Blogs, marketing, and misfires

With the current drive to "personalise" things - readers buying a book because they liked the author's blog/photo I suppose I should admit something:

I've never bought a book because of an author's blog. However I have not bought books because of an author's blog.

If the blog is simply life, the universe, and everything then unless they have an interesting and unusual job (and I don't mean writing) it isn't going to hold my interest. Since most people's lives are very similar, just blogging about your own life won't pull people. This is especially true if you write about something outside your normal field. It's one reason why I keep my writing and books seperate from my job/work/life/cats blog. Just as celebrities resort to desperate tactics to stay in the headlines, writers resort to more desperate tactics to gain blog readers and problems start to occur.

A few years ago I was following a blog, from someone with an extremely unusual career and a good writing style. Like many people, I followed it, gave advice and help. The writer wanted to change jobs, so they were even negotiating a publishing deal through another readers' connection. About eighteen months into this the writer came clean: they didn't have the job, they had lied about the events and had in fact done it as a creative writing exercise to prove they could write.

The result was not readers praising them as a good writer: it was the total loss of their fanbase. The blog never recovered, and the publishing deal evaporated. I, like most of their other readers, were completely stunned.

I checked recently. The blog has gone and so has the confessional post and everything before it. The person is now back to writing on their first book, and trying to get another publishing deal. Six years lost for one lie. It was one of the most spectacular marketing misfires I have ever seen.

(No I'm not naming the writer. With any luck their life is back on track and they are older and a bit wiser. Teens are meant to make mistakes - it's just that when they do them online the results don't ever really go away.)

The moral? You can lose friends and reputation a lot more quickly than you can make them.

Be honest with your readers.

You only have to check the google rankings, however, to see that a targeted and focused blog will do better in search results and click through traffic, which is why I also run those. So why do I keep this blog going, when I have targetted blogs available? Because I can be a lot more abrasive, accurate in my views, and cover a much wider range of subjects here than on other blogs where I should be worrying about marketing, trying to make everything fit a focused and targeted blog, and work with SEO.

The other reason? On a marketing blog you shouldn't say anything negative or burn bridges. As anyone who has followed this blog knows, in some areas (usually to do with fraud, criminal behaviour, or incompetency) my policy is closer to "Hand me the matches and the petrol and stand well back." Not the best marketing and sales policy in the world.