Several months ago, I happened upon Occam’s Razor, the acclaimed blog of Google’s Digital Marketing Evangelist, Avinash Kaushik. He is a well known practitioner in the Digital Marketing and Analytics space, and his posts are collections of actionable and practical advice for both beginners and experts in the trade.
His posts are received well by his audience, who are all too happy to engage at length in further discussion and knowledge sharing in the comments section of each post. The blog looks rather unsophisticated, but it seems to serve Avinash’s purpose. (Even John Gruber’s Daring Fireball and Kevin Kelly’s personal blog look like they have been designed by a 10-year-old. But design does not seem to have affected the popularity of these much visited corners of the internet.)
He attributes much of his blogging success to Guy Kawasaki’s advice. One such piece of advice he says he followed closely is the following:
Think “book” not “diary.”I have come to believe that this is probably the best way to be successful in blogosphere.
Oddly enough, among all the thought-provoking posts on Avinash’s blog, this simple sentence in his About section was the one thing that made me think.
Here’s the original quote from Guy, from his post The 120 Day Wonder: How to Evangelize a Blog.
Think “book” not “diary.” First, a bit of philosophy: my suggestion is that you think of your blog as a “product.” A good analogy is the difference between a diary and a book. When you write a diary, it contains your spontaneous thoughts and feelings. You have no plans for others to read it. By contrast, if you write a book, from day one you should be thinking about spreading the word about it. If you want to evangelize your blog, then think “book” not “diary” and market the heck out of it.
I immediately had a look at my own blog, of which this post is a part. I saw neither a book nor a diary.
There are surely some elements of a diary in it. This post, for example, is about an experience I had. Here I am documenting that experience, in great (and sometimes unnecessary) detail, not really caring whether anyone would spend any time reading about the uninteresting happenings of my uneventful life. My posts about starting up my business fall into the same category. I think of these as entries in a journal.
And then there are elements of a book, too. For instance, some of the more pseudo-profound pieces I’ve written about Determinism, Meritocracy, and Spirituality were surely the products of me wanting to get more eyeballs. These were instances of me trying to “sell my book.”
I’ve written earlier about how blogging is purely an exercise in self-satisfaction for me. It is also the only medium in which I can do a decent job saying what I have to say. In other words, I’m not particularly good at it, but good enough to convince myself to write regularly about things that intrigue me. This is why I write every day, even though I don’t publish frequently.
So I’ve decided to ignore Guy’s advice altogether, and keep at this book-diary combo for as long as I can. If you made it this far, and happen to have an opinion on this book-diary debate, let me know.
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