Is frugality always worth it? Is it always worth it to trade your time to save money?
And at what point does frugality simply become not worth it?
One of the interesting ironies of frugality is if you get really good at it, you get to a point where you don't have to do it any more. You'll have plenty of money left over because you're using that money as efficiently as possible.
Which then leaves you with a new decision layer: what types of frugality are worth it relative to the tradeoffs in time required?
Grocery shopping gives us an excellent example of this decision layer: A competent frugalista will reduce his or her grocery bill to a point where it takes up a smaller and smaller portion of the household budget. Then, all of a sudden, it stops being worth it to invest an extra 25 minutes driving to another grocery store to buy a couple of cheaper items there. The few bucks you save stops being worth it.
Now, granted, some frugality skills become automatic and thus require no effort. Like buying lower cost unbranded or store brand items. After all, the less expensive product is right there, buying it requires no extra effort. Further, some frugality techniques may remain worthwhile because they offer sustained payoffs. Examples here would be a one-time phone call every few years to renegotiate a cellphone or cable bill, or a quick call to tweak coverage on an insurance bill. That phone call could save you hundreds of dollars a year for years.
And then there are big-ticket frugality decisions that always stay worth it. Replacing a high fee mutual fund with a near-zero fee index fund is a prime example here. This single decision can save you tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of an investing career, and the savings differential grows as your assets grow.
In our home we are grappling with this new decision layer too, and I finding I'm retaining the frugality habits I do automatically and habitually, the ones that come naturally to me and don't require any thinking or extra cognitive energy. And then I try to maintain any frugality habit that saves me both money and time, so I can entirely sidestep the money/time tradeoff above. And this often involves avoiding shopping and avoiding buying things entirely, and re-allocating that time to things I'd much rather do. It's another one of frugality's rich ironies.
One last thought. What happens to readers who "get" the value of frugality, learn and then master it… and then master it so well that they don't really need to be frugal any more?
They stop reading blog posts about frugality! It's an interesting second-order question for frugality and budget bloggers to think about.
**************************
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Showing posts with label blogging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blogging. Show all posts
Why Bad Blogs Get More Readers (An Accidental, Secret Recipe for Massive Web Traffic)
I've often said that it bugs me to see a good blog go unread. It's one reason why I run Friday Links posts: it's my own small effort to put good stuff I find in front of more readers.
But today I want to ask the exact opposite question: why do certain really bad blogs get so much traffic?
An obvious example is The Food Babe, a site with an intriguing (and unintentional) recipe for wide readership. Deep down, we're all vaguely suspicious of modernity, technology and scary-sounding long words. If you play off these fears, worried readers come running to your site. Add in a conspiracy theory here and there for good measure, and things you write start to sound rhetorically persuasive.
Notice I said rhetorically persuasive, not scientifically persuasive. Or logically persuasive. But this is the key to the secret recipe! If you write something scientifically or logically laughable but rhetorically persuasive, you quickly generate a second-order readership. A second crew of readers, readers more competent in logic and basic scientific principles, will point out the scientific and logical flaws in your argument. Often with dripping condescension.
Then, the original readers, the credulous ones, argue back. After all, nobody likes being condescended to.
So, if there's such a thing as a typical Food Babe reader, it would break down into two general types:
1) Credulous first-order readers looking for new things to fear.
2) Second-order readers astounded at how dumb other people are.
So here's your business model: write posts for the first group, but make those posts unrigorous enough to attract the second group too. If you follow this secret recipe correctly, you get viral posts, exploding traffic stats, and some really entertaining comment wars.
This might be the only profitable business model in blogging--perhaps in all of online media. And it certainly helps explain the ubiquitous outrage porn, worry porn and political handwringing porn suffusing our overall cognitive environment these days.
And since fear-mongering and conspiracy-mongering are particularly effective forms of rhetoric, The Food Babe really cleaned up for a while there. That is, until her scientific incompetence became a little too obvious. When it got out that she wrote (but later deleted without comment or explanation) a post on the radiation risks of microwave ovens (it contained quotes like this one: "when you stand in front of a radar device you will start perspiring/cooking from the inside out, just like food is cooked in the microwave oven."), her already-tenuous credibility met its end. Fortunately for us, the internet never forgets. Eventually, goofily unscientific people get found out and exposed, even if they do try to scrub their sites of the most scientifically hilarious things they've said.
But! Some bloggers use these embarrassing things about themselves to grow their traffic even more. One of Tim Ferriss's best business insights back in the early days of SEO was to make sure he captured pageview traffic from the keywords "Tim Ferriss Scam."
So, he wrote a post titled, naturally, "Tim Ferriss Scam!" Interestingly, it doesn't rank as highly as it used to, illustrating yet another challenge of blogging: the ceaseless competition for traffic, everywhere, all the time, for any and all keywords.
Ironically, Ferriss' Tim Ferriss Scam! post actually contains some excellent ideas (the quotes from Scott Boras and Epictetus for example), and it's a smart post from the standpoint of using a writer's time, since it mostly contains meta-content, content reused and retreaded from other posts and sources. Talk about turning your detractors to your advantage.
