Why Blogging Isn't The Ideal Author Platform

Blog vs Website

Me: "My name is Morris and I'm a blogger."

Everybody at the BA meeting "Hi Morris!"

Me: "I can't do this..." Sobs and runs out of the room.

Blogging is an addiction. Blogging is a bad addiction for most authors. There are exceptions to the rule, highly disciplined authors who relegate their blog to the once a month update about the progress of their latest book, but most of us fall into the colossal waste of time category as bloggers. While I'm going to offer a more technical argument as to why blogs make bad platforms for authors, particularly standalone blogs that aren't nested in a static, traditional website, I want to make the emotional argument first. Blogging sucked three years of creative writing out of my brain, and it can do it to you as well. Blogs lead authors into repeating themselves over and over again on the same subject, to whining about their personal lives, and into spending time and money researching topics for new blog posts. Blogs take on a life of their own and drag the blogger into an endless attempt to maintain and amuse a subscriber base, preaching to the converted, and waking up in the middle of the night to scribble down a germ of an idea for the next days mandatory post. Most bloggers lead lives of quiet desperation, quiet because nobody reads their blogs and desperation because they don't know how to stop. If I could sum up the problem with blogs in one 90's concept, it would be the lack of closure. Blogging never reaches a logical conclusion, it just goes on and on until the blogger breaks the vicious cycle and walks away, or finds a sort of peace six feet under. If Dante was writing today, one of the punishments of the damned would surely be perpetually spending the night in Hell writing blogs, and the day reading them.

But sticking strictly with the colossal waste of time aspect, let me give you some statistics from my own blogging career. I've been writing the Self Publishing blog since the summer of 2005, with nearly 300 posts at the time of this writing, and a top 10 ranking on Google for the phrase "Self Publishing." Sound impressive? There's a single static page on my website that draws more unique visitors every day than all of my blog posts combined. Only the main page of the blog appears in Top 50 pages ranked for popularity on my site each day, only a handful of posts in the archives draw more than a ten visitors a day. The average number of visitors to archived blog posts on my site is less than 3 unique visitors a day, compared to an average over 30 visitors a day for static pages.The oldest posts draw much better than the newest posts, because they were more likely to get deep links early on, based on people finding them through search engines. As the number of posts expands and the subjects begin to overlap, the search engines are more likely to send visitors to the older, more "authoritative" posts, which only reinforces the problem. If I'd quit blogging at the end of 2005 (and I really did try), I'd still get half the visitors I get today, for about a tenth of the work Most importantly, I went three years without writing a new book as the blog served as the main release valve for my pent up pontificating. At the time of this writing, my blog about Self Publishing already contains more words than all of my self published books, combined!

The main reason that the viability of archived blog posts follow the law of diminishing returns is the repetition and overlap. When you're creating static web pages, essentially chapters of books or stand-alone essays and articles, you wouldn't repeat the same themes over and over again, unless you are sorely lacking in originality. So your blog eventually saturates all the search engine presence you're going to achieve on a given subject unless the subject itself is undergoing rapid and ongoing change, especially in terms of the proper names involved. I've also got fiction stories worked into my blog, chunks of memoir, anecdotes from travels and a lot of cleaned up correspondence, all of it connected in some way with self publishing. My readers seem to enjoy it, but it presents a tricky categorization job for the search engines, and all of the personal observations that creep in are no doubt a turn-off to some readers who would have been happy just to get the facts. Many blogs are also hurt by the organization of the content, and a different method of archiving blog posts using different blogging software might help on the margins.

Another reason for the relative lack of visitors to archived posts is that the titles of blog posts are usually repeated in several crucial places, which reinforces to the search engine that this is precisely what author believes that post to be about. So an art historian who wrote an amusing blog post titled "The Fly On Michelangelo's David" will probably garner a top in Google for people who search on "Fly On Michelangelo's David", but not much else, unless the archive post attracts a number of deep links from sites that view it in a larger context. Unfortunately, people who link to blogs are more likely to link to the main page "Here's a great blog" than to the individual posts that hooked their interest. Since around zero people a year are likely to run a search on "Fly On Michelangelo's David", the title carries within it the seeds of its own destruction, even if it got a great reaction when it was the feature post on the main page. Although the post may offer a brilliant analysis of some facet of Renaissance sculpture, the author has unconsciously convinced the search engines that it's about that funny first sentence where a fly gets by museum security and lands on David's nose.

