In late 2013, I made a bold statement about resolutions and goals for the coming year. A close friend of mine made a statement about how “no one ever keeps those anyway,” so I set out to prove them wrong. I started writing daily on January 1st and kept pushing myself to write every morning from then on.

It was a great effort and, though I didn’t begin with such motives, I learned a great deal.

Lessons

The first lesson was one in prioritization. It’s true, you always make time for the things that matter most to you – if you say “I don’t have time for that” you really mean “I don’t care about that as much as I care about …”

Every demand on your time – work, family, hobbies, television, running, blogging – has some standing with you in terms of priority. Those who sleep in rather than run in the morning value sleep over fitness. Those who watch American Idol in the evening rather than read the newspaper value entertainment over information.

If you’re not writing, you’re doing something else that you value more than writing. Stop saying you “don’t have time,” because really, it doesn’t take that much. The truth is that you just don’t care as much about blogging as you do something else in your life.

That’s perfectly OK.

Some of my colleagues have picked on me for blogging daily. They’ve tried to guess at my motives or tried to mock my effort to produce meaningful content on a regular basis. I don’t hold any of this against anyone. I also don’t hold anyone’s lack of a blogging regimen against them, either. If I didn’t have the selfish motive above to drive me, I would never have gotten this far.

Value

The second lesson is in the inherent value of a product. When I started blogging every day, another friend challenged me to produce only quality content when I published. He alleged I’d be unable to produce meaningful material on such a rigorous schedule.

To a certain degree, he was right.

Often, I find myself faced with writer’s block. I have plenty of things I want to say, but I just can’t find the right words with which to say them. There are several posts that began as a draft on this site, only to languish for weeks before finally being deleted as I knew I’d never find the right words.

Some pieces I finally revisited and published. Others remain on my to-do list for the future. The point wasn’t always that I felt uncomfortable with writing on a topic, it was that I was trying to provide value for my readers.

The ironic thing is that some of my most polished articles fail to resound with anyone. I spend weeks – or in some cases months – perfecting a piece only to see it receive perhaps 5 views the day it’s published. It’s made me reevaluate the audience for whom I want to provide value – the handful of people who see a post at 8:05am when it’s fresh, or the crowds who find it thanks to Google months later when it becomes relevant once again.

I’ve come to embrace the idea of writing for an audience of just one or two and ignoring the other influences out there. Many of my pieces have been written for two people specifically:

• The individual facing a problem or a question today – often this is the developer who emailed me the night before or someone who filled out a contact form looking for help.
• The individual facing a problem or question next year who turns to Google – more often than not, this individual is me. My tech articles are less for others and more a way to write down something I’ve figured out so I can revisit the approach later when an issue comes back up.

By writing pieces to appeal to a mass audience (read: Twitter or Hacker News), I don’t adequately serve either of these individuals. I can never be all things to all people, so my goal has become to provide value for (at least) these two and pray that traffic and readership follows.

Traffic

I’ve also learned that traffic isn’t everything. In the early days, I was inspired by Chris Lema’s accounts of the million-visitor blog. Part of me (the vain part) wanted to achieve the same kind of success. I hoped that producing content daily, tweeting it at regular intervals, and pushing stories on sites like Hacker News would help bring in the readers.

It did, but not in the way I really wanted.

In 2013, my site received 52,000 visits in total – most of this due to two highly popular articles in May and November. ¹ By upping content production, I was able to boost my 2014 traffic to just shy of 100,000 visits.

While not quite a million-visitor site, doubling my site traffic in a year is still quite an accomplishment. Unfortunately, the majority of those visits – 75% to be exact – are first time visitors, many of whom won’t be back. They came in for one article or following a single reference and quickly left the site without interacting with the content or perusing my other work.

My preference isn’t for raw numbers, it’s for interaction. I’ve gathered several comments on articles that show the lengths to which people will go in a discussion – sometimes the comment threads are orders of magnitude longer than the original article. I absolutely love this! My hope and dream is to nurture a site where anyone can have a voice and can engage in meaningful dialogue on a topic.

It looks like this will bring in traffic, too, so it’s a win-win.

A Return to Long-Form

The down-side of blogging daily has been a decided watering-down of my content. Pieces that could go deeper on a topic, pull in charts and references, or even gather helpful illustrations are instead rushed into 350-word drive-bys that do little more than attract an eye or two when first published. In 2015 I’ll be revisiting the idea of publishing long-form content, taking longer to polish an article and pulling together ancillary resources to flesh things out more than they are.

On the one hand, this will mean more in-depth coverage of arguments, technical topics, or current issues. On the other hand, this might mean I won’t have fresh content for you every day of the week.

