Blogger vs WordPress Blog

Hot Off the Press WordPressers Making a Splash

Ben Huberman

Jul 29, 2015 @ 4:00 pm

Community, WordPress.com

media, new york times magazine, publishing, Slate, The Atlantic, The Millions, The Toast, writers, writing

Previous Post August in Blogging U: Blogging 101

Please do not use these comments for asking questions, support, or bug reporting. Use the forums or support contact form for that.

Please read our comment guidelines before posting.

Source: WordPressers Making a Splash

If you know exactly what you're doing, you can build a blog that gets over 100,000 visitors per month in less than year—from scratch.

Chances are, however, you don't know exactly what you need to do to achieve that, but that's okay.

The fact that you're here and ready to learn means that one day, you will know what you need to do to create a fully sustainable business from your blog.

Another factor is the time it takes. Some of you may be able to build a thriving blog in a year, while others may take two, three, or even five years.

During this journey, your blog will progress through five distinct stages:

Blog creation

Initial growth: finding your 100 "true fans"

Scaling up your traffic

Reaping the rewards

Maintaining your success

In this article, I'll outline the five stages of blog growth to help you understand where you're today and how far you have left to go.

Stage 1: Your Blog is Born

Expected time to complete: Less than two weeks.

When you read most blogs on creating an online business and online marketing, the sexy parts involve hundreds of thousands of visitors and profit.

But traffic and profit are the result; your foundation is the cause of those results. Figuring out the important details of your blog isn't always easy, but without a solid foundation, you can't build a skyscraper.

There are four things you need to do in this preparatory phase.

Even if you already have a blog, you may benefit from going over these things again and improving them if you skipped them before.

1. Define Your Niche

This is the first step—the step where most blog owners fail. It is crucial to know who is going to benefit from your content.

In other words: who do you want to serve?

You don't need to know how you're going to do it yet. The products you will make, the content you will create, and your traffic generating methods don't matter yet. The audience you want to help comes first.

You need to be able to state what type of people you're trying to serve and be as specific as possible. It's better to be too specific than too general as you can always expand later.

For example, you may want to serve office workers who want to learn how to eat healthy at work.

Here are 124 niche case studies, both good and bad.

2. Create a Reader Persona

Now that you know the people you want to serve, you need to learn more about them.

In order to create content that actually helps them, you must understand who they are, how they act, and what they struggle with.

You can learn about your target audience in many ways, for example:

in-person conversations

demographic sites like Alexa and SEMrush

By the end of your research, you should know your target audience's:

age

gender

job

hobbies

beliefs

values

You can even give your reader persona a name. Note that all of these have to be as specific as possible. For instance, 25-35 years old isn't an age, it's a range. Pick one age that accurately describes your ideal reader.

In the end, you want to have one specific person in mind you can write for. This will help you create content that resonates with your readers.

3. Create Your Blog

If you're going to build a blog-based business, you will at some point need a functional blog.

Unless you need some really unique features, I recommend sticking with WordPress for now. It's the simplest option to get you up and running, and you can always redesign the blog in the future. Here's how to install WordPress—it's pretty simple.

Alternatively, if you're already running your site on a platform like HubSpot, it might be even easier for you to create a blog.

What I don't advise you do is go out and spend thousands of dollars on a custom CMS or design. The first version of any blog isn't going to be perfect, and it's going to change a lot down the line.

Focus on getting a simple, functional, and not completely ugly blog up and running as fast as possible. Don't waste weeks or months trying to make everything look perfect.

4. Discover Where Your Readers Hang Out

Before you can even attempt to draw your target audience to your blog, you have to figure out where they spend their time.

Note that in some niches, you may have to get offline and go to conventions or local meetings to connect with your target audience and get them on your site.

To start with, find the most popular blogs in your niche. The easiest ways to do this is by Googling "top [your general niche] blogs."

Create a spreadsheet to keep track of these sites. In one column, indicate if the blog allows comments, and in another, if it allows guest posts. To check for guest posts, Google "[domain name] guest post."

Go through any big lists of blogs, and visit each one individually. Look for signs of high traffic such as several comments on each blog post or a lot of social shares.

Add the best ones to your list. You want to identify blogs your reader persona visits so you can eventually get them over to your site. Ideally, you want to identify as many as you can, but at least 50. If you're having trouble getting that many, think broader, e.g., "best health sites" instead of "best nutrition sites".

