There are a lot of good resources out there which tell you how to blog successfully. I have recently started to collect them on my Wiki page “Successful Blogging”, which I will update regularly. Unfortunately, they rarely tell you how to cope with the evolution of a Weblog.
Category Marketing
Learning to Cope with the Evolution of a Weblog
At February 13th, it will be 4 years that I posted my first blog entry – I am still lovin’ it! Let me tell you about some of the changes I had to deal with in those 4 years and what you can do about them.
The most important changes were:
- My Weblog has moved to different domains (from zzoss.com to sandrozic.de to groganz.com as of today).
- I changed the software several times (from b2 to a self-made eZ Publish-based blog to WordPress).
- There were times when I blogged actively (~5 blogs per week) and less so (1 entry per month).
- My focus on certain topics varied over time (e.g. from general LAMP-based Web development to ECM, from development to marketing).
Points 1. and 2. lead to the fact that I repeatedly lost some link love, especially on Google and Technorati, because Trackbacks and Pingbacks got lost. Just recently, I managed to import all posts I wrote in my first 2 years of blogging – it’s amazing to see that some of them made it back to be listed among the most visited pages in my site stats (mostly referrals from Google).
What’s most unfortunate is that I could not recover comments to old postings. Well, I could, manually, but that would mean a lot of work. Lost comments is like lost friends.
If you want to avoid the same mistakes, make sure
- to keep your blog at the same domain at all times to keep your permalinks valid,
- to choose a Weblog software that is well supported to avoid migration problems.
When it comes to point 3., it has a lot to do with point 4.: The level of active blogging correlated with what I did. I blogged more actively while I was self-employed, simply to raise awareness which would lead to consulting contracts. After getting employed, there were times when I was simply buried with work that did not require me to blog.
Concerning point 4., I believe that there is nothing you can do about the shifting focus of what you write about. I even think that Weblogs are there to show how individuals change over time and how their interests change.
If I narrowed down my blog to one specific topic (e.g. Open Source ECM), it would not be in sync with my personality. My general interest is in being open and combining Open Source software with the knowledge society. That’s a rather broad topic, but also a thrilling conjunction where most new things happen these days.
The only problem I see is that my tagcloud does not reflect the change of interest. Some tags (e.g. “pear”) appear much too prominent, although they are outside of my scope of interest these days. Hm, I should get a chronological slider for my tagcloud, just as they did here to display Microsoft’s evolution based on a tagcloud.
In the end, it’s all about transparency and authenticity in the blogosphere, including the ability to deal with changes. Blogging is a lot about learning to cope with evolution, reflecting upon what happened and letting others know how to avoid some of the traps. Hope that helps!
Pinpoint Your Marketing Message
This is about a simple truth, often heard, often neglected.
Especially start-ups talk too much. Look at the first page of a young company’s site and you’ll get plenty of information, but the visitor will end up asking herself: how can I actually benefit from what they offer? Unexperienced entrepreneurs often fail at boiling down their marketing message to 3 or 4 sentences. They live in imaginary skyscrapers touching the moon where the elevator ride takes days.
Writing a song
Good marketing has a lot in common with popular music:
“One of the most brilliant points of humanity is when you take a complex situation, and describe it in a sense that’s simplistic enough for people to grasp it very easily. That’s amazing, really, and that’s what I try to do with songwriting – I try to take a big subject and condense it down into something very simple, maybe just a phrase, or a line, or a couple of lines that says everything. That’s a tough challenge, and that’s what keeps bringing me back to writing music. It’s never easy, which means there’s always a challenge to come up with something new and different.” (Geoff Tate)
Less is more
Just try it: explain your product in 30 seconds to strangers and make them understand. Less is more. It’s damn hard, but it’s worth it. That exercise will help you to take an outsider’s view of your product, to better reflect upon what you are offering. It’s much too common that start-ups feel overwhelmed by their own product and don’t realize that it’s not about technology, but the benefits it offers to potential buyers. Looking at your product from the outside makes you better understand your potential customers. It will make the difference and provide a basis for others to choose or reject your products.
All is less
Of course, there’s always the challenge that you need to adapt your core marketing message over time, as the market and your product changes. You’ll see that changing an existing clear marketing message is possible, while changing a flabby we-can-do-it-all statement is impossible because you can only restate your omni potential hopes or downsize your message. All is less. Indifference makes you inflexible for change.
Video White Papers
Via Copyblogger, I found this entry about educational marketing with so called video white papers:
A few years ago, I began taking the concepts used in developing white papers for clients and applying them to video-based presentations. Not really canned slide-shows, not really product demos, and not just sales presentations, but a mix of the three. I started calling them video white papers, because like a good white paper, they focused on the audience and their issues, not the authors and all the amazing benefits they have to offer. My goal was to provide an alternative to a typical presentation and demo.
Open Marketing and the Ethics of Sharing
Zend recently decided to not call themselves the creators of PHP anymore. This change in Zend’s marketing has been long overdue. It caused friction with some PHP core developers over the past years that spread into the PHP community.
Others also make mistakes
It is not that Zend is the only company in the Open Source market that made some marketing mistakes in the past. MySQL for example had their CTO Monty Widenius talk fancier then usual in an internally conducted interview and the answers did not sound like he really said them. It made known members of the MySQL community wonder who kidnapped Monty.
Sex sells?
To some marketing experts, the Open Source community might seem like a mine-field with many traps, because there are just too many critical thinkers in the community. It is so because they don’t fully understand the ethics of sharing.
Marketing and ethics – how does that go together? Isn’t marketing based on emotions and instincts? Catching you with the “sex sells” trick? Open Marketing is different – yet still emotional.
Have a lot of fun
Open Marketing addresses the intellect, because in Open Source it’s all about transparency: transparent software (code), transparent collaboration (mailinglists), transparent deficiency (bugs), …
Open Marketing also addresses emotions, because it’s fun. After your Linux installation, you read “Have a lot of fun”. Open Source developers identify with what they do, because they believe in their skills, the good work of the team, the value of sharing. They care about their work and the results – isn’t that emotional?
Hubs and innovation
Intellect and emotions come together in the ethics of sharing. It’s supporters believe that they can still gain although sharing, or better: they gain because they share. The more you share, the more you become the center of communication flows in the Open Source community. Speaking in terms of communication theory, you become a hub in a communication network.
What does that have to do with Open Marketing? It means that the correct marketing is vital to an Open Source company because it needs to be one of the main hubs in the communication flow of the Open Source community it targets at. Otherwise, the company will slowly loose it’s innovative power and market share respectively.
Proprietary vs. Open Marketing
The ethic of sharing is not so much about naive persons longing to be good, instead it is at the heart of the Open Source business, it is egoistic as well as altruistic at once, intellectual and emotional, and the basis for making money.
To summarize: Open Marketing is just as “copyleft” to the traditional marketing, as the GPL is to proprietary software licensing. It is not about illusions, it is about realities. In that sense, Zend just fixed a bug in their marketing and move from a sometimes proprietary style marketingto a better open marketing. Welcome back to reality!
Sandro Groganz 