I think the tribal aversion of engineers to marketing is coming out in force here.
Being authentic is wonderful. Of course, we know authenticity is prized by this community (and many others). So if we get up on a soapbox and say "Be authentic!", are we being authentic or are we marketing?
I think the answer is "both".
The prior post rubbed me wrong not because it was "Give people what they want!" and not because it was introspective, but because it seemed to glorify pageviews for the sake of pageviews, as opposed to there being some strategy to actually create value. If folks had perceived value creation, they probably wouldn't have cared if titles were optimized for their interests.
I'm not particularly enthusiastic about personal promotion via scaring people into thinking Facebook exists to out gay people, but at the bottom of that post, there was a brief aside about how you should take the hint if people retitle your post when tweeting it. That is a SOLID piece of concrete, actionable advice about writing good titles, which is a core competency for marketing It also provides value to all parties. There is a reason I don't title my blog posts "Something I thought today."
I think if people perceived the posts as "creating more value than they captured", they would have no problem whatsoever with optimizing the execution of them.
Read the first article - I think there is more actionable and useful stuff in there that people just starting out can use.
But I think I overshot my targets and my attempt at exposure is leading to a backlash. I'll just stop talking now and go off and write my next article, which will be more 'me'.
Thank you. If I'm reading your blog, it's because I want to hear what you have to say, not because I want to be pandered to. Write what you want to write, and I'll take it or leave it. Attention-whoring gets you looks, but it builds no real value; writing about what interests you -- while it can be hit or miss -- does.
"If I'm reading your blog, it's because I want to hear what you have to say, not because I want to be pandered to."
Claiming authenticity and claiming you have no underlying motive are powerful mainstream marketing techniques. I doubt the motivations of this author are any different than the motivations of the other author that admitted he was trying to manipulate us. This author is just taking advantage of our gullibility whereas the other author was pointing it out. Nobody likes to hear they've been manipulated, but which is really the more valuable message?
There's a reason why TV commercials don't start out with "The purpose of this commercial is to manipulate you into buying this product."
Well- I'm not impressed. This post provided no insight to me besides the message "Interesting posts get lots of views" and "I can get as many posts as some guy who spams on my website by being me"
Those two messages seem very irrelevant to my life. The post didn't even have an interesting story =/
If anyone got something better than that out of the post, please tell me because this is at the top of HN and I don't know why. No rudeness intended.
Ironic that his follow up post about just being 'you' also just happened to pander to the HN crowd which as a result will probably bring him another 25K plus in traffic?
Simply writing and waiting for the traffic to roll in is unrealistic. You can still author great content and promote it via social/news/blog platforms. Just because you market yourself well doesn't make your content crap.
That's the funny thing, Johns 'Ikea' post, in spite of not being of much practical use to me, as opposed to Max' post, will actually get me to visit his site more often rather than less, simply because it was genuine.
I read for all kinds of reasons, sometimes to further my business goals, sometimes to learn. The simple fact that you'd go out of your way to get the answer to a question that bugs you really impresses me. That's exactly why I am a programmer to begin with, the kid in my just simply never stops wondering about questions like that and every now and then I have time enough to find the answer to a few of those.
So, likely your next post will be inspirational in some other sense.
I've written several blog entries where I say, basically, that the blog is for me. If the rest of you like it, fine, but that's not the point.
I find the truth is a little more complex, however. Analytical guys being what they are, I look at my blog stats from time to time. (Look! Shiny numbers and graphs!) When I start doing this too much, then I end up trying to "game" the system, and my writing goes downhill.
So I had a very visceral response to John's post: if you really are just writing "you", then you aren't looking at your stats (and not caring whether other people do or not) If, however, you're looking to the community for validation (and don't we all do that to some degree)? That's when you start writing posts that are basically "Look at me! I'm much more honest/trustworthy/humble than that other guy"
Write for you, yes. But if you tell us too many times "I write for me" then you're really not writing for you anymore, are you?
