Blog Azeroth

http://writetodone.com/2008/09/24/anato ... attention/

I was originally going to write on the topic but this illustrates the point way better than I could.

Read it. Ask questions.

Any questions?

It's a good guilde, pointing out some of the basics of journalism or public writing in general. My only objection is that I don't want to see too many blogs following the "success recipe". Why? Because no matter how much I adore World of Matticus I don't want to be confronted with 100 wanna-be-Matticuses. I want to see different concepts, I want to hear different voices.

I want diversity in the blog menu. I appreciate if there are some blogs out there who refuse to follow the ABC of writing easily available posts, who dare to challenge the reader with long texts, who give me a little bit of resistence and don't overboil the pasta if you get what I mean. I don't want every single blog to be streamlined for perfect efficiency.

So yes - read this guide. Use it. But not as a pattern that you always have to stick to - dare to be different from time to time.

Will skin alive if confronted with giant wall of text.

After skimming this article, I must say that I personally find broccoli to be infinitely more palatable than cauliflower.

I'm fairly sure that most of my readers are often distracted by shiny things, and thus impossible to keep entertained for longer than 30 seconds at a time.


Doesn't stop me from getting wordy, though.

For the past two weeks or so my blog posts have been generating tons of comments. Ranging from 30-70 comments on a daily post. So with all the coverage about the upcoming changes, people are listening. And responding.

@PixelatedExecutioner: are you sure about that, that they leave after 30 sec?

You know you can check it out with Feedburner. My visitors spend on everage 3 minutes. Which I guess is about what it takes to read a post. And I certainly do provide text walls from time to time. What I'm trying to say is that there'se a market for different kinds of blogs just as there's a market for text heavy morning papers as well as "eaysy-to-read" sensational afternoon papers.

Anyway I'm glad it doesn't stop you to get wordy.

That doesn't meen though that you shouldn't help your readers to get through the text more easily. Of course you should. And the articel Matticus referred to is great for inspiration, as long as you think a bit for yourself as well and add your personal flavour to your blog.

Matticus, sorry but now I am going to try and write a huge comment on each one of your posts

No one expects the comments of a nin!

I'm just being facetious. Chalk it up to my wierd sense of humor.

My average right now is pretty high - around five minutes (I use both Feedburner and Analytics for my numbers), but I attribute that to the announcement for the winner of my Blizzcon ticket contest.

The day the report went up on WoW Insider, I had 1000 hits, and the following day had 500 and change. Before that post went up, my average was between 1 1/2 and 2 1/2 minutes, usually, and I'd say that 70% of my readerbase right now is solely made up by my guildmates (though I'm probably wrong, but I'm not using the right tools to track it - or maybe I am, I just don't know how).

I did read the article, and found a number of things that I'll be trying out in the future. It would probably be easier if I were a theorycrafter or had something profound to say about WoW at any given time, but... Oh well.

Sometimes I am reluctant to put much faith in the 'time spent' analytics anyhow, as an average. Most people only spend a couple of minutes on my blog, which is about what I would expect (especially since I don't generate huge amounts of new traffic, so it's the same people coming back frequently). There are the occasional obscenely long times, which I put down to people like myself who use tabbed browsing and often dont close tabs for extended periods (including overnight). That sort of thing really skews my average time spent.

As for writing styles, there are many ways I could improve the way I write (since I essentially write how I speak, which I am forever telling my students is bad), but I am far too lazy to consistently think about it. I guess a lot of it comes down to your purpose for writing - I write for myself much more than other people, only have a passing interest in numbers and readership, and will never be looking to make money out of blogging. This is probably very different to the attitudes of most bloggers, and I am sure many would consider it to be rather selfish, but then... I am a lock!

I must say that this article was really very good, I started implementing the style of writing immediately.

I actually managed to go from 100 visitors a day to like 4,000 + visitors on Tuesday when my blog got linked on wowinsider when the WoW servers were still down (the dramatic increase of people even temporarily crashed the whole site).

In general, I try to have a mix of shorter posts and longer posts (shorter posts being quick announcements, but usually ending up with pretty long posts).

Anything that is going to be super-long is usually a how-to guide that I make seperate pages with only a short blog post linking to the guide for people who actually want to read the whole thing.

In general, I try to come up with somewhat sensational titles, that are still descriptive, from time to time (my favorite still being "Do I make you feel thorny?" when I wrote about why the druid thorns buff wasn't overpowered). I find a lot of people write analytical posts in a way that isn't approachable, so having good headlines and intro/conclusions that speak to the masses seems a good way for me to express what I want to get across.