If you write or want to make money writing, (and it doesn’t have to be about gardening) you might want to check out these two -suddenly free - ebooks on copywriting. I paid about $25 bucks for one of them 5 or 6 years ago. And now they’re free.
Check it out and download it here.
But I’m glad I didn’t wait.
One of the things I’m really excited about right now is the new way I’m looking at setting up online gardening seminars. A few brave souls stuck around for a few hours of webinars, gave me some great feedback and pushed my thinking into the 21st century. While I’ll be making a video this coming week on that, I thought I’d turn the same lessons to blogging.
So here’s what I’m thinking about and I’d love your thoughts.
The old publishing model went something like: editor gets a thought about subject X. Finds writer. Editor and writer to and fro and work out story details. At this point, the story is between the editor and the writer. (and yes, sometimes the details vary - the writer comes up with the story etc)
Bottom line though, the decision to publish is made by the editor and communication is between the editor and the writer.
The editor involves a support team to put out the magazine.
Magazine printed.
Reader reads.
End of story. Oh yeah, the odd reader writes editor and gets published in next issue.
So the established process goes something like writer>editor>reader.
I think the technology of the Net has really given us disintermediation and that the time and technology is ripe to take full advantage of it.
But for the most part we aren’t.
Most writers (and I include bloggers here) are stuck in the old writer>editor>reader model. What has happened is that the writer has become the writer/editor so the process now looks like writer/editor>reader.
And again, a few folks make comments on blogs but every garden blogger I know laments the fact that only a very small proportion of subscribers actually comment.
There’s a message there folks.
Writer/editor>reader doesn’t fully involve the readership.
There’s still an editor in the process and that editor still stands between the writer and the reader. The writer has become the editor.
Look around the Net and figure out how many websites are written by the writer/editor without regard for what readers want to read. Without regard for what’s important to readers. Writers have become their own editors and make decisions accordingly but it’s still a one-way street. The old publishing model isn’t dead; it has simply moved online.
The power of the Net is such that we can now involve our readers in the process. We can ask them what they want to read, what they want to know and then we can respond appropriately.
The process becomes writer>reader>writer. A circular process and an ongoing one.
I already do this in some small way with my web sites. I use software to discover what folks are looking for in the Net and then I write about those things. My thinking is that if you’re looking for something, then I’ll write about it for you. Over the last 3-4 years, there have been some 3000 pages put up on my sites about just about every gardening topic you could think of - and still folks keep asking new questions. 
New software lets me take questions and comments directly on my sites and I can answer them right there. Yes, I still make writer/editor decisions but more and more I’m involving my readers in the process.
In that case it’s reader>writer>reader> Fun stuff.
This leads me back to the seminar series where I’m setting up the same kind of system only much more transparently - it is much more direct and obvious. This system is going to be reader>writer>reader>writer>reader>etc. This will be a circular system and we’re going to harness the power of the Internet (as far as I can push it anyway) in an ongoing loop of having readers determine the nature of what they want to know/read. In that case, I’ll be part of the process but not necessarily determining where it will go.
So what’s the point of all this? I think I’ve got a writer>reader>writer process working as best I can on my websites. I’ve got it designed for the seminar series but I haven’t quite figured out how and what to do with this blog, I think blogging is still pretty much stuck in the writer/editor>reader process (with small proportions of readers commenting) and I have to think about that.
My point (and you knew I was going to get there sooner or later) is that the vast majority of garden blogs and websites are stuck in a writer/editor>reader process and will never grow out of it.
Is this important to you? Is this important to your readers? Or is blogging the place for this writer/editor>reader function?
Are blogs the new garden magazines?
So what’s with the changes here? What are you doing now?
I can almost hear some of this type of comment from readers as they take a look at the changing blog layout (again).
So here’s the real deal and my take on one aspect of the garden blogging world as it sits today.
First of all, the majority of readers here are also bloggers. Interesting bit of data but one that’s repeated over and over across the Net. If you read blogs, you tend to be a blogger yourself or involved in some other Net way (forums etc). It’s actually a bit of a loop, garden bloggers tend to talk to themselves and each other a lot. So if you’re not a blogger, this might not be of interest to you and you can stay tuned for an increasing flow of garden related info in subsequent posts. If you are a blogger, let me give you a bit of an insight into how I currently see blogging.
My primary consideration is reader reaction. I measure this with stats packages and other less esoteric ways that don’t concern us right now. If I’m doing my job, my readers become better gardeners or more informed or whatever, but they show me this kind of thing in the underlying stats of the blog over time.