By the way, Ferriss has had a few Food Babe moments of his own. Readers here at CK will remember my extended criticism of the flaws in his book The Four Hour Chef, for example. Or his uproariously implausible post: From Geek to Freak: How I Gained 34 lbs. of Muscle in 4 Weeks.[1]
Much like a typical Food Babe post, From Geek to Freak is an (unintended?) masterpiece of meta-conversation. With its waxed and spray-tanned before-and-after photos and its 1,300 (and growing) comments arguing over whether it's possible or impossible to gain 34 pounds of muscle in a month, it all becomes a twisted game.
His game, that is. We're the suckers, expending our attention and our finite cognitive resources. We argue for him even when we argue against him. Savvy readers ought to be able to see a parallel--a direct parallel--that's been playing out over the past several months in our political media.
The Koontz Principle of Online Incompetence
Let's get back to the [Your name here] Scam post writing technique for a moment. Vani the Food Babe did one of these posts too, writing her own "Food Babe: Scam" post, and it's a veritable tour de force in unaware rhetoric [2] that drives home an interesting, if depressing point: the internet rewards incompetence. Write something incompetent, and people will read it, get mad, comment, and link back to you. Then, incompetent people read those comments, get mad, comment more, and link back to you. Competent people respond, comment more, write about you, link back to you, your search engine ranking goes higher and higher, and so on. Rinse, repeat... and sell ads!
If we carry this to its ultimate logical conclusion, we arrive at a useful general principle. Let's call it The Koontz Principle of Online Incompetence: The most divisive and incompetent content tends to rise to the top of all search rankings. Think of it as an informational equivalent of The Peter Principle.[3]
So, in a way, maybe it's not a bad thing that sites like The Food Babe no longer attract the attention and profits they used to, and likewise, maybe it's a good sign that our biggest media institutions--as they play the same twisted game with far greater resources--are losing readers and money too.
Footnotes:
[1] Glass houses disclaimer: I've written plenty of posts that are bad, stupid, boring, unrigorous, wrong, etc., and I've also generated arguments between readers arguing for (and sometimes even against!) my incompetence. I try to do the best I can here at CK, but believe me, I come up short plenty of times too.
[2] Techniques include but are not limited to: using mean tweets against her (this is the so-called "tone fallacy": arguing that if you're not nice, your criticism is therefore disqualified); claiming "it's not about me" in a post self-evidently 100% about her, and using rhetorically powerful (but logically vacuous) phrases like "obviously, some powerful entities in the chemical and food industries have a financial incentive to try to discredit me" and "The bottom line is that many of these people who use this argument to discredit me, don't want the truth, regarding our food supply, coming out." One could easily write a satire using statements like these. Hey, wait: somebody already did!
[3] The Peter Principle states that every employee gets promoted up through an organization until he reaches a level where he's incompetent. Anyone working at any large corporation has seen this principle at work, and it is why, in the longer run, large organizations often tend toward generalized incompetence.
READ NEXT: Did Newark Mayor Cory Booker Really *Try* With His Food Stamp Challenge?
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com
via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
But today I want to ask the exact opposite question: why do certain really bad blogs get so much traffic?
An obvious example is The Food Babe, a site with an intriguing (and unintentional) recipe for wide readership. Deep down, we're all vaguely suspicious of modernity, technology and scary-sounding long words. If you play off these fears, worried readers come running to your site. Add in a conspiracy theory here and there for good measure, and things you write start to sound rhetorically persuasive.
Notice I said rhetorically persuasive, not scientifically persuasive. Or logically persuasive. But this is the key to the secret recipe! If you write something scientifically or logically laughable but rhetorically persuasive, you quickly generate a second-order readership. A second crew of readers, readers more competent in logic and basic scientific principles, will point out the scientific and logical flaws in your argument. Often with dripping condescension.
Then, the original readers, the credulous ones, argue back. After all, nobody likes being condescended to.
So, if there's such a thing as a typical Food Babe reader, it would break down into two general types:
1) Credulous first-order readers looking for new things to fear.
2) Second-order readers astounded at how dumb other people are.
So here's your business model: write posts for the first group, but make those posts unrigorous enough to attract the second group too. If you follow this secret recipe correctly, you get viral posts, exploding traffic stats, and some really entertaining comment wars.
This might be the only profitable business model in blogging--perhaps in all of online media. And it certainly helps explain the ubiquitous outrage porn, worry porn and political handwringing porn suffusing our overall cognitive environment these days.
And since fear-mongering and conspiracy-mongering are particularly effective forms of rhetoric, The Food Babe really cleaned up for a while there. That is, until her scientific incompetence became a little too obvious. When it got out that she wrote (but later deleted without comment or explanation) a post on the radiation risks of microwave ovens (it contained quotes like this one: "when you stand in front of a radar device you will start perspiring/cooking from the inside out, just like food is cooked in the microwave oven."), her already-tenuous credibility met its end. Fortunately for us, the internet never forgets. Eventually, goofily unscientific people get found out and exposed, even if they do try to scrub their sites of the most scientifically hilarious things they've said.
