I have been telling lots of bloggers that they too can become professionals and be paid a wage for their blogging.  As a hobbyist blogger, what is it that you are doing to be a blogger?  Are you just putting words on a page and hoping people will show up?  Believe it or not, many companies are doing just that, putting a blog on their site and waiting to get rich off the process.  If you are a blogger and you believe in that doctrine I am the first to call you out.  There is no quick way to stardom as it relates to blogging.  Putting words on a page are a part to the overall picture but I can scrape content and call it good.  That is not the case when wanting to be successful.

Bloggers are a special breed.  They know how to be successful as a community builder and as a marketer, advertiser and PR person for their blog.  They wear all those hats and more.  They are in effect, the CEO, CFO, CTO and all other C level employees of thir blogs.  This is invaluable to companies.  A person that knows social media and can implement that knowledge into a use that benefits the blog, the company and its future.  This is a skill that cannot be passed down to the communication department, the PR department, or to that intern in the mail room with a MySpace account.  A blogger or a professional blogger must wear many hats.  I call them social media managers as they wear any hats and have many functions.  What do you consider your job description as a professional blogger?

I was bragging a bit about my night last night because I was able to sit and read a book in the quiet of my own home.  It is not normally I can do with 4 kids 7 and under trying to upset my routine in every way possible.  I usually only have time to gobble up the more than 2000 RSS feeds I read everyday, but for some reason I was able to finish those earlier than normal during the day and I found myself with some free time.  A luxury of the highest in my home.  The book I devoured in one evening was “The Road“, by Cormac McCarthy and published through Random House.  The book itself is not the most important part of this post, but the fact that I was able to actually read written words on a page was important.

In blogging we tend to write our posts quickly and in a conversational style that sometimes loses the reader as we sometimes speak to our own minds and the only person it makes sense to is us as the writer.  The reader is left with blank spot where your message was lost.  Conventional style writing, as in authors of fiction writing tend to be very descriptive with use of adjectives and other forms that place us in their minds and we absorb their pictures and the message it brings.  Reading that book last night brought me to an epiphany that I too had begun to fall into a style of wiring that may be too close to home and I may be losing readers.  Sometimes you have to reach out and rattle the chain of the reader and have them understand and see that picture or message in your own mind.  We can all be better bloggers and better at content production with just a little reading.  By the way, I really recommend the book.  It was a gift from my mother-in-law of all things.

As I indicated in a comment in a post  I read today over at Kian’s blog,  I had to make my own sound in the echosphere. Yeah, I called an "echosphere" for a reason because Kian is experiencing something I have also experienced and continue to deal with like the feeling of having my eyes pried open with toothpicks and forced to watch I Love Lucy 24/7. I can only read Scoble’s take on a topic, or Winer’s thoughts about this and that, and what Doc told me today, so many times before I start to think about jumping out my office window.  In this case only 3 feet off the ground but nonetheless, totally whacked.

**Please note that I am completely  hypocritical in that statement 1. because I am envious of their traffic readership, and 2. the reason they are so easy to link to is because all I have to do is Google there last names, or in Doc’s case the word "Doc" and I get a first page search response.  This is a result of the echo chamber I complain of and using blogs to my preached point about SEO.**

With that said, let me explain the blogging echo chamber dilemma.  Blogs are real time.  As fast as something can be typed and the publish button pushed, words can be transmitted to readers all over the world.  When you have people that are gurus as I have mentioned above, everyone is excited to report what exciting thing they read today over at this popular blog.  If they are excited to report it, and you are also excited, and both of you blog it and make me click to go read it, you can see where you get caught up in that echo chamber or the "blogging fissure" (my phrase).

