BLOG COACH STEPS UP

The blog coach call came from a man who needed help.

Why call me?

Because I’ve got a track record of thirty-two hundred posts on boomerpdx.

Not thirty, not thirty-two, but thirty-two hundred blog posts.

I’d call me too. But there’s more, so much more.

Besides boomerpdx, I’ve written another blog: DEEGEESBB.

Both blogs have thousands of posts without overlap.

First question: Why two blogs?

The first one was a free site on WordPress.com.

The URL comes out looking like deegeesbb.wordpress.com.

You can pay to remove the ‘wordpress’ part so readers think you’re not cheap.

Cheap? It’s not cheap self-hosting with the cost of a domain name and a hosting company.

I pay Blue Host for boomerpdx.

And it may have been a mistake not migrating my earlier blog to the new ones integrating the two of them.

Instead, I started over fresh and clean with a Studio Press child’s themes on Genesis framework.

All I had to do was generate a new audience, new interest, new attention.

Sound familiar?

On top of everything else you need to make a blog in your image, which means plugins.

And like you, some plugins will have compatibility problems.

If you have someone set up your blog and they load it with extensions and customization, who are you going to call when things don’t work?

On the other hand, if you take the time to set up your blog, or call your local blog coach like me, you’ll be able to fix things without the hassle of calling and scheduling and waiting and waiting and, wait for it, waiting some more.

Blog Or Newsletter

This could also be Substack vs WordPress.

Substack has gained a lot of traction as a place for journalists and writers to build a blog/newsletter and earn money with subscription content, but WordPress is still the engine that powers over 43% of all the websites on the internet.

With the right setup, you can also make WordPress do pretty much everything that Substack can do…though it’s definitely a little more complicated to get started.

Why don’t I use Substack?

In general, the key difference is that Substack is simpler, while WordPress gives you more flexibility and it can also be a lot cheaper if you have lots of subscribers.

Another advantage of WordPress’ self-hosted approach is that you have full ownership of your platform. With Substack, Substack could always decide to close your account (though Substack has been very supportive of writers so far). If you have a self-hosted WordPress site, no one can close your account because you control the platform.

2

“Supportive of writers so far,” is the key phrase.

If you’ve been keeping up with the problems on Twitter after Elon Musk bought it the idea of a platform being ‘supportive of writers so far’ shows how far ‘so far’ is.

So far?

“This is just my strong, intuitive sense that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization,” Musk said at a TED conference on the day he made his offer. “I don’t care about the economics at all.”

When one of the richest guys in the world says “it’s not about the money,” then what’s it about?

What I’ve seen from Mr. Musk is a shit talk avalanche that includes volunteering to fight Mark Zuckerberg in a cage along with a penis measuring contest.

Since Musk is six feet tall I’m already crowning him a big dick based on attitude.

What About the Writing Part Blog Coach

I use Yoast SEO for a writing guide. Why?

Because the point of putting yourself out there in words is either to attract readers to your point of view and give them something to act on, or just a shit talk exercise.

Say you want to find readers who need your insights into problems that you’ve spent time on looking for solutions.

Then you want effective Search Engine Optimization, SEO, so someone searching on a key word in your topic finds you and learns.

So it’s about learning? Yes, it is, and the sooner the better.

A blog coach can guide you to a platform, but after that you need to take over and rule as the king of your site.

Yoast suggest blog posts should be three hundred words or less to accommodate short attention spans.

My material runs to 750 words in general, the common length of a newspaper column. I don’t want short attention spans scrolling through.

I like my readers to be able to focus.

Ol’ Blog Coach Traffic Spike

The most hits I’ve had in a day ran up to 7000. With that many visitors none left a comment, none joined.

What they did was follow a link from Reddit discussing the size of the statue of David’s penis.

Of course, being a David myself, I had an opinion.

From theage.com.au:

One of the most intriguing, if least openly discussed, mysteries in art has been resolved.

Michelangelo’s David is meant to be a representation in marble of the perfect male form. So why did his creator not make him – how would one say – a little better endowed?

Speaking for all Davids on earth, stop staring at the junk.

It’s a sculpture in marble. That ought to be enough. Stone. Rock. The guy has better gear than any other named statue.

Is there a statue of Joe? Frank? Jimmy?

There’s a statue of Rocky in Philadelphia wearing shorts and no one questions the Italian Stallion.

Writing For Blog Traffic

The writer who needs a blog coach, specifically this blog coach, carries a large burden of knowledge and experience ranging from crime and punishment, to global warming, to aerospace.

So far I’ve told him readers will find him based on interest.

They will engage in his interests based on trust.

And they will trust him once they know him better.

I’ve known him a few years now and not once has he had a misstep, or misrepresented anything that rings of conspiracy or slogans.

This is a writer seeking a greater truth asking for help. From me. And I’ll give it because?

We have shared interests. I trust him at his word. And the more I know about him the more I like him.

Who can you say that about?

And he’s a writer. If he was a writer and a guitar player we’d buy a van and go on tour, but we’ll settle on blog coach.

Here’s my blogging advice:

Write shorter pieces that link to longer pieces.

Give readers a heads up and let them explore the ideas further in a series of posts.

Grab their attention and keep it with exceptional writing.

Write a good story.

Write it and they will come.