Consistency

Because your blog shares many attributes of your local newspaper, think for a moment about what the newspaper look like. It has a masthead, headings, and stories. It has a certain number of columns, fonts of a certain size and type, and stories categorized within sections. It looks that way every day. It is consistent.

On the other hand, imagine what you’d think of a newspaper that placed random obituaries in the sports section, put the top story of the day in the classifieds section, or used random fonts and character sizes across an ever-changing number of columns.

You wouldn’t have a lot of respect for that newspaper, would you? It would not be taken seriously by most readers. They would ignore it, even though it may be incredibly informative and insightful once they get past the layout. They will ignore your blog, too, unless you learn a lesson from the papers:

• consistency makes a good first impression.

That means your entries have to look smart and interesting, even before the reader scans a single headline. And your entries must be readable, especially if you are quoting a source and explaining or arguing with that source.

This can be done through the use of bolds, indentations, color (either font or background) or as many ways as you can imagine.

The only limitations are your imagination and a respect for consistency. What works for one entry should be made to work for all. If a specific layout does not work for most entries, keep experimenting until you find one that does. Your readers will appreciate it.

Your blog entries, laying one after the other on a page, will present the same visual opportunity to make a first impression as the consistent fonts and columns of a newspaper. That means your entries should all look similar. They should have the same font in the same size. The headlines and links should be treated the same way all down the page. If you use images, they should appear in the same place in each entry. The entries, at least on the front page, should be the same size, with no entry so large that it takes up the whole front page unless that’s the only story you’re doing for the day – and you do it every day.

But how do you do that, since you’ll not have the same amount to say about every subject or the same number of images to present? Extra commentary should be handled, like newspapers do it, “behind the fold.”

Take a look at a few of the favorite blogs you chose earlier and notice a linked line at the bottom of many stories. It may say, “More behind the fold” or simply, “Read more.” Notice how each of the entries looks the same, with no long entries taking up the entire page. Notice how if a story does not interest you (and not every one will) you can see the next story without paging down. That blog realizes that if a long story does not interest a reader, she will most likely not skip to the next one unless she can see it; she will likely surf away instead. If it does interest the reader, the rest of the story is only a click away.

Whatever blog software you choose (and we’ll review a few types later) should allow you to put data behind the fold, saving your front page for multiple stories, just like a newspaper does.

Remember, the New Media will take the best from the Old Media, and a consistent and serious presentation is one of the best lessons you can learn from them.

Blog Entries, Content, and Commentary

What stories are to a city newspaper, blog entries are to your Blog Empire. And while your layout is important, readers will not return again and again to admire your layout or ruminate over your clever title. They’ll return again and again to read your writing or view your artwork or check the links that you provide. In other words, while they may read because of your layout, they will return because of your entries.

An entry is simply a published piece of material, and your readers will have definite expectations for your entries that you will need to meet, again and again, in order to woo them into coming back tomorrow. Luckily, most of those expectations are set by you in prior entries. Those expectations are insight, relevance, timeliness, accuracy, and consistency.

Insightful and Unique Content

Whether your blog provides photographs of the rain forest, reviews of Pacific Northwest restaurants, or the largest collection of ethnic jokes on the planet, your readers expect that every time they come there, they’ll find something new, unique, and worthwhile. They’ll expect to find something they can’t find anywhere else or find by themselves without searching all over.

In short, they’ll expect you to provide insightful and unique content on a certain consistent subject or issue. Your insight and your dedication to providing quality are what will draw them back.

Links and Commentary

On a news blog, for example, your readers expect that your commentary will provide interesting and relevant news, probably with a link to an original story or a source site. They will also expect you to provide expertise that they do not possess, information they have not found elsewhere, and an up-to–the-minute take on relevant trends and rumors.

They want to read the entry and come away feeling they now know more than they did, that they learned something interesting, and that they leave with a reason to return.

A blog that reviews restaurants will meet those same expectations in a different manner. Timeliness is less a factor – restaurants don’t change as quickly as the daily news – but relevance and thoroughness become more important. Your readers are not going to return for your reviews of Portland’s collection of Subway restaurants, nor for your fifth review of Kell’s Irish Pub, even if you think it the best place in the world to eat. They demand an expanding collection of useful content, and they want each entry to tell them everything they need to know to make an enjoyable dining decision. They want you to be clear, honest, and thorough.

Perhaps your blog is a reference blog, collecting and publishing links by subject. While readers may not have expectations for your commentary, they will expect the links to be accurate and present a thorough overview of the subject from all angles – or at least from the angle your readers have come to expect from prior commentary. Consistency and thoroughness are again the watchwords.

