Below is a video of the unboxing. And of course, you can order the book today from Amazon and I hope you do. If not for the book, to support my efforts. Thanks to everyone who has stood by me during this process!

Written by Aaron Brazell on January 28, 2010

It’s now November and almost everything is in the bag for me. I’ve written the book with an average of 20-30 pages per chapter. I’ve gone through Author Review (A.R.), more commonly called “editing”. I’ve taken screenshots. Wrote code. Sifted through pages and pages that have so many changes, from three different editors, that the page appears to bleed. I’ve survived. Sometimes barely. I want to talk about the process of writing that book.

Writing a book is as much mental as it is emotional. Everyday, you evaluate what you have to get done, how much time you have to get it done, and consider the tone and voice in which it is written. I noted in my announcement that I would take on extra work to compensate for the lack of full-time pay the advance money would turn out to be. This became the most difficult part of the process, as it would turn out.

Early on, I spent a tremendous amount of time being very precise and intentional in how I wrote. It was a very slow process but I was pacing myself. I had 4 deadlines at 25% increments that were a month apart (except the last one). I could afford to be deliberate and intentional and pace myself. I had nine chapters to write in 30 days. Done. The first deadline was no problem, but it was a definite time investment.

The second deadline approached in late August. It was the 50% deadline and nine more chapters were due. By this time, I was heavily invested in the two client projects – a corporate redevelopment of Navstar, a federal IT service provider in Northern Virginia and TheCityFix, a WordPress MU/BuddyPress-based project for EMBARQ, a major non-profit in DC. Both of these projects were lagging behind as I went about being meticulous about my book. So when the 50% deadline came, I had my chapters but I was delayed on my clients.

Putting the book on the back-burner at the beginning of the 75% deadline, I spent time catching up on client work. As a week turned into two, and then three and I had not been able to start on the 75% deadline, I had mornings where I would have nervous and mental breakdowns in the shower. I had no idea how I could do it all. I was under intense pressure to do and I simply did not know if I could do it. I hid it well, but exactly one week before I had to have another nine chapters turned in, I began that process of writing those nine chapters. I told my clients I was unavailable. I locked myself away for 12-16 hour writing marathons. At 8pm on the day of my 75% deadline, I turned in my last chapter – a marathon effort that began 7 days before. I headed to the bar for a beer.

We got started on the process late, so although Wiley agreed to push back the 25%, 50% and 75% deadlines to compensate, the final deadline had to stay fixed at October 14. Two and a half weeks. I took a bit of time off to go back to client work because I knew I’d be going to Orlando to keynote IZEAFest, and had intentionally took advantage of the group rate that IZEA had negotiated to get a few extra days in sunny Florida. In theory, I could write the rest of the book by the pool and enjoy the sun. Good idea, but then the wifi was ridiculously poor and I lost six days in the two and a half weeks I had to finish things up.

I came back from Orlando looking at the same situation I had with my 75% deadline – 8 days to go, 9 chapters to write. Up until this point, I had made every deadline even if I was unofficially granted a few extra days here or there if I needed it. I never took those extensions. My editor was firm on the 100% deadline though. It must be done. (She ended up giving slightly in the end but I couldn’t take her up on that because I was leaving for Vegas and Blog World Expo on the day of my final deadline. There was no way to be in Vegas and take advantage of a few more days to write!)

Miraculously, as I flew at 37,000 feet on Virgin America en route to Blog World Expo, I was submitting my final chapter and screenshots. Thank God for wireless internet on flights! I made it. Done. Complete. Breathe.

When I got back from Vegas, however, my editor told me she needed me to rewrite a chapter (or significant portions of the chapter). Sighing heavily, I did just that addressing the areas of concern she had. Then the deluge of chapters began floating back to me for A.R. I had to sort through every single chapter, rewriting some portions, approving code changes from Mark Jaquith, my technical editor, wording and grammatical changes from my copy editor and other generalized suggestions and changes from my lead editor.

