Blog Book

Had a great time at the Naked Conversations [launch party](http://redcouch.typepad.com/weblog/2006/01/party_time.html) last night, got the book signed, congratulated Robert and Shel and the crowd enjoyed [Broback's magic](http://www.flickr.com/photos/vikman/89625068/). Blog posts are rolling in and [Robert posted about the party this morning](http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/01/22/what-a-party/). We’re mid book now, and appreciate the effort those two put in, especially finding that one [book voice](http://redcouch.typepad.com/weblog/2006/01/advice_to_new_c.html) - it’s a Herculean task, writing a book.

Speaking for the wives, the quote of the night was from Maryam Scoble who said, “The book is all about naked conversations and doesn’t mention Paula (Shel’s wife) or me!”

For more see the Technorati naked_conversations tag.

I’ve been talking to my colleagues about the irony of writing a book about blogging is that I have to stop blogging to get it done. In order to write and not just post and read RSS, I go into the Book Writing Bunker, as I call it. I sequester myself from the scene. The 2.0s, AJAXes, and whatever else Flash has reinvented itself into.

In his post, [Web 2.0: Our Own Little Echo Chamber](http://loosewire.typepad.com/blog/2006/01/web_20_our_own_.html), Jeremy Wagstaff notes how outside of our echo chamber, the world goes on working and finds the Internet and blogs to be a distraction. At the beginning of last year, around [SXSW](http://www.sxsw.com/), I was still complaining about how exactly was [RSS making the world more productive](http://www.texturadesign.com/archives/fear_of_bold.htm) — are 1,555 unread headlines more valuable that scanning the Google news homepage?

Jeremy’s right and from my perspective, to grow business blogging beyond a marketing and conversation tool, it has to become integrated, mission critical, and less time consuming. Our book is focused on practical blogging and part of what we have to explain is how a company is going to prosper from their blog. I’ll talk with Shel and Scoble about that tonight at their [book launch party](http://redcouch.typepad.com/weblog/2006/01/party_time.html) and will go back into the Book Writing Bunker on Sunday.

A few more items on the book

* As the publication dates nears, we’ll launch a new blog to support the book
* Shel posted [great advice to authors](http://redcouch.typepad.com/weblog/2006/01/advice_to_new_c.html), including how to find the elusive common voice
* Publish and Prosper is showing up in Google, on [Peachpit's site](http://www.peachpit.com/title/0321395387) and [Amazon.com](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=as2&path=ASIN/0321395387&tag=texturadesign-20&camp=1789&creative=9325)

[From Wired](http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70037-0.html?tw=rss.index), a new [study shows](http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/tandf/tbit/2006/00000025/00000002/art00003) that in “less than half the time it takes to blink — people make aesthetic judgments that influence the rest of their experience with an internet site.” The report comes just as we’re finishing up a book chapter on designing a blog, choosing a layout, features, and color. Much of design is “I know it when I see it.” You can apply techniques like [Eyetracker](http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=64), [heat maps](http://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/static.py?page=tips.html), and consider the vast amounts of research on usability that companies like Amazon.com do, but here (as I’d suspect) it comes down to that critical first impression — that [blink Gladwell writes about](http://www.gladwell.com/blink/).

The study doesn’t show what makes a difference, what users like or don’t, but concludes that, “designers have to make sure they’re not offending users visually” and to not give them a negative impression.

The study didn’t cover it, but my guess is that RSS doesn’t give a great first impression, especially those RSS icons I call the little badges of courage.

It was a [big day on Friday](http://texturadesign.com/2006/01/on_this_day_1.htm) — my birthday, parent’s anniversary, Friday the 13th, and Naked Conversations went on sale. [Shel and I talked](http://redcouch.typepad.com/weblog/2006/01/tim_brays_quali.html) about the book, writing, struggles, and finding a book voice — as I learned the hard way, posting to a blog isn’t the same as writing a lucid paragraph for your readers and those [two author voices](/book/about_the_authors/) need to become one narrator.

I haven’t read much of Naked Conversations yet, just the chapter about [Clip-n-Seal](http://redcouch.typepad.com/weblog/2005/05/chapter_5_littl.html), but I’ll get a copy at the release party this weekend. As the [reviews come in](http://redcouch.typepad.com/weblog/2006/01/thanks_to_our_a.html), I’m sure the book is going to do well and I think [our book](/book/), taking a very practical “how-to” approach will be a great compliment: learn the why and then the how.

Last week Teresa interviewed Shel about the book and we’ll have that [podcast](/podcast/) up soon.

We just inserted a sidebar into the book, in the disarming detractors section, about [Alaska Airlines](http://blogbusinesssummit.com/2005/12/alaska_airlines_1.htm). I posted my take on the story on [inFlightHQ](http://inflighthq.com/archives/2005/12/the_call_for_pr.htm). When writing it, I thought about how I’d explain that to one to a group of business people. It’s mob rules at times with the bloggers.

As arcane as it sounds, we’ve resorted to only using Word for the final editing stages of our book. Both Steve and I experience what I call Word Vertigo when attempting to write and edit the documents. What we do is break each section of a chapter into simple text files, write them, then assemble the files into Word when we send them to the Editor. At first, for a struggling few weeks, I thought it was just me, like we were missing some magnificent feature in Word that would coalesce all the editing features into something that made sense. I think the main problem is that I’m so used to working in HTML, with simple formating, that Word constantly gets in my way. And then when you use track changes, with the lines, comment boxes, colors, inserted, deleted, you end up with Word Vertigo.

The lack of postings here should tell you how hard we’re working on the book. I haven’t done 18 hours a day, since dotcom land.

Here is some beta copy from our upcoming book. I throw it out there just for the fun of it, and would love to get comments from experienced bloggers who focus on conversion rate.