But! Some bloggers use these embarrassing things about themselves to grow their traffic even more. One of Tim Ferriss's best business insights back in the early days of SEO was to make sure he captured pageview traffic from the keywords "Tim Ferriss Scam."
So, he wrote a post titled, naturally, "Tim Ferriss Scam!" Interestingly, it doesn't rank as highly as it used to, illustrating yet another challenge of blogging: the ceaseless competition for traffic, everywhere, all the time, for any and all keywords.
Ironically, Ferriss' Tim Ferriss Scam! post actually contains some excellent ideas (the quotes from Scott Boras and Epictetus for example), and it's a smart post from the standpoint of using a writer's time, since it mostly contains meta-content, content reused and retreaded from other posts and sources. Talk about turning your detractors to your advantage.
By the way, Ferriss has had a few Food Babe moments of his own. Readers here at CK will remember my extended criticism of the flaws in his book The Four Hour Chef, for example. Or his uproariously implausible post: From Geek to Freak: How I Gained 34 lbs. of Muscle in 4 Weeks.[1]
Much like a typical Food Babe post, From Geek to Freak is an (unintended?) masterpiece of meta-conversation. With its waxed and spray-tanned before-and-after photos and its 1,300 (and growing) comments arguing over whether it's possible or impossible to gain 34 pounds of muscle in a month, it all becomes a twisted game.
His game, that is. We're the suckers, expending our attention and our finite cognitive resources. We argue for him even when we argue against him. Savvy readers ought to be able to see a parallel--a direct parallel--that's been playing out over the past several months in our political media.
The Koontz Principle of Online Incompetence
Let's get back to the [Your name here] Scam post writing technique for a moment. Vani the Food Babe did one of these posts too, writing her own "Food Babe: Scam" post, and it's a veritable tour de force in unaware rhetoric [2] that drives home an interesting, if depressing point: the internet rewards incompetence. Write something incompetent, and people will read it, get mad, comment, and link back to you. Then, incompetent people read those comments, get mad, comment more, and link back to you. Competent people respond, comment more, write about you, link back to you, your search engine ranking goes higher and higher, and so on. Rinse, repeat... and sell ads!
If we carry this to its ultimate logical conclusion, we arrive at a useful general principle. Let's call it The Koontz Principle of Online Incompetence: The most divisive and incompetent content tends to rise to the top of all search rankings. Think of it as an informational equivalent of The Peter Principle.[3]
So, in a way, maybe it's not a bad thing that sites like The Food Babe no longer attract the attention and profits they used to, and likewise, maybe it's a good sign that our biggest media institutions--as they play the same twisted game with far greater resources--are losing readers and money too.
Footnotes:
[1] Glass houses disclaimer: I've written plenty of posts that are bad, stupid, boring, unrigorous, wrong, etc., and I've also generated arguments between readers arguing for (and sometimes even against!) my incompetence. I try to do the best I can here at CK, but believe me, I come up short plenty of times too.
[2] Techniques include but are not limited to: using mean tweets against her (this is the so-called "tone fallacy": arguing that if you're not nice, your criticism is therefore disqualified); claiming "it's not about me" in a post self-evidently 100% about her, and using rhetorically powerful (but logically vacuous) phrases like "obviously, some powerful entities in the chemical and food industries have a financial incentive to try to discredit me" and "The bottom line is that many of these people who use this argument to discredit me, don't want the truth, regarding our food supply, coming out." One could easily write a satire using statements like these. Hey, wait: somebody already did!
[3] The Peter Principle states that every employee gets promoted up through an organization until he reaches a level where he's incompetent. Anyone working at any large corporation has seen this principle at work, and it is why, in the longer run, large organizations often tend toward generalized incompetence.
READ NEXT: Did Newark Mayor Cory Booker Really *Try* With His Food Stamp Challenge?
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com
via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
The Collapsing Economics of Food Blogging
There was an old joke in the internet's early middle ages, back when "Web 2.0" used to be a new phrase:
Web 2.0: You make the content, they make the money.
Food bloggers are learning this for real right now. All bloggers are.
Spend a few minutes on the Get Off My Internets site and you'll see dozens of food and lifestyle bloggers of all stripes launching GoFundMe and Kickstarter campaigns, as the standard blogging income mechanisms of advertising, Amazon links and sponsored posts produce less (and less consistent) income. One particularly high-profile example: Gluten Free Girl, at one point one of the most widely read food bloggers out there[1], just took a part time job to supplement her income.
Yes. It's true.
Breathe.
Bloggers simply aren't making the kind of money they used to. And nowhere is this more true than in food blogging. The question is: why?
Here's why. There are zero--absolutely zero--barriers to entry. Literally anybody can start a blog. And for a while there it seemed like everybody did.
