How to Be a Better Blogger

I’ve noticed two types of bloggers.

There are those who love to write and want to share an important message but lack an understanding of the economics of writing online. They dismiss the idea of using market forces to scale their arguments—often due to fear, misunderstanding, or ideological stance.

And there are those who think the sole purpose of blogging is business, their ultimate concern being to drive traffic to ads, to promote their products, to maximize leads, to maximize conversions, to maximize anything that will maximize profit—often to the neglect of social responsibility.

I disagree with both perspectives and argue that to be a better blogger you should operate somewhere in the middle.

If you run your blog as a business or you blog for a company, challenge yourself to be a better writer by learning the principles of responsible argument, employing ethical writing techniques to create a closer connection with your audience, and accepting that writing is a social act with social consequences.

If you blog for social change, to teach and to help others, try to learn about writing in the digital economy—about using responsible rhetoric to attract, influence, and lead online audiences, without ignoring how you will fund your project.

Each side can learn from the other.  In fact, each side is learning from the other thanks to the growing popularity of podcasts and other mass communication technologies, leading to an incredible cross-pollination between business people who have taken on the role of publishers via content marketing, and writers (and other creatives), who have liberated a suppressed entrepreneurial spirit to pursue their social causes.

These two groups (I’ll call them the business blogggers and the humanist bloggers) can inform each other in many interesting ways, but for this post, I’ll share just a few thoughts about how each group benefits.

First, the business bloggers.

Rhetoric and the Business of Blogging

Business bloggers benefit when they study writing. That sounds obvious, but I don’t just mean writing correctly—I’m referring to the principles of composition and rhetoric.

These principles help them gain a deeper understanding of the writing process, audience analysis, argument, style, the social implications of writing and creating content, and the tools needed to make ethical business decisions relating to their blog.

That last one might surprise you. What does composition and rhetoric have to say about making ethical business decisions? The answer has to do with the quality of arguments.

Rhetoric gets a bad rap, but rhetoric as a discipline is highly concerned with the ethics of argument, and when you sell a product in the marketplace, you are essentially making a Rogerian argument, where you are pitching the solution to a problem.

When a problem is solved in the marketplace, it is done through a mutual understanding: the seller understands the customer’s problem and the customer understands the value in the seller’s proposed solution. When products and services fail—or worse, deceive people—there is no mutual understanding, no common ground; instead, there is an imbalance, the feeling of one side getting duped or cheated—usually the customer.

A bad product is like a bad argument. It succeeds by one or a combination of the following: exploiting emotions (pathos), distorting information (logos), and exploiting authority or positional power (ethos). Such products usually fail in the long term.

The examples below illustrate this parallel between bad arguments and bad products. (Notice the lack of common ground in each scenario).

Bad Arguments

Corrupted Ethos: The boss who asserts her positional authority to win a policy debate. The parents who resort to the “Because I said so” line when arguing with their children.

Corrupted Pathos: The politician who stokes the fear and anxiety of voters to win an election.

Corrupted Logos: The radio host who withholds or misrepresents facts to influence listeners’ opinions.

Bad Products

Corrupted Ethos: The consultant who embellishes his experience. The software company that has paid for fake reviews. The cable company that uses its size (positional authority) to act against customer interests.

Corrupted Pathos: An inferior product that relies on ad copy which recklessly exploits an emotion like fear, guilt, sadness, or the desire for recognition.

Corrupted Logos: The car salesman who misrepresents the condition of a vehicle.

You could restate this section’s opening point this way: A good product is like a good argument, which means that ethical rhetorical practice is a fundamental tool in both the marketplace of ideas and the marketplace of goods and services. This is how rhetoric can help business bloggers.

Learning About the Economics of Writing Online

If you’re a humanist blogger, someone who is hesitant to use market forces to amplify your message, how do you benefit from learning—maybe even embracing—the economics of writing?

The obvious answer is that having economic support for your blog means that you have the chance to consistently reach more people—more people to teach, more people to persuade, more people to persuade you back.

But I think the less obvious answer is that when you observe the many shady ways that people engage in online business—the clickbait headlines, the undisclosed sponsored posts, the annoying advertisements, the shameless get-rich, get-slim, get-healthy, get smart, get-anything-you-need promises, you start to learn a great deal about what not to do. And you come to appreciate it more when you find people doing online business the right way.

I’ll share my opinions about what it means to do online business the right way in a future post, but for now, just keep in mind that there is a finite number of ways to generate revenue for your site, and more than the particular revenue model you adopt, it’s your level of honesty, transparency, and integrity that determines your website’s character.  That’s the basic lesson—that it’s possible to operate your blog ethically while seeking financial support, and that doing so is worth it, if it means doing more for your social cause, if it means contributing to a healthier discourse within the digital wild west that is the internet.

The internet is overpopulated with “informative” websites that exist for the sole purpose of steering visitors to questionable products and services, or worse, to the friendly front gate of radical and hateful ideologies.  These sites, because they exploit internet marketing strategies, get an undeserved share of web traffic.  (For example, at the time of this writing, the third result in a Google search for “Martin Luther King” belongs to a website run by a white supremacist group devoted to exposing him as a fraud).

And let’s not forget about the trolls, who some say are “winning the internet.”

Meanwhile, I’ve seen too many honest and interesting authors of websites, podcasts, Youtube channels, etc. fade away because they didn’t have a business strategy.  At some point, they came to terms with the reality that creating online content is an economic activity that must be supported.

True, blogging and other ways of creating online content is very inexpensive.  Starting out, your time is all you have to spend, and the only costs are your opportunity costs.  And even when you buy a domain and own your website, the costs can be cheaper than a coffee habit, something you can pursue with even a little spending money.  But a website does have costs, and they almost certainly grow as your reach grows.

Financial support has got to come from somewhere.  For me, it comes from my day job, which allows me to pay the costs for this website.  The costs are not prohibitive–maybe $40 a month at the time of this writing, but the costs are real and something I have to contend with to continue publishing on this site.  I feel fortunate to be able to spend $40 a month.  But I’m not scared to seek additional ways to support this site, if it means I get to spend more time writing and pursuing my cause.  Chances are, your cause deserves the same.

In the next post, I talk about why writers often feel reluctant to think or talk about the economics of writing online, and why I think it’s actually a responsibility to overcome this reluctance.