How to buildan enormously popular

and successful blogby Andrew Konoff

Saturday, 19 January, 13

Warning!Participation enforced.Bad language ahead.

I’ll talk about philosophy.

Saturday, 19 January, 13

An overview1. It’s a process, not a guarantee

2. There are four and a half steps:

• define your goals.

• choose a focus.

• build a diverse content calendar.

• expand to a bigger audience.

• do some other shit that’s helpful.

Saturday, 19 January, 13

Stuff we won’t do

• Talk about platforms (e.g. Tumblr)

• Talk about specific topics (e.g. cats)

• Talk about media types (e.g. infographics, vlogs, podcasts)

• Care about haters

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Why listen to me?

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Why listen to me?

• I’m the marketing guy at GoInstant, and this is exactly what I’m doing there.

• I was the Saskatchewanderer. Ran a travel blog that had 173,000 unique visitors in four months, 45,000 YouTube views, and 2,000 Twitter followers.

• I’ll be using these as examples of what to do and what not to do.

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It’s a process...

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Not a guarantee

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Processes involve feedback

• Each step in this process generates outcomes, which we will measure.

• Some outcomes are better than others.

• If our metrics are well-chosen, the numbers show which outcomes are good.

• The numbers don’t matter if the metrics don’t measure your goals.

• If your goals suck, that’s another matter.

Saturday, 19 January, 13

Step 1: Pick your goals

• Ask yourself: what should your blog get you? How will you know you’ve succeeded?

• Money?

• Sales leads?

• Expert status?

• Laid?

• Text can do anything but write itself.

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Define your commitment.

• How much money and time and energy do you have?

• Our process involves prioritization, so don’t worry too much if you’re resource-poor.

• Mostly, ask this for your own sanity.

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Question time!

What’s your blogging goal? Do you have more than one?

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Step 2: Find your focus.

• It has two parts:

• Your thesis, argument, or insight.

• Your audience. Who is passionate about what you have to say?

• GoInstant: Customer experiences matter for business.

• Saskatchewanderer: Saskatchewan is full of cool shit.

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Focus Metrics:

• Forget about audience size. Care about engagement per reader.

• Lots of readers with little interest equals bad bad bad die die die

• Measure time on page, subscriptions, social shares, number of posts read per visit, comments, etc. etc.

• Engagement is the fundamental building block of every good blog, app, relationship.

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Focus Metrics:

• The proof of a growth opportunity: you want each post to generate a higher rate of marginal engagement.

• If I got 10 views last week, I want 12 next week, and 15 next week, and 20 next week.

• Marginal gains: +2, +3, +5. Up and to the right for the 2nd derivative.

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Focus Metrics:

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Question time!

What’s your blog’s focus? How’s your engagement? Is it a growth opportunity?

Does it accomplish your goals?

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Step 3: Build a content calendar

• The secret? Mix up these two axes:

• Audience: Niche <--> Broad

• Durability: Timely <--> Evergreen

• Take risks to really engage people. Some types of post are riskier than others.

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Step 3: Build a content calendar

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Content Cal Metrics

• Preliminary work: define blog categories for matrix quadrants.

• How many shares?

• How many views in the first day? After the first week?

• How much time on page?

• Then compare the categories.

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Question time!

Make a post idea per quadrant.Which work best for your audience?

Do some posts get more views later in their life?

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Step 4: Expand

• It’s time to build out your audience by expanding the focus of your blog:

• to add another highly engaged, closely related audience.

• to include a thesis that is consistent with your core focus’s thesis.

• Remember: focus = thesis + audience

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A lesson from Lakatos

Imre Lakatos is the coolest Hungarian philosopher of science ever.

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Research Programmes

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Same for blogs

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Same for blogs

• For GoInstant:

• core of “customer experience matters,” surrounded by “X matters for customer experiences.”

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Mistakes

• As the Saskatchewanderer:

• Saskatchewan is cool!

• After the Saskatchewanderer:

• All purpose travel writing! Please for the love of god hire me I’m unemployed actually I’ll write anything just c’mon please try

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Better idea

• If Saskatchewan has all this cool stuff, I can find other beautiful stuff in other unpopular Canadian destinations.

• Audience: broke ass Canucks.

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Expansion Metrics

• Exact same as focus.

• Are your readers highly engaged?

• Is this a real growth opportunity? Is the rate of growth itself increasing?

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Step 4.5: Everything else

• Get good at writing by fucking up constantly.

• Marketing matters.

• Market to your audiences. Test.

• Build relationships with other bloggers through guest blogs.

• SEO benefit is huge.

• Give a fuck about the technical parts of writing and of running a blog.

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Any questions?

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Thank you so much!

Share the presentation:http://bit.ly/bigbigblog

Follow me on Twitter:@andrewkonoff

and HAVE AN AWESOME PODCAMP!

Saturday, 19 January, 13