I was told that the edit process is grueling. That it is painful. That I better have thick skin. I went into A.R. expecting the worst. Fortunately, it was a fairly painless process. Perhaps after the marathon sprints and my inherent instinct to trust the people around me to make me look good, I rolled with the process. These people make me look good! While I accepted almost every suggestion from all three editors, there were times I vetoed. As the author, I have that prerogative to a point. Generally, however, I trust these people to help me through. It was not as bad as I expected.

Emotionally, I was numb. The book took a toll on me. In most ways, the toll is good. In other ways, perhaps not so much. I still will have to proofread the final product in December and will have a week to do so, but this process is all but over. However, I’m still numb. Does a man achieving what seemed so difficult to do give him an emotional outbreak, as we see when sports teams win the big championship, or does it make us look at life a little more soberly and say, “Wow… I did that. Crazy. Now what?” For me, I think it’s the latter.

From a business perspective, The Navstar project has been wrapped up for almost two months now. TheCityFix is all but wrapped up. When you’re writing, you don’t have time for business development. So now I’ve hit the reset button and rebuilding again. The buzz around the book has already generated enough leads that I don’t think I’ll be hurting for work.

From a book perspective, I can’t wait for this thing to come out. It is available on Amazon on February 15th and you can preorder it now. There will be a book launch in Baltimore and Washington, likely. I will undoubtedly be traveling to many WordCamps next year, including our own WordCamp Mid-Atlantic (which I co-organize). Next time I write a book, however, I will write it about something I want to write about and not something I’m qualified to write about. (kidding).

To aspiring writers, I say:

• Find your groove early. Don’t waste time on stylesheets (every publisher provides a style guide). That’s what the editor is for.
• Roadmap your book so it’s on paper. Most publishers will require a table of contents before you start. It’s for your good as well as theirs.
• Have thick skin during the editing process. Your editors don’t hate you even if their markup seems like they do. They have your best interest in mind.
• Have an agent! The agent is there to help navigate through the business process. Sure, they take 10-15% off the top, but they can often get you more money and more concessions. It’s sort of like don’t ever go to court without a lawyer.
• Write because you want to write. You’ll never make it rich on writing (unless you’re Thomas Friedman, and even then, you’re probably making money from speaking engagements because of your writing).
• Figure out the environment and mode you need to be in to effectively write.
• If you need to stop because you’re mentally exhausted, stop… because you’re mentally exhausted. It doesn’t help your writing to be doing so in a robotic, bleary eyed way.
• Most of all, have fun! Writing a book is a hard process, but so rewarding. If you treat it like work, it will be work. If you treat it as a way to channel your energies, you’ll have more fun doing it. :-)

Written by Aaron Brazell on November 17, 2009

So, Geoff is a friend of mine but I told him I’d give him an honest review of this book, and honest review I will do. Overall, the book is brilliant. I’m glad this is not “yet another book on blogging”. It doesn’t provide a how to. It doesn’t provide options for choosing your platform or describe how to subscribe to RSS.

It’s obvious that this book was written mostly for executives. This is not a bad thing as Executives are the ones steering companies and the reality is that if companies don’t embrace social media, they will be left behind. It is presented in a very philosophical way, describing the challenges that companies face today when it comes to the social media landscape, brand management and public relations. The simple message is, “Hey guys, you need to get what is going on today and you need to do it fast because Now is Gone”.

The book starts with an intro from Brian Solis who you may remember was a member of the PR Roundtable discussion hosted here in November, 2007. I love Brian, but the foreword was too lengthy and off-putting. As a reader, I wanted to get into the meat of the book and it seemed to take awhile to get to that point.

Geoff makes some common sense analogies between social media mirroring real life. It stood out to me that people do not like to be controlled but they will allow themselves to be influenced – as long as you don’t try to control them! His 5 steps to the basis of an effective social media message could probably be broken out further, but were effective for the book:

1. Giving Up Control of the Message
2. Participating in a Community
3. Is Your Community Social Media Savvy?
4. Dedicating the Resources
5. Ethics and Transparency

This book as a whole is a slam dunk, effectively communicating a message that is very much needed and, is very timely at a time where companies are embarrassing themselves more than ever in their engagement with social media. In that way, this book could not be more timely.

I would suggest for the next book, however, (There will be another one, right Geoff? :) ) that fewer callouts be used. It seems that call outs were half the book and if that was the intention, you might as well have made them part of the book. :) That’s a minor point though.

Bottom line… 4 out of 5 stars (does that mean anything anymore?). Job well done. Go buy Now is Gone (aff) today.

Written by Aaron Brazell on December 8, 2007

Here’s a glimpse at page 1 of Chapter 1. Oh la la. Lots of work to do. Thank God I have thick skin. :-)

Written by Aaron Brazell on February 9, 2006

A few years ago, shortly after the release of the wildly famous Halo 2 for the XBOX, I had made an entry about a stats package that I was working on developing. I had posted about it and it turns out the project never went anywhere because of time or desire. Over a year later, that entry continued to be one of the hottest entries on my blog. If I wanted to, I could have rode that wave and continued to post about Halo 2. I’m quite convinced the blog would have performed extraordinarily well, but I had no real passion for the subject matter.

The point is that readers look for value. They want value. They want something that helps them become better people, become better workers; something that adds to their technical knowledge or even their ability to compete in Halo 2. On your end, there’s a lot of work to do. It’s easy to regurgitate information and it’s easy to link to everything and anything but your readers can go to those places and get the value they want. The best way is to add to their value yourself.

A Community of Interest

Have you ever noticed in your life how similar people tend to group together. Sports bars have core fan groups, often times in the middle of rival territory. Music lovers segregate into groups of musical genre and radio stations emerge dedicated to that style.

Bloggers are no different. Many bloggers keep a blogroll, or a list of links of folks that they read on a regular basis, and quickly assessing the links in the list often provide a good insight into the blogger and his interests. Blog networks are also effective in forging relationships among bloggers. Networks give bloggers access to each other and to the resources of the network. This can be

Blogroll Networking

There’s several blogs that I read that include blogrolls. Blogrolls are an effective way to share like-minded bloggers with your readers. As your reading list grows, though, blogrolls can become pretty unwieldy. One blogger maintains a list of 150 Women’s rights blogs and another has close to a hundred different links to techy blogs.

Besides the cumbersome nature of blogrolls, it allows your readers a window into who you are as a blogger and what interests you. It demonstrates that your reading, and hence your writing, usually tends to reflect the personality and interests that you hold. That is community and that is an unattributed benefit to blogging.

Some bloggers have an active community of readers already and have likely gained those readers over time and by presenting content that people have found, enjoyed and thus encouraged readers to continue to come back to. For bloggers who enjoy this kind of loyal readership, they may opt not to use a blogroll at all instead preferring to read their blogs of interest privately and filtering excellent content that will interest their readers. Either way provides excellent opportunity to develop relationships with other like-minded bloggers.

The Blog Network Effect

Blog networks are another fast growing trend in the blogosphere and lend an additional layer of support, organization and grouping. Everyone wants to belong. In the Olympic games, an uncanny propensity for citizens to rally behind their nation’s athletes in sports that otherwise would not interest them demonstrates this idea. As an American, I don’t comprehend the sport they call curling. But every four years, my eyes are glued to the television rallying behind Team USA. Why? Because it offers a sense of belonging.

Blog networks give bloggers citizenship in something. Suddenly, a group of independent minded bloggers pull together and feel a sense of belonging to something that is greater than themselves. It pulls community together and provides for the general well being of bloggers through linking, a new audience as well as helping bloggers meet and integrate with people they may have never encountered before. This is the blog network effect.

CALLOUT (not quote):
Major Blog Networks

• 9rules is a network developed by Paul “Scrivs” Scrivens, Colin Devroe and Mike Rundle and focuses on helping bloggers grow their blogs by driving traffic and revenue to them.
• b5media is a network developed by Darren Rowse, Duncan Riley and co-author Jeremy Wright and has since added Shai Coggins and her About Weblogs all-women blog network. b5media is all about developing the profile of bloggers through constant promotion and a strong internal network of communication.
• Weblogs Inc, founded by Jason Calacanis, is the largest of all blog networks and drives a lot of traffic to its bloggers. Posting requirements are steep but offers a lot of exposure.
• WeblogsSL is a spanish language network
• Shiny Media is a UK-based blog network that focuses on niche topics that are often ignored elsewhere.

Summary

Blogs are all about people and spotlighting them and their interests, strengths and ways of thinking. Blogging is an incredibly useful tool for developing relationships between people – readers and bloggers as well as bloggers and other bloggers.

Written by Aaron Brazell on February 8, 2006

The practice of social networking is similar, especially in the sense of blogs, in that it doesn’t take a whole lot to have acquaintances, if acquaintance is defined by being a participant at someone else’s blog. The analogy falls apart when you factor in the top bloggers that everyone reads.

To gain a more accurate perception of degrees of separation, those top bloggers would have to be removed from the equation. As you blog longer, you’ll likely be amazed at the connections you make with people that you had no expectation for.

Assisting Others Through Your Blogging

Relationships are not simply built on the practical “knowing” someone. They are built on intangibles such as respect, trust and value. In a recent entry I read, the blogger spoke of someone who he did not know very well, if at all, who had been reading his blog and through it felt like he “knew” the blogger.

This is not unordinary. Through an authentic and passionate blogger, readers learn to respect the opinions and thoughts written by the blogger and trusts, sometimes to a fault, what the blogger has to say. Some bloggers develop an almost cult-like following in this way. Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net is one of these bloggers. As an independent, yet knowledgeable mind who values his readers and helping them grow as bloggers (particularly in earning revenue from blogs), Darren has developed a large and dedicated following of other readers who find ultimate value in what he writes. This is not because he fancies himself as the know-all and be-all of blogging success, but because he has learned, the hard way in some case, what is effective in achieving his definition of success.

This is great for Darren because his readers success as bloggers is his own passion. Through his writing, his famous lists and authentic personality, Darren has developed relationships with his readers.

Respect is Earned, Not Given

The old saying about earning respect holds up absolutely in blogging. So many bloggers begin their blogging careers with lofty expectations of thousands of pageviews, linkbacks, etc. and while this may be true of some bloggers, it is generally not the rule.

It would be great if respect could be had by simply putting a blog up, but for most people, it is necessary to “do the time” first. That means consistency in posting and commenting, interacting on deeper levels with other bloggers in the same niche, etc. As Jeremy puts it in his book Blog Marketing, it’s all about finding your voice.

It’s easy to begin spouting off on issues that you may or may not have any business spouting off about, but it’s a different thing to build a reputation with readers through thorough and quality coverage of a topic. Over time, this builds respect among readers and people will flock to you.

When readers respect you, the opportunity to pass your knowledge on to them grows. Like Darren, you will find that people will begin to take advice and views you make seriously and professionally and you will have inadvertently helped them become better at what they do as well!

Gaining Trust

Trust is another thing that doesn’t just arrive on your doorstep because you begin to blog. Trust is often gained through hands on experience and conveyance of the issue. For instance, Dave Winer has tremendous experience with RSS. In fact, he was the guy that came up with the orginal concept and specification and has played a key role throughout the past 9 years in developing RSS as a medium for syndicating news. Whenever a company or entity releases a new concept version of RSS or a new way to consume RSS, it is not unusual to hear Dave Winer contribute his own commentary on the item.

The reason why Dave Winer can do this is because he has built up a tremendous amount of trust across the internet among folks that deal in the RSS industry. He has earned both the respect of the industry and earned the trust of all who watch his industry. He is often quoted in technical white papers, industry journals and blogs around the interent.

While it is hardly expected that you, or either of us, will end up as a Dave Winer, the example given to us crosses the plane of blogging. Trust among your peers and readers will accelerate the growth and reach of your blog and will help you influence more people who read you.

Give them Value!

Besides trust and respect, the third key ingredient to your helping people through your blog is value. The main principle behind the dialogue in blogs is that if you invest the time and energy in providing readers with quality content, they will value your blogging and continue to return to read some more. This is value. The invest in you with the expectation that you will give them something worthwhile.

It’s this value factor that will make your blog grow. As a new blogger, I encourage you to find your voice – that is, find what is worthwhile to your readers as well as to you. Discover what makes your blog perform and attracts an audience. Be a stat watcher and find out, perhaps to your surprise, what it is that is attracting attention to your blog.

A few years ago, shortly after the release of the wildly famous Halo 2 for the XBOX, I had made an entry about a stats package that I was working on developing. I had posted about it and it turns out the project never went anywhere because of time or desire. Over a year later, that entry continued to be one of the hottest entries on my blog. If I wanted to, I could have rode that wave and continued to post about Halo 2. I’m quite convinced the blog would have performed extraordinarily well, but I had no real passion for the subject matter.

The point is that readers look for value. They want value. They want something that helps them become better people, become better workers; something that adds to their technical knowledge or even their ability to compete in Halo 2. On your end, there’s a lot of work to do. It’s easy to regurgitate information and it’s easy to link to everything and anything but your readers can go to those places and get the value they want. The best way is to add to their value yourself.

Written by Aaron Brazell on February 6, 2006

This week has been a busy one indeed. Let me sum it up, if I can.

• Monday morning conference call with SpiderWorks, the editors and publishers of You Can Blog. As a result of that conference call, Part I (Chapters 1-3) has been compiled, read through for flow and content one final time by both me and Jeremy and have been officially submitted to SpiderWorks. Part II (Chapters 4 and 5) has gone through the editorial process with me and await Jeremy’s final thumbs up on Monday. Then that will go the publisher as well, probably on Monday as well.
• Chapter 7 and 10 (both part of Part III) are nearing completion. I am writing Chapter 7 (on this blog, in fact) and Jeremy is wrapping up Chapter 10. That will complete the draft process as we go through the read, edit, flow routine before submitting III and IV as well. It’s a marathon.
• Though not officially announced over at b5media yet, I have been chosen as the new sports channel editor. My job in that role will be to build a channel of quality sports blogs. As an American, I admit this to be a small challenge on a personal level. Our existing bloggers come from so many international flavors, it’s going to be hard to get some good ol’ American sports lovin’. I’ll have to train myself that when one of the bloggers wants to start a “football” blog, it’ll have something to do with penalty shots and butterfly kicks, not a pigskin gridiron “Terrell Owns Rushed to the Hospital Unconscious because of a Brett Favre bullet pass to his face” type of blog. :)
  I can’t speak officially on what exactly is in the works, but you will find out soon and I can’t wait to see how these sports blogs develop. If you have an idea for a sports blog, email me at aaron@b5media.com.
• As mentioned earlier this week, my registration has been officially submitted for Blogonomics. Much more money is needed to make this a reality. Robert Scoble, Darren Rowse, Nick Wilson of Performancing fame…. many more people of whom the business of blogging is important will be there and I just can’t wait to be challenged and even taught. What good is being around these guys if I don’t learn from them. So help me out with a little pocket change or more. Make a small investment in the life of this blog… and this blogger. :) Thanks to the folks who have already sponsored the trip.
• Finally, I want to thank Andy Merrett and all the bloggers at the Bluefish Network for the past 4 or 5 months. Technosailor has been a member of the network there and I hope we’ve done a little something to help boost their profile as they have helped me boost mine. As a result of my increased role as a b5media blogger, and now a staff member, I felt it was really best if Technosailor withdrew from their network. Technosailor is an independent blog and prides itself as thus. It is not joining b5media despite my role there. At least I don’t think it is. The only b5 blog that I run is Emerging Earth.

I’ll be back in a more official capacity as the new week begins. As my blogging becomes increasinly large-scale, you can expect NO entries from me on Sundays and light blogging, if any, on Saturdays. I need to walk away from it on a regular basis. We all need a day off. Of course, guest bloggers may want to step in on weekends. That would be cool, eh?

Written by Aaron Brazell on February 5, 2006

In a recent exchange on a blog I commented on, the author had posted an entry on a topic that was somewhat controversial. It was a topic that I had definite opinions, and those opinions seemed to contradict the author’s perspective. I made a comment that was not hostile toward the author, but yet expressed disagreement with the perspective presented. It was quickly met with a comment that indicated that the entry was not meant for everyone to comment on and that my perspective was not welcome.

This example is exactly the wrong method to approach blogging. First of all, growing a blog is akin to growing a marriage. You may not always like what the other person does, but you embrace them anyway. They may have stinky breath in the morning, fart under the covers or leave eggshells in the sink, but behind all of that there is a person you love.

It’s not uncommon for people to have different mentalities and world views in the blogosphere. But in the end, they are your figurative best friend. Without those differing views feeding your blog, you will have a steeper hill to climb.

Open Up to New Ideas

If blogging has done nothing else for me, it has opened me up to new ideas. Rather, it has given me a communications outlet to the world where ideas are consistently batted around. For most people who do not have such a communications outlet, it is easy to become desensitized to what is going on in the world around them. They turn on the television and hear and see what is presented. But to many of these folks, there is no real outlet for speaking, or in this case writing their thoughts.

Some folks over the years have taken the opportunity to keep journals (you know, the old fashioned pen and notebook style), but relationships takes bi-directional communication. It takes the ability for the person to communicate through written or verbal speech and be communicated back to.

Why Communication? I Thought Relationships Were the Topic

Relationships with your readers as well as other bloggers, family, coworkers and friends are why blogs are so powerful a medium. By blogging, an author is forced to take the initiative to verbalize (figuratively) what he thinks for someone else’s benefit. And in doing so, the blogger has the opportunity to be applauded or contradicted by the other person. There is an honesty inherent there that is, by it’s very nature, the dynamic of a blog.

Blogging is a very different kind of communication tool. It is actually quite limiting in the traditional sense. Experts estimate that between 70 and 90% of communication is non-verbal. In other words, in a traditional sense, more is conveyed with body language and vocal intonation than is conveyed with the words themselves. Right off the bat, blogging is at a disadvantage over other forms of non-written communication. This has begun to be circumvented by mediums such as podcasting, but the vast majority of blogging remains constrained to the written word.

As bloggers become more effective in their use of the written word to convey the emotions and feelings that are typically conveyed using intonation and body language, the walls of communication between commenters and bloggers will begin to crumble. And with those crumbling walls comes a sense of understanding and empathy.

The reality is that your readers are a wealth of knowledge and insight and have plenty to contribute if you let them. By actively listening and encouraging dialogue among your entire community of readers, the flow of ideas can begin to flow like water. We will have more discussion of the effect of blogging on ideas in the next chapter, but building a rapport with your readers will go a long way to growing the blog. By demonstrating for them that you can be corrected, that you can offer leadership in the defined area of your blog by speaking with relative authority you become a source for them as well as other writers in your niche.

Blogging and the Social Network

Of course, ideas are not all relationships are built on. Friendships and social partnerships also develop. At b5media, for instance, we have over 50 bloggers who have developed a unique kind of bond. The topics are wide and varied and many do not interest me in the least. But the connection that is common among all of us is a passion for blogging. Some of the behind-the-scenes relationships that have developed between people that are so completely different are really quite amazing. However, it’s not necessary to be a part of a “blogging network” to have social ties with other bloggers and develop a steadfast core of people that exchange ideas, stories and passions.

Social networking as a whole is a trend that is growing fast and furious. Every day, new services and websites emerge dealing with people interacting with people with a common blog-like atmosphere. The giants in this industry are del.icio.us, Flickr and Digg but many others exist as well. Squidoohttp://www.squidoo.com utilizes the concept of the “lens” which approaches social networking from the point of view that everyone views the world through their own unique perspective, or lens. Clipmarkshttp://www.clipmarks.com allows people to capture interesting stuff on the internet (including images, captions and layout) and share the “clipmarks” with the world. Blogmarkshttp://www.blogmarks.net takes social networking a step farther and allows for direct integration of sites that you find interesting and have bookmarked into your blog.

The idea behind Social Networking is really based in a 1960s study that demonstrated that two randomly chosen American citizens were connected by, on average, six acquaintances. This is where the famous phrase “six degrees of separation” came from and it is the basis of the concept of social networking.

The practice of social networking is similar, especially in the sense of blogs, in that it doesn’t take a whole lot to have acquaintances, if acquaintance is defined by being a participant at someone else’s blog. The analogy falls apart when you factor in the top bloggers that everyone reads.

To gain a more accurate perception of degrees of separation, those top bloggers would have to be removed from the equation. As you blog longer, you’ll likely be amazed at the connections you make with people that you had no expectation for.

–To Be continued

Written by Aaron Brazell on January 31, 2006

As bloggers, most of our interaction comes with people whom we have never met in person. In fact, our little corners of the internet often involve people from all across the world whom we may never meet in person. On my blog, I commonly encounter people from Europe and Asia as well as in my own backyard in Maryland. Far more readers come who may never involve themselves in the conversation, but will daily read the entries that I put up. That dynamic flow of human interaction is exactly the strongest benefit of blogging.

In other words, there are a lot of differences in thoughts and opinions. A famous radio talk show host, known for his radical ideology, has been known to encourage his listeners to disagree if they wish but to meet him in the arena of ideas. In other words, a dynamic relationship consisting of varying opinions can still be healthy and grow if the respective sides agree to listen to each other and take the time to understand where the other parties are coming from.

Diversity in Thought

As indicated above, my readers come from many parts of the world and as such, their thought process and mentality are shaped and influenced by the culture that they are from. They come from different political systems, family structures and have differences in life events.

Some may be computer system administrators with 15 years of experience, or web designers just beginning in the industry. Others are moms or wives of military personnel. Still others are gamers and entertainment gurus. No matter what the persuasion is, one thing is in common – they are all people with a history behind them that has shaped their world view.

As a blogger, your best assets are these people. Their personalities and views will make your blog stronger and more desirable for others who might otherwise not comment based on a perception that their views may not be accepted.

With each of these varied “cultural” differences (some which may be literally cultural and others not) among our readers, taking the time to understand the situation that your readers come from will strengthen your writing and allow more empathy between yourself and your readers.

Diversity in Opinion

Likewise, reader opinions are as varied as their thought processes are. In fact, some people can have identical thought processes and reach completely different conclusions. Stephen Colbert, of Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report jokingly refers to this as “truthiness,” which is the quality by which someone purports to know something emotionally or instinctively, without regard to evidence or to what the person might conclude from intellectual examinationhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness.

Joking aside, many of your readers will have access to the same information and sources you do and draw vastly different conclusions. They may be right. They may be wrong. The same way for you. If you keep an open mind when interacting with your readers, you will show them that you appreciate them and value their opinion. After all, they need a reason to invest their time and efforts in you and your blog.

In a recent exchange on a blog I commented on, the author had posted an entry on a topic that was somewhat controversial. It was a topic that I had definite opinions, and those opinions seemed to contradict the author’s perspective. I made a comment that was not hostile toward the author, but yet expressed disagreement with the perspective presented. It was quickly met with a comment that indicated that the entry was not meant for everyone to comment on and that my perspective was not welcome.

This example is exactly the wrong method to approach blogging. First of all, growing a blog is akin to growing a marriage. You may not always like what the other person does, but you embrace them anyway. They may have stinky breath in the morning, fart under the covers or leave eggshells in the sink, but behind all of that there is a person you love.

It’s not uncommon for people to have different mentalities and world views in the blogosphere. But in the end, they are your figurative best friend. Without those differing views feeding your blog, you will have a steeper hill to climb.

– To Be continued

Written by Aaron Brazell on January 30, 2006