After blogs, it's time to check out forums in your niche. Again, search for "[your general niche]+ forum," and go through the results on the first few pages.

If you find forums you believe your target audience visits regularly, record them in a separate section of your spreadsheet. Note the number of members, or active members, to indicate activity and popularity.

Forums typically aren't big enough to use as a main traffic strategy at any point, but they can help you refine your reader persona and can be used for certain promotion tactics.

Stage 2: Finding Your 100 True Fans

Expected time to complete: Less than four months.

Back in 2008, Kevin Kelly coined a concept called 1,000 true fans. It really took off when Seth Godin started referencing it in his advice.

In short, he described how anyone could make a great living if they interacted with and had support from 1,000 true fans.

This article was written in the context of being a musician or an artist, but the same applies to most small businesses. A relatively small group of loyal readers can make your business a big enough success to allow you to become a full-time blogger (if you aren't already).

If you have a new blog, going from zero to 1,000 is a big leap. Too big, in my opinion, and unnecessary.

A better goal is to gather 100 true fans.

When you first begin a blog, you're starting at zero. No matter how well you research your target audience, you're going to make mistakes. The problem here is that no one will tell you what mistakes you're making—at least not yet.

As long as you define your target audience well enough, you will have the ability to attract your first 100 fans (although it could take a while). These fans will play an instrumental role in the growth of your blog.

Source: The 5 Stages of Blog Growth: How Your Traffic Tactics Should Change as You Grow

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today urged the blog publishing platform WordPress to remove ISIS propaganda from its website, after the League's research found a repository of ISIS videos, statements and publications on the platform.

WordPress has not responded to ADL's flagging of the content, which included beheading and execution clips and articles encouraging individuals to travel, join and carry out attacks. ADL is also asking internet consumers to help persuade WordPress to remove the content.

"We applaud open source tools like WordPress that have given many tools to individuals and organizations to express themselves. However, if WordPress is aware of violent ISIS propaganda hosted on their servers, content that glorifies and promotes terrorism, then it is incumbent upon them to swiftly take some kind of action," said Jonathan A. Greenblatt, ADL National Director. "Other social media companies have recently taken significant steps in the battle against online hate, and we hope that WordPress will make efforts to address terror propaganda on their service."

According to ADL's Center on Extremism, one particular website on WordPress includes ISIS materials as well as materials from other terror organizations in French, Turkish, Dutch, Arabic and other languages and includes a section for Dabiq, ISIS' English-language magazine.

"ISIS and its supporters continue to maneuver through various channels to promote their message to as wide of audience as possible, so it is not surprising that they have found another virtual home on WordPress," said Oren Segal, Director of ADL's Center on Extremism. "Just last year, we witnessed ISIS attempting to move its social media presence away from Twitter, which regularly removed and shut down their profiles. WordPress can set an example by not only removing the content, but also by making clear that terrorist materials have no place on its platform."

ADL's "Best Practices for Responding to Cyberhate" establishes guideposts for the industry and the Internet community to help prevent the spread of online hate speech. The initiative is a result of discussions and deliberations by an industry working group convened by the League.

In an attempt to help Internet uses better navigate the various mechanisms available for reporting online hate speech, ADL launched The ADL Cyber-Safety Action Guide, a platform where consumers can learn how and where to report bigoted, bullying or hateful speech to the major social media platforms and other Internet providers.

A variety of other resources on cyberhate, including a special curriculum, Addressing Hate Online, designed specifically for high school students, are available on ADL's web site.

Source: Jewish Group Calls for Blog Platform WordPress to Remove ISIS

Automattic, the company behind the popular WordPress blogging platform, has seen a steady increase in DMCA takedown notices in recent years.

Some of these are legitimate, aimed at disabling access to copyright-infringing material. However, there are also many overbroad and abusive takedown notices which take up a lot of the company's time and resources.

To give the public insight into the effort it takes to process the requests WordPress regularly publishes a transparency report. In the report WordPress outlines the number of DMCA takedown notices, but also how many were rejected due to inaccuracies or abuse.

"We work hard to make our DMCA process as fair, transparent, and balanced as possible, so we stringently review all notices we receive to quickly process valid infringement claims and push back on those that we see as abusive," WordPress explains.

The latest update covering the past half year shows that 4,679 piracy takedown requests were received during this period. What stands out is that content was removed in barely half of the cases reported.

In total, 43% of all notices were rejected, either because they were incomplete or due to abuse. February and April were particularly bad months, as more than half of all notices were rejected.

