Darren Rowse on Blogging for Dollars at ConnectNow in Sydney

The following are my notes from Darren Rowse's presentation at the ConnectNow conference in Sydney.

Confessions of a Blogger and Social Media Addict

Darren's intrigued by the program this morning -- we've got Gary Vaynerchuk, who's one of the most extroverted people you'll ever meet, and Darren's one of the most introverted people you'll ever meet -- which just goes to show that social media is a place for everyone.

Darren's had 20 jobs in the past 10 years, none of them in social media/web. He's got a Bachelor of Theology, half a Bachelor in Marketing, got a C grade average in English in High School, and was incapable of making text BOLD for the three months into his first blog. He had no history in this kind of thing and no desires to be a web entrepreneur. He did start start a business when he was 6, selling pictures of Brooke Shields from his mother's Women's Day magazines, so he obviously had some sort of impetus.

He thinks we're smarter than he is -- we're from companies that have resources; there's a wealth of online resources we can tap into. We have such a big head start and he thinks we can achieve so much more than he ever could. Before 2002, his Web experience was Hotmail, Google, Netscape, and IRC. He started using IRC in 1996, and now he sees lots of similarities with what's going on in social media. Although skeptical at first, within an hour of getting on IRC Darren was hooked, and for the next 3 years he spent at least an hour every day in that room. He was astounded by the depth of relationships in that room. When one of their members died, they had a virtual memorial. When two got married, they had a virtual reception.

Up until 2002, that was his main experience of online community, but then he got a link to tallskinnykiwi.com. He was really hooked by this blog, by the content and by the voice. Here was this guy on the other side of the world and he had this amplification tool that he could use to impact thousands of people. He also saw community on the blog -- not only did Andrew talk to 1,000 people every week, but they talked back to him, and they expanded his ideas in the comments. There was this little mini-blogosphere around him, and they were sharing and growing and building community. Darren was doing this in his church, but he realized the power of doing this online.

So he started own blog, and because he was commenting on other blogs people began to find his blog, "LivingRoom". Over the next year he became an "authority" (he's totally bemused by this), and a year and a half later he started his first professional blog by accident. It was called Visually Speaking, and he started it to share photos of his trip to Morocco with his family and friends, but he'd also posted a review of his camera. When he checked his stats, he realized that nobody had visited to look at the photos, but he was ranking number 1 on Google for the camera review. He began to think what could happen if he had hundreds of reviews, and within a year he was a professional blogger.

Problogger is the blog he wanted to read. He was beginning to make a living from blogging and nobody was writing about it, so he started that blog. It's led him to amazing opportunities he never imagined. If you want to make money out of blogs, often it's not the direct income (advertising, etc), it's the indirect stuff. You just don't know where this type of thing will lead.

Today, he gets 3.5 million visitors a month, 14 million page views a month, has 150,000+ social network connections, and has 12 writers (part time).

Principles of blogging and social media:

• LISTEN: It is the most important thing. Social media is all the more effective when you build it on a base of listening. Blogs are amazing broadcasting tools, but that broadcasting is all the more effective when he stops to listen. It needs to happen on a variety of levels. You need to listen to the culture of the mediums: the language of Facebook, the style of Twitter. When he first got onto Twitter, he spent 2 weeks just watching what his associates and the people he respected were doing: the language, the etiquette; and that made him a much more powerful Twitter user. Listen for where the people you want to reach are already gathering. Listen to what is being said about you -- create a Google alert for yourself. This isn't about vanity; it's about connections. Listen to what is working and what isn't working on your blog. He experiments constantly with new ways of writing and new tools, and then in the weeks that follow he does a lot of analysis on it. Two days ago they started a new column called "Trends of the Blogosphere". He thinks that's a good idea, but he'll sit down and do some analysis in a few weeks. He also sets up time to listen: a post, for example, called, "What's wrong with blogging?" got 140 comments and spawned 20 or 30 other blog posts.
• Identify Goals: It's so important if you want to use any of these types of mediums to work out what you want to achieve.
• Build a "Home Base" -- and then build outposts around your home base. When Twitter first launched he saw a number of bloggers announce they were shutting down their blogs to become full-time Twitterers. Darren was amazed by this. They were shutting down their own space to put all their time and effort into Twitter.com, where your account is owned by them. He's got a presence on Twitter, YouTube, StumbleUpon, etc, but the main purpose of those outposts is to drive traffic to ProBlogger. You also have to be willing to go to others' home bases -- it's not the case that "If you build it, they will come."
• TRUST: If you are looking to build lasting influence, if you want to stimulate change, you need to invest time in building trust. As he's launched a variety of products over the past few years, and he feels the only reason he's done so well is because he's built up a lot of trust. He launched an ebook last year and sold 5,000 copies in a few weeks, and when he asked people why they bought it he was amazed by how many people said they bought it because Darren had told them to. Trust comes from others, and it comes from being a trustworthy person.
• Be Useful: One of his matras is to solve people's problems. If you can solve a problem, enhance their lives, send them away from your blog or your Twitter account better off than when they arrived, they will come back. This can be making people laugh, educating them, informing them, or giving them a sense of belonging. What problem are you solving with your Twitter account or your blog? Digital Photography School exists because most people who have cameras don't know how to use them, but every post he writes is a chance to solve a smaller problem: fuzzy photos, aperture, etc. Every time you're about to hit publish or tweet, ask yourself, "Does this matter? Is this going to solve someone's problem?"
• Build Community: He discovered community through IRC. People don't just use the Internet to download stuff, they use it more and more to connect with others. He's had 30 blogs over the past years, and the 3 that remain are the ones that have a community. There are so many ways of building a community on a blog -- starting in the comments section! If you're getting comments, respond! Use interactive tools, polls, chat, invite readers to generate content for you. On ProBlogger last week he asked people to generate a 2-minute blogging tip on a video; this is a great way to grow content. Give your readers jobs -- when he started a forum on his photography school, he highlighted the top commenters and asked them to become moderators. In church he discovered that if you asked people to do something on the first day (join the welcoming committee, pass out flyers, etc), they were more likely to come back. Give people homework -- see his 31 days to build a better blog program for a great example. Darren gives a little bit of teaching, and then gives them something to do. Give people avenues to join, to subscribe, to become a part of it in some way. On his blogs he's got forums, newsletters, he gives people ways to connect. People call themselves "members" of his site, rather than just "readers".
• Be Personal: In October last year he was at BlogWorldExpo, a conference of around 3,000 bloggers. He was on the stage with 3 other bloggers, and he noticed as he was talking to another person a woman was running up to him. She launched herself at him, hugged him, and started to sob. "I feel that I know you!" she cried. He doesn't try to be intentionally personal, but he uses his real name, discusses relevant personal milestones (like the births of his children), uses video, and has his picture on his blog, and because of this, this woman who feels she knows him has sent hundreds of people to his blog.
• Tell Stories: He was talking with people last night at the cocktails about the profound power of stories. Half of the most read posts on his blog have stories in them of some sort. Stories engage the imagination and touch people at a heart level rather than a head level. Stories go beyond facts and figures and reveal something personal about you, even if it's not a personal story. They trigger emotions, they're sensory, they're conversations. When he tells a story in a blog post he notices that the comments are filled with people telling their own stories. Stories provide a hook and grab attention. The web is full of information, but start a post with a story and people take notice of it. Stories are memorable; he doesn't remember most of the posts he's written, but he remembers the ones where he's told a story. They're also convincing: if you want to get people to do something, a story is an inspiring way.
• Be Unique: We operate in a world that is full of clutter. One of the ways he recommends people breaking through the clutter is to share your opinion. When the iPad came out, there were thousands of posts announcing it had been launched -- who cares? We already knew that.
• Build a Network Before You Need It: He had a guy come up to him and say, "I've just launched a Twitter account to promote my book, what should I do?" Darren replied, "When does the book come out?" "Next week," the guy said. "Well," said Darren, "you're about a year too late."
• Leverage What You Have: A lot of bloggers struggle that first week of blogging: how do I get people to read my blog? It's all about looking at what you've already built and leveraging that. Now when he launches something new he's got great platforms, but when he first started his blog, he told his church. Four people checked it out -- but they were the first four!
• Craft Content: If there's one thing that takes a blog above everyone else, it's people who take time to craft content before they slap it out. He believes that, in a 140-character world, the pendulum is swinging back towards long-form content. He finds his longer posts are doing much better than they used to. He wrote a series a while back called How to Craft a Blog Post: 10 Crucial Points to Pause that provides excellent tips on this.
• Be Playful: He once wrote a post once as a guest post from the voice of his 2-year-old son. This was back in the day when he'd get 10-20 comments, and he got 140 comments on that post.
• Be Transparent: He launched a Twitter account called @ProBloggerDeals, and made it really clear that this was a place where he was only going to ask people to buy stuff. He thought he might get shot down; the next day he had 2,500 followers.
• Be Accessible: This is really important when you start growing to a certain size, because the demands become so great. The larger your audience grows, the harder it is to be personal and be accessible. He uses UStream for this -- "This is where I'm going to be, you can ask whatever you want." It's a bounded time where he's giving himself to his readers.
• Be Passionate: People can tell if you're not interested, engaged, or if your topic doesn't mean anything to you. If you're not passionate about your topic, find people who are. He wrote an open letter to AdSense that was a love letter, playful and passionate -- and caused Google to change their policy.
• Promote... But Not Too Much. He talked about going out into other people's territory, and he finds this hard because he's shy, but you have to do it. However, there comes a point where additional effort actually yields less returns.
• Viral Promotion: It works, but it's not something you can design. But what he does it educate his readers on Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg, so that they can share content for him -- this increases the chances they'll use it.
• Social Proof: If you already have subscribers, it's easier to get other people to subscribe. On his photography blog he launched it without any comments -- he wanted readers before he opened comments. When he launched the forum, he invited his most active participants first so they could seed the content.
• Use Familiar Mediums: He uses email, RSS. They've got 420,000 subscribers, 300,000 are email. Here's their email cycle:
  
  
  
  
• Be Prolific: It's hard to work out where to spend your time on the Internet, so he recommends look at where the people you want to connect with are and go there. Don't set up expectations that you'll be on every social network, but be prolific. When people see you on different mediums, the brand gets reinforced. It can be really tiring, but it's also really powerful.
• Sometimes The Money Comes Later: In the first two years of his photography blog, he monetized through ad networks and affiliate marketing; in the third and fourth years, the direct sales and products grew because he had a community of trust.
• Don't just make money FROM your blog, make money BECAUSE of it: Your blog can dramatically increase your value in indirect ways.
• Persist: Most people he comes into contact with give up blogging after 3 months. 3 months is NOTHING on a blog. It takes a year, two, three, of building something, sending people away better than they arrived. His success is because he's persisted at it, taken these lessons and kept doing them day in and day out. 

I'd just like to add a personal comment here: Darren's blog is PHENOMENAL, and I strongly recommend you read it if you are interested in blogging: ProBlogger. Check it out :-)