Most bloggers are part of the
Long Tail, the 600-foot long gap in the chart above that collectively
gets 80% of the roughly 700,000 hours of total blogosphere readership
each day, but which individually get miniscule attention. What if you
have aspirations for your blog to be discovered, to become one of the
2000 A- and B-list blogs on the other side of that gap that each get at
least 30 hours of reader attention each day? How do you get your blog
'discovered', when the only established ways are to grab the attention
of either an A-lister or two, or Google, and even if you can do that
the momentary audience you draw is likely to quickly dissipate again?
The predicament most bloggers face is much like that of athletes,
artists, models, actors, writers and those striving to be
discovered in professions where a handful are rich and famous almost
beyond comprehension, while the huge majority live on the edge of
invisibility (according to the Canadian tax authorities, average income
for people declaring themselves to be in these professions was about
$12,000 last year). The way people in these professions usually get
discovered is to use agents. But in a non-profit profession like blogging, where there are no millionaire superstars, there are no agents -- so we have to help ourselves out here.
Author and writing adviser Nicholas Sparks
suggests these steps to be discovered by a literary agent: (1) write a
great book, (2) research to find appropriate, good agents,
and (3) write a good one-page Query Letter, consisting of:
- A description of previous writing experience
- A quick summation of the story
- Other books that are similar to yours, and why yours is better
- The possible market for the book
- A reason why you want to work with this particular representative
- A sentence explaining that the book is complete, with a request to have it read
The writing service Preditors and Editors
(no great fan of using agents) recommends a Query Letter when you're
writing directly to a publisher's editor, though with the addition of a
'hook' (a couple of sentences to grab the reader's attention). Once
you've got their interest, the publisher will often provide you with a
template for a Proposal, a 5-20 page document usually comprising:
- Overview and principal ideas
- Other similar books, and what distinguishes and differentiates yours
- The possible audience(s) for the book, and selling points for each audience
- Table of contents, book length and suggested price (often with a synopsis of each chapter and/or a sample chapter)
- Author credentials and experience, and what the author will do to promote the book
- Who will provide the introduction and endorsements for the book
- The status of the book
Much of what you're providing to the agent or publisher will be
repeated on the book-jacket, which is what the publisher uses to get
your book 'discovered' inside the bookstores.
The world of book-buying is changing, though, with more and more readers browsing for books online,
where the book-jacket is, at best, harder to read. While Amazon's
'search inside' capability does let you browse the book-jacket, the
table of contents, the index and usually the introduction or first
chapter, it also provides this additional information for browsers:
- Reader and editorial reviews
- Affinity information: Other books bought by people who
bought the book, or previewed online by people who previewed this book,
and reader lists that include this book
- Books deemed by Amazon's algorithms to be 'similar'
How could all of this be applied to blogs? There are a lot of blog
directories out there, and I've signed up for most of them, but none of
them is prominent enough to deliver any significant volume of
readership to an undiscovered blog. Here's what I think we need instead:
- Blog-Jackets: Something
analogous to book-jackets, that would contain the kind of information
readers want to know when they first stumble upon a new blog:
- A short bio of the author(s), with your credentials and background, and perhaps a 'why you blog' paragraph
- A quick overview of your blog content, how much/how long you've
written, and perhaps a list of your best articles or table of contents
- What makes your blog unique, different, and valuable to readers
- Who your intended audience is (almost no blogs include this information today)
- Endorsements from readers, and/or Technorati, Bloglines or SiteMeter rankings and data
Where should this information be kept to attract the attention of readers? First, I think blog software should provide this blog-jacket functionality,
on a separate 'About This Blog page' that can be accessed from any
other blog page, just as your blog 'home' page is. This would allow
blog directories to be more complete and to be compiled automatically,
without the authors having to fill in a separate form for each
directory. It could also serve to introduce your blog to new readers,
both passively when they first happen upon it, and actively in your
other promotion efforts, such as when you e-mail someone 'cold' with a
request that they look at your blog or an article in it. I would
certainly use a standardized blog-jacket to orient myself to a new
blog, if it were available.