But that’s OK because when I do publish, it will be a meaningful piece you want to read.

Topics will still run the gamut of tech to business to politics to faith – the things that matter most – but will intentionally sacrifice frequency in the interest of quality.

The past year has seen incredible growth in the WordPress community, in the tech community, in the business space, and in the Church. It’s also seen amazing changes and progress on this site.

If the year ahead is even half as interesting, it will be a powerful thing to experience.

The post Lessons Learned from Daily Blogging appeared first on Eric A Mann.

Real-time Media

Twitter is a very real-time publication stream. You carefully craft a story or message and drop it into a river of ever-flowing content to be consumed by others.

It’s akin to sticking your head out the window of a moving car and yelling your message at bystanders on the sidewalk. The only people who ever know you said something are those who happened to be standing on that particular street at that particular time.

Yes, your followers (those who would frequent your street) can rewind things and see what you said before they got up that morning. Unfortunately that becomes a nearly impossible task as individuals’ list of accounts to follow continues to grow.

If your message is important, you might make a go of repeating it over and over again, hoping to catch a new crowd of followers each time. ¹

Unfortunately, this also leads to a phenomenon known as Twitterspam. If you follow certain accounts long enough, you’ll see their postings consist mostly of links to off-site content and no real interaction with the rest of the community. It dilutes your ability to convey messages effectively as the people you want listening are less likely to pay attention to a spammer.

Long-form Content

Blogging is more akin to writing prose and placing it into a time capsule. On the one hand, most sites receive a major influx of content when a new post goes live. This could be because they promote the new content on Twitter or through other social media. It could be due to RSS readers acknowledging the new content.

Frankly, it doesn’t matter. The real value in a blog is that content never disappears. Every word written is available essentially forever, and the cost involved with pulling that content back to the forefront is minimal. Unlike a realtime stream (Twitter), blogs provide a way to consistently access evergreen, long-form writing.

Unlike streams of information, blogs are a great way to collect a wealth of knowledge that might prove useful in the future. That said, too frequently referencing articles from your own site could be perceived as a form of Blogspam.

Like its Twitter-relative above, blogspam can be just as damaging to your ability to reach a target audience.

With both in mind, how can you best leverage a consistent publication calendar without also alienating your target audience?

The post Editorial Calendars and Unintentional Spam appeared first on Eric A Mann.

He convinced some students they were above rules as, according to his theory, nothing existed that wasn’t recognized by the story teller. It was a bit of an existential nightmare, and for his hard work at confusing (and in some cases, corrupting) young minds he was fired at the end of the year.

Still, his points have had me thinking for years. Not that my story is the one, only, true story of the universe, but in the context of viewing others as storytellers in their own right.

My Story

I’m sitting in traffic, drumming with frustration on the steering wheel because I’m running late, I can easily envision the entire story that’s led me to that point. I remember buying my car. I remember signing up to volunteer that day. I remember getting distracted by a challenging code puzzle. I remember rushing out the door and almost slipping on a patch of ice in the driveway. I remember the drivers who’d cut me off, those who’d let me merge, and the little old lady who blocked my turn and left me stuck at yet another red light.

The story about what led me to that light – to that moment – is rich and could fill mountains of pages if anyone cared to tell it. It’s also my story, so it’s something dear to me when I look back on it.

But if I look to my left or my right I see other drivers. Other individuals with stories of their own – some similar to mine, some unfathomably different. The light turns green, and they’re gone. Stories as mountainous as my own that will never intersect again and forever remain a mystery.

I watch a bus pass by, carrying with it a score of frustrations, hopes, fears, ambitions, and stories. Each and every one precious in its uniqueness and untellable in its scale. Just pausing for a moment to appreciate the grandiose nature of the world around me is breathtaking.

A honk sounds behind me and I realize, like the old woman before me, my daydreaming has stranded yet another driver at yet another light. I hurry through as the light fades to yellow and watch a woman behind me begin to drum with frustration on her own steering wheel.

I wonder what story led her to that moment.

The post Stories Abound appeared first on Eric A Mann.

I rented out meeting rooms and presentation venues, and invited professionals from around the area to attend seminars and workshops about content creation. Shorter sessions were just 2-3 hours and you usually left with a few bullet points about your brand’s character, tone, and at least 2 article ideas.

Longer sessions were all day, included lunch, and had you walking away with no less than 3, fully-fleshed-out articles.

All of my sessions included homework: the 30-days-of-blogging challenge.

The Challenge

Unlike my current aims of blogging every day, this challenge was not about publishing content on a consistent schedule. It was about producing content.

