Before we begin, please visit www.instantsupercar.com to view and understand my application.
For the past 4 years or so, I’ve dabbled with various software ventures through my start-up. However, none of them really has anything to do with my personal interests, but are initiatives designed to meet market needs. Then late last year, when we began to scope out our first iPhone Application: Instant Supercar, it made me realize how much “passion” matters in the process of creating, and marketing a product.
Jim Koch, founder of Sam Adams beer, famously said in his commercials that when you do something you love, you never feel that you’re “working”. Combine the passion for your product with a sense of ownership knowing that this is coming from your company, and the process can actually be described as blissful.
The idea all started when a colleague picked up an Audi S5, which got the whole office buzzing about the V8 engine. Suddenly we said, hey, what if we made an app that adds a V8 soundtrack to any mode of transportation? A quick search made sure there “isn’t an app for that”, then work begun.
As a joint development effort by a bunch of petro-heads, we divided the job duties. My role as the Audio Guy was to beg people let me borrow their exotic cars, which is challenging, but not impossible to do around NYC. Then came 7 hours spent in Guitar Center, a crash course in audio recording techniques and technologies. Countless hours were spent researching and discussing how best to record an audio track for playback.
Meanwhile, in our coding workshop, brilliant code was being written to tie the iPhone accelerometer output with my recorded sound bites. The results not only exceeded my expectations, but the process was priceless.
For promotion, we recorded our own infomercial, and had videos of Instant Supercar in action on the subway. Then we fired the video, along with a promotional iTunes code to all the auto sites we know. We were already frequent readers of these blogs, so everything felt extremely natural. We all know that once news hits one auto site, it tends to spread among the blogs like wildfire.
Now we sit back and see whether we get any feedback from these writers. In the meantime, I think it’s time to start App #2.
Growing up I often watched in wonderment as my mother, a Chinese journalist writing for a newspaper in Taiwan, filled in pages and pages of brackets with her Chinese articles. These specialized paper were pre-printed with light green brackets, and standard issue among her colleagues. Designed so that words can be counted quickly, and given to those blessed with the unique talent of using a computer, where it would be fed into the printing press for tomorrow’s story. Her job, she often described as “crawling brackets”. Each box had a monetary value, so you write with dual purpose. Fancy, wordy sentences were rewarded.
the dreaded grid paper
Later in her career she was forced to learn computer input methods in Chinese, no easy task for someone in their 40s. Many of her peers couldn’t adapt and retired. A half dozen books later, she still calls what she does “crawling brackets”, and the word count feature in text editors is her new best friend.
In her effort to keep up with the times, something my family’s extremely proud to see, she has adapted her popular New York food column to a popular blog. In a recent book launch party, she mentioned to the crowd that despite the shift to electronic media in the digital age, one thing she remains thankful for, is how her column still gives her the opportunity to “crawl brackets”.
As a SEO obsessed blogger, I’ve never used the word count feature since my days of paper writing on campus. Blogging was suppose to liberate the creative minds from the limited print real estate, however it also completely disrupted the incentive system that for years churned out some of the best literary works.
For a traditional writer, the paper acted as the middleman between the literary pieces, and the commercial aspect of advertising. The paper found you advertisers, and your role as a writer is to write pieces that’d attract eyeballs to that particular section. Writing better, for the most part, doesn’t impact your income. Controversial pieces might cause a stir, but again, will not light up your pocket books.
Bloggers on the other hand, are responsible for tying the words to the dollars. Without the security blanket of a “sales” team hunting down potential advertisers, most resort to ad networks that pay on a CPM system. So your role is to not to create long articles that fill up the word counter, but rather how to attract the most eyeballs. Remember, each 1000 eyeballs trigger that magical CPM, M as in thousand.
a thousand of these, or rather 500 right eyes, gets you your $CPM.
My mother often said most literary folks choose their career for stability and laid back lifestyle. Life is just the pen (or the keyboard), a topic, and a paycheck. What perhaps she’s trying to say, is that writers are not what most would describe as “business people”. That’s why you many of the greatest writers with financial success hire agents.
Blogging forces the writer to up his or her business sense, creating a group of SEO obsessed writers that would do anything for people to visit their site. I’m one of them. (if you’re reading this, thank you)
Is this beneficial for the future of writing? I am worried. Perhaps when the iPad revolutionizes the book business, the balance between literary creations and monetary incentives will be shaken up once again. Until then, I’m hoping bloggers take a step back, write with passion, not for metrics. We should write for the achievement of words, not the advancement of search optimization.
CS
The fact I’m blogging this entry is quite ironic, but I’m going relatively SEO light with this entry.
Between my day job, start-up, and hobby, I operate 6 blogs. The purpose of these blogs are not necessarily revenue drivers, but are just a space to express and share my experience, and to point them at things that I find interesting. With that said, as any writer knows, it feels great to get readership. With free technologies such as Google Analytics and the excellent built-in analytic of WordPress, it’s literally feels like it’s feeding the addiction of writers of their desire for attention.
What happens when you give an addict too much of the good stuff, for free? Yep, they burn out. If your objective of blogging is for the purpose of generating more traffic, then the insight offered by these analytic programs will sometimes lead you down the wrong path. If you have a good understanding of SEO, you start to blog for keywords, blog for searches, blog for back-links. An unhealthy cycle that not only burns out the writer, but also leads to more worthless content on the internet. I have to admit some of my earlier entries were fueled by this desire for readers, and it usually backfires.
To make sure that your blog stays on point, and remains useful and relevant, I have devised the following “system”. This draws from not only my experience as a technology person, but also as a writer in traditional print media.
- Set a publishing schedule. The nature of writing and publishing of any kind is that your readership will spike (relatively) when you publish a new entry, and gradually decline from there. That usually fuels the desire to post more content, more often. However even the best bloggers only have so many ideas, and some ideas are really more suitable for the 140 character world of Twitter, not an entire entry. So depending on your workload, set a publishing schedule! For me, it’s once a week across my 6 blogs.
- Use drafts to stick by your plans. It’s one thing to set a schedule, it’s harder to stick by it. I grew up watching my mother writing newspaper columns, so I understand the importance of pacing yourself. This not only keeps the ideas fresh, it also prevents burnout. Now I understand sometimes an idea comes to mind and you really want to get it written, that’s when you use the draft feature. Save it, and polish/publish around your regularly scheduled publish time. Otherwise you exhaust your ideas too early, and can get frustrated when you don’t publish for 2 weeks and see traffic dip.
- Keep it a good length. Just getting traffic and eyeballs doesn’t mean anything if the people are not reading your entries, agreeing with your ideas. A higher line chart with an equally high bounce rate doesn’t help anyone. So write clean, concise articles that are helpful. If your idea keeps flowing, write a part 2. When you do write it, make sure to come back to part one and add a link.
- Write for humans, optimize for bots. NOT the other way around! I often tell people, once you learn SEO, you NEVER code the same. Once you learn how Google functions, it’s extremely tempting to title your posts with keywords, fill your article with keywords, add a ton of links, etc. This will only results in a high bounce rate as your entries will look like gibberish to humans. It’s critical to find the right balance between proper human reading and “spider food”.
- Keeping things organized. Lets face it, we’ve all setup WordPress too many times that even the super quick and easy install is getting a bit tedious. It’s tempting to leave the system in place once it’s setup, and only use the “post” feature. However as a blog evolves, sometimes you’ll notice categories are no longer relevant, or that your Social Media plug-in is somewhat out dated. Make sure that you refresh your blog often, and ALWAYS backup before you make critical changes.
I think this entry is ready for publishing. 