Don't get me wrong, the fact that anybody can start a blog is one of the best things about blogging. It just also happens to be the worst thing about the business of blogging.
And as circular as it sounds, when a profitable marketplace is easy to enter, people enter it. And then more people enter it, and then more, and then more... until the economics are destroyed by too many people having entered it and competed away all the profits.[2] We are well past this point in food blogging.
Worse, most of us (and this includes me) don't really treat what we're doing like a business, making a bad competitive environment even worse. My income from Casual Kitchen these days is perhaps one-tenth (a tenth!) of what it was at peak, which was back in 2010-2011. Admittedly, I am vastly undermonetizing this site, and over time I've eliminated quite a lot of the advertising and other monetization programs I used to use in the past. Maybe this is a mistake and maybe I'm needlessly leaving money on the table, I don't know.
It's a strange business, this blogging. In theory, content over the internet scales nearly perfectly. It costs me nothing, literally zero, to add an incremental reader, or for that matter to add ten times or one hundred times the readers I have. And more readers mean (theoretically at least) more income. So the business "should work" as long as there's low or non-existent competition for those incremental readers. And, likewise, low or non-existent competition for advertisers, sponsors and keyword buyers who will pay for access to those readers. Like I said above, we are well past this point today.
The lack of barriers to entry is the key. I don't mean to be negative or to bring anybody down. But these worsening economics of food blogging? They are here to stay.
Footnotes:
[1] In an upcoming post I'll talk more about how bloggers like Gluten Free Girl and Vani The Food Babe managed to garner enormous pageview stats in spite of (or better said, because of) things like recipe errors, bad writing, and horrendously unrigorous thinking.
[2] This is foundational insight for investors too. You want to avoid investing in companies with low or no barriers to entry, and focus on investing in companies with high barriers to entry. Warren Buffett uses the phrase “moats” to describe this: he tells anyone who will listen to seek out companies with wide moats around their businesses.
Web 2.0: You make the content, they make the money.
Food bloggers are learning this for real right now. All bloggers are.
Spend a few minutes on the Get Off My Internets site and you'll see dozens of food and lifestyle bloggers of all stripes launching GoFundMe and Kickstarter campaigns, as the standard blogging income mechanisms of advertising, Amazon links and sponsored posts produce less (and less consistent) income. One particularly high-profile example: Gluten Free Girl, at one point one of the most widely read food bloggers out there[1], just took a part time job to supplement her income.
Yes. It's true.
Breathe.
Bloggers simply aren't making the kind of money they used to. And nowhere is this more true than in food blogging. The question is: why?
Here's why. There are zero--absolutely zero--barriers to entry. Literally anybody can start a blog. And for a while there it seemed like everybody did.
Don't get me wrong, the fact that anybody can start a blog is one of the best things about blogging. It just also happens to be the worst thing about the business of blogging.
And as circular as it sounds, when a profitable marketplace is easy to enter, people enter it. And then more people enter it, and then more, and then more... until the economics are destroyed by too many people having entered it and competed away all the profits.[2] We are well past this point in food blogging.
Worse, most of us (and this includes me) don't really treat what we're doing like a business, making a bad competitive environment even worse. My income from Casual Kitchen these days is perhaps one-tenth (a tenth!) of what it was at peak, which was back in 2010-2011. Admittedly, I am vastly undermonetizing this site, and over time I've eliminated quite a lot of the advertising and other monetization programs I used to use in the past. Maybe this is a mistake and maybe I'm needlessly leaving money on the table, I don't know.
It's a strange business, this blogging. In theory, content over the internet scales nearly perfectly. It costs me nothing, literally zero, to add an incremental reader, or for that matter to add ten times or one hundred times the readers I have. And more readers mean (theoretically at least) more income. So the business "should work" as long as there's low or non-existent competition for those incremental readers. And, likewise, low or non-existent competition for advertisers, sponsors and keyword buyers who will pay for access to those readers. Like I said above, we are well past this point today.
The lack of barriers to entry is the key. I don't mean to be negative or to bring anybody down. But these worsening economics of food blogging? They are here to stay.
Footnotes:
[1] In an upcoming post I'll talk more about how bloggers like Gluten Free Girl and Vani The Food Babe managed to garner enormous pageview stats in spite of (or better said, because of) things like recipe errors, bad writing, and horrendously unrigorous thinking.
[2] This is foundational insight for investors too. You want to avoid investing in companies with low or no barriers to entry, and focus on investing in companies with high barriers to entry. Warren Buffett uses the phrase “moats” to describe this: he tells anyone who will listen to seek out companies with wide moats around their businesses.
On Trusting Food Bloggers, Cookbook Authors and Their Recipes
How do you know if you can trust a recipe from a food blogger, a chef, or a cookbook author? Why do we trust some recipe authors more than others? And why do we not trust certain recipe authors at all?
We're inundated by food blogs, food websites and recipe aggregation sites these days. There are so many cookbooks out there, and more coming out every year, that it's almost funny. And they all seem to have some kind of marketing angle, food niche or some celebrity chef behind them in order to stand out from the pack.
And there's nothing more frustrating than trying a new recipe and having taste bad. It can take the fun out of cooking for weeks. No, months!
New cooks--those who haven't yet developed an eye for discerning good recipes from bad ones--are like lambs led to slaughter in this world.
But yet there are certain cooks and chefs I instinctively trust: writers and cookbook authors like Mollie Katzen,
Paul Prudhomme
and Jay Solomon,
for example. Among food bloggers, I instinctively trust recipes from people like Dave at Food and Fire, Melissa at Alosha's Kitchen, Jules at Stonesoup, and Mike at Dad Cooks Dinner, just to name a few.
And then there are the cooks and food bloggers I instinctively don't trust: like Martha Stewart, or Shauna Ahern. Martha Stewart has a reputation for complex, often difficult, recipes. Shauna Ahern has an unfortunate reputation for publishing sloppy, error-ridden recipes.
I think it comes down to consistency. As circular as it may sound: if you're reliable, people will rely on you. They'll see you as a generally sound source of good recipes. This is what I'd like to have for my reputation here at Casual Kitchen. People know what they're predominantly going to get here: easy, healthy and laughably inexpensive recipes. Sure, not all readers will like all of my recipes, but the majority of readers should like the majority of my recipes... or else I'm doing it wrong.
I'd also add that the standards differ between regular bloggers and professionalized websites or cookbooks or magazines. Recipes from professionalized sites have test kitchens, editors, copy editors and fact-checkers: in other words, they have a staff of people who exist to check things over. This isn't to say that you'll never find a mistake in a professionalized publication, but the vast majority of mistakes will get caught and fixed.
Therefore, the professionalized realm is, and should be, less forgiving: If you publish a bad or error-ridden recipe on a professionalized media site, your reputation can suffer permanent harm.
I think this is why, for example, a widely-read food blogger like Shauna Ahern can catch heavy flack after publishing error-ridden recipes on professionalized food sites. Ahern's infamous "Potato-Mushroom Tart" on Martha Stewart's website is an object example: not only did it leave out "potatoes" in the ingredient list (an error several commenters quickly caught), but the savory recipe also accidentally included a sweet crust recipe containing cinnamon and sugar (an error that several commenters caught after having made the recipe, which apparently tasted awful). By the way, this recipe, and the Martha Stewart-affiliated website that contained it, have long since been deleted. But as we all know, the internet never forgets.
Look, nobody is saying everything must be perfect everywhere and always. But if you're publishing recipes on major media company websites, you (or the site publishing you, or ideally both) have an obligation to not post recipes with catastrophic errors in them. Don't you think?
Readers, how do you know who to trust when you read food blogs? How do you think about this issue?
For further reading:
1) Shauna Ahern's infamous and error-ridden Potato Mushroom Tart post, courtesy of the wayback machine.
It's quite interesting to read the comments--there's an entire a story arc there. First, a series of increasingly frustrated comments from readers who can't believe such a glaring error could exist in a recipe from a well-known food blogger on a Martha Stewart site no less. Next, days later, a response from a site editor. Then, yet another day later, a response/excuse from Shauna Ahern herself ("I'm not sure why people are so upset"). After that, a series of weird sockpuppet-like comments ("this recipe was delish!"). And then an intriguing meta-discussion of whether it's "mean" or "a personal attack" or "hate" to criticize a bad recipe on a major media company's food website. Really interesting on a few levels.
2) About a month later, Ahern published another highly suspect recipe, this time on The Food Network's website.
3) Not for the faint of heart, and don't go here if you have anything else to do today: A 1,391-page (and growing) thread on Shauna Ahern at the Get Off My Internets forum.
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
We're inundated by food blogs, food websites and recipe aggregation sites these days. There are so many cookbooks out there, and more coming out every year, that it's almost funny. And they all seem to have some kind of marketing angle, food niche or some celebrity chef behind them in order to stand out from the pack.
And there's nothing more frustrating than trying a new recipe and having taste bad. It can take the fun out of cooking for weeks. No, months!
New cooks--those who haven't yet developed an eye for discerning good recipes from bad ones--are like lambs led to slaughter in this world.
But yet there are certain cooks and chefs I instinctively trust: writers and cookbook authors like Mollie Katzen,
Paul Prudhomme and Jay Solomon, for example. Among food bloggers, I instinctively trust recipes from people like Dave at Food and Fire, Melissa at Alosha's Kitchen, Jules at Stonesoup, and Mike at Dad Cooks Dinner, just to name a few. And then there are the cooks and food bloggers I instinctively don't trust: like Martha Stewart, or Shauna Ahern. Martha Stewart has a reputation for complex, often difficult, recipes. Shauna Ahern has an unfortunate reputation for publishing sloppy, error-ridden recipes.