Every day ¹ you would sit down and write something. It could be a 100-word memo about a product, a 400-word summary of a sales meeting, a 1600-word description of your core business model, anything.

Then, the next day, you’d write something else.

None of this needed to be shared on your corporate site or published under your own name. Actually, I often helped students set up new accounts on Blogger or WordPress.com under pseudonyms so they could write anonymously. The aim wasn’t to take anything to market, it was to produce content and have your peers review it.

Our sessions consisted of explaining in detail your business, core competencies, and overall marketing strategy to a group of strangers. Then you pieced together the persona you wanted your brand to embody and the tone with which your writing would convey that persona.

Doing this as a group exercise, and allowing the same group to follow your work, established a certain level of accountability. It also gave you instant access to a group of people who could give you feedback about how genuine your brand felt through your writing.

Usually, after the 30 days were complete, you’d have maybe 3 articles that could be further refined and then published publicly to help establish your brand’s voice. After that, the trick was to keep writing regularly – even if not publishing – so you could maintain that voice.

Figure out your voice, then write everyday for a month. You don't need to publish daily, just write. @EricMann at @WordPressDC

— Anthony D Paul (@anthonydpaul) November 11, 2014

If you’re strategically building content, a large part of your strategy must be consistency. Not consistency in your publishing schedule, but in your means of communication.

The post Strategically Building Content appeared first on Eric A Mann.

That’s the most amazing thing, really. That the authors featured in the anthology are still technically novices. They haven’t achieved commercial success and are, as of yet, unpublished.

It was in the WotF anthology in 2002 that I discovered the work of Patrick Rothfuss. He included a single chapter from a book he’d been working on for years, and that short chapter took the grand prize for the yearly competition. It was fresh, riveting, and promised what would be a stellar novel to be published in the future.

So when I saw his first book, The Name of the Wind, at a Borders store a few years later I bought it immediately. I read it in spurts when I could find the time, devouring every fantastic page. To my surprise, though, the chapter he’d won the WotF competition with was nowhere to be found in the book; this was instead a chapter from the second novel in the series.

When that novel, The Wise Man’s Fear, came out I bought it immediately in ebook format (I didn’t want to wait for Amazon and Borders was out of stock), took an early day off work, and read the entire thing in one sitting. It was glorious!

I can count on one hand the number of authors whose work I thoroughly enjoy this much. London, Faulkner, Hemingway, Follett, and Rothfuss. ¹ So the opportunity to see one of them in person at a reading is something not to be missed.

Last night, I joined about 800 others at the Newmark Theater downtown to hear Patrick talk about his latest novella. We heard some fantastic music, listened to the first few pages of the book read aloud by the author, and laughed together at some truly insane jokes and commentary Mr. Rothfuss has written – I am neither dead nor too big to matter, but hope one day to write a book worthy of one of his reviews. ²

Seeing an icon from a distance is one thing. Meeting them in the lobby before they speak is something else. Being able to realize the person to whom you look up is human and, like you, struggles with human things is inspiring. It helps remind you that yes, normal people can be just as successful.

It also makes me want to write again.

Who do you look up to who you might be able to meet or at least see speak in person? How inspiring an experience would that be for you and your career? What’s holding you back from making it happen?

The post A Night with Patrick Rothfuss appeared first on Eric A Mann.

I’d usually pick a 31-day month for the challenge. It gave everyone involved at least one day they could slip – a holiday, a sick day, a much-needed day off. The objective wasn’t to drive new writers into the ground, it was to help people build up a wealth of content and establish daily habits of both writing and publishing their content.

This year, I decided to push myself even further with daily writing. Instead of 30 days with the potential of a skip day, I wanted to push for 365 consecutive days of content. A new post of at least 300 words every single day for a year. We’ve a week and two months to go, and thus far I’ve kept pace with my objective.

So let’s spice it up a bit.

NaNoWriMo

A close friend of mine introduced me to the National Novel Writing Month challenge in college. The goal is to write a new, 50,000-word story in one month. There isn’t a daily publishing requirements, just length and time requirements.

I failed in my first attempt back in 2002, mostly because I lacked discipline. I tried again in 2009, finally taking the time to schedule daily writing into my routine. I managed to pull of a 50,000+ word novel within the month, and subsequently published in in 5,000-word chunks on this site.

In 2010 I tried but failed to get past the first few chunks of writing, so I regrouped in 2011 with a team of writers. I challenged the Boy Scout unit I worked with to join and complete the challenge. To my surprise and excitement, one Scout joined and completed a novel in under a month!

