A few lessons in blogging from the past 24 hours

Recently I've been doing a couple of guest posts for John Chow and yesterday my latest was published; Successful Blogging - 5 Tips for Writing With Confidence where I focused on some of the more obvious aspects of blogging language. I also raised a few eyebrows with some advice on how to "blag it". I promptly got my ass handed to me.

The article on JohnChow.com was explaining how to use confident language to give additional authority to your posts; because readers respond well to authoritive tones. I spoke about how you should avoid bragging about inconsequential successes (like being frontpaged on Digg).

Why did I ever recommend that?
Because if you're trying to dress the part of being a big-shot blogger then bragging about fairly ordinary events acts in contrary to your image as being a big shot, get it?

The rest of the advice
Was fairly normal; using unambiguous language to explain what you mean, talk about the things you do right and only admit failure when you've got a point to prove - these are fairly ordinary points that can split opinion... But it was my final point that really got the comments flowing.

#5 - You Don’t Need To Tell The Truth All The Time
I had genuine reasons for giving this as a tip but they weren't conveyed in the original post. Because I was writing for JohnChow.com (where evil behaviour is almost worshipped) I thought I'd include this. What I meant was that if you're trying to "dress for the promotion you're trying to get" then it's not always necessary to tell the absolute truth. Be murky about it, deliberately vague and "blag" your experience using supporting material.

What that sounded like to most readers was "lie to everyone" and that's not quite what I meant. I know a lot of people on the Internet who have told a white lie or two to help things go more smoothly - I wasn't advocating massive bare-faced lies to everyone - but I appreciate why it seemed this way.

One of my blogging idols got involved and it hurt!
Darren Rowse from Problogger read the post and gave a thorough and constructive reply. His reply was arguing against almost every point I made which was fair, the Internet is all about discussion, right?

Unfortunately he then posted his reply on Problogger and things got worse
The article made a little more sense on JohnChow.com because the readers expect some slightly evil advice from time to time (hence it's inclusion, despite me not living by those rules). You see once you take the article out of context I look like a bad person; and that didn't feel good. Darren remained constructive but I couldn't help but feel that I was unable to voice my opinion.

So I've been keeping my head down a little today, feeling sheepish because my advice fell slightly outside the context that I intended it to be in. This leads to an important lesson:

Proof read your posts

If I'd have sat on that post for 24hours before sending it over to John I'd have been happier, it would have likely been reworded and maybe 40% of this storm wouldn't have happened.

Either way, I guess it got people talking about me and Oscar Wilde seemed to think that was a good thing, albeit if it doesn't seem that way today.

So just to conclude, I don't lie to my readers on this site and I do admit failure (notably my PPC failings). I'm a little unhappy at how the post was perceived but that's just part of the blogging game. Thanks to everyone for all for your comments. On the bright side Darren Rowse now knows who I am...

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