I have some colleagues at UMaine who are thinking about starting a blog (in an allied field of ecology) and, knowing my experience with Dynamic Ecology, they asked for what tips I would pass on. To be honest I was surprised how few tips I had. I like boiling down learned experience into a few pithy bullet points generally. But I have to confess blogging has remained largely opaque to me as far as what creates success (whether defined personally or by readership), despite over a decade of doing it. I suspect timing is a big piece but that is not something within the control of the person(s) starting the blog. And all things considered it does feel like post-twitter fragmentation, blogging is having a 2nd moment, so it’s definitely not the worst time.
So with that disclaimer of not really having a clue, here was the advice I gave:
1) Figure out who is your audience? You will of course have some diversity, but is it primarily geared at trained scientists or practitioners or ? (I have found that it is hard to blog across this divide, so you may have to pick) Similarly what career stage? (easier to blog across this divide; the age distribution of our readers has varied over time but we’ve always had all career stages).
2) Figure out your post length. We generally found this to be about ~700-1000 words or 3-4 paragraphs (creeping up to 1500 or 2000 words occasionally when truly necessary), worked for us – enough to get a complex idea cross, short enough not to get skipped or TL;DR.
3) Technology wise, wordpress has worked well enough for us (just the free version). Very important to have a dedicated twitter account (you can set wordpress up to automatically tweet) as a high fraction of your readers still find us via twitter. Get some links from university web pages early on (Google prioritizes pages linked to from universities). You don’t need to be active on X yourself. Just autorobot tweets let people find you and retweet you. I know DE is not doing this right now due to the preferences of authors, but for a starting blog I think it is really important.
4) You build audience by regularity of postings. In the high days of DE we tried to have as many as 3 posts a week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday). Now we’re down to 1-2. Jeremy is really good at throwing in high quality fillers (e.g. Friday links which turn out to be among our most popular posts) that help keep this up. You can of course deviate occasionally (e.g. holiday weeks). But set a rate (once a week, once a month or ?), tell the readers that up front, and then follow through. This can be hard to motivate in the early days when you don’t have a lot of readers, but it is circular – you won’t get a lot of readers if you don’t post regularly. This is one reason that I think co-blogging with a team of 2-4 people makes a lot of sense. Got a busy week? – ask for somebody else to pitch in.
5) Think in advance about your comment culture. Are reader comments a big part of what you hope happens or is it mostly outbound (either form is fine and common). What kind of comments cross the line to unwelcome? The spam filter works pretty well (although of late it has been too aggressive). We’ve allowed a pretty robust comment culture as long as it remains respectful, not ad hominem, and adding value to the conversation. That has worked well. We only moderate out a fraction of a percent of comments and people respect the rules. WordPress defaults to requiring you to approve all comments but has a setting where you only have to moderate comments from people who have never commented before, but lets through comments from people you have accepted before. That has worked well for us. If you do want comments, I like to end my posts with questions to make the invitation to comment very explicit. Still only a fraction of readers will comment. But more will start to comment if the observe and see it is a positive culture.
6) I feel like I should say know why you’re blogging. But certainly my vague sense of why I was blogging turned out to be wrong. I thought I was going to have lots of conversations about the science of ecology with people around the world. But I think DE really ended up being a commentator and decoder on academic culture (ecology flavor). That turned out to be really rewarding. So I’m not sure you have to know why in advance. Like anything with a community there is a dialogue or negotiation going on.
7) I don’t think any of us at DE have ever figured out what makes a post popular or not. So commit to the frequency, but write for yourself – don’t chase clicks.
8) Get comfortable with fast, 80% writing. This is key. If you are trying to produce beautifully written and/or 100% typo free posts this will affect frequency. If you feel inspired, bang out 3-4 paragraphs, read it again a few hours or days later. Then put it in the schedule for release. This is not a medium that rewards perfection – get comfortable with being a little rough on the edges. Also be opportunistic – like this post! Friends ask for advice which goes into email due to travel, and next day I realize 80% of a blog is written. Some of my most popular posts have come from a conversation (usually one where I’m giving advice because it wouldn’t be intellectually honest to post something that was 50% somebody else’s idea). This is the secret to why people assume we spend a ton of time on the blog, but we don’t. I don’t think any of us ever spend much more than an hour or so on a post (with some rare exceptions). It’s a great way to develop as a writer too.
That’s really about all I’ve figured out so far! I’m very curious to see what Jeremy, Meghan, or other readers who blog would add or change!?