I think it comes down to consistency. As circular as it may sound: if you're reliable, people will rely on you. They'll see you as a generally sound source of good recipes. This is what I'd like to have for my reputation here at Casual Kitchen. People know what they're predominantly going to get here: easy, healthy and laughably inexpensive recipes. Sure, not all readers will like all of my recipes, but the majority of readers should like the majority of my recipes... or else I'm doing it wrong.
I'd also add that the standards differ between regular bloggers and professionalized websites or cookbooks or magazines. Recipes from professionalized sites have test kitchens, editors, copy editors and fact-checkers: in other words, they have a staff of people who exist to check things over. This isn't to say that you'll never find a mistake in a professionalized publication, but the vast majority of mistakes will get caught and fixed.
Therefore, the professionalized realm is, and should be, less forgiving: If you publish a bad or error-ridden recipe on a professionalized media site, your reputation can suffer permanent harm.
I think this is why, for example, a widely-read food blogger like Shauna Ahern can catch heavy flack after publishing error-ridden recipes on professionalized food sites. Ahern's infamous "Potato-Mushroom Tart" on Martha Stewart's website is an object example: not only did it leave out "potatoes" in the ingredient list (an error several commenters quickly caught), but the savory recipe also accidentally included a sweet crust recipe containing cinnamon and sugar (an error that several commenters caught after having made the recipe, which apparently tasted awful). By the way, this recipe, and the Martha Stewart-affiliated website that contained it, have long since been deleted. But as we all know, the internet never forgets.
Look, nobody is saying everything must be perfect everywhere and always. But if you're publishing recipes on major media company websites, you (or the site publishing you, or ideally both) have an obligation to not post recipes with catastrophic errors in them. Don't you think?
Readers, how do you know who to trust when you read food blogs? How do you think about this issue?
For further reading:
1) Shauna Ahern's infamous and error-ridden Potato Mushroom Tart post, courtesy of the wayback machine.
It's quite interesting to read the comments--there's an entire a story arc there. First, a series of increasingly frustrated comments from readers who can't believe such a glaring error could exist in a recipe from a well-known food blogger on a Martha Stewart site no less. Next, days later, a response from a site editor. Then, yet another day later, a response/excuse from Shauna Ahern herself ("I'm not sure why people are so upset"). After that, a series of weird sockpuppet-like comments ("this recipe was delish!"). And then an intriguing meta-discussion of whether it's "mean" or "a personal attack" or "hate" to criticize a bad recipe on a major media company's food website. Really interesting on a few levels.
2) About a month later, Ahern published another highly suspect recipe, this time on The Food Network's website.
3) Not for the faint of heart, and don't go here if you have anything else to do today: A 1,391-page (and growing) thread on Shauna Ahern at the Get Off My Internets forum.
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com
via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
On Blogging and Narcissism
A reader asks:
How do you avoid being narcissistic when you blog?
Hmmm. I’m not entirely sure you can. (And--heh--why would you want to?) But in all seriousness, I try to ask myself two questions before I press the publish button on a new post:
1) Will this post help readers, or at least help them think differently?
2) Do I want this post to be a part of my overall body of work?
I still write narcissistic crap here at Casual Kitchen, but these two questions have helped me limit the damage.
Another thing I do is try to eliminate first person overkill in my writing. I try to cut out words like I/me/my/myself wherever I can, and replace them with you/we/us/ourselves. This is purely a mechanistic solution, but it helps. And then, I try to use other peoples’ examples and experiences to teach and share the ideas I want to communicate to readers. This forces me to talk about myself still less.
The problem, of course, is our worst narcissism surfaces whenever we’re not thinking about it. After all, if you knew you were coming across as narcissistic, you’d change what you were doing (or writing, or saying) so you wouldn’t come across as narcissistic. Right?
Therefore, if you are honestly concerned about sounding narcissistic, then by definition you are not. A true narcissist would never conceive of worrying about his own narcissism.
So be concerned whether or not your writing sounds narcissistic. The battle is won as soon as the idea crosses your mind.
Readers, what do you do to limit your narcissism in your writing?
Related Posts:
Best Practices to Raise the Level of Discussion on Your Blog
How to Write A Killer Links Post
Dealing with Trolls
On Writing for Casual Kitchen
On Writing for Casual Kitchen, Part 2: Keeping Track
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
How do you avoid being narcissistic when you blog?
Hmmm. I’m not entirely sure you can. (And--heh--why would you want to?) But in all seriousness, I try to ask myself two questions before I press the publish button on a new post:
1) Will this post help readers, or at least help them think differently?
2) Do I want this post to be a part of my overall body of work?
I still write narcissistic crap here at Casual Kitchen, but these two questions have helped me limit the damage.
Another thing I do is try to eliminate first person overkill in my writing. I try to cut out words like I/me/my/myself wherever I can, and replace them with you/we/us/ourselves. This is purely a mechanistic solution, but it helps. And then, I try to use other peoples’ examples and experiences to teach and share the ideas I want to communicate to readers. This forces me to talk about myself still less.