A few months ago, I went with a magazine format and this had immediate impacts on readership. The most glaring was that income went up. I made more money from the magazine format than I made from other formats. Fascinating stuff and I learned a lot from looking at how that happened. But I also learned that my primary objective in involving readers was somehow not working the way I had wanted. And my writing frequency had changed because of the demands of working within a fully featured content management system. it had gone down because it took more time to post. And my readers responded in various ways.
But I made more money.
Let me digress for a minute and tell you about Google. Google engineers are trying to develop a system of evaluating websites using their mathematical formula that mimic a human brain. (Terminator fans - Skynet step one) To do this (in very simple terms as I currently understand it) they divide Googles’ operations into short term and long term memory. And they measure thousands of variables about each website they spider.
So for example, a bounce rate (the time a visitor stays on a site) is an important measure of how visitors react to your site. I’m told the average blog has bounce rate of 75% within the first 3 seconds. In other words, 75% of all visitors will stay on your blog less than 3 seconds. Only about 1% will stay for a minute or more. And yes, this will vary slightly from blog to blog. This is partially because blogs tend to be date oriented. The structure of a blog is date based, with the most recent on top and the oldest hidden. Few folks search for old news or old posts. Google sees this and classes blogs as short term memory. You rise to the top of the search engines fast and you disappear just as quickly on the downslope; put into the supplemental index faster and then dropped faster.
In contrast, websites have hierarchical structures and are not date based. Bounce rates are much better on websites and visitors tend to stay longer. For these and other reasons, Google classes websites as long term memory. You rise slower but stay in the main index longer.
This means if you want to work with Google on short term memory items (news and views) you use a blog. If you want to work with Google on longer term material, you use a website.
So what does this mean for the average garden blogger?
it means that garden blogging is wonderful for some kinds of objectives. If you want to blog to meet other gardeners - an over the backyard electronic fence kind of thing - blogging is perfect. If you want to rant, rave or pass along current news, blogging is great software and Google will short term love you. If you want to pass along many different trains of thought, blogging is perfect. But if you want to write great gardening tips that will be found for a long time, blogging isn’t the software (remember as a rule of thumb, blog posts will be forgotten more quickly than website pages) And while there are exceptions to this; this is the general pattern of how Google treats blogs and websites.
So what’s that got to do with anything here?
Glad you asked. Long term readers know that I’m constantly experimenting, trying to figure out the best technologies to help other gardeners learn and become better gardeners. That’s what I do for a living - for over 30 years now. In one form or other, my life’s work has been to teach gardening skills and promote the use of plants as a lifestyle. This is just the latest incarnation.
So the magazine theme increased my income but reduced other more important variables that I wanted to achieve from this software platform. This means the format really wasn’t working in the long run and it had to be changed. Really, I don’t blog to make money. I established a very long time ago that garden blogging was never going to make enough money to justify the time spent on it. So you blog for other reasons. In my case, I want a fast platform to share news stories, quick tidbits, pictures, video etc. All things of interest but probably not of lasting importance to Google - but things that one of my reader segments like to read and don’t fit on any website or newsletter.
Reader segments? What are you talking about. Well, you know that I have a newsletter as one segment, a forum for some folks, this blog for some folks, a seminar series for others. Everybody learns and works in different ways so my enjoyment in garden writing is delivering systems to help as many as possible. As I said on my webinar video last week, I’m having way too much fun doing all this stuff! Seriously, it’s a lot more fun than digging and selling perennials in freezing rain in April.
I’m very fortunate in my life’s work. I get to work with plants, write about them and actually make enough money to afford a few toys. I love what I do and I try to do the best I can do with the tools I have.
Blogging doesn’t make much money but it’s a heck of a lot of fun and it meets the needs of a chunk of my readers. The magazine format was getting in the way of this so it had to go.
And that’s why I’ve just deleted the magazine format and why this looks pretty plain. I’ll likely search around for another blog theme that catches my fancy but for now, I’m enjoying plain and simple. Back to basics and having a good time doing it.
So stay tuned, I’ve once again started to rethink blogging and what I want to use it for. And you gentle readers will once again, in your own ways, show me dramatically if I’m on the right or wrong track. The only thing I can tell you is that I’m having a great time doing it and I hope you’re equally amused at your end.