Blogging is essentially a Long Tail activity. For anybody who isn't familiar with the book, "The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More" by Chris Anderson, the book started as an article in Wired magazine, and then was expanded, debated and massaged into a best seller on Chris's blog. The Long Tail thesis is that the information age, and the Internet in particular, has made it possible for a huge variety of products (including information) to be made available to buyers, so that every tiny niche can be well served. The downside is that filling one of those tiny niches won't provide anybody with a living, other than the middleman, like Amazon, in the case of books. When you get past the main page of a blog and a couple posts that attracted a lot of attention and incoming links, most of the remaining blog posts end up way out on the end of the Long Tail, some don't even draw one visitor a month. And I'm talking about moderately popular blogs, where the archived posts have decent PageRanks by association. The upside conclusion of The Long Tail is that the internet creates a huge, level playing field where everybody gets their chance at breaking through. But the rules governing fame remained unchanged. A handful of bloggers will attract hundreds of thousands of readers a day and a small number will attract tens of thousands, these mainly for controversial subjects like politics or by riding on the coat tails famous people. A larger number of niche professionals and hobbyists will attract thousands or hundreds of readers a day, in return for a serious investment in time. But the vast majority of bloggers will find their primary readership amongst friends and family, if they get any regular readers at all.

For a website to function as a platform that establishes you as something of an authority on your subject matter, it helps if you offer a comprehensive analysis or survey of the field. Blog structure and blogging tendencies can actually obscure the amount of work you've put in, due to scattering of posts, and the granularity of approach blogging fosters. Let's cast you as our gifted historian and critic of Renaissance art, who decides to establish a web platform while making a six month tour of European museums. You blog about the works you visit each day, along with what you had for lunch, the rude guy driving the taxi, and the attractive people in the lobby of your hotel. While the blog may serve as a sufficient written record of work related expenses to document a travel write-off for the IRS (assuming you're earning money as an art historian or related professional), it's not going to fare as well as an organized static website that breaks your critical survey of the art works into logical divisions that would be known to students of the Renaissance. In other words, you're better off with a website structure that resembles the chapters of a book or a dissertation more than a travelogue. If you have the discipline to do both, then the blog with pictures of you in exotic places is icing on the cake for readers, especially if you're attractive. Remember, you're writing for human readers, but you're organizing for search engines. The core of your platform as an Renaissance art expert has to be the art, your life as a tourist tends to dilute impact for search if you don't make the divisions clear.

When it comes to the value of blogging or subscription newsletters as a book marketing tool , the outcome depends a great deal on what the author writes and whether the author already has a measure of success. A successful fiction author builds a following, whether they utilize an internet platform or not, and a blog or subscription newsletter is a great way to keep the the fan base engaged and to let them know when a new book comes out. Of course fans will buy the new book or make their library order a copy, which is even better. Fiction readers keep reading the authors they like until they are given a reason to stop, like a series of disappointing books, or the discovery that the author holds personal views they abhor. Self-help gurus, or literary nonfiction authors who work a genre like history or culture, can also develop a following. If you are a lifestyle guru, a business guru, a health guru, you may develop a fan base who will devour everything you publish. While a blog or a newsletter is again an excellent way to keep in touch with those readers and sell them new books, you still need to be careful that it doesn't replace writing new books altogether, or get so packed with information that readers don't feel the need to buy the new books. Literary nonfiction is similar to fiction in that people read it more for pleasure than for information. Few readers have a practical need to know about the lives of our Constitutional framers or Civil War generals, but if an author produces books that can stand on their own as literature, many of us would rather read nonfiction than fiction. In the case of any author whose books have reached bestseller status, whether fiction or nonfiction, readers are going to find out about new books regardless of whether or not the author maintains a blog or a website.

But if you're unknown, have yet to produce your first book or write nonfiction as a work-a-day author,entertaining a fan base just isn't relevant. I don't expect readers of this book to run out and buy my books on computer repair or my Hebrew translations, and I would consider it spamming if I sent the buyers of those books e-mails promoting this book, or my title about POD. I've sold thousands of books direct and I've never sent a single e-mail to one of those buyers asking them to purchase another one of my books.Authors who follow the advice of marketing gurus tend to be rabid about creating lists of e-mail addresses from potential customers. I even encountered one author who insisted that capturing the personal information of visitors to a website or blog was more important than selling them a book. Good grief, we're supposed to be authors, not telemarketers. I don't want to sell my books to people who don't really want them and aren't going to read them, I'd rather go back to working for a living. The visitors I want to attract to my website are new visitors who find my book excerpts and related writings through search engines, value my writing, and buy a book. In terms of visitors received and books sold for the time I put in writing, blogging is the worst return on investment I get.