In “How To Blog Without Killing Yourself” Tim Ferris shares his blogging secrets and best practices on blogging – why he blogs and why it’s fun.
Image by It’s Holly
We decided to summarize the presentation below as Tim made some great points. If you decide just to read our comments make sure you still watch the last 10 minutes of his presentation, it’s hilarious as Tim explains how he outsourced his dating as an experiment.
Why does Tim Ferris Blog?
It’s definitely not for income generation. There are much better ways according to Tim. Instead he blogs on what he is passionate about, for example he once blogged about how he overcome his phobia for swimming
The bigger question according to Tim is; “Why do you do anything?”
He does blogging for the following reasons:
“To Love, be Loved and to never stop learning.”
With blogging you get access to people and important resources. It’s a perfect laboratory for learning and sharing with others. Essentially most of the benefit Tim gains is indirect i.e meeting and interacting with people on his blog.
Are There Rules To Blogging
Tim’s guiding principle when blogging is based on a famous quote from Mark Twain
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.” ~ Mark Twain
A lot of the dogma in blogging about posting frequency and content did not stand up to his own testing.
Post Frequency and Tools
Tim uses crazyegg.com for observing click patterns (heat maps) in addition to google analytics. Tim suggests that you only measure the things that matter. Don’t waste your time with too much testing and analysis.
Here are some findings from Tim’s own testing ( NB it may be unique to his type of blog only):
- The best times for blog posts are 7am EST and 6pm EST (these are also good times for submission to digg.com)
- The best quality comments to posts appear on Tuesday, Thursday & Saturday
- Post no more than twice a week
- Changing the default label Categories (on the default wordpress install) to Topics will improve your click through rates
- Having a twitter statistics icon at the top of your page will loose your first time visitors to twitter (put it further down the page)
- RSS Subscription – explain the benefits e.g. “7 reasons to subscribe via your RSS feed”. NB RSS is becoming less relevant as micro-blogging tools such as twitter become more popular
- Keep the date off blog posts as new visitors are typically after fresh information
- For long posts Tim puts the estimated “total read time” at the top of the post
How To Research
Tim uses a number of tools for his research.
slinkset.com
- allows you to create your own personal digg in about 20 seconds. Tim uses it to poll his twitter following.
twitter.com
- Tim uses twitter for polling and quick research and as a personal online diary, he symphonizes his twitter history to iCal.
evernote.com
- when researching Tim uses evernote.com to gather snippets of information of what he is researching (there is a Evernote Clipper Firefox add-on for this). After all the research is gathered, Tim uses Evernote’s inbuilt search feature to write his articles.
How To Write
The most important thing is not being a good writer but in having a voice. Your own unique personality. Passion in what you write beats polling and focus groups hands down – write what your passionate about. If your not having fun it will be obvious to your readers. When your emotional and interested about something and write about it – it always does well. NB Remember to never attack other people (it only attracts people you don’t want). Write about the problem not the person.
Other quick tips
- Find your best time for writing – morning or evening
- For important posts always edit by hand. Revise and remove at least 10% to 20% of the draft
- Never write for SEO in your first draft. It will not sound natural. Write your post first then SEO optimize it afterwards
- Ensure you post has only one topic – i.e that it can be described in only one way. You don’t want people linking to you for multiple topics.
- Videos and photos – there is no correlation on your video production quality and the popularity and results – short is good. Don’t do stand alone video posts, always have surrounding text.
- Stumbleupon is thecheapest source of purchased traffic and also a great source of high quality traffic
- Don’t chase the news (your probably not passionate about it), pick evergreen topics (that your passionate about) that will always get traffic
Blog Comments
Tim does read all the comments on his blogs even though he gets over 2000 comments a day and spends about 20 minutes a day reviewing them. He has a zero tolerance policy and treats his comments sections like his own living room to which readers are invited. Tim has a comment rules section on his blog that works well.
Conclusion
Blogging can be hell if you follow the so called “blogging rules”. You will burn out if you don’t love what your blogging about. Don’t make it a source of stress. Take fun seriously and make blogging a passion in your life.
What Are You Passionate Blogging About ?
Please Share Your Thoughts Below.
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About Danny Sheehan
Danny lives in Hong Kong but is originally from Australia. He is Married to Maggie and together they have two children with whom they enjoy sharing and enjoying an exciting life with daily. Danny's passions are freedom, adventure and discovery, mainly in nature and science but also spiritually. He is a great believer in living in the NOW.
More about Danny Sheehan
Passion For life