Yesterday I received an update from a blog I’m apparently subscribed to which mainly focusses on successful blogging. It’s a bit of a weird thing for me to bother with because I’m pretty much detached from success or failure on this blog, and in fact it’s hard to say what success even amounts to for it. However, it piqued my interest because of how it enumerated the common reasons for achieving success, by which I presume it means a large readership, engagement and positive responses, and also perhaps monetisation and profit. What I’m doing here has little or nothing to do with any of that.
What it actually reminds me of is an incident I experienced once in a café with a friend. I should emphasise the word “friend” here because there was no suggestion of attraction or romantic involvement at any point in our relationship. They were talking about their recent separation with their partner, and I was trying to be a good listener and doing all the usual stuff you’re supposed to do in that situation: reflecting back what they were saying, paying attention to the emotional content and all that stuff. All rather similar, I hope, to a herbal consultation. Anyway, apparently some bloke was earwigging and when my friend got up to go to the toilet, he said to me that I didn’t stand a chance with them because our conversation was focussing too much on them rather than myself. I didn’t reply to this but it’s long stuck in my mind as being two things: really bad advice for how a date should go, and a serious misreading of the situation. But it was also delivered with great confidence. I could relate this to Dunning-Kruger, but I won’t because I keep doing that and it’s probably getting boring. It was just amazing at how sure he was about his reading of the situation and that his terrible advice was correct.
This is to some extent how I feel about blogging advice, and I also feel like I’m in a good position to assess it. There are similarities between success in blogging as outlined above and success in romantic relationships, and looking at it in that way I’m in a detached relationship with this blog and its success, whatever that means. I am friends with this blog but not in love with it or looking to pursue a relationship. Therefore, when I look at advice about successful blogging I may ironically be in a better position to evaluate it because I don’t care all that much about how many people read my stuff and I’m not planning to make any money out of this. If I was, I’d probably try to make it more focussed on one subject. The gender blog, for example, gets loads more readers per post than this one even though I’m currently writing about once a year on there. I also think that some of the advice I’ve encountered is rather like that bloke in the café: it misreads the situation and is delivered with confidence. There’s actually a subreddit called confidentlyincorrect on this very subject, and it’s an interesting phenomenon, and let’s face it, it’s both connected to Dunning-Kruger and the NLP process of unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence and unconscious competence.
Anyway, yesterday’s email impressed me with its incorrectitude. There was a bullet list at the start, which I’ll paraphrase as: Write as much content as possible, write longer articles, put lots of keywords into the body of the text and use the same formula for titles as everyone else does. I don’t do that last one because I’ve no idea what it is, but I do try to “grab the reader”, and I try to blog about topical issues some of the time. It doesn’t yield lots of views. My posts are often about four or five thousand words long, which is longer than the average of 1142 words. This is not by design: it simply takes me that long to say what I want to say, partly because my writing style is too verbose and I tend to wander off-topic a lot. As for frequency, I have been posting daily but now average less than that, and the modal frequency is less than weekly but more than once a month. The distribution of that particular curve is quite flat though: almost as many people blog daily as blog weekly, and almost as many people weekly as twice to thrice a month. Using the same formula for titles as everyone else really sounds like clickbait.
I do all those things but it doesn’t translate into views. Precisely because this doesn’t bother me, I’m more likely to see this in a neutral way, and if nothing else it does mean this is not a magic formula for getting them. A different project of mine, now long since abandoned, was my YouTube channel, where I once again followed the standard advice at the time, which incidentally has since changed. I remember some of the details. You were supposed to keep videos below three minutes in length, use saturated thumbnails with white impact text with a black background, edit out all the pauses, elicit a strong emotional response, get attention in the first few seconds of the video, include a call to action and encourage viewers to rate, share, comment, like and subscribe. As far as I remember, I did all of this. Like the advice given regarding blogging, following it didn’t result in getting loads of views, and in fact one of those pieces of advice, keeping it under three minutes, has now been discarded because of advertising and sponsorship. I did care about that. I do not care about this, not in that way anyway. I love this blog – as a friend!
Inadvertently communicating desperation drives people away of course. If you’re understood to be the best judge of your work and are visibly pushing it hard, it can raise doubts in people’s minds about how good it is. It suggests you are correctly perceiving it as of poor quality. This happens with me and advertising. If I see something advertised, it makes me wonder what’s wrong with it that it doesn’t sell itself. This is to some extent unfair because people can’t buy something if they don’t know it exists, but I’m mainly thinking of TV and video advertising here rather than something with a much lower profile.
Returning to the metablog I mentioned above, two things related to this point come to mind. One is that perhaps people who blog “successfully” have neither the time nor the inclination to tell other people how they did it. They lack the time because they’re either busy blogging successfully or busy enjoying their income from their success, so if they’re having to blog about how to blog well, maybe they aren’t doing as well as they’d like their readers to think they are. As for inclination, although I’m not going to say everyone’s a meanie, if you blog well in the sense that you make a considerable income from it, would you really want to teach others your trade secrets so they can compete successfully with you?
Maybe you would. However, that doesn’t mean you will end up giving good advice, because a number of cognitive biasses will have come to the fore if you’re successful. People are driven psychologically to develop a sense of agency. And we need this. The same situation can be a lot less threatening and depressing if you’ve managed to convince yourself that you are consciously acting to address the threat or problem even if it later turns out what you did made no practical difference. In fact it did make a difference because that sense of agency succeeded in tiding you over a period, perhaps ongoing, perhaps not, rather than suffering. However, a sense of agency can be misleading. You’re likely, post hoc, to misremember what you’ve done and, more importantly, to confuse correlation with causation. Studies have shown that poor people perceive a lack of control over their circumstances and attribute much success of others to luck, whereas rich people perceive that their personal qualities and decisions are the cause of their success. Consequently, they may be unreliable guides if they’re trying to help others achieve their success even if they’re acting in good faith.
Having said all that, I may myself be influenced by Dunning-Kruger at this point. Maybe I just don’t know enough about successful blogging to be able to judge the content of such courses. Whereas that may be so, someone attempting to sell their blogging skills to others is confronted with a problem. They can’t show their hand. Consequently, whereas they may be able to offer a sample of their content, if they give away the best quality and most useful information, potential customers can take that away and do it for themselves without paying a penny. Therefore they may have to present their poorer-quality content before reaching the paywall, but the people you’re trying to sell your stuff to will then see that low value stuff and might conclude that it’s representative of whatever else you have to offer that you’re asking money for. Thus for all I know there may be good advice out there which I just never see because of my cynicism.
The reason I don’t think this is true is based on my experience running a herbal practice. I spent the first four years practicing without accessing my mentor or any kind of social network based on the professional body or other herbalists. After that period, I decided it would be worthwhile to attend a continuing professional development (CPD) seminar on running a successful herbal practice. Most of the attendees were newly qualified and just setting up. It was a well-run session and I’m not dissing the qualities of the tutor, leader or facilitator, whatever you want to call her. However, every last bit of advice that she offered and which we discussed was something I had tried and persisted with for several years and hadn’t worked. There may be an argument that I simply hadn’t tried for long enough, but there’s also the question of cutting one’s losses. I don’t begrudge her willingness to help others along the way or even to attempt to make a living out of such a financially unsuccessful line of business, and I believed she thought it would help, but it really didn’t and only someone with little experience would believe it would. Once you’ve tried all that, you will have learnt that it’s all pointless in the sense that it doesn’t raise your profile or income or help you build the business. However, such seminars are quite possibly worthwhile in that they help the people offering them to make money and perhaps even to the participants in that they will feel encouraged for a while, and gain that all-important sense of agency.
In the end, I think you have to be detached from the results. This blog is a means of self-expression for me and to be honest I do want to be heard, but I’ve never been under any illusions that it will become popular or gain a wide readership. It’s one of those situations where the best piece of advice I can offer if you actually want to make money from a blog is to do the exact opposite of everything I’m doing. For a start, stick to a narrow range of subjects. I don’t do this partly because I can’t, but mainly because I’ve got no interest in getting lots of views. Probably what I’m most interested in is a high ratio of engagement compared to number of views, which sadly I don’t have. I want this to be a conversation. But this isn’t about me. It may well be that people offering advice on successful blogging genuinely believe their methods will work, and I can believe that successful bloggers will sometimes offer paid advice they genuinely believe in, but in fact all that amounts to, a lot of the time, is what they’ve done to keep themselves going while their profile and engagement has coincidentally risen. They might easily have done a completely different set of things and be offering those as a course instead. Then again, I’m not a member of their potential market, so I don’t have to engage in any rationalisation about whether or not their suggestions and training have any value to others. I dunno, maybe they’ll work but I don’t really care to be honest, and that apathy means that my own advice might paradoxically be more valuable. I’m not interested in doing something that boring though.
A Box Of Chocolates 