The problem, of course, is our worst narcissism surfaces whenever we’re not thinking about it. After all, if you knew you were coming across as narcissistic, you’d change what you were doing (or writing, or saying) so you wouldn’t come across as narcissistic. Right?
Therefore, if you are honestly concerned about sounding narcissistic, then by definition you are not. A true narcissist would never conceive of worrying about his own narcissism.
So be concerned whether or not your writing sounds narcissistic. The battle is won as soon as the idea crosses your mind.
Readers, what do you do to limit your narcissism in your writing?
Related Posts:
Best Practices to Raise the Level of Discussion on Your Blog
How to Write A Killer Links Post
Dealing with Trolls
On Writing for Casual Kitchen
On Writing for Casual Kitchen, Part 2: Keeping Track
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com
via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
The Current State of Individual Blogging
This post is off-topic. And a little whiny.
Let's say you're like most people who take up blogging: you enjoy writing and you want to get better at it. You have insights and ideas to share, and if you're lucky, your insights and ideas are useful and interesting. Finally, and understandably, you want to build your blog's audience, increase your pageviews and, hey, maybe even make a little money while you're at it.
There's a problem however. You're competing for a finite resource: attention. And you're up against powerful competitors: sites like The Huffington Post, Gawker Media, and thousands of other professional media companies, with more staff, more resources, and the ability to pump out incredible amounts of content. And don't forget, you're also up against a monstrous army of SEO engineers constantly tweaking titles, lead paragraphs... anything to capture all the pageviews they can.
Of course, all of us are up against an even bigger force: Google's search algorithm, which changes, abitrarily, all the time.
What Swiss Chard Taught Me About Search
I'll share an example. Until recently, one of the most heavily trafficked posts here at CK was, weirdly enough, How to Cook Swiss Chard.
Somehow--and to this day I have no idea how--that post became Google's first result for the search query "how to cook swiss chard." I never optimized it, I never pumped it full of keywords, I never did anything. All that search traffic just... happened. And back in 2009 and 2010, this post by itself drove nearly a third of my search traffic.
Until a few months ago, when that traffic spontaneously vanished.
Later, I found out it was around the time Google rolled out Penguin, its new search algorithm. Now, I'm third on the list for "how to cook swiss chard."
Is this a big deal? Yes. A huge deal. By going from first to third, I now get less than a tenth of the traffic from this search string. Incredible, isn't it? The rule of thumb is about 35-40% of search traffic goes to the first result, and the rest of the traffic is divided up by everybody else in rapidly diminishing shares of the spoils.
And if you fall off the front page, forget about it. Page two results capture as little as 1/100th the traffic of the #1 result. Search is in many ways the ultimate winner-take-all market.
Worse, there's next to nothing I can do about it. Hiring an SEO firm to "fix" this would make zero economic sense. Casual Kitchen simply doesn't make enough revenue. Not to mention, there are probably hundreds (or even thousands) of SEO firms working for other websites... all trying to do the exact same thing. All the time.
Of course, anything anybody does could easily vanish the minute Google decides to roll out yet another iteration of their search algorithm.
And this is just one insignificant post on an insignificant blog in an insignificant corner of the internet. Imagine this happening to your carefully-tended blog across multiple posts and across all of your search traffic. Because at some point, it probably will happen. The bottom line? Nobody can really count on having a stable share of internet traffic.
HuffPo Thinks You Have No Attention Span
Next, imagine who you're competing against in the race for pageviews, revenues and reader attention. Take Gawker media as an example, with its enormous collection of websites, each with full-time staff using real-time search activity to generate purpose-built posts to capture traffic. We're talking about staff writers who pump out as many as twelve posts a day, who are paid based on pageviews. (For more on information mills and other internet publishing trends, I strongly recommend Ryan Holiday's eye-opening book Trust Me, I'm Lying.)
I haven't even mentioned the content farm industry, where you can pay a firm to generate customized, pre-written, SEO-enhanced articles for your site. It makes me feel dirty just thinking about it.
The idea of competing with these companies is hilarious to me. It would mean never writing a post longer than 300 words (HuffPost presumes its readers don't have the attention span to digest a 900 word post like the one you're reading right now). It would mean writing "worry porn" articles like Does Tabasco Cause Birth Defects? or posting multi-pageview slide shows of anti-informative things like The Ten Worst Foods In The Entire Universe. Anything--anything--to get you to click through.
All of this is exactly what I don't want to do here at Casual Kitchen. There are too many truly interesting things out there to teach, learn and write about. In the meantime, however, I still have to accept a fundamental truth: my traffic stats and my ability to reach new readers is increasingly out of my hands.
Concluding Thoughts
Oh man. It sounds like I'm just wringing my hands and complaining, doesn't it? But what really I'm trying to do is understand the lay of the land where Casual Kitchen lies. Which takes me to my final question: What's a blogger to do?
Heck, I don't know. But I have some ideas. For one thing, accept that this is the reality of individual blogging. And accept that as a writer, sometimes your fate, popularity and economic success are as arbitrary as your search rankings.
