Why I Blog

I’ve been blogging for a long time. I’m not as prolific as some, but I try and post weekly, and occasionally I do better than that. I’ve had long droughts too. Every once in awhile I ask myself, “Why do I blog, anyway?”

As I’ve pointed out in the past, I can trace almost every opportunity I’ve had back to blogging. So that’s pretty compelling.

But it’s also because I receive great feedback and hope that I’m genuinely helping people.

Last night I received an email from Tilman Kreuder. I don’t get a ton of these sorts of emails, but enough to know that there are people out there reading and appreciating what I’m writing. Here’s Tilman’s email (edited a bit for privacy reasons):

How are you?

I’ve been a frequent reader of your blog for the last two years and it really helped me in the process of starting my own little business. A friend and I are bootstrapping a platform (web and mobile) for soccer statistics in parallel to our day jobs. Thanx to you we are using tools and methologies from the lean startup process, so thank you again for that advice.

Another friend, who is working from Germany on ****************, and I are going to San Francisco from July 30th until August 13th. Him partly to work more closely with his partners and me mostly for vacation and to meet people.

Before I bore you to death I’ll get to the point: Are you by any chance (I know the odds are bad) in SF during that time period as well? If yes, I would love to meet you for a coffee or slice of pizza to show you our lean canvas for the soccer statistics and pick your brain a little.

Take care and keep on blogging.

I don’t know if I’ll be in SF during that time period, but I emailed Tilman back right away and thanked him for the note. Sometimes you get half-hearted emails where people say, “I love your blog, now check out this thing…” which for the most part feel fake. I typically delete those emails. But Tilman’s email is cool and appreciated.

Bloggers blog because they want attention. They want feedback. I haven’t been able to develop a great community here in terms of comments and dialogue, but a lot of that does happen on Twitter (and occasionally on Facebook.) Anyway, that’s why I blog. I know (from feedback like Tilman’s) that people are out there extracting some amount of value from what I write. And that’s pretty damn cool.

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Sidebar update: While writing this post, I got the following email, which is the other side of blogging / having a public profile of some kind:

I find it pleasurable to request your partnership in business worth USD$98.6M. This is legitimate and may be of appeal to you. Contact me directly on: jki-sang010@live.hk

Sorry, I don’t find it pleasurable in the least.

Help Me Help You – Join the Instigator Blog Feedback Group

I love writing. Although I’ve struggled to write consistently of late, I always enjoy hitting “publish” and seeing the content go up live on the blog. I think the content is worthwhile for people, although commenting has slowly declined over the last few years. I think that has a lot to do with Twitter though, and not the quality of the content itself.

This blog has also shifted focus a few times. Of late, I’ve written a lot about startup accelerators since that’s what I’m focused on with Year One Labs. In the future, who knows … That shifting likely causes groups of people to be more or less interested over time, since the subject matter has changed quite drastically since I started back in 2006.

All bloggers crave feedback. Positive, negative or neutral – we all want to get a sense of what people like, don’t like, and how we’re influencing people and creating value.

With that in mind, I’d invite you all to join my “Instigator Blog Feedback Group.”

qidiqThe feedback group is powered by qidiq – a startup inside of Year One Labs. You can sign-up via email or download the iPhone application and then register for the “instigatorblog” feed.

qidiq is an extremely easy-to-use tool for soliciting ongoing feedback from a select group of people. As a feed owner you send one question at a time to people, instead of sending a full survey (that gets low response rate and irritates people). Recipients receive email notifications and can answer quickly, or they get push notifications to their iPhones, and can answer with a quick tap. People can also comment on each question and see results. qidiq is just launching in beta now, and experimenting with different market segments that make sense – think: events/conferences, associations, user groups, publishers, blogs, etc. There are lots of use cases for soliciting quick, easy feedback and making it a fun experience for everyone.

For my blog, I’ll send out questions infrequently, usually after I write a blog post, to solicit private feedback on specific questions I have. So you won’t be inundated with questions, and you’ll be helping me create a better blog for you.

Once again, here’s where you can sign-up: Instigator Blog Feedback Group

New Design for Instigator Blog – Lightweight and Simplified

Every so often I feel compelled to redesign this blog. The first redesign was in 2007, followed by another in 2008. It’s been a couple years since the last redesign, and this one is a big departure from the last. It’s still a work-in-progress, but I’d love to get your feedback.

I really wanted to go simple and lightweight. Strip out unnecessary elements and focus more attention on the content. I eliminated a lot of the sidebar noise; which I think most people ignore anyway. It’s still perhaps a bit too noisy over there – but I added a list of categories and a tag cloud in an effort to draw attention to older, but still valuable and relevant content.

The home page now only shows one post, with links to a few other recent ones. This is to shine a spotlight on the most recent post.

I put a “related posts” plugin back in, again hoping that it gets people digging further into the content. My bounce rate is quite high, and time spent on the site is low — I’m looking for ways to improve both those metrics.

I put the “subscribe” options at the top but also part-way down the sidebar. My goal is to increase subscriptions (via email, RSS or Twitter), and people will notice the colorful icons as they’re reading a specific post.

The footer (for now) has almost nothing in it. I’m still not convinced there’s anything meaningful you can’t put in the footer of a blog that increases key metrics like generating traffic, engagement, etc. But I’m open to suggestions.

I think the design is more personal, even though it’s a bit starker. The tagline is personal, my picture is more prominently displayed (although I need a new picture too!) The “contact” link is also more prominent. In some ways (at least to me) it feels more welcoming. Less can truly be more.

This wasn’t a rigorous re-design process. I went looking for a premium WordPress theme, found Minimal and decided to give it a try. I’ve made some modifications (I always enjoy hacking around in WordPress), but they haven’t been drastic. I do believe it’s important to have great design for your blog. In 2008 after redesigning Instigator Blog I wrote a guest post on ProBlogger about the experience. Design matters. But there are so many good premium themes out there that you don’t necessarily have to start from scratch.

I’ll be tweaking here and there for the next little while. I’m not entirely satisfied with everything on the site, but I’m very pleased with the overall look. It speaks very well to how I feel right now and to my near-term goals. I’m trying to simplify, clean up, discover, free myself and focus. Instigator Blog has always been a reflection of me; and I welcome you to its new look & feel.

All comments and feedback are welcome!

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Ben Yoskovitz
I'm VP Product at GoInstant.

I'm also a Founding Partner at Year One Labs, an early stage accelerator in Montreal. Previously I founded Standout Jobs (and sold it).

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Instigator Blog runs WordPress and uses the Minimal theme by Curt Ziegler.