• Whatever the theme of your blog, your readers will expect every entry to be timely, relevant, and accurate.

Earning and Protecting Your Reputation

Reputation is Everything! 

Whether or not your brand is relevant to your content, it will quickly develop one relevant attribute: a reputation. Everyone who reads your blog will come away with an impression, either good or bad. They will like it or not.

Surprisingly, that’s not the most important issue for your Blog Empire, because no reader, not even your most loyal, is going to like or agree with everything you say. The important issue is whether that reader believes your blog to be important.

If a reader does not find a blog important, they will probably not return even if they liked a story or two: there are simply too many other blogs to see.

If a reader finds your blog insightful, entertaining, and relevant, they will return even though they may disagree with your commentary or don’t like your layout.

In order to be a serious empire, your blog must exude seriousness.

That doesn’t mean your subject must be serious, but you must be serious about your subject. For political and technology blogs, that means accuracy and timeliness.

Rumors must be noted as such. Opinions must be noted as such. You can be a partisan – in fact, your theme may be a very partisan view of something - but you’ve got to be fair to your readers, who will form an opinion about your subject based on what you say.

• If your blog is an art blog, you’ve got to focus on quality.
• If your blog features model trains, entries about your daughter’s dance recital will lose readers.
• If your blog is a reference or news blog, you’ve got to be thorough.

Once your reputation is established, readers will come to your blog to see what you have to say because they will expect you to know more than them. If you miss the big story or are shown by later events to be completely off-the-wall when you said you were certain, they may not return.

Reputation is everything, so as you build your Blog Empire, remember what you want a reputation for and consistently strive to earn it.

Building Your Blog Empire

Deciding What Type of Empire You’ll Build

So you want to build an empire. Unlike historical empires that relied on unique military tactics, advanced technology, and slave labor, your empire will rely on a single person: you. You’ll design it, you’ll build it, and you’ll people it with readers who return to it day after day, becoming in a small sense virtual citizens of your Blog Empire and eventually your happy customers.

• You’ll use the same tactics as others, but you’ll use them more efficiently.
• You’ll use the same infrastructure as others, but you’ll use it more effectively.
• You’ll compete with other empires for your readers’ time, and you’ll do so successfully.

A Blog Empire is an empire of customer service and you will not only be its ruler, you will be the servant of all who enter it. Sound like fun? It can be, if you design your empire with one person in mind: you.

It seems a dichotomy to say that a Blog Empire should be built around the provider rather than the customer, but there’s a simple reason for it:

• It will be you who updates it day after day.
• You will be the editor, the designer, and the main focus of the site.

Your expertise, your hobby, or your insight will provide the service that the citizens of your Blog Empire want. You can’t sell from an empty cart and you’ve got to be in it for the long haul.

That means you’ve got to provide content that features what you know and what you love. You will be the key, and every part of your Blog Empire will be designed with that in mind.

However, before you can lay the foundations, we need to review a few options. Let’s take a look at a few successful blogs and generate some ideas. Then we’ll come back for a good look at the one who can make it all work: you.

The Components of a Blog Empire

A Blog Empire, like any other business, is made up of three major components: a supplier, buyers, and the products for sale. But a blog in many cases differs from the average business because you are bringing together two sets of customers and delivering two sets of products. And you’re not even selling the main item you produce.

Sound confusing? It’s really not.

Let’s take a look at the component parts and illustrate just how simple it is. The first component is a supplier. That’s you. It is your words, your opinion, your research, and your art which can bring thousands or even millions of readers to your blog. You will be the attraction, the broker, and the Emperor of your Blog Empire. If it weren’t for you, the blog wouldn’t exist. Because of who you are, what you know, and what you do, it can thrive.

The second component is a buyer, a customer. While the vast majority of your customers will be your readers, other customers will include companies that pay you to feature their links and advertisements on your blog. “Traffic” (those millions of readers out there who care about what you say) is the lifeline of your site: you’ve got to find them and bring them in. Once they are there, your advertising customers will pay for access to your reading customers, and your reading customers will pay for your information and merchandise.

The final component is a product. Like all businesses, yours can’t exist without a product to sell. But what do you sell when you’re giving your opinion away for free on a blog? The first product you sell is yourself: your opinions and your expertise. Without selling yourself to your readers, you will have no customers. They may not always pay you directly (though we’ll see that in many cases, they will) but if they don’t buy what you’re saying, they will not buy anything else.