Which means what we've all known all along about blogging: you write for the love of it and for the love of interacting with your readers. No matter how many or how few there are.
Readers, what do you think? And why do you blog?
Related Posts:
In Defense of Big Farms
Doing More Harm Than Good
Zombies, Processed Foods and the Advertising-Consumption Cycle
A Fund For... Who, Exactly? Addressing the "A Fund For Jennie" Controversy
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
Let's say you're like most people who take up blogging: you enjoy writing and you want to get better at it. You have insights and ideas to share, and if you're lucky, your insights and ideas are useful and interesting. Finally, and understandably, you want to build your blog's audience, increase your pageviews and, hey, maybe even make a little money while you're at it.
There's a problem however. You're competing for a finite resource: attention. And you're up against powerful competitors: sites like The Huffington Post, Gawker Media, and thousands of other professional media companies, with more staff, more resources, and the ability to pump out incredible amounts of content. And don't forget, you're also up against a monstrous army of SEO engineers constantly tweaking titles, lead paragraphs... anything to capture all the pageviews they can.
Of course, all of us are up against an even bigger force: Google's search algorithm, which changes, abitrarily, all the time.
What Swiss Chard Taught Me About Search
I'll share an example. Until recently, one of the most heavily trafficked posts here at CK was, weirdly enough, How to Cook Swiss Chard.
Somehow--and to this day I have no idea how--that post became Google's first result for the search query "how to cook swiss chard." I never optimized it, I never pumped it full of keywords, I never did anything. All that search traffic just... happened. And back in 2009 and 2010, this post by itself drove nearly a third of my search traffic.
Until a few months ago, when that traffic spontaneously vanished.
Later, I found out it was around the time Google rolled out Penguin, its new search algorithm. Now, I'm third on the list for "how to cook swiss chard."
Is this a big deal? Yes. A huge deal. By going from first to third, I now get less than a tenth of the traffic from this search string. Incredible, isn't it? The rule of thumb is about 35-40% of search traffic goes to the first result, and the rest of the traffic is divided up by everybody else in rapidly diminishing shares of the spoils.
And if you fall off the front page, forget about it. Page two results capture as little as 1/100th the traffic of the #1 result. Search is in many ways the ultimate winner-take-all market.
Worse, there's next to nothing I can do about it. Hiring an SEO firm to "fix" this would make zero economic sense. Casual Kitchen simply doesn't make enough revenue. Not to mention, there are probably hundreds (or even thousands) of SEO firms working for other websites... all trying to do the exact same thing. All the time.
Of course, anything anybody does could easily vanish the minute Google decides to roll out yet another iteration of their search algorithm.
And this is just one insignificant post on an insignificant blog in an insignificant corner of the internet. Imagine this happening to your carefully-tended blog across multiple posts and across all of your search traffic. Because at some point, it probably will happen. The bottom line? Nobody can really count on having a stable share of internet traffic.
HuffPo Thinks You Have No Attention Span
Next, imagine who you're competing against in the race for pageviews, revenues and reader attention. Take Gawker media as an example, with its enormous collection of websites, each with full-time staff using real-time search activity to generate purpose-built posts to capture traffic. We're talking about staff writers who pump out as many as twelve posts a day, who are paid based on pageviews. (For more on information mills and other internet publishing trends, I strongly recommend Ryan Holiday's eye-opening book Trust Me, I'm Lying.)
I haven't even mentioned the content farm industry, where you can pay a firm to generate customized, pre-written, SEO-enhanced articles for your site. It makes me feel dirty just thinking about it.
The idea of competing with these companies is hilarious to me. It would mean never writing a post longer than 300 words (HuffPost presumes its readers don't have the attention span to digest a 900 word post like the one you're reading right now). It would mean writing "worry porn" articles like Does Tabasco Cause Birth Defects? or posting multi-pageview slide shows of anti-informative things like The Ten Worst Foods In The Entire Universe. Anything--anything--to get you to click through.
All of this is exactly what I don't want to do here at Casual Kitchen. There are too many truly interesting things out there to teach, learn and write about. In the meantime, however, I still have to accept a fundamental truth: my traffic stats and my ability to reach new readers is increasingly out of my hands.
Concluding Thoughts
Oh man. It sounds like I'm just wringing my hands and complaining, doesn't it? But what really I'm trying to do is understand the lay of the land where Casual Kitchen lies. Which takes me to my final question: What's a blogger to do?
Heck, I don't know. But I have some ideas. For one thing, accept that this is the reality of individual blogging. And accept that as a writer, sometimes your fate, popularity and economic success are as arbitrary as your search rankings.
Which means what we've all known all along about blogging: you write for the love of it and for the love of interacting with your readers. No matter how many or how few there are.
Readers, what do you think? And why do you blog?
Related Posts:
In Defense of Big Farms
Doing More Harm Than Good
Zombies, Processed Foods and the Advertising-Consumption Cycle
A Fund For... Who, Exactly? Addressing the "A Fund For Jennie" Controversy
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com
via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
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