in basic ways (blog titles, your bio, etc?)
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