The second product you sell is your space. You lease it to advertisers who will pay you to put information in front of your millions and millions of readers. Whether text links or flashing popup banner ads, your advertisers will pay you for a small part of your readers’ attention.

The final product you sell is your merchandise. With a properly-branded name and a reputation for excellence, your readers will purchase coffee mugs, t-shirts, bumper stickers…anything you can imagine.

In your Blog Empire, your reader is a customer and a product, and the more customers you have, the more products you can sell and the more profit you can pocket. You can turn your labor of love into a digital cash cow by building a Blog Empire that brings customers and buyers together.

We will show you how to do just that.

What a Blog is (and is Not)

A good working definition of a blog is simply a journal or newsletter that is frequently updated and intended for the timely reading. It often provides opportunities for unfiltered and immediate feedback, sports an informal or even partisan attitude, and is written in a more personal style than traditional press outlets.

Blogs come in all shapes and subjects, from the maunderings of troubled teen souls to displays of classical photography to breaking news and commentary. They can be online journals, locked with a password shared by a few trusted friends, or they can be page after page of source code, sharing useful and free computer programs with the world.

A blog may be an online journal tangential to a company’s main business, where users of a company’s products give feedback and ask for help. Blogs can be hosted by single individuals, shared by teams, or produced by entire companies. They may be hosted on a dedicated blog server using fancy templates or lovingly hand-crafted in HTML on a page that resembles a bulletin board.

But a blog is not simply a syndicated column or a newspaper that is online. Many news outlets feature their content online and even allow readers to respond to stories. However, the newspaper’s business does not change just because it has a new medium. Editors and writers still do the same jobs they did before the advent of online distribution; the newspaper does not view itself as any different from what it always was. And perhaps therein lies the difference: attitude.

The newspaper sees itself as presenting all the news that’s fit to print, written by objective professionals, while the blogger sees himself as presenting a piece of his own world and his own expertise from his own perspective.

As blogs become more popular, more columnists are becoming bloggers and more bloggers are becoming professional in what they write. Perhaps in a few years, the distinction between the Old Media and the New will be irrelevant in the mind of writers; for many readers today, it already is.

The number of individual blogs has topped 20 million and readership is exploding. In fact, the trade magazine Ad Age reports that during 2005 alone, American workers will spend the equivalent of 551,000 years reading blogs, rumor sheets, and online diaries. Hundreds of millions of readers worldwide get their news and entertainment from these independent sources, supporting their favorite bloggers through donations, link usage, and purchase of blog-related memorabilia.

Introduction to Blogs and Blogging

The New Media

In September of 2004, the CBS News program “60 Minutes II” ran a special on President George Bush’s service in the Texas National Guard during the Vietnam War. One of the pieces of data they displayed was a memo allegedly written by the late Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian.

As soon as the memo flashed across the screen, the New Media began an investigation that would lead to in the firing of three CBS News executives and the retirement of longtime anchor Dan Rather.

At issue was a simple question: was the memo authentic? CBS News assured the public it was, citing handwriting and document experts. Within 24 hours, the New Media had shown that such was not the case, that the memos could not have been produced on any machine in the hands of the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam era.

The New Media quickly demonstrated that the proportional spacing of the memo and the superscripting of dates were nearly impossible to create on 1970s technology and that the layout of the memo was unlike anything produced at the time. In short, they showed that the memo was not created on a Texas National Guard typewriter as CBS News had alleged, but was instead produced on a modern computer using Microsoft Word on its default settings and faxed or copied repeatedly to make it look old. They showed, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the memo was a fake.

As word of the fraud spread across the internet, additional data came to the fore, questioning the use of CBS news’ acquisition and handling of the documents. Within a week, other major news organizations began reporting on the controversy, within two weeks, CBS itself reported that they had been misled by their source concerning the origin of the memo. Soon after, CBS brought in a former attorney general and a former president of the Associated Press to get to the bottom of the issue. The result was a shakeup of the entire CBS news structure.

Who was this “New Media” that was knowledgeable enough about such arcane topics as superscripting and National Guard memo layouts to shake up one of the biggest news outfits in the world in a matter of weeks?

It was a network of independent bloggers who posted their findings in real time, shared information, and tested ideas. And their posts were followed closely by millions of readers, many of whom posted the findings on their own blogs for their own readers.

As those readers shared the information with friends and colleagues, interest in the New Media, and the habit of readers looking for their news from independent sources, accelerated a climb that began when Matt Drudge reported rumors of what became the Monica Lewinski scandal several months before the Old Media whispered a word publicly about it.