Now throw into that recipe a dash of RSS.  Many of these gurus and leaders in their respective industries, all like to get their message read and have many vehicles to publish within.  I’m going to single out specifically a site I have had this problem with, not necessarily to pick a fight but because they may actually read this and take it as feedback. WebProNews is the vehicle of which I speak.  I have nearly every single author or columnist they have in their stable in my feed reader.  Meaning I can read what Scoble (I’m not picking on you Robert it’s just your name’s easy to type and to remember) said in my feeds in the morning with coffee.  I really don’t need to read that same article in the afternoon published word for word on WPN.  I’m afraid it does not end there.  For whatever reason, Bloglines (my main feed reader) picks up this feed again and again, publishing the same feed again, with possibly a new feed thrown in once they have cut and pasted an article from another WPN author. This can go on throughout the day, causing a dozen "unread" feeds.  I’m sorry, it still does not end there.  Now throw in that bowl and fold, the fact that I have search feeds with search strings I follow related to the industry, and for clients, and for metrics.  Due to having these feeds, a search tag may be related to "Business Blogging", which means that every article that is tagged business blogging ends up sent to me as "new content".  In reality it was that same Scoble article I read in the morning.  We professional bloggers that like to stay on the lunatic fringe of blog consulting, blog marketing and blog advertising (oh man this is a keyword feast!) have now read 20 articles written by 50 different authors, sent to us 5 times, and thrown on our windshield again by our own need for information.  You can see how the echo chamber is suddenly a recipe of disaster.

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One thing I learned during Blog Business Summit is that for most people RSS is over their heads, like Goodyear blimp over their heads.  This isn’t their fault, it’s ours.  We, as the blogi masters, just haven’t done enough to help people get it (or "grok" it as I like to say).

Anita Campbell has an article in Inc Technology that brings it all down to this: "The simple reality is:  RSS still has far too much geek factor."

The question is, then, what can we do about it?  I think it comes down to two things, education and application.

First we have to educate people what it is, how it really works, how to look for it on sites, and how to subscribe.  Then we need, we absolutely need to show people why it is so important.  Why it can save them time and help them in their day-to-day jobs.

Anita has these suggestions for education:

• Use the new orange button.  If you are still using the old buttons with the acronyms XML or RSS, swap them out for the new button.  Today’s browsers, such as Firefox, auto-detect RSS feeds and will display the new orange button in the lower right hand corner of the browser when the user is on a site with RSS. You want users to see the same version of the button on your site and in the browser bar.  This will help reinforce how to use RSS feeds.
• Use descriptive text links. Add a text link next to the orange button. A simple “subscribe to news feeds” text link is preferable to the rather baffling “syndicate this site” label that you so often see.
• Consider adding a description page.  Give your readers an information page with a plain English description of feeds. The Yahoo study pointed out that some of the confusion users experience comes after they click on the orange buttons and either nothing happens or they’re taken to an ugly page of raw HTML. One easy alternative is to use the FeedBurner service. FeedBurner adds a user friendly page.
• Offer one-click subscribe buttons. “One click subscribe” buttons let users do just that: subscribe with one or a few clicks to automatically receive updates to your feed at one of the popular start pages or news aggregator sites such as Bloglines or Google reader.
• Use RSS auto-discovery.  Add an RSS auto-discovery command to your website’s HTML, if the site supports this feature (most blog software does).  RSS auto discovery lets applications such as the Firefox browser know there’s an RSS feed on your site. Then the application can alert the user that there is a feed to subscribe to.

All of these are great.  These are pretty easy things we, as site/blog owners can do.  Then we need to just show people that Bloglines and Google Reader can be their friends.  I suggest an online tool to start people off versus an application like Attensa or FeedDemon because the medium of a web-browser will make sense to them.

On the why part … this is where just showing Google News feeds, Technorati feeds, and others are so, so important.  Sure it’s cool to get headlines, but showing them how they can get that edge through sifting and consolidating information is powerful, it can be life changing.  And heck it’s pretty fun when you can get the scoop on breaking news or a hot tip.

It usually only takes 30 minutes to show someone the amazing world of RSS can help them.  Isn’t 30 minutes a small price for getting your information flow from a raging river to a controllable stream?

Thought so.

Tags: RSS, collaborative intelligence