OK, I read a ton of stuff every day. In fact, I read about 75 blogs almost every day (that’s down from 100 a month or so ago) and it is only the determined and high quality blogs that stay in my reader (or the so-different that there is no alternative) And I said at one point that I’d share some of those with you.
One blog that I read (and have for some time now) is that of George Ball. Yes, “that” George Ball - vilified in the blogosphere as the ultimate Darth Gardener for his company’s purchase and subsequent moving of Heronswood Nursery.
But hold on for just a second.
Understand several things. The first is that I spent over 20 years in the trenches running my own specialist nursery and 3 years travelling the U.S. east coast as the Territory Sales Manager for Canada’s largest perennial nursery. This qualifies me to have opinions about the nursery trade. Well, I guess any gardener/blogger can have opinions but I have some experience behind mine.
And George Ball has opinions based on his experiences in the nursery trade.
Now George and I have never met. He wrote the introduction to one of my books (Burpee Book of Bulbs) and given that he owns Burpee, this is his right. That’s as close as we’ve come to talking. Heck, he never even asked me to sign his copy (assuming he has one)
The deal is simple. This man is in the trenches. He runs one of the largest gardening operations in the US. And regarding the blogosphere, there are always two sides to every issue. I don’t want nor do I intend to enter that debate nor will I be approving comments that want to open it here.
All I want to say is that love him or hate him - you have to read him.
Here’s another of my friends with her “guest blog” for you to enjoy. You might want to check out her ongoing stories here.
Honey, after seven Wisconsin winters, I thought I had seen every kind of weather the planet spews, from hurricanes to blizzards. But, two feet of snow and -15ºF nights followed by a 50-degree-day that spawned frozen fog thick enough to cut into blocks are testing my Southern serenity. I might as well be back in the bayous of Louisiana, where sulfur fog obscures oil refinery pollution and muffles crying nutrias. At least, I wouldn’t be chilled to the bone as I am now, despite my mink coat and endless cups of Earl Grey tea spiked with peach brandy.
My precious tropical beauties are keeping me from going totally mad, especially the 14-pound amorphophallus bulb in the sunroom. Its passion-pink bud tantalizes me, knowing that it will burst forth in a month or two with the smelliest flower on the planet. ‘Konjac’, the cultivar I’ve been growing in the garden during our brief summers for the last four years, is the little cousin of giant ‘Titan’, the one television news crews like to cover when it blooms for a sensational blurb for the 6 p.m. news. Mine will produce the same cheap-vinyl-car-seat-cover purple spathe (Tony Avent’s description, not mine) atop a snakeskin mottled-burgundy and chartreuse stem, followed by a three-foot-high violet spadix that unfurls for only 12 hours. It reeks like rotten fish to attract carrion flies, its normal pollinator. They usually feed off of dead ‘gators and cows mired in the swamp.
I can hardly wait for the bud to break dormancy. Any harbinger of spring, especially one of this enormity cannot come too soon. It’s snowing again!
Love,
M’Liz
I invited a few garden writer friends to post some “guest blogs” this week. Here’s the first from Roger Dorion of Kitchen Gardeners.
Kitchen Gardeners of the World Unite!
The French say potager. In Italy, it’s called an orto. Anglophones use the term kitchen garden. Wherever soil can be found, you’ll find people getting their hands in it with visions of home-made feasts dancing in their heads. In the past few years, a new nonprofit organization called “Kitchen Gardeners International” (KGI) has taken root to unite and grow the global community of gardening gastronomes.
The organization was founded by Roger Doiron, an American who lived for 10 years in Europe, as a hopeful response to what he sees as a troubled food system. “We’re becoming increasing distant from our food, both literally and figuratively to the detriment of our health, environment and gastronomy,” says Doiron “. For Doiron, the kitchen garden offers both a means and a metaphor for people to reconnect with their sustenance.
Although still a seedling, the organization would seem to have sprouted on fertile ground. “The response to our launch has been very encouraging,” says Doiron. “We now have over 4800 people from over 90 countries subscribed to our e-mail newsletter, from Alabama to Albania”. Through its newsletter and other activities, KGI offers gardeners and food lovers a portal to multicultural world of kitchen gardening and hand-made foods.
Its future plans include new activities for bringing kitchen gardeners together both literally and virtually. It will once again organize “International Kitchen Garden Day” which it dubs a “global celebration of the most local of foods”. This year’s event will take place on August 24th, 2008.
For more information, see the KGI website: www.kitchengardeners.org.
