Latest posts from Danny Brown

Enjoy the latest posts from Danny Brown, and feel free to add your own thoughts in the comments after the post.

Why You Don’t Need to Blog Daily

Keep up and blog on There’s a bit of a debate as to how often you should blog if you want to have a successful blog and grow the community around it.

Some folks will say you need to blog every day, or every other day.

Others will say once a week.

Others will say only blog when you have something useful to say (I’m not too sold on the last one – one person’s definition of useful is another’s definition of crap).

To be honest, there’s no right or wrong answer. Or at least, no standard right or wrong answer.

There is a right answer for you, however, and that’s the one you need to look at.

Questions and Answers

Blogging’s a funny beast. It can be personal; it can be corporate. It can be funny; it can be sad. It can be a sales tool; it can be a simple connection tool. It can be written; it can be media.

Simply put, blogging is in a world of its own when it comes to set parameters. You can’t say what works for one blogger will work for another; it just doesn’t roll that way.

What it does do, however, is make it easy to choose how often you’ll blog by asking two must-know questions before you start.

Are you passionate about the topic?
What time can you realistically allocate?

These are just two questions, but they offer the best idea for you as to how often you’ll blog. If you’re not passionate about your topic, blogging will soon become a chore, and once something becomes a chore… Well, we all hate chores, right?

If you can only allocate a few hours a week (and this includes promoting your blog and responding to comments on the post), then you’re probably only going to post once or twice a week. An hour a day would see you post daily; a couple of hours a month, you’d probably only be able to blog bi-weekly. (These are just rough stats – they don’t necessarily relate to your timescales).

So these questions kind of dictate how often you might blog.

It’s Not Worth It Then, Is It?

Now, depending on who you read and who you listen to, if you’re posting infrequently then you’re never going to grow your blog or get the readers/subscribers you’re after. Out of sight, out of mind, right?

Not necessarily.

I blog pretty much every day. I don’t do it just to “get more readers” – I’ve never had a subscription run here and I don’t plan on having one, ever. I’d rather grow my readership and subscribers organically as opposed to giving faux reasons why you should subscribe.

Instead, I blog as frequently because I genuinely love blogging. I love the interaction with you; I love being able to bounce ideas off each other; I love being able to offer an alternative take on something and then invite you to offer yours.

My friend John Haydon blogs a little less frequently, but still pretty regularly. Chris Garrett, co-author of the ProBlogger book and owner of the popular new media site ChrisG.com, has been posting fairly irregularly over the last few months.

Now. Take a look at this chart from Compete.com, which shows the monthly traffic for all three sites over the last 12 months.

As you can see, while there have been dips and gains, Chris has the most traffic, while John and I have swapped it back and forth as to where the higher traffic has been on a given month.

The blog that posts less is more “popular” than ones that post either daily, or more frequently. Kind of blows the whole “post every day” argument out the water.

So.

Listen to you, and write for you. Everything else is a bonus – readers, commenters, community, subscribers. Get what feels right for you, and that comfort will come across in your blog.

And that’s when it starts being fun. And when others see it’s fun? Well, there might just be no stopping you then…

photo credit: markhillary

What Posterous Could Learn from Gravity Forms About Service

Customers and employees are your two most important ingredients in a successful business. Without one, you can’t have the other.

Customer service is an especially hot topic for me, as I’ve worked in improving how service is measured and improved at a few companies, where previously it was maybe in third or fourth place when it came to that company’s priorities.

Your employees are your best customers, and your customers are your best employees. They’ll defend you; market for you; endorse you; and be your voice where you might not currently have a presence.

If you look after them. Something blogging platform Posterous could improve on.

A Week is a Long Time in Business

Almost two weeks ago, I decided to stop posting short-form blog posts over at Posterous, and move all my blogging back to my blog right here. While I had enjoyed experimenting with Posterous, this is my homebase. And I wasn’t keen on a third-party “owning” my content.

