Getting in the Brain of a Blogger

A major part of creating web content is appealing to the audience. To appeal to the audience, you first have to know who your audience is. Here, I’m going to examine web audience scenarios for a fashion blog that I follow, Caphillstyle.

The blog was created by Belle, who describes her blog as “a fashion blog for women who don’t want to sacrifice their sense of style for professional success.” She focuses on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. From reading Belle’s blog, it is clear that the intended demographic of her audience is professional women around 30 (20 at the youngest, 40 at the oldest) either in Washington or on the East Coast (the intense discussion of appropriate Derby attire would never occur anywhere else). However, as Redish explains in “Writing Web Content that Works”, demographics alone cannot be used to define an audience. Scenarios are an effective alternative that give a more well-rounded idea of a target audience.

Here is a scenario I created for Caphillstyle:

This is Amy. She is 28 years old and works as a staffer on Capitol Hill. Amy lives in an apartment in the pricey DC area, and is required to dress professionally for her job. However, her clothing is frequently limited to suits and button-downs because she lacks the knowledge and budget to change it to anything more fashion-forward. Amy is trying to get ahead in her job field as well as save money for retirement.

Amy uses the web constantly throughout the day. She is on-call 24/7 from her smartphone and gets updates from work-related sites as well as blogs that she follows for pleasure. Because Amy is budget-conscious and busy, she needs information beyond fashion that tells her not just what to wear, but how to wear it.

Admittedly, my scenario is from the wrong end- I began with the website and extrapolated an audience. However, if the website is effective (and Belle’s popularity shows it is), the scenario should be virtually the same either way.

Additionally, by tailoring the website to suit the scenario, the website is better able to brand itself for the target audience. This branding is one of the most important aspects of creating a website and allows it to be useful and memorable.

Is Blogging a form of Journalism and can you make a living from it?

From the title of this blog post, there might seem to be an obvious answer- if you can make a living from it, then blogging is journalism. However, the definition of journalism is not as concrete as one would think and, at least according to Rettberg, does not require  monetary gain from one’s efforts. That being said, Rettberg does not characterize monetary gain as a necessary element to journalism overall, but instead broadens the definition to those who provide information about topics that are relatively news-related. Given this, many bloggers are journalists of a sort, but the overall tone of the chapter gives an idea of blogging as a fluffy sort of journalism. Rettberg mentions how bloggers often regard their work as much more personal, thus making it more difficult to have objective journalism. Indeed, objective journalism is not their goal. Like the example of the Virginia Tech student who updated his LiveJournal as events on the campus progressed the day of the shooting, the original intention in many cases is not for a wide audience. This student did not intend to be a journalist, but on that day, he was one of the most sought-after sources available online.

The personal nature of blogs also relates to the possibility of monetary gain from their content. Rettberg goes into several examples of ways in which bloggers profit from their efforts, including ads, PayPerPost, and product promotions, but concludes that many bloggers see their online content as a part of themselves too personal to commercialize. Of course, there is an enormous variety of blogs and types of bloggers that cannot easily be summed up, but the economic statistics that Rettberg presents supports this idea of blogs as a non-monetary form of writing. He states that 90% of the profits in blogging are made by the top 15% of blogs. To me, this is not encouraging for the future of blogging as a money-making, “career”-type job. Instead, It is more likely that, if the economic figures continue in this way, blogs will remain personal hobbies that venture into journalism, but are not in the same category as news publications.

What is the definition of journalism? What kinds of material are you willing to pay to read? Do you think people are more or less likely to pay for online content?

How blogs developed and how they are used

In Chapter 2 of his book, Rettberg describes how the transition from the printed word to the online is comparable to the transition from both the spoken word to the written, and the written word to the printed. Several times, he references the arguments that Plato made against the written word, as he believed it to be an easier means of learning and exploring knowledge that did not require enough of either the student or the teachers. At one point, he takes issue with the written word as being “non responsive”, i.e. that you can’t ask questions of a manuscript. Thus, Plato seems to have believed, there was no way to gain additional insight or information from the source of the information, which limited the overall educational experience. While the societal and educational developments of the written and printed word were great, Plato was not wrong with his initial concern — the development of the printing press, especially, led to reading becoming a much more individual and private form of education and largely eliminated the public readings and discussions of Plato’s era.

However the standard learning process changed (or suffered) with the development of writing, Rettberg explains in chapter 3 how he believes that blogs and social media online have brought back the communicative element in writing, thus alleviating Plato’s concerns a few thousand years later. With books and other published print materials, there are often multiple separations between the author who thought of the ideas and wrote them down and the consumer who reads them. It is in only the rarest of occasions that a reader could get the opportunity to request further insight from the author. On the Internet, this is not the case. Blogs, more so than other forms of the written word, have a social and connective aspect that allows the reader to comment on the material and the author to respond in turn. Also, multiple readers of the same material can, at any given time, connect with one another and share their insights, with the author being privy to these discussions. In a way, this seems somewhat cyclic — first there was little technology but much discussion and sharing of ideas. Then, as technology gradually improved and mass communicative strategies increased, there was less discussion and more independent knowledge and learning. Now, technology has come around again to the point where discussion is easily facilitated and encourages ideas to be examined by groups around the world.

Do you read more often online or in print form? Why? What will be lost with the loss of the print form as the main format of daily reading?

Grab their attention for a good reason

In chapter four of Writing for Digital Media, Brian Carroll explains how best to create a headline that will both inform and draw in the reader. Good headlines, he says, are not just catchy, but are also tell the reader what the article is about, harking back to his previous focus on scanning. People don’t want to delve into the entire prose without having a reasonable idea of what the focus of the piece is. It’s the same idea that makes us read the inside or back cover of a book before we decide to read the whole thing. We want to make sure the effort is worth our while.

When writing a blog, you have the same duty to your audience that a publisher has to the population of the library or bookstore. You have to make the blog attractive, easy to find, and attention-getting. In my experience, this is the most difficult part of making a blog. Just finding a name for a blog that is clever, catchy, informative, and not too cheesy is ridiculously difficult. Doing that for each post? It’s no wonder that a lot of headlines fall flat. Sorry if mine are included in that number.

In chapter seven, Carroll discusses how to make a blog a legitimate a worthwhile form of journalism. You  can grab all the attention you want with the perfect headline and spot-on tags, but it’s useless if the blog itself isn’t worth reading.  A large part of making the blog worthwhile is closely tied in with credibility. Building credibility and a sense of legitimacy for your blog helps you to gain a loyal audience who believes that what you have to say is something they want to hear.

The list of Ten Steps to Better Blogging that Carroll describes are extremely helpful as well. Several that I hope to work on are Step 3- Be authentic, Step 7- Learn the Software, and Step 9- Break Up the Text. I’ve noticed that my writing style is often more formal that is appropriate for a blog platform. I tend not to relate to my audience very well, and stay stiff and aloof. Hopefully I can learn to be more authentic and write in a more conversational way. As far as software is concerned, I consider myself to be a total novice. Fortunately, WordPress is relatively easy to use, but I struggle even with that. Experimentation and work in Digital Communications should help alleviate this problem. Finally, as is probably painfully apparent, I tend towards large blocks of text. In this post, I’ve tried to break up the text into smaller paragraphs than usual, but I still haven’t been able to incorporate visual elements into my blog posts. My goal is to create dynamic, visually engaging posts that allow the reader to get the information without feeling like they had to read an essay.

What are some examples of catchy headlines? What headlines are you drawn in to read? What aspects of a website turn you away from reading it?