Professional blogging in practice: part 1

It’s a nice dream, that of the aspiring problogger. Address a fascinated Internet audience daily about a topic you – and they – love, while earning money? Too good to be true!

If you work as part of a blogging team for a large site, chances are you will be tasked to come up with multiple daily posts on the blog’s topic. While inspiration and introspection can get you so far, the job of keeping content fresh and covering breaking news means you need to establish good work habits, particularly if you’ve only blogged as a hobby before.

Blogging breaks down into handy steps:

• Find something interesting to write about
• Write about it
• Add appropriate images
• Add metadata: internal and external links, tags, etc
• Schedule
• (Optional) Promote
• Babysit – Edit, update, monitor comments

Find something interesting to write about

This might sound like the easy part, but on slow news days and slow inspiration days it can seem nearly impossible to pull 5 or more posts out of thin air.

RSS is your friend. You’re probably already subscribed to relevant feeds, but did you spend a couple of hours daily combing them? Learn which feeds have interesting commentary, which are fastest to break news, and which are your competitors. Expand your reading – you can often get inspired by posts that aren’t directly related to your subject. Maybe your co-bloggers can recommend some new subscriptions for you, or there might even be a team OPML file.

When you find something interesting on the RSS wires, you have a choice. Write about it immediately or file it away. The former is pretty self-evident; if it’s an amazing post, or breaking news, jump on it! Double check to make sure nobody else is working on the same story, though; bloggers often overlap, and there’s nothing worse than wasting your time.

I can’t stress enough the importance of a good filing, or notebook, system. Whether you use a web product such as Evernote, delicious, pbWiki, or many others – or simply star things in your RSS reader, or save URLs to Notepad – you’ll find it invaluable, I promise. Try out different systems and see what works for you; I found I prefer a combination of simplicity (I just want to press one button) with tagging (to remind me why), so something like delicious and flagging/clipping in NetNewsWire worked well for me. Not every link comes in through RSS, hence the dual system.

Say you’ve set up a delicious account; bookmark interesting posts that you’re not ready to jump on right now, and tag them (“to-post”, “commentary”, “news”, “totally-wrong”, “controversial”, “nintendo”). Then when you’re done crawling and ready to write, you have a set of links right there, with reminders why you bookmarked them. Most importantly, stuff that doesn’t make it into today’s posts is still there tomorrow and you can start the day by talking about something that’s still fresh. You can also highlight posts you might want to refute, or elaborate on – I’d occasionally find a really interesting academic post and muse on the topic for a more mainstream audience, for example.

RSS isn’t the centre of the world, mind you. Other sources for interesting stuff to blog about include Twitter, a goldmine for things people are finding cool right now. Twitturly and to a lesser extent popaculous show you just the URLs being tweeted about, though following a ton of interesting people in your subject area is a more personal approach, especially since you can contribute to the conversation. However, don’t fall into the trap of thinking that just because something’s popular on Twitter, it’s going to be popular with your readers: filter everything before you post.

As well as Twitter you can use services such as TechMeme, Digg, reddit and so on. You should be aiming to get coverage on these sites, rather than use them as a news source, but sometimes you can find an interesting story you hadn’t stumbled across before it hits the front page.

Don’t underestimate the power of press releases, either. Get on some mailing lists and sign up for press sites; even in this day and age, there are times when the first you’ll hear of something is the press release. Based in the UK, I used to scour GamesPress and GamesIndustry.biz daily to jump on new press alerts before the Americans woke up. However, again, you need a filter between the release and your readers. Simply spouting off the release adds zero value to the site, but adding some unique insights, an interview, reader polls, sarcastic commentary or humour reminds your readers why they read your site and not the press releases directly.

Your readers are also a source of inspiration and links. Perhaps a comment left on a recent post is worthy of a full article; perhaps they have written in with some news you haven’t even seen yet. (Having a tip line, if you obviously use it – thank readers in your posts – is a great way to ensure you wake up to Stuff To Write About). Maybe one of them is interview material, maybe you find their comments interesting enough to ask them a daily question (we started this with WoW Insider’s Breakfast Topics and it’s been a hit).

The team of people you work with on the blog can also be very helpful. Discussions can throw up post material, they can pass on subjects to you they don’t have the time or expertise to cover, and perhaps you can trade off skills: if one person really enjoys trawling RSS for cool stuff, and you hate it, why not team up? Coming up with regular feature ideas as part of the team is also really useful; if you’re posting a different regular feature each day, they can almost write themselves (or you publish and answer a reader question – easy!) and it keeps the blog content nice and varied.

Finally don’t forget the subject matter as a source. For example, on WoW Insider many post ideas surface just from playing the game and noting down interesting things you observe, the issues that worry your guild mates (and by extension your readers), funny bugs you’ve found, annoying habits people have, etc. This isn’t as easy in most other subject areas, but if, say, you’re writing on nutrition then why not write about the things you cook and eat as well as looking abroad for inspiration? Fitness blogger? Try a new regime and write about it. Or you could talk about blogging itself, of course.

Between all these tips, a daily quota seems like nothing. You start the day’s work with two interesting stories from yesterday, a tip mailbox with three great possibilities, five popular links from Twitter, a regular feature to write, a reader comment you’ve been meaning to follow up, an idea you had while at the gym this morning and a press release that nobody seems to have torn apart yet. Of course, now the fun part is prioritising and figuring out which to cover and which to drop… or which can wait until tomorrow.

In part two, I’ll cover the rest of the problogging pipeline, and look at healthy work habits in part three.