Is Truthiness Holding Back Your Blog?

Truthiness has certainly hurt this blog. See the post about Mental Super powers :

http://www.pickthebrain.com/blog/mental-superpowers-how-to-unleash-the-full-potential-of-your-mind/

Peter – Interesting post. I’ll admit that this is an area where I could improve. I’m going to use some of the techniques you suggest here to see what happens. Thanks for the information!

I work for a research institute that is part of a major university. We are working on a major site redesign and I must say, truthiness is our biggest enemy. You can dredge up all the analytics know to man and people will still say, “but we’ve always done it this way.” The fact that our users are frustrated with the old way (as documented in a survey), means frighteningly little.

“I am a very fortunate man. Whenever I make a mistake, other people are sure to notice it.” – Confucius

My motto has always been “if you measure it, you can improve it”, so… I try to rely on as little truthiness as possible. I tend to shy away from what everybody else is doing and instead beat out my own path, especially when it comes to actual blog content.

“…but if you have dreams of your blog becoming wildly popular it may be in your interest to pay better attention to what your readers want…”

^ I agree, but I think it’s also important to stay true to yourself. A lot of times blogs write airy, ‘feel good’ pieces because that’s what people want to hear; I would rather write what’s in my heart than what everybody ‘wants’ to hear, if what they want to hear is mindless fluff they can find anywhere else.

I have been struggling with this very issue.

My blog is about my quest for “order, serenity, and peace of mind”, and my concept is almost “anti-expert” because the organizing experts have not been very helpful to me.

While I have learned a few things along the way that work for me, I hardly have all the answers, and so my content is anecdotal – is that truthiness?

I’m on the journey myself, and if anyone finds hope or inspiration in my blog, I’ll be thrilled.

I also think it depends on WHY you are writing.

Are you writing so you can sell other products you make? Are you authentically trying to get the word out on something you are passionate about? Are you trying to help others make their lives better? Are you recreationally writing?

I was blown away when I read an article (man I wish I remembered who wrote it) where the blogger stated that the way to make money off adsense was to NOT write articles that were too interesting. You wanted them to be interesting enough to get people to your site, but not so interesting that they stayed instead of clicking an ad.

I think if you go the ‘truthiness’ route, who you are as a person really shines through. (Like with Gretchen’s Happiness Blog)

Steve,

As I indicated in my article, I think it is important to pay attention to reader feedback when blogging. The article you linked to received a very mixed response, and believe me I paid attention to the negative comments.

That said, I think it is important to recognize with blogging (as with many things in life) that there will always be detractors and people with different opinions. In my opinion, your comment is nothing more than a cheap shot. Have a nice weekend

Hayden,

You raise some great points. As a bit of background to this article, I have (and still do) take a “truthiness” approach to most of my blogging. I have a very left-brain job, so for me blogging is largely a creative outlet that taps the right hemisphere of my brain.

In recent months, however, I have come to realize that there are ways in which evidence, facts and feedback can be easily incorporated into my blogging and add to the success of the blogs I am involved in.

Matt,

I’m the same actually – the more I blog, the more stubborn I’m becoming in writing what I want to write.

Perhaps I should note here that the editorial approach Wendy Piersall takes is not the one I take. But I can certainly understand it, and I thought it would be interesting to throw the idea “out there” for people to consider.

I believe in any business,offline or online, blog included, value creation is the key. Testing help in increasing the return but if there is no value in what you offer, it will slowly die off. Just spoken to a friend, his teenage son wrote a blog out of sharing his passion and now is getting attention, http://www.novelr.com

I was un-aware of the “truthiness” concept but it does make perfect sense.

Sometimes you have to accept that you might be wrong on something and then appreciate a better solution

Very interesting post big thanks

Wow! I feel like I’ve been living under a rock since 2005! How did I miss all the firestorm about truthiness? I just read the very long article about it on Wikipedia. (Hilarious original routine by Colbert, by the way!) To answer your question about tossing away truthiness for testing, evidence, and feedback to improve my blog, I do have a success story in progress — sort of.

When I began blogging last year, my posts were as dedicated to the facts as possible, faithfully reporting them, citing references and authorities whenever possible, and so on. I also featured fact-intense articles about American law and English language and American culture lessons. But, the readers seemed to prefer — by a large margin — my more truthy articles to my more truthful ones! So, I changed my focus. I stopped writing new posts about law or English, cut way back on citing sources, and got right to the meat of my opinions or conclusions, instead. This has made a big difference for my blog, traffic-wise. Now it doesn’t fluctuate as much as seems to be steadily growing.

Ironic, isn’t it? My blog has become more successful as a result of using the truth of traffic indicators to move my focus away from truth in my articles to truthiness. The readers prefer it. Now I strive for the intersection between the topics (and style of writing) I love and the desire of the majority of blog readers out there. If self-help is easier to digest without all the facts, then so be it. I’d rather help with less facts than be of no help with an entire reference library. But, that leaves a big chunk of why I started blogging in the first place out of the equation — at least for now. Guess I’ll just have to wait till more teens, minorities, and immigrants turn to the web for lessons in English and law.

Thanks for introducing me to “truthiness!”

So much to take in, so many different ideas about blogging. I guess it should be making me feel over whelmed but in fact it’s doing the exact opposite, I just want to stay home all the time and research, research, research.

Thank you for all the information!

One easy trap to fall into is relying too much on past facts. Things change and things that were quite correct once often become less so today. This leads to the problem trish notes: “but we’ve always done it this way”. If we’re not careful we can end up saying that to ourselves – what was once truth has become truthiness.

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