According to WordPress' figures more than 10% of the notices were abusive, and the company highlights some examples in its "Hall of Shame."

WordPress' most recent takedown statistics

For the first time WordPress has also released information on the organizations that submit the most complaints. Web Sheriff is listed on top here, followed by Audiolock and InternetSecurities.

Commenting on the new data Stephen Blythe, Community Guardian at Automattic, informs TF that they have seen a significant bump in rejections over the past months. This increase has two main causes.

"The first is that we rejected a large number of abusive takedown notifications from Web Sheriff that related to a single site. The second is that we are constantly refining our processes to ensure that we catch and push back on as many of these misuses as possible," Blythe says.

WordPress currently doesn't publish the takedown notices in full, but the company plans to highlight more abuse cases on its website in the coming months.

"We see numerous instances of abuse of the DMCA takedown process, on a regular basis. We plan to publish these via our transparency blog in future," Blythe notes.

While the number of takedown requests WordPress receives pales in comparison to larger Internet services, it's good to see that the company carefully reviews all notices to prevent unwarranted censorship. It will be interesting to see how the volume of request changes over time and whether copyright holders will improve their accuracy.

Source: WordPress Rejects 43% Of All 'Piracy' Takedown Notices

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra's community.The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

This is my first blog post on Gamasutra. Everything I post here will be on my own blog, too: https://warrenspector.wordpress.com/. But, my own blog will feature additional items that interest me but aren't necessarily Gamasutra-worthy. (I promise all my posts won't be about the Denius-Sams Gaming Academy, my current and nearly all-consuming gig.) So, if you're interested, keep an eye on this and my personal blog, okay?

Enough prologue, let's get to blogging.

I wanted to start my Gamasutra blogging career with something that's been on my mind for a while (since GDC, for sure, and long before that, truth be told). What prompted me to write this, in particular, was an email I got the other day from an Australian journalist -- Patrick Stafford -- about something that happened at GDC 2015. Here's the portion of his email that led me to this post:

"At GDC, I was at a panel about Telltale's games – a bunch of their writers were speaking. At one point, Kevin Bruner asked the audience something along the lines of, 'does anyone here think that what we make shouldn't be called games?'  I looked around, and I believe I saw you raise your hand."

Truth be told, the guy was right. I did raise my hand in answer to Kevin's question, and I have to own up to the fact that I was expressing a sincerely held belief. I've often said Telltale makes things that are game-like, but not exactly games. I think of them as some sort of interactive experience (obviously), but does that mean "game?" I don't think so.

Now, before people get their shorts in a knot about this, let me say a couple of things:

First, the definition of "game" is so broad (and ill-defined... and debated...), Telltale's work can clearly be said to fall under that umbrella, if you want to put it there. And if you do want to put The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, Tales from the Borderlands, Game of Thrones and others in the "game" category (or, to cite a non-Telltale example, David Cage's Heavy Rain), go ahead. I'm not religious about this. Labels, at the end of the day, aren't all that important, you know? Understanding how something works is important, but labels, not so much.

Second, I love Telltale's work. The fact that I think of The Walking Dead et al as wonderful experiences but not wonderful games may seem like a subtle distinction, but it's an important one for me.

So, circling back to Patrick's email, I figured I owed him a response and, at the same time, thought this was a good opportunity to think through - for myself - my feelings about Telltale's work. So let's tiptoe through the minefield...

When I think of games – narrative games -- I think of several things: plot (of course), but also challenges, goals and solutions. I think of character progression. Unlike, say, David Cage, I think of systems and mechanics - I think a lot about that. I think of players having some impact on the narrative or, at least, how that narrative plays out minute-to-minute (given each player's unique skills and the choices each makes in overcoming developer-created problems).

That last one is the most important to me, personally, something to bear in mind here. Nothing else (literally nothing) is more important to me. Your mileage may vary.

I'm absolutely not saying that all games should or must empower players, giving them ownership of the narrative at the minute-to-minute level. However, if you accept that idea, even simple choices can make a difference. You don't have to go full-on Mass Effect or, if you'll indulge me, Deus Ex. It's fine to empower players in small and/or conventional ways:

Which weapon do I use to defeat an enemy? A perfectly reasonable, if minor experience differentiator.

Do I go up here before going down there? Again, giving players even this amount of freedom is a small win.