Sorry if that sounded like Mr. Asshole Guy. Like I said, the criticism comes from my doing the same thing.
Looks like you're overreacting here. All John said that he didn't go out of his way to get more pageviews. I think it's different to writing for yourself.
At first I took it all at face value. Gradually I started hating the apparent dominance of snake-oil-selling bloggers. Then I decided that there was more to it than I first thought and am preparing a strategy that fits in blogging with my other goals.
Consider: what is the art of promotion, but another form of power? It can be abused, just like programming skills can be abused for malicious purposes, but it can also be applied to contribute to other efforts.
Blogging is a worthy cross-promotional tool, and it could give you the star power necessary to start a community or a collaborative project from scratch. And in the meantime, ad monetization gives a little bit of reward for building a strong site.
And you don't have to work within the "make regular posts on vapid topics" cycle to succeed: Good posts on niche subjects can go a long way, especially if you stick to making them search-friendly "evergreen" articles and not pure news/rumor/opinion. While you can't compete with the likes of Demand Media on quantity, you can exploit specialty subjects far better.
I think Max Klein's posts are more about "learn the tricks how to get 50000 page views on will", as opposed to "write good posts and they'll come"
Edit: studying at school also doesn't create value by itself, and many people never get much value from their studies, but these who know for what they learn get the most
Well, Max Klein was also being himself and was posting things he considered interesting. Even though he himself thinks he was manipulating people, I don't actually think he was manipulating anyone but himself.
I just wanted to say, because I did a bunch of blogging recently about how you can drive traffic deliberately by picking fights, and did it while driving traffic deliberately by picking some fights: in the past I was getting these occasionally 10K+ pageview days just by being me (which is small compared to the 50K+ these guys are talking about), and then sort of either graduated or devolved (depending on your frame of reference) to getting similar numbers deliberately. Basically I figured out what was happening, out of curiousity, and once I had figured it out, that meant I then had the ability to do it deliberately. So now, sometimes, I do.
I think the "tribal aversion of engineers to marketing" thing is very valid - being able to drive traffic is useful, and engineers seem to think that building systems that reward driving traffic (such as Google) makes you a better person than using such a system successfully (if you want to make money with Google, you're going to need to drive some traffic). It's such an arbitrary thing. If the system is worth building then it must be worth using too.
My 'hobby' site gets around 4.5m page views a month. It makes a bit of money, but not enough to live off.
It has, however, been the main reason i've got my past few jobs. Having something that you can point to that has some sort of impact can open a lot of doors.
[+] [-] patio11|16 years ago|reply
Being authentic is wonderful. Of course, we know authenticity is prized by this community (and many others). So if we get up on a soapbox and say "Be authentic!", are we being authentic or are we marketing?
I think the answer is "both".
The prior post rubbed me wrong not because it was "Give people what they want!" and not because it was introspective, but because it seemed to glorify pageviews for the sake of pageviews, as opposed to there being some strategy to actually create value. If folks had perceived value creation, they probably wouldn't have cared if titles were optimized for their interests.
I'm not particularly enthusiastic about personal promotion via scaring people into thinking Facebook exists to out gay people, but at the bottom of that post, there was a brief aside about how you should take the hint if people retitle your post when tweeting it. That is a SOLID piece of concrete, actionable advice about writing good titles, which is a core competency for marketing It also provides value to all parties. There is a reason I don't title my blog posts "Something I thought today."
I think if people perceived the posts as "creating more value than they captured", they would have no problem whatsoever with optimizing the execution of them.
[+] [-] maxklein|16 years ago|reply
But I think I overshot my targets and my attempt at exposure is leading to a backlash. I'll just stop talking now and go off and write my next article, which will be more 'me'.
[+] [-] daeken|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] briansmith|16 years ago|reply
Claiming authenticity and claiming you have no underlying motive are powerful mainstream marketing techniques. I doubt the motivations of this author are any different than the motivations of the other author that admitted he was trying to manipulate us. This author is just taking advantage of our gullibility whereas the other author was pointing it out. Nobody likes to hear they've been manipulated, but which is really the more valuable message?
There's a reason why TV commercials don't start out with "The purpose of this commercial is to manipulate you into buying this product."
[+] [-] axod|16 years ago|reply
Huh? 37signals and similar do pretty well out of it.
[+] [-] dbz|16 years ago|reply
Those two messages seem very irrelevant to my life. The post didn't even have an interesting story =/
If anyone got something better than that out of the post, please tell me because this is at the top of HN and I don't know why. No rudeness intended.
[+] [-] Retric|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josefresco|16 years ago|reply
Simply writing and waiting for the traffic to roll in is unrealistic. You can still author great content and promote it via social/news/blog platforms. Just because you market yourself well doesn't make your content crap.
[+] [-] jacquesm|16 years ago|reply
I read for all kinds of reasons, sometimes to further my business goals, sometimes to learn. The simple fact that you'd go out of your way to get the answer to a question that bugs you really impresses me. That's exactly why I am a programmer to begin with, the kid in my just simply never stops wondering about questions like that and every now and then I have time enough to find the answer to a few of those.
So, likely your next post will be inspirational in some other sense.
Keep them coming, and I'll definitely be reading.
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|16 years ago|reply
I find the truth is a little more complex, however. Analytical guys being what they are, I look at my blog stats from time to time. (Look! Shiny numbers and graphs!) When I start doing this too much, then I end up trying to "game" the system, and my writing goes downhill.
So I had a very visceral response to John's post: if you really are just writing "you", then you aren't looking at your stats (and not caring whether other people do or not) If, however, you're looking to the community for validation (and don't we all do that to some degree)? That's when you start writing posts that are basically "Look at me! I'm much more honest/trustworthy/humble than that other guy"
Write for you, yes. But if you tell us too many times "I write for me" then you're really not writing for you anymore, are you?
Sorry if that sounded like Mr. Asshole Guy. Like I said, the criticism comes from my doing the same thing.
[+] [-] alexro|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chipsy|16 years ago|reply
At first I took it all at face value. Gradually I started hating the apparent dominance of snake-oil-selling bloggers. Then I decided that there was more to it than I first thought and am preparing a strategy that fits in blogging with my other goals.
Consider: what is the art of promotion, but another form of power? It can be abused, just like programming skills can be abused for malicious purposes, but it can also be applied to contribute to other efforts.
Blogging is a worthy cross-promotional tool, and it could give you the star power necessary to start a community or a collaborative project from scratch. And in the meantime, ad monetization gives a little bit of reward for building a strong site.
And you don't have to work within the "make regular posts on vapid topics" cycle to succeed: Good posts on niche subjects can go a long way, especially if you stick to making them search-friendly "evergreen" articles and not pure news/rumor/opinion. While you can't compete with the likes of Demand Media on quantity, you can exploit specialty subjects far better.
[+] [-] alexro|16 years ago|reply
Edit: studying at school also doesn't create value by itself, and many people never get much value from their studies, but these who know for what they learn get the most
[+] [-] Confusion|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] galactus|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yes_its_giles|16 years ago|reply
I think the "tribal aversion of engineers to marketing" thing is very valid - being able to drive traffic is useful, and engineers seem to think that building systems that reward driving traffic (such as Google) makes you a better person than using such a system successfully (if you want to make money with Google, you're going to need to drive some traffic). It's such an arbitrary thing. If the system is worth building then it must be worth using too.
[+] [-] sailormoon|16 years ago|reply
Monetary value of those uniques: $0.00
Self esteem/social confirmation/confidence boosting value of those uniques: very high.
[+] [-] goatforce5|16 years ago|reply
It has, however, been the main reason i've got my past few jobs. Having something that you can point to that has some sort of impact can open a lot of doors.
[+] [-] numbchuckskills|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] judofyr|16 years ago|reply