So, I wrote a post about why I was leaving Posterous and made the decision that I’d delete my account there within a few days, to allow anyone to come and subscribe here if they wished.

And that’s where the fun begins.

I tried deleting my account, and kept getting an error message. No worries, the message mentioned Posterous had been emailed about it, and it’d be resolved soon. Except it wasn’t.

For a week, I tried to delete my account – I even made it my secondary one since I was informed that primary accounts at Posterous need you to contact support to delete the account for you.

Still no joy. Frustrated, I reached out to Posterous via their Twitter account. No reply there, so over to contacting their helpdesk.

In all fairness, their representative Vince got back to me seven hours later. Yet it wasn’t to delete the site right away – that would only happen if I confirmed that this was what I wanted to do (click to enlarge).

So, I mention that yes, I do want to delete my account and I pointed Vince to my post on their platform as to the reasons why.

This was on Thursday, August 12, and as of writing, my Posterous account is still live.

Customers Hate Obstacles

So now I’m pretty frustrated with Posterous. I no longer want to use their service, but I’m still “using it” if you visit my account there. And the company isn’t making it easy for me to stop using their service.

It’s like me signing you up to my newsletter, and then making you jump through a bunch of hoops to unsubscribe, in the hope you might give up and stay with me for convenience’s sake.

And it’s a shame. I’ve written before how Posterous offers an easy way in for folks to experiment with blogging, and I’ve pointed clients their way in the past that wanted to see if blogging is for them. But not now – my experience with Posterous has been soured by something that should be pretty straightforward.

As customers, we can be a complaining bunch, but at times the complaining could be easily avoided just by taking away the obstacles companies put us through. Some get that spot on.

The Gravity Forms Experience

I started using Gravity Forms recently for my contact forms. I’d heard good things about them and I wanted to check them out, so I bought the single user license. I loved how they worked, so I wanted to upgrade to the multi-site license instead.

I used their contact form to ask how easy this was, and what the steps would be. Within 10 minutes, Carl Hancock had an emailed answer and easy-to-follow steps on how to upgrade. Within 30 minutes, I had a coupon code to use that would deduct my original purchase from the multi-site one.

But what really stood out for me is that this all happened late at night. I contacted Gravity Forms at 11.28pm, and by 11.58pm I had my coupon code and purchase instructions.

Thirty minutes.

That level of service turns me from a simple customer to a brand advocate. If anyone asks me about forms for blogging, I point them in the direction of Gravity Forms. Every time.

Simple Sells

It may be that Posterous has a larger userbase than Gravity Forms. It may be that their platform needs more technical nous than Gravity Forms. It may be that there’s a certain timescale before something can get done.

But to customers, that doesn’t always matter. All we want is a simple product, and one that we can stop using at any time if we choose to do so. Making us go through hoops just ensures we won’t return to your product in future, and will probably use your competitors instead.

You could say that Posterous is a free product, and so the support doesn’t need to be as good as that of a premium product. But let’s say at some stage they’re looking to make it a paid service – how they look after you now defines how you’ll perceive paying for their service.

Marketing might sell a product, but service is the gold that repeat sales come from.

Compare the Posterous and the Gravity Forms approach – which one would you be a loyal customer of?

Update – my account has been deleted after Rich Pearson of Posterous kindly stepped in and explained the delay.

Evolution of the iPod

Next year, Apple’s iPod will celebrate its tenth anniversary.

Say what you want about Steve Jobs, the guy knows how to create an icon. Before iPod, we were all supposedly happy with our Sony Walkman’s (or Discman’s, if you were posh).

Who would have thought that a computer manufacturer would turn all that on its head and change the way we buy and listen to music forever?

In an early celebration of the iPod’s tenth anniversary, here’s a look back at the evolution of this pop culture icon, as well as some of the big stories of the time (make sure to switch to 480p mode to view it).

Hope you enjoy, and what’s been your favourite iPod so far?

If you’re reading this post via RSS or by email subscription, you can watch the video here.