Do I wait for a long straight piece to fill in a narrow gap or do I drop the L-shaped piece that's already on the screen? Even Tetris tells a player-recounted story, of a sort.

You can probably think of dozens, hundreds, thousands more of these small differentiating elements, from games that most people wouldn't think are particularly player-empowering. The ones I've listed, and the others you can think of, may be the lamest choices imaginable (though I'm not saying they are). Lame or not, each of these player-driven decisions significantly differentiates one player's experience from another.

(As a note, the test of whether a choice has made a meaningful difference is whether two players, discussing their experience, describe a unique moment, even if the outcome of a choice is the same for both of them.)

For me, differentiated experience is a defining characteristic of games - maybe the defining characteristic.

By contrast, Telltale's work, though incorporating a kind of player-empowerment, limits player options in significant ways.

Let's go back to the list of things I think of when I think about game narrative - challenges, goals, solutions, mechanics/systems and character progression.

If you've experienced any of Telltale's work you're probably way ahead of me, but here's my take:

Games like The Walking Dead certainly offer story, challenges, goals and solutions. Isn't that enough to call them games and put all this seemingly nit-picky labeling behind us? Obviously, I don't think so or I'd just stop right here and say "Oops. Never mind." So what is it about Telltale's work that makes it hard for me to say they're games?

For starters, they basically have no mechanics (or when they do introduce simple mechanics — shooting while backing up stairs and such -- they seem out of place and unnecessary). There's no character progression to speak of. And there's no real player control of the minute-to-minute. That last point is key.

Everything Telltale offers is pre-planned -- even the game-like qualities they do incorporate. The challenges, the goals the solutions, everything is determined and constrained by the designers through a script that I'm pretty certain utilizes a traditional branching tree structure.  (True confession time: I don't have any inside information about how things work under the hood at Telltale -- I'd love it if someone who did know would chime in and tell me!)

If my experience of Telltale's work has led me to the correct conclusion, you can't really go where you want to go when you want to go there and I don't think there's ever the possibility of a player discovering a freeform, player-driven solution to a problem.

What that tells me is that Telltale is less interested in empowering players and, like a novelist or film-maker, more interested in the story they want to tell.  It tells me they're not much interested in the player's impact on the minute-to-minute unfolding of the experience. Nothing wrong with that, though it's not a choice I'd likely make as a developer. What Telltale clearly does care about is character interaction and dialogue choices that give the illusion that players have a role in directing the narrative. And they clearly value choices that feel meaningful (even when they're really not). Man, does Telltale get choices.

Paradoxically, these player-limiting characteristics and the focus on linear story elements are, I think, where the Telltale magic happens.

Magic? You bet. The magic is that the choices Telltale offers say little or nothing about the characters' feelings about a situation… and they're not about allowing players to min-max or optimize or save-and-reload until they find the "best" solution to the puzzle or problem. Do you know how rare these characteristics are in games?

Pretty damn rare. The magic of Telltale's choices - the magic of their work, overall, is that I, at least, and I suspect many of you reading this, forget the character you're playing. The choices Telltale asks you to make as you wend your way through their artfully crafted stories reveal something about the player's feelings about right and wrong. Telltale forces you to, within script constraints, think about what would be the best thing to do in a given situation if you encountered that situation in the real world (or a zombie-infested one...). "Game space" is subordinate to "real space" and character development is subordinate to players' realizations about themselves.

Despite featuring strong, well-developed characters, Telltale's scripts force players to think for themselves and about themselves. That's awesome and, if I may say, what I've always tried to do in the games I've worked on. I'll let others decide how successful I've been. Clearly, Telltale's approach is working.

Telltale succeeds at this not because their mechanics are great or their puzzles are challenging or their worlds are open-ended. They succeed because their scripts are flat-out better than other people's, and even more important, those scripts pose ethical dilemmas that are more subtle and problematic than anything anyone else in the game business has on offer.

Is there more to the magic than talented writers and an interest in ethics? I think there is. Again, I have no inside information, but I think there's a structural thing going on that's pretty old-school but still very effective: I've already mentioned the branching tree structure. Telltale's work takes that to a whole new level. Without meaning to disparage anything or anyone in any way, I often describe the Telltale (or David Cage) approach as jamming several movie scripts together and, then, refining those scripts so they intertwine with one another to give the illusion of player choice, rather than the reality of it.

