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Create Real Value By “Remixing” — How to reference blogs for producing original content

July 21, 2009 By

(Reading time: 6 – 9 minutes)

Heat up your content with creative remixing

Heat up your content with creative remixing

Suppose you have a couple of problems on your plate. You need to figure out how to do something, and maybe you need to write a blog post or two. When possible, it makes sense to combine these activities, kill both birds with the same stone.

If you’re on the web, your first stop is a search engine. Hopefully, you’ll find the results you need really fast, and be able to take action right away…

…but probably not.

Instead, you’ll find a couple websites that are pretty close, along with half a dozen spam blogs successfully gaming your search terms, followed by people more or less copying the content from the most relevant one or two posts you found. Maybe they did some rewording. Probably not much.

So, what do you do?

Here’s what I do… Remix!

I collect up as much information as I need, then I remix it into a blog post while I’m simultaneously solving my “real” problem.

Use the source

Here’s the general procedure:

  1. Solve your problem using one or more other sources. Take notes in your own words, paste in small text for quoting when appropriate.
  2. Add your own original value within the mixed in content by rewriting, clarifying and extending notions from your source material. Add your own unique perspective and customization to help extend the source work even further.
  3. Use concrete examples of how you took action, how you created “knowledge” from “information.”
  4. Provide FULL CREDIT to all sources! LINK to the articles you found useful and cite the author by name whenever possible. Do not worry about “bleeding link juice” and do not ask for reciprocal links. You’re building on their work, they are under no obligation implicit or explicit to link forward.

Let’s take a look at some recent examples from right here on Website In A Weekend.

Do you make these mistakes blogging?

The number of “Blogging Mistakes” posts has to run into the thousands.

How could anyone write anything new on the subject?

Easy.

Say what hasn’t been said: how to fix these mistakes!

Suppose you have a bad permalink structure. You need to change it. You do change it. Your search engine results plummet. You fix that as well. Now you have a basis for a post linking “blog mistake” with “blog solution.” You don’t need to list all 17 or 29 or 313 blogging mistakes. Just list a couple and explain exactly how you fixed them.

Check this out… One mistake at the time of this writing is that there is no “Dr WordPress” portrait here on Website In A Weekend. The easy solution is point my iPhone at myself, and post the resulting photo. A better solution is to thoughtfully define exactly what I want to communicate in such a photo, then find someone really good to shoot a few pictures. Now I have real value to report:

  1. Mistake: no photo
  2. Specify kind of photo
  3. Specify who takes the picture

The photographer, of course, would get a link, testimonial and referrals, because I won’t use pictures I am not delighted with. Regular readers, of course, will expect to see my shining face ugly mug in the masthead in the near future. (Look for the “blogging mistakes” post as well. It’s over 3000 words already, still have a ways to go.)

Everything about Sitemaps has been said

Probably, not everything has been said… but there are certainly enough posts listing the features of having a sitemap for helping search engines crawl your website. My original intention was to write an excellent article on sitemap generation while I was installing and verifying a sitemap on a new website. I got the excellent article, but it turned out to be on Google Webmaster Tools, a little different than the list of feature I had envisioned for sitemaps, but likely more useful in the long term.

Even better, I selected a couple of the features of sitemap technology, explained the benefit to the reader (that’s you), and gave a specific example of how to execute. Lists of facts about sitemaps are useful, an explanation of the benefits to you and and example of how to implement is even better. Check out the resulting article: “Using Google Webmaster Tools To Ensure Proper Search Engine Indexing.”

Customizing Thesis 404 error page

The default WordPress 404 Error page is not terribly interesting and not particularly useful for keeping readers on your website. As a a result, you should consider modifying your 404 page as one of the first things you do when setting up a new website. I just did this myself recently on several websites I operate which use the Thesis theme. I hadn’t dug into Thesis very deeply yet, so I had to do some digging around the web. Here’s what I found out.

The easiest Thesis theme 404 tutorial is by Sugar Rae, a long-time Thesis user and real smart lady. She laid it all out in a short article. I was able to implement her code example very quickly. Since her code consisted of a place holder, I decided I wanted to get even smarter, with the Smart 404 WordPress plugin from Michael Tyson. Now, my 404 page returns customized results based on the broken URL requested. At the time of this writing, that’s all I have, but I plan on implementing advertisements and current promotions into my custom 404 page in the near future.

And of course I wrote a blog post about my Thesis 404 page while I was implementing it, as you can see by the last link I gave.

Create, don’t steal

The electronic composition age of “cut-n-paste” documents follows by 50 years the revolution in sound engineering when magnetic tapes could be cut, spliced, and re-recorded. Now, as then, the objective is to build new creative work deriving from, but not blatantly copying existing works. Copyright law is clear on derivative and fair use, but it’s really no more than common sense:

  1. Quote when you use small excerpts word-for-word.
  2. Reference original work whenever and where ever you draw inspiration.

