Tim Ferriss talks about blogging (50 mins). Here are my notes:
- he has used WordPress from the beginning, 3 yrs
- Why blog? Why do you do anything? To love, be loved, and never stop learning.
- not for income, for access to people and resources: authority equates to access to important people, events, etc.
- most wives-tales about frequency, times of posting, etc. are not true
- uses crazyegg.com for clickthroughs, heat maps
- uses google.com/analytics, only measure what matters, don’t get caught chasing #’s down the rabbit hole
- best times to post are 7am or 6pm (for Digg.com submissions too), best days are Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday
- he posts once or twice a week
- changed “Categories” to “Topics” – wording very important, greatly increased page views and time on site
- how much has he spent designing? 1st iteration – $0, 2nd – $500, 3rd – $1200
- removed Twitter status b/c people, esp. 1st timers were leaving
- “gear” page is a placeholder to see who will visit, lots do
- dates displayed at top of posts on homepage, for older posts, in archives, dates at bottom – dramatically improved time on site
- posts atop articles: “total read time: X” and “bolded parts: x” (ave. reader 250wpm, page 350 words)
- uses slinkset.com – your personal digg
- uses Twitter for polling, research, personal online diary (can sync w/gcal)
- uses evernote.com to copy/past ideas, has 45 article drafts, 5-10% will be published
- Tucher Max > not important to be a good writer, but have your own voice! “passion beats poling and focus groups”
- posts written from polls about “what you you like?” generate poor response
- write about what makes you passionate, sad, angry, but be careful to
- don’t attack people, attack problems
- find your biorhythm, writes best btwn 1-5am, one class of wine, one of yerba-mate
- edit important posts by hand (printout), remove 20% each time
- ignore SEO at first, just write, then
- uses google keyword tool to insert synonyms, sort by ave monthly volume – http://www.google.com/sktool/
- try to make sure you can describe your posts in only one way, don’t segment with multiple topics
- no correlation btwn. time/money spent making a video and hits, short is good
- text sticks around, is indexed, copied, pasted, as opposed to video
- stumbleupon.com is the cheapest form of traffic if you buy their ads, it’s a slow trickle of high-quality traffic
- flickr search (creative commons) for photos, sort by most interesting
- 0% tolerance for snarky, rude comments, spends 20mins. a day on comments
- keeps a record of good comments, could be post on their own
- the critical minority will always be the most vocal
- uses fourhourblog.com – longform, blog.timferriss.com – shortform experiement, litliberation.com – social media fund raising
- weebly.com, interesting platform
- THINK BIG BUT PLAY OFTEN, TAKE FUN SERIOUSLY!
- blogging can be your own self-imposed hell if you’re just following others’s rules
- hugely positive thing for him, not source of stress
- takes 20 mins – 6 hrs to write per post
- plugins (aside from obvious) > redirection, popular content, share this (on the fence about)
- uses greasmonkey script to remove pagination of, for example, Twitter pages
- brand your blog broadly to avoid pigeonholing yourself
- host: Mediatemple, nitro package – fast response time
For the full list of 40 tips…
And here is another video (5 mins.) on stoicism’s productivity.
Practice:
- Negative visualization – define your fears, explicitly
- Privation – once a month live your fear as directly as possible, whether it be poverty, embarrassment, rejection, etc.
Suggested reading:
- Seneca – Letters From A Stoic
- Seneca – Dialogues and Letters (#24)
- Marcus Aurelius – Meditations