Most of the bloggers we know that are experiencing success promoting products or services don’t embrace the “hard sell” approach. Many of these people would chafe at the notion of trying to “close” a visitor, and would rather just focus on creating quality posts that get noticed. While we agree posts are great for driving traffic and credibility, sales will certainly be enhanced if you have a strategy for dealing with people once they arrive.

Experienced online retailers like Amazon and Land’s End spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours annually trying to enhance “conversion rate”, which is a measurement indicating what percentage of visitors become buyers. Those sites have discovered scores of techniques (mostly proprietary) that can make a huge difference in sales. In a report issued in April 2005, Nielsen/NetRatings released an Internet retail analysis which indicated that for the top 100 Web retailers, an average of 1 in 20 visitors become buyers. Amazon’s rate is more than double that. If you are averaging less than 5% conversion, you may want to look at ways to help people through the buying process.

The blogosphere is not a used car lot, and overly pushy promotions can get negative comments from experienced blog readers and posters. Instead of nagging “buy now!” exclamations, we believe the best way to convert a visitor into a buyer is to simply make it easy for them to make a buying decision. Smart bloggers utilize several techniques to help facilitate this process, here are a few key ideas.

Make it clear what you do, and the products you sell. A brief paragraph about your company containing a link to your product pages should be positioned near the top of every page.

Posting about targeted customer experiences and featuring testimonials in the sidebars (again with links to products) can help visitors overcome internal objections. If you’ve researched why people don’t buy, and feature customer comments directly refuting the common reasons, sales can be boosted dramatically.

Mention products in posts and link back to pages that allow purchasing.

Leverage trusted retail sites your visitors may rely on now. Many potential buyers are hesitant to provide credit card information to unfamiliar Web sites, and prefer not to have to re-enter contact information. Clip-n-Seal uses at least two popular shopping cart systems that permit buying through services that have millions of registered users. Visitors can purchase through Paypal (with more than 20 million account holders) or Amazon (with over 40 million account holders). Other prominent services many bloggers use include Yahoo and eBay.

I finally posted on [tagging](http://blogbusinesssummit.com/archives/2005/10/tagging_tag_clo.htm) and that’ll make it into the book somewhere. We won’t focus on it, but will explain it relation to business. That goes for tagging and other blogging technologies.

We’re writing Chapter 4 of our [book](/book/) with [Writeboard](http://www.writeboard.com/). Writeboard is a 37signalized wiki, with a mo’ betta user interface and it should work well to collect draft passages and centralize review comments. We’ve already been using [Basecamp](http://www.37signals.com/) to manage the book as a project, uploading and downloading files, posting on our progress, and adopting a simple RSS workflow.

We decided to give Writeboard a try after if popped up as a tab in Basecamp (I blurted out, “what tab is dat?”) and out of total frustration with Word. Word is not working for us. It should work, we want it to work, but when I can’t figure out how to view comments only from Broback, I get unhappy and frustrated. So does the rest of the team. Word is very difficult to look at when tracking changes, it causes vertigo, with all those balloons, lines, and who knows what else is going on.

I learned that in the business district of Montreal, they don’t know how to pour a good espresso. 6 coffee shops all poured espresso like drip, well more like tea actually. I may have missed a better shop, but I think 6 was a good enough sample. Patrick confirmed that no good coffee can be found downtown and assured me that there is good coffee in Mileend (especially) and Plateau neighborhoods. Beer however, was not an issue!

and the title for the books is . . . Publish & Prosper: Blogging for Business

I’ll be in Montreal this week on a business trip and looking forward to finding a coffee shop and writing. It’s supposed to rain the whole time, in a beautiful city. No better book-writing weather than that!

As a new author (well, soon to be, when it’s published), I’ve been spending time on all things authorly, dreaming of ways to get our book on Oprah and topics current to authors. I’ve noticed the Google Print debate and the Author’s Guild lawsuit. What surprised me, as reported by Preston Galla, is that Google blogged that they don’t “show even a single page to users who find copyrighted books through this program.” Well, they do. I just read through chapter one of Designing With Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman.

Google’s fair user argument will be decided by lawyers and the copyright for DWWS is well expressed on the Google Print pages, as well as links to buy it. The program will certainly allow users to find and buy their books more easily, Amazon’s look inside feature does the same thing. The problem with Google’s plan, as discussed in Dave’s post on AdSense, is what if you have a problem? What if you want your book excluded or the wrong links are on the page, or whatever? Do you get a call center or a mailto that takes 6 months to respond? A FAQ isn’t enough.

Update

Search and Rescue op-ed by Tim O’Reilly

Writing a book is like a Miyazaki movie. It’s a zeppelin of publishing that floats along with all these gears, characters, steam and knobs, and things to turn, and finally out spits a book.

Luckily our editor has an encyclopedic memory. I panicked for a while earlier this week. When editing/rewriting content is getting moved around so much that I was getting lost and panicked trying to remember this example I had of a niche business blog. She remember, had it all memorized, and I was like, “cool.”

I noticed our revision cycle in a word doc file name

BlogBook_outline_SB_EK_DLB_EK_DLB_EK.doc

That’s Steve to Erin to me, back to Erin, to me, then Erin. That starts all over again when it goes to PeachPit for editing and comes back to us.

In the afterglow of the Summit, we’re back to writing and working on chapters and finalizing the table of contents. The Summit was like a big case study for what people want to learn more about and they told us. There’s a mix between the tech, the practical, and the big picture. Our approach was also reassured by what we heard.

A podcast about our blog book started today, with the tagline, “listen to us type.” We’ll bookcast about each chapter as they’re written and then more when we start the book tour next year. For chapter one, I forgot how much I despised working in Word and vow to write the whole book in bbEdit.