>>>DISCLAIMER: I am not a lawyer and the above is not legal advice.

Referencing other work on the web is far easier than providing formal citation for work published in more traditional venues. You have no excuse not to link to your inspiration and sources. And it gets even better: if someone you use for a source objects (for whatever reason), it’s EASY to find similar information from a different source, from someone who would be delighted for the link and attribution.

Lastly, consider using people’s actual names. Not the name of their blog, but their name. It amazes me that so few bloggers do this. I won’t drop any names here, out of context, but you will find all through my writing, off line and on, that when I cite someone, I use their name whenever I can. You should too.

Filed Under: Creating Content Tagged With: , ,

How To Know When To Write A New Blog Post

July 2, 2009 By

(Reading time: 4 – 7 minutes)

WordPress is a hot topic on Google: millions of search engine results. Everyone and their mother’s brother’s uncle’s 2d cousin on their great aunt’s side seems to be a WordPress expert, and bent on telling the world about it.

Or at least, attempting to convince Google.

Such a crowded space, so much competition!

So why Yet Another Blog About WordPress?

Well, lot’s of reasons, and some of them good reasons. The most important reason being that lots of people searching for something means the market exists. It’s easy to dominate a topic where no market exists, and that’s a great way to go hungry.

There’s many more reasons… let’s dig deeper…

Entering a crowded market

No matter how crowded the market, your perspective, properly communicated is valuable.

Everyone has slightly different needs and interests. The way you explain something might be better than the way I explain it. Different authors resonate with different readers. So the more different explanations on a subject… the better served the reader.

Most articles on any subject are crap anyway. Pareto’s Law (80/20 rule) definitely holds. On “hot” search terms, it’s more like 99/1 as the spammers, scammers and black hats crush search results by gaming the search engines. (How they find time to do this is a mystery to me. Life is too short.) If you write an article that simply “doesn’t suck,” readers will be grateful!

Here’s how to know when you need to write an article:

  1. Search results are non-existent, or poor, but you need more information
  2. Other articles are poorly-written. Can you explain it better? If so you should.
  3. Other articles are out of date or inaccurate. This applies to the WordPress Codex as well. By all means, learn to add to the Codex, but when you have long term interest in a topic, write your own article and keep it up to date.
  4. Your situation is unique, nobody explains what you need to know in a way that works for you. Write up your process and share it with the world. Perhaps you want to add international language capabilities to a WordPress plugin, and all the explanations don’t work for you. Then do what I did with a little plugin I wrote to teach myself internationalization.
  5. You have the overweening desire to “own” a topic. There’s a couple of topics on Website In A Weekend in the category, one on article revisions, the other on favicons.
  6. You are a “learn by doing” type of person. If you’re like me, you find it hard to learn something simply by listening, watching or reading. You have to actually do it. For me, this means writing out procedures and processes, documenting my practice, even in programming, engineering. It takes more time. I like to think it means I learn something better than people that can learn by reading, listening or watching, but that’s probably just me making myself feel better. In any case, when I want to learn something, I like to write about it. For more information, read Writing to Learn — The open secret writers rarely write about.
  7. You find articles having no actionable content. This is where the 80/20 rule really kicks in! Most articles have very little simple, actionable content, and consist only of facts scraped from manual pages, source code documentation, or information contained in 80% of the other articles. The worst of these are poorly modified webpages taken directly from existing and widely available documentation. Totally useless!

If any of the reasons above apply, write that blog post or page. You know you can do a better job, and readers will thank you.

Standing out from the crowd

When you write a new article on an existing topic, there are a number of things to keep in mind:

  1. You won’t get much traffic initially. Existing pages, especially if they have been around a long time, will stomp you in SERPs. Don’t worry about. Write for your readers above all, and they will find you out on the long tail.
  2. Write very high quality, factually accurate posts. You have the time do this, you aren’t first so you have to be best.
  3. Tell a story that engages your readers.
  4. Explain exactly why you needed to write the article, what problem you were trying to solve, why that problem was important to you and why it may be important to the reader, define who your audience is for the article. (when? where?)

Website In A Weekend does it better

Website In A Weekend exists because I got tired of finding crappy content about WordPress on the web. I knew I could do a better job. So I’m doing it.

My key to success is writing into the long tail, that is, writing the highest possible quality blog posts, as quickly as possible to leverage Google’s longevity ratings. I’ve heard it said about blogging “publish then polish,” and that’s what I’m doing.

Every article on Website In A Weekend is all original content. All written from scratch. Every article will be rewritten as necessary to keep up with readers demands, and to maintain accuracy with WordPress as it continues to evolve.

The first person finding something factually inaccurate anywhere, contact me for 30 minutes free consulting by Skype or chat on any topic on this entire website (offer expires October 31 2009).

Filed Under: Creating Content Tagged With: , ,
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