About China blogosphere, travel, and entrepreneurship

If you are a blogger, you have to read Avinash Kaushik’s blog Occam’s Razor. We met with Avinash yesterday and he generously shared some great advice. Avinash was my former colleague at Intuit, who started his blog in May 2006 and has built what may be the #1 Web analytics blog (Technorati Authority of 1106 as of 02/08). He posted some great tips here and here, and I’ve repeatedly gone back to read this post.

I haven’t completely synthesized all the input he gave us yesterday. I might do that on a follow on post. But I’ve adapted his 20 tips into the best 10 tips I will try to follow here at CN Reviews. I am hoping that we will have some other guest bloggers on CN Reviews, so I hope this inspires some dialog between current and potential CN Reviews bloggers on what we should do here.

Here are the tips:

10 - Nobody cares about you, they care about what you do for them.
9 - Be as simple and succinct as possible.
8 - Pattern your readers by being consistent.
7 - Create a dialog with your readers.
6 - Add one “correct” reader, one at a time.
5 - Blogs need constant promotion, participation, and evangelism.
4 - Make it personal with your own point of view.
3 - Pick a subject matter you are passionate about and/or that you are good at.
2 - Have clear goals for the blog.
1 - Become very good (top 25% in the world) at two things.

And now for more thoughts on these 10 tips.

10 - Nobody cares about you, they care about what you do for them.

This was a bit of harsh truth from Avinash, but I think he is right. People will spend their scarce time reading our blog only if we are doing something for them. Prospective target readers for CN Reviews: (a) people who know both Chinese and Western cultures but more of one than the other, want to learn what they don’t know, and share what they do, (b) people who want to learn more about travel and entrepreneurship in China.

9 - Be as simple and succinct as possible.

Awflasher told us: “don’t make the post too long but make it very readable.” We are not achieving this right now. We should target 250-350 words per post. If the post is longer, then it should have a short summary. We should aim to write at the 6th grade level. We should also embrace Globish, language easily written and read by non-native speakers. Livid also gave us the same tip to keep it short.

8 - Pattern your readers by being consistent.

We’re doing this! When David joined us, we created three specific posts: Monday Metro(pol) which talks about Beijing transportation and infrastructure, CN Reviews Mind The Gap Wednesday which talks about cultural differences from David’s point of view, and an unnamed “Lifestyle” Saturday (or Sunday) post. Min and I have been relatively less consistent.

7 - Create a dialog with your readers.

Yes, but how? What I’m doing is: (a) commenting on the blogs of our readers if I know what their blog is, (b) emailing a quick thank you to people who comment on CN Reviews, (c) trying to ask questions at the end of the post, and (d) doing shorter posts that are focused on getting readers to give us their feedback. But I think comments is one of our most important metrics to drive and to track. I just started experimenting with Twitter and Facebook, which both seem like a good way to create dialog with readers and friends.

6 - Add one “correct” reader, one at a time.

Avinash wrote this in the context of getting Dugg and comparing his Digg traffic to his Yahoo! Groups traffic. Here is his chart:

Lesson: you just don’t want traffic. You want the right readers. I’d love to have a community of bloggers, contributors, and readers who care about bridging China and the West. So for us HaoHaoReport is more important that Digg.

5 - Blogs need constant promotion, participation, and evangelism.

There is no silver bullet. Here’s my short list of ideas: (a) post and link to other bloggers, thus generating a trackback link from their blog; (b) comment on other blogs, (c) build up Twitter as a distribution method, (c) social bookmarking at HaoHaoReport and De.licio.us, (d) occasional posting links on Facebook, (e) write about popular topics that people have set Google Alerts for, e.g. people’s names, (f) emailing commenters to engage in more dialogue. I also like participating in wangjianshuo’s community and ifgogo.com as well.

4 - Make it personal with your own point of view.

Livid gave us some advice: make it more of a journal than an essay. Avinash gave us some other advice: think about writing a book, not a diary. Here’s how I synthesize this: Be sure you can answer the question, “If I had to write a book from the blog, what would the book be about and what is the table of contents?” But then, “Make the book personal, infuse it with your personality and your unique point of view.”

3 - Pick a subject matter you are passionate about and/or that you are good at.

Blogging takes a lot of energy. Everyone is really busy. In the end, you can only really blog about what you care about. Which means you can’t be too theoretical about tips #10 and #6. “Correct” readers mean people who care about what you care about. “What you do for them” is ultimately tied to what you care about most.

2 - Have clear goals for the blog.

Have clear objectives (as stated in words) and clear goals (as stated in numbers or metrics). Well I saved the hardest tips for last. Yes, we are not clear yet what our goals are for the blog. But Avinash’s advice was to focus on one thing first, and then expand from there. He gave his own example of starting with Web Analytics, then moving on the Competitive Intelligence, then to Qualitative Insights…but always under the overall umbrella of Data for Decision Making on the Web.

1 - Become very good (top 25% in the world) at two things.

Well, I’m still figuring out what this is. But I think the direction that Avinash is giving is good.  Thanks Avinash! There was much more that was discussed but I need to digest it further.  Topic for another blog post.

What are your goals? And what are the two things you want to be world class in?