This year, I’ve decided to make yet another attempt at writing a novel in a month – this time pulling along a few coworkers as I delve into the insanity that defines a rapid-writer’s routine. The blog will still feature new content every day, but hopefully with several thousand additional words of fiction as I go.

As I work towards my objective, I’ll publish chunks here as I go – assuming they’re relevant to the other content on the site.

The post Writing Challenges appeared first on Eric A Mann.

As a result, I still hold on to my first-generation Sony eReader – some of the books I own are only readable on that particular device.

I’ve also dabbled in the publishing world, so keeping an eye on the birth and evolution of digital rights management has been very interesting. This year, though, my mind has been on DRM more frequently than I expected.

My Ideas

I started a publishing company in 2007 because I had the lofty goal of writing and publishing my own book. In the past several years, I’ve published 4 titles under my own imprint – none of them written by me. I’ve also edited and contributed to several other titles, again, though, none authored by me.

I still write on a daily basis, and the long-term objective of writing and publishing a work of my own hasn’t waned at all. It’s just the market into which I’d be releasing it that’s changed.

We’re down to just a handful of brick-and-mortar booksellers, so most titles these days are released as both printed and digital editions to leverage the ubiquity of Amazon and electronic consumption. I’m not opposed to distributing my work electronically – considering you’re reading my blog on an electronic device that should be obvious – I just want a way to protect my copyright.

To that end, I’ve been brainstorming different ways to protect my work and, thus far, come up with just ideas. ²

Streaming

One avenue into which I haven’t looked thus far is the idea of streaming digital content to readers. With a stream, the content never really lives on the client device. It lives on your hosted server and is piped in realtime to an application over which you wield control.

You control the encoding, you control the client-side storage, you control the experience. On the surface, it feels like the optimum situation for delivering digital content in a safe-for-copyright manner.

Actually, Amazon is already working on ebook streaming.

As a reader, though, this feels like a crappy solution. I enjoy reading books because I can disconnect from the world and dive into a universe crafted by a talented author. I don’t want to be connected to an online service to read. I don’t want a gatekeeper somewhere making the decision about whether or not I can access a book today – with or without ads – or controlling the rate at which I pull down content.

My biggest fear, as a reader, is that Amazon (or whoever hosts a content streaming service) won’t be around in the future. As the holders of the keys to content I’ve purchased, their disappearance means I lose access to these titles, characters, and worlds I’ve paid good money for.

It raises the question of what exactly we buy when we turn over cash for a book. Do we buy unlimited access to that title, even if the actual content is physically owned by a third party? Do we own a discrete copy of that content?

These are questions I need to answer before either publishing my work (I have a lot of content ready to be released) or before I even engage in my next 3rd-party publication project.

The post Static Content and Real-time Streaming appeared first on Eric A Mann.

It was a fairly expensive furniture purchase, though looking back on it, we probably could have gotten away with a cheaper model.

Still, the many boxes arrived at the house, and we began the slow, steady process of assembling. It was a fine desk, so we made sure none of the boxes had been damaged during shipment and did a visual inspection of all the components. We even hand-polished a few of the facing pieces to make sure that was just dust on the desktop and not a large scratch.

For the first time, my dad actually sat and read the assembly directions before pulling out his tools. Everything seemed in order, and we dug in.

A few hours later, and most of the desk was assembled. It was built in two large pieces that, apart, took at least two people to maneuver. The entire L-shaped desk took at least three of us to get into position. The final (heaviest) piece to add on was the right-hand desktop.

We lifted it into place and rested the wall-facing side on the appropriate pegs. On the count of three, my brother and I eased the room-facing side down and …

It didn’t fit.

Half of the pegs lined up, half were off by just a hair. Enough that if you pushed just right and hit the desk in just the right place they might actually fall into place.

My brother did just that. Kneeling beside the desk, he threw his palm against the desktop. Then his fist. Then his elbow. Then … pop. The desktop was in place. ¹

We didn’t discover until a few years later that we’d assembled the desktop backwards. The pegs weren’t meant to line up the way we had them. A too-heavy printer caused things to pop apart again, and we noticed the penciled-on directions to line up the opposite side against the wall.

We popped off the desktop, turned it around, and voila! It fit perfectly.

Does It Fit?

Those of us with blogs or product lines or marketing messages often have a piece of material we want to put out that doesn’t quite fit with the rest of our message. You can force it and massage it into place today, but when placed under pressure years from now, that heavy-handed fitting will pop apart.

The next time you’re prepping an article, a newsletter, a product proposal, or anything with your brand stamped on it stop and ask yourself: does it fit? Or am I trying to force this into place?

The post Does It Fit? appeared first on Eric A Mann.