That has some interesting side effects that make it hard for me to apply the word "game":

No matter how convincing the illusion is, I'm pretty sure no one at Telltale has ever been or will ever be surprised by any choice any player makes. Millions of players can play, but because writers and designers carefully craft every choice ahead of time, the possible outcomes all exist, in some metaphysical sense, in "script-space," regardless of which choices you select.

And no player will ever surprise themselves as they play because they really have very little freedom, if any, to leave the tracks laid by the intertwined scripts. Players will be surprised by the choices and consequences afforded them by the talented, creative people whose scripts they're experiencing, but nothing can happen unless a writer/designer implemented it in the first place. Being surprised by something - largely a result of interactions between tools/interactions with in-gameworld elements - requires giving players control at a level Telltale simply won't allow.

That means that the only difference between my experience and yours in a Telltale game is that I chose one script and you chose another. You saw a slightly different scene than I did but, ultimately, your script and my script will converge again, maybe even in the very next scene. In reality, we're both experiencing a single story, just a well-disguised one. We can compare our choices with other people's choices - something Telltale exploits in an exceptionally elegant and compelling manner -- and the results seem player-driven because branching done in a sophisticated manner works that way. But that comparison of my pre-planned choices versus your preplanned choices is all players can do. They can't really make a difference. It's cool that you made the same choices as 42% of players, but that doesn't add up to a game-defining, player-driven narrative in my book.

That it works at all is part magic trick and part something else (which I'll get to in a moment - remember the words "familiarity" and "comfort"). And, just to restate in a slightly different way something I said earlier: I don't believe Telltale's magic tricks make their work "less than" or "worse than" other interactive narratives or works more irrefutably classified as games - far from it. Magic is cool - cool enough that The Walking Dead was my favorite interactive experience of 2012 and Telltale's more recent work is compelling as well.

Going one step further, I'm so inspired by Telltale's work that I actually thought about trying to make a game in that style. I'm sure it's a lot harder than it looks, but I suspect it would be like writing a choose-your-own-adventure book (with pretty pictures). I wrote some pick-a-path stuff back in my tabletop days and had a lot of fun with it so, yeah, I've thought about exercising that muscle again...

Anyway, let me give you a sort of a bottom line ("sort of" because I'm not really done yet - this is just an illusion of closure...).

If you need to put a label on what Telltale does, here's my answer: No, they're not making games. They are, as I hinted earlier, making "experiences" (my preferred, if imprecise term). To be more concrete, and at risk of being mocked for resurrecting a term long thought dead, let's say Telltale is the place that finally cracked the "interactive movie" code. Terminology aside (and my embarrassment at using it), for those of you who've been sleeping under a rock for the last 25 years, the true interactive movie has been the holy grail for a lot of developers and, now we know, the experience of choice for a lot of players. And Telltale's better at it than anyone else.

I know there's no great insight in trotting out the hoary old chestnut: "interactive movie." (I fully expect a fair amount of grief about even typing those words from the deeper thinkers among you.) But I think an accurate hoary old chestnut is better than lumping Telltale's work in with clearly categorizable narrative games that function in fundamentally different ways and offer players fundamentally different kinds of experiences.

One final semi-relevant thought (and now I really am wrapping up): A large part of Telltale's success probably stems from the familiarity normal people - i.e., non-gamers - have with existing media like movies and television. People get movies and TV and, therefore, have a high level of comfort with a work that looks like a movie or TV show and feels like a movie or TV show - but one that can be redirected in simple, safe yet still compelling ways by the viewer. A lot of developers - I'll include myself here - would be well-served by focusing a little more on familiarity and the comfort of our audience. Going to them rather than insisting they come to us makes a lot of sense, something Telltale gets (and I do not...).

So does Telltale make "games" or "experiences" or "interactive movies?" Honestly, despite having just spent pages making some sort of case, I really don't much care what you call them. Call them poodles for all I care. As long as Telltale keeps doing what they do as well as they do it, I'll be a happy guy.

BTW, I was going to end this post with something along the lines of "If you want to comment on this, I'm eager to engage in a dialogue about Telltale, games and narrative. However, I beg you to refrain from using the terms 'narratology' or 'ludology.' Those words make my skin crawl. I'll probably ignore any comments that go there." I was going to do that, but thought it might be too obnoxious, so I didn't. Well, now that I think about it, I just did end my post with that comment (foolishly, no doubt). First mine, triggered, I guess. Have at me.

I'm done now. Got to go play some Game of Thrones... 

Source: Telltale May Not Make Games, But They Do Make Magic