- An Amazon Blog-Catalogue:
No slight intended to existing blog directories, but I think we need to
get Amazon, the cataloguers of all things written, to add blogs to
their listings. Why should they do so? Because blogs have become a
major source of book reviews and book referrals, publicists for what
Amazon sells. Because it would complement what they already do, bring
them more traffic and provide another valuable service to their
customers. Because they could add a level of professionalism and
standardization to the cataloguing of blogs that is currently missing
(International Standard Blog Numbers?) The information in blog-jackets
could supply the basic content in the catalogue, and then Amazon could
use its existing tools like its affinity engines and reader review
capabilities to make the catalogue even more useful. Why could Amazon
do this better than Google? Because Google is in the search business,
not the catalogue business. And Google is already doing a lot for bloggers in their area of expertise.
- Samplers:
My third idea is to give bloggers a way to cross the digital divide and
get their blogs and content discovered by hard-copy readers at
face-to-face opportunities. Most of us belong to various networks where
we talk with people about many of the same things we write about. But
several readers have remarked about the disconnect between our P2P and
online networks, and that fact that many of those we meet in person
have never read what we've written, despite our attempts to get them to
do so. Many people just don't read stuff online
-- it isn't their 'information behaviour' to do so. And also, when you
print articles from your blog on a regular printer, the appearance is
usually ghastly -- the print size is too large or small, the formatting
gets messed up, the graphics chopped, and the blog sidebar content is
an annoying distraction and waste of paper. And the value of the links
in the article is lost. What we need is a simple mechanism that allows
us to select (perhaps by their permalinks) a set of articles we have
written about a particular theme, and to get them indexed, formatted
and printed professionally, with a cover page that we can customize for
the circumstances. My friend Terry Frazier
has been exploring this, and I think he's on the right track. I don't
think this needs to be a complicated or costly offering, and the
businesses best positioned to print professional-looking samplers may
well be instant printers rather than publishers. Think of it as
analogous to what the photo developers offer: You e-mail them your
photos, they process them professionally and courier or mail them out
to you the next day. Instant printers could strip out the blog
sidebars, convert the links to footnotes with the full URL listed, add
a cover page, format the results professionally for a variety of page
sizes, print it on quality stock and even professionally bind it, and
mail it out next day for a modest price (probably not much more
expensive than a comparable quantity of business cards, but a lot more
impressive). Then when you're visiting your P2P networks at Meetups,
conferences, breakfast meetings, book circles or other social
occasions, your sampler becomes your, and your blog's, calling card.
- Hard-Copy Partnerships:
My final idea for getting your blog discovered is to partner with
hard-copy publications that have a similar audience to your blog's.
Although some publications have their own blogs, there are still
opportunities to exploit the flexibility, timeliness and interactivity
of the online world to offer hard-copy publishers opportunities and
bridges that they probably don't have the capability, imagination or
interest in pursuing themselves. You could offer follow-up forums,
research support, additional reading links, reader feedback, and a host
of other functionalities on your blog, 'branded' with the hard-copy
publication's logo, all of which promotes the hard-copy publication to
readers online. In return, you'd get a regular mention in the hard-copy
periodical as the 'place to go' online for latest developments and
follow-ups on their stories. Who knows, you might even build the
partnership to the point where they would publish some of your blog
content in hard-copy form, and, if they're big enough, pay you for your
services. Even if they don't, they have nothing to lose by giving you
some free publicity, and you have nothing to lose by doing the same for
them. It beats ads from people you don't know, and allows your blog to
benefit from their brand.
Has anyone tried any of these techniques, or any other innovative
methods to get your under-appreciated blog discovered? My audience
surged by 25% after a group of A-listers consecutively wrote about my
article on thinking differently last month, but this audience didn't
stay long, and my readership has returned to previous levels. I'm
increasingly convinced that the type of attention you get from
A-listers, and from serendipitous Googlers as well, is rarely
sustainable or terribly high quality. We need to try something new.
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