It’s a great idea, but sometimes there’s a minor detail in implementation that we miss: deduplication.

Pagination

WordPress ships automatically with a “sticky posts” feature that helps deal with featured content and automatically handles deduplication. Editors can flag a post as being sticky, and WordPress will automatically pull it out of the chronological feed and dump it at the top of the queue.

The catch: your first page of queried posts will now have n + m elements: the standard posts_per_page amount plus all of your sticky content. The advantage, though, is that your sticky posts won’t show up twice as readers page through content.

Sticky posts are great for featured content if you can solve the pagination problem.

Deduplication

If you roll your own featured post functionality, you can more easily solve the pagination problem (posts_per_page is respected automatically), but you’re left determining a better way to de-duplicate your post content. There isn’t much of a problem with a post showing up on page 1 (featured) and then later on page 50 – readers don’t often get that deep into pagination unless they’re looking for something, and it’s rarely the content they already had on page 1.

But when a new post is also featured, the chances of it showing up twice within the first few pages of your chronological feed are high. You never want readers to see this, for example:

CNN wrote a great article about HP – but there’s absolutely no reason to list the same coverage of the same story twice. These links appear to be for different articles, given their differing images, update times, and Facebook share counts. The links go through to nearly identical articles – with the similarity down to a 1-day difference in publication date. The first article was a solo post; the second a collaboration that re-uses the majority of the content from the first verbatim.

This is an attempt by CNN to make it feel to readers that there’s more coverage on an event than really exists.

The Consequence

A reader coming to your site is looking for unique content – your personal take on an event or idea, breaking coverage of some interesting news, or just prose that’s unique from what they’ve read elsewhere. Seeing the same content on pages 1 and 50 of your feed is disconcerting if anyone notices.

Seeing duplicated content on page 1 of your site is frustrating and demonstrates a failure on your part to understand the goals and interests of your customers.

There is no faster way to drive content away from your site than self-plagiarism. Pointing two different snippets (excerpts, links, etc) to the same content is a fantastic way to make it appear like you have more content than you do. It’s also a great way to tell your readers you care more about traffic than providing value to them, a message they’ll understand loud and clear when they leave you for another source of information.

The post Deduplication and Self-Plagiarism appeared first on Eric A Mann.

You can put your blog on WordPress.com for free, but then you’re limited to what their infrastructure will allow and the set of themes/features you can use.

You can self-host your blog for as little as $5 thanks to companies like Linode and Digital Ocean. The opportunity cost of self-hosting is huge, though, as you become your own sysadmin. You have to both install and maintain your own software. Security patches are your responsibility. Major traffic spikes that take your site down – or an inevitable hack – suck hours out of your week.

Managed hosts like WPEngine ¹, Pagely, and PressLabs help lift the burden of systems maintenance from you. But they’re not cheap either.

Any way you slice it, blogging on a space you own and control costs money. Blogging isn’t free.

Covering Costs

There’s a constant battle between the costs involved with running a website – hosting, domain names, DNS hosting ², CDN, system backups, security monitoring.

My site is running free WordPress on a comped WPEngine account, and it still costs quite a deal of money to keep things going. If you run your own site, you’re likely in the same boat.

For the longest time, I’ve considered running this site to be a sunk cost. I carve out some of my monthly budget to keep everything lit up and running. Others turn to things like page ads to cover their server costs; for some it’s a reasonable way to break even. Others actually come out ahead.

I hate advertising, though, and won’t throw new ads up on this site.

Instead, I want to try something a bit more inventive: patronage.

Patrons

Once upon a time, artists made their living solely through the financial graces of well-off beneficiaries who wanted to enrich the world with further art.

I’d like to expand this site to a more contributor-driven model, but will likely need to (eventually) move to a paid hosting platform to do that.

I’d like to serve all content 100% of SSL, but need to purchase the appropriate certificates to do that.

I’d like to utilize more frequent backups and security audits to ensure content is always safe and always available – this would cost $40/month with VaultPress.

I’d like to begin pulling in (commissioned) photography to make the site more visually engaging, but have no budget to do that.

I’d like to do all of the above without either resorting to ad sales or exhausting my personal finances to do so. I’m turning to Gittip as a potential ³ way to help fund this.

Gittip is a patronage site. You can subscribe to automatically donate a fixed, weekly amount to anyone you want. It can be as little or as large as you’d like and is used to fund everything from blogs to vlogs to open source projects.

My goal is $25/week. ⁴ If just five people want to pitch in, that’s an espresso a week to help keep the site going.

Think we can do it?

The post Blogging Patrons appeared first on Eric A Mann.