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As many of you are aware, Jason Calacanis of Mahalo, went into retirement from blogging on July 11th. Claiming he needed to find his new voice, he set out on a quest to build an ‘intimate mailing list’ to host discussions on.

In a recent blog post, an update on his retirement, Jason says he is having a wonderful time writing his emails to his ‘intimate email group” (since when is 3000+ considered intimate?)…he continues: “I’ve been writing 2-5k word thought pieces on the email list, and I’ve found it to be very rewarding in a way that the mud pit of blogging isn’t.”

My thoughts are:

1. How is blogging a mudpit, and does that make us bloggers pigs? If so I feel a bit insulted.

2. Isn’t writing 2k+ ‘thought pieces’ the same as blogging just in a different format? I mean blog comes from the word weblog, which is a log of information on the web, a journal so to speak of one’s thoughts and opinions, whether it’s posted to a website or sent over email, in my opinion he’s still blogging.

3. It appears to me that this is somewhat of a scam like his twitter follower campaign, and other such to build a bigger audience for himself and mahalo. Everyone knows that the money is in your ‘list’. I’m not saying building a newsletter is bad, but if you want people to subscribe to your newsletter, don’t do it by trickery, just come out and say it.

Darren Rowse from Problogger says that before you do anything you need to build a list, and should start a newsletter on day one of your blog’s launch. There are just so many people who still don’t use feed readers that can benefit from your blog, and you can benefit from their visiting your site it’s a win-win.

Jason Calacanis continues his blog post : “Now I still love blogs: still read them, still comment on them…. but I’m trying to find my voice again–my true voice. There is something about the acoustic, intimate nature of email that is impacting how I write. I’m writing every sentence as if I’m looking someone in the eye and speaking directly to them. I’m thinking about the economy of words again. I’m trying to say things in as few words as possible, and I’m cutting sentences, paragraphs and pages more than I’m publishing them. I’m proof reading again, and C.K. Sample is proofing for me. It’s a new, slower and more considered process and I’m loving it. I’ve published ten emails or so and I’ve thrown away at least 30. Somethings happening, but I don’t know what it is.”

My thoughts:

When he says “I’m writing every sentence as if I’m looking someone in the eye and speaking directly to them.” I’m thinking, isn’t that how blogs are? That’s at least how I’ve always wrote my blog, as if I’m writing an intimate letter to a long lost friend…

He also says “I’m thinking about the economy of words again. I’m trying to say things in as few words as possible, and I’m cutting sentences, paragraphs and pages more than I’m publishing them. I’m proof reading again,” and I’m thinking economy of words?

Didn’t you say your ‘emaillog’(not to be confused with a weblog of course) are 2k-5k word thought pieces? How is that economical at all?

He continues:

“Over 100 folks respond to every email and I try to respond to every single person. Some of these emails are five pages and I read every single word. No one else sees these words–they are between me and the reader and that is also wonderful and true. Posting to the comment section of a blog is meaningless when compared to sending an email containing your thoughts inteneded for the author. Folks say very, very deep, true and honest things in one to one communications that they can’t say in a blog comment. I love that.”

Call my cynical, but the tone is that of perhaps a hippie(and I’m a very liberal person, hell I voted for Dennis Kucinich), or someone in a midlife crisis, or perhaps someone post stroke, maybe he’s been playing with model kits in a non-ventilated room, your guess is as good as mine. No offense but it’s like he’s living in a dream land. If he were writing blog pieces people could still email him from the blog if he so choosed to put up a contact form right at the bottom of each post or such.

Bottom line: Jason Calacanis if you’re really retired from blogging, more power to you, but why not stop blogging about being retired from blogging, seriously. I know blogging is addