This week I’m focusing on how you can improve your blog. So far I’ve talked about why you should schedule blog posts, how to write a product review, how to spice up your blog with pictures, and how to get people to find you online, and today I’m wrapping things up with a book recommendation.  My next series in a couple of weeks will focus on social networking basics.

Everything I know about style, I learned from two dead white guys.

Watching Project Runway is Not Enough

Strunk and White’s classic book The Elements of Style crams a lot into less than 100 pages, and it’s less than $15.  It covers basic rules of grammar, explains frequently misused words, and inspires readers to become better writers.

My first reaction upon reading the Approach to Style section was a revolt.  I don’t want my blog to read like a faceless newspaper article or an encyclopedia entry.  However, the more I dug into the book, the more I realized that it encouraged the reader to follow some simple guidelines in their efforts to build their own unique voice.  When the book’s authors put similar passageways from Faulkner and Hemingway side-by-side to show how two writers convey the same concept, it just plain works.

It’s chock full of examples from famous books I know I should have read a long time ago.  Reading each snippet reinforces the notion that writing really is an art, and that every time we publish a blog entry, Strunk and White each turn another revolution in their graves.

The hilarious presenter and blogger Jimmy May (Blog – Twitter) first prompted me to buy this book, and I owe him a debt of gratitude.  I’d also like to thank Mrs. Weathersby, my senior year English teacher, and point out that I learned a valuable lesson in her class.  Although she was horrified to discover that I’d written John Szegda’s term paper for him, I did indeed learn that writing pays off.

I highly recommend The Elements of Style to any blogger who wants to improve their craft, and you can buy it from Amazon.

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

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This week I’m focusing on how you can improve your blog.  So far I’ve discussed how to build your momentum by scheduling posts ahead of time, the basics of search engine optimization, and how to spice things up with pictures.  Tomorrow’s post will finish up the series with a book recommendation for bloggers of all skill levels.

Bloggers – product reviews are timeless content that will attract more readers, especially readers you’ve never had before. People search the web for product reviews, and if they like the quality of your review, they might stick around and read more articles.

Reviews for enterprise-quality products, like SQL Server tools, are really hard to find.  Some magazines task their writers with banging out quick reviews, but the writers may not have your level of IT experience.  They might look at features, get all excited, and not understand how the features would work in real life.

Two Burned Thumbs Up!

Here’s a few tips on how to write a useful review:

Spend at least a month with the product, using it on a daily basis. If you find that the product solves a need, and that you get excited to use the product instead of doing things “the old way”, mention that in your review.  On the other hand, if you have to remind yourself that this product is installed, and if you find yourself cringing when you open it, then that needs to be reflected in your review.

Talk to somebody who’s used it for longer than a month. Ask the vendor for a few contact names of customers.  Granted, these customers have been hand-picked by the vendor because they love the product, but you can still get useful information from them.  Ask the user why they picked the product, how much they paid for it, and whether they’d buy it again.  Ask for at least one thing they don’t like about the product or the company.

Call for support. Even if you’re not having a problem, make one up.  My personal favorite: “Hi, I’m trying to run this on <insert really new or really old OS here>, and whenever I double-click on the desktop icon, nothing happens.”  See how the support experience goes.  If you’re connected directly with the person who wrote the code, that’s a good thing and a bad thing – it means they probably don’t have any customers.  If you’re connected directly with someone who doesn’t even understand the product, that’s just a bad thing.

Make a list of the product’s competitors and ask why they’re different. Don’t just ask the vendor whose product you’re reviewing, either, because those bozos all say the same thing: “Nobody competes with us!  We’re unique!”  Yeah, and so are snowflakes, but there’s a bunch of those too.  Tell your friends about the product, and odds are they’ll know a competitor.  Call or email the competing vendor and ask, “Hey, I’m evaluating Product X – why should I choose your product instead of Product X?”  They’ll be more than happy to tell you all the ways Product X bites the big one.

Introducing the Pinto Four Wheel Drive!

Don’t write the review until you can list at least three things you don’t like about the product. If you can’t find those three things, you haven’t used the product long enough.  For example, I’m drinking the Apple Kool-Aid, but even I can tell you three things I don’t like about a piece of Apple hardware within the first month of using it.  (My iPhone: the battery life sucks, it doesn’t fit in docks when it’s got a case on, and the browser keeps reloading pages whenever I switch windows.)

Send your review to the company before you post it. This isn’t an attempt to blackmail the company – rather, you’re asking them if there’s any inaccuracies.  You might have misunderstood how the product worked, or maybe you got some details wrong.  Ask the company’s marketing department to double-check your work before it goes live.

DON’T write too many sponsored reviews. Companies like PayPerPost, ReviewMe and SponsoredReviews offer bloggers $5-$500 per blog post depending on the blog’s popularity and the number of words & links in the review.  Done right, it comes off as somewhat funny and doesn’t offend too many people, as this example post shows.  (It still left me with a slimy feeling, but it’s still the best-written one I’ve seen.)  Done wrong, it exudes spamminess, and readers will unsubscribe from your blog after just a couple of those posts.  I’ve personally avoided these because I’m not in blogging to make money, as I discussed in my series on How to Start a Blog.

Amazon Earnings Report Snippet

DO include an affiliate link to buy the product. Don’t be ashamed to make a little money off your work.  If you’re going to do a book review, sign up for the Amazon Affiliate program and generate an affiliate link for the book.  Use that link in your review article.  When someone clicks on your Amazon link to order the book, you get a 4% cut of the revenue.  Here’s the hilarious part: no matter what they buy, you get a cut, as evidenced in this screenshot of my Amazon earnings report.  If you’re reviewing something that’s not sold by Amazon, consider signing up for Commission Junction, which offers similar programs for other vendors like Newegg. I don’t make much off these programs – around $100/month – but it’s a nice perk.

Include product pictures, and link them to buy the item. People love clicking on pictures, even if they’re not scantily clad models.  Take advantage of that psychological impulse and use your aforementioned affiliate link so that when they click on the picture they go straight to the store to buy the item.  (If this kind of tip gets you all excited, check out Problogger’s series on how they made over $100k with the Amazon Associates program.)

If a company approaches you directly about writing a review, it’s not uncommon to ask for compensation in the form of their products.  For example, if a software company asks you to review their Widgetizer Pro, they’ll include a few free licenses too.  Consider using one for yourself and giving a couple away to your readers – maybe via a contest, choosing a random commenter on that blog post.  However, don’t be suckered into putting dozens of hours of your own time into researching the product, testing it, and writing the review, all in exchange for $250 of licensing.  Put a dollar amount on your time, estimate what it’ll take to do a fair job on the review, and ask the company to either compensate you as a consultant or ask for more freebies in exchange for the review.  If you don’t, then you probably won’t put the full amount of time into the review, and your readers will be able to tell you’re doing a puff piece.  Rule of thumb: if your knowledge of the product consists of reading the brochure, you’re not doing justice to your readers.

If you accept compensation, disclose that in the review. Just mention in the review that the gear was provided to you by Company X in exchange for the review.  If you were paid to write the review, things get more complicated – the FTC is considering holding bloggers liable for their sponsored reviews.

Finally, think twice before you body-slam a product. If a product just doesn’t float your boat, consider returning it to the company and not posting anything on your blog.  Maybe you weren’t the target audience after all, or maybe the product could get better in a version or two.  Send your feedback to the company so they can help improve their work.  If you roast a company’s product in your review, other companies will think twice before sending you a product for review.

This happens to me too – authors have sent me several books for review, but I didn’t end up posting the reviews on my blog.  I’ve forwarded my thoughts over, explained why I wasn’t such a big fan, but wished them the best of luck in their work.  No sense in burning bridges – you only have one online reputation.  Guard it carefully.

At the same time, if the product does something really boneheaded, like putting your production servers in danger, then you should probably identify that product before somebody makes a dumb investment.  After all, a lot of people bought Pintos….

Want Some Sample Reviews?

Here’s a few of the reviews I’ve done in the past:

• Dell EMC AX150i iSCSI SAN Review
• HP C-Class Blade Chassis Review
• HP Virtual Connect Review
• Whuffie Factor Book Review
• Wine Trials Book Review
• All of my posts tagged Review

Next Up: A Small Book That Makes a Big Difference In Your Blog Skills

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

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This week I’m focusing on how you can improve your blog. Yesterday I kicked things off with why you should schedule blog posts.  Tomorrow I’ll break some bad news to you – your blog is boring.

I blog to help other people.

I’m only successful if they can find me.

No, not every player is a winner.

Picture yourself walking through a carnival jam-packed with crazy idiots, insightful geniuses, and half-clothed hotties all vying for your attention.  They’re all screaming at the tops of their lungs, enticing you into their carnival tent to see their freak show.  Some are free, some cost money, and all are desperate to get you inside.  When you finally pick a tent and go in, you find that even inside the tent, while you’re trying to focus on what you went in for, there’s even more barkers inside trying to get you to go to another tent.

The Internet isn’t fair. The Internet IS a fair.

You might be crafting the smartest, most well-written blog out there, but you’re still out there, and you’re out there along with a gazillion other carnies.  Some of them are trying to make money off their booth, and they’re going to do whatever it takes – fair, slimy or otherwise – in order to get people in the door.

Your one weapon, the great equalizer, is the search engine.

Search engines want to hook their users up with the best content possible.  The better the search results, the more likely the readers are to come back to that same search engine again.  Search engines make money off ads, so they too are carnies hawking their wares.  They want to help you help them help their users. (Triple score! I just won a giant stuffed banana!)  Making your site easier for search engines is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Step 1: Break your blog posts into sections.

This assumes that your posts are longer than a couple hundred words – and frankly, they need to be.  The less content you have, the less search engines have to work with.  Less isn’t more when it comes to blog posts.

For every couple/few paragraphs, throw in a header like you see here.  In WordPress, you should use Heading 3, because Headings 1 & 2 are already used for higher-level titles in your blog (like the blog title and post titles).  Use descriptive words in those headings, words that match the kinds of things people are searching for.  For examples, check out my entry last week about truncate_only, and look at what words I used.

At the same time, you have to walk the line between serving the search engines and serving readers.  If you just stuff your headings chock full o’ keywords, your blog won’t be enjoyable to read.  Make the headlines fun first, and SEO-friendly second.

Step 2: Specify summaries and keywords for your posts.

If you go to a search engine and search for SQLIO, here’s what shows up:

SQLIO Search Results

See the one-sentence explanations below each page title?  Read through those more closely.  Which ones look the most inviting to the readers?

In the battle for visitors, this is like your opening shot.  You only get a tiny amount of screen real estate, and every pixel counts.  Instead of making the search engine guess what your article is about or using a random sentence from your post, why not tell it exactly what to show?  You can!

If you’re using WordPress, install the All in One SEO Pack.  After installation, it’ll warn you that it must be configured.  Just go to the settings page and click the Enable radio button.  All done.  Then, when editing a blog post, you’ll have these fields at the bottom of the post:

All in One SEO Pack

Without the All in One SEO Pack plugin, WordPress tries to guess the post’s Title, Description and Keywords.  The plugin gives you fine-tuned control over exactly what your post is about.

I don’t set these fields on every blog post I write, because I don’t expect most of ‘em to have long-lasting search engine power.  The more work I put into a post, though, the more likely I am to put some effort into the SEO fields so that more folks can find my work.

Step 3: Publish a sitemap.xml file.

If you’re using WordPress, all you have to do is install the Google XML Sitemaps Generator plugin.  There’s not much to configure, but set yourself a reminder in your favorite task management software to check the settings once a month.  I’ve had some problems when my file permissions changed and the plugin was no longer able to write the sitemap file.  If that happens, the plugin shows instructions on how to fix it, but unless you go into the plugin’s configuration page, you’ll never know there’s a problem.  It doesn’t send an email or alert you other than showing an error on the config page.

If you’re using a different kind of blog, I got nothin’ for ya.  It’s up to you to figure out how it works.

After publishing a sitemap.xml file, sign up for Google Webmaster Tools.  It’s a completely free service that gives you valuable statistics and diagnostics about your blog, your readers and your search engine optimization.  Once a month, I log into Webmaster Tools to find out if Google’s had any problems indexing my blog.

These steps take a little work, but I’ve found that over time they make a big difference.  Of course, if you’re lazy, there’s a solution for that too.

Enter the Snake Oil: Search Engine Optimization

Wherever there’s carnivals, there’s snake oil vendors: people selling mythical potions that will cure all ailments.  In this case, the ailment is your low search engine ranking, and there’s a long list of vendors who’d love to give you a hand with that problem.

If you pay someone $500 to do search engine optimization for you and boost your search rankings, how do you know if they succeeded?  They’ll tell you that it may take days or weeks for the search engines to notice the changes.  They’ll tell you that your mileage may vary, and that all sales are final, no refunds allowed.  You might even be working on your blog yourself at the same time, and it’s impossible to tell how much improvement was due to their efforts versus yours.

Some SEO vendors do a fantastic job, but they’re priced outside the reach of most bloggers (including me).  If you’re dead set on spending money on search engine optimization, check out the book Landing Page Optimization by Tim Ash.  It explains how to build out sections of your site specifically for search engine visitors and how to get them to stick around.

I’d recommend my favorite SEO company to you here, but then I’d lose my competitive advantage.  After all, the other carnies are reading this too…

WordPress SEO Tutorial Video from Google

Matt Cutts (Blog – Twitter) is a member of Google’s Webspam team.  He spoke at WordCamp San Francisco about how WordPress bloggers can make their web site more searchable.  It’s a 45-minute long video, so warm up that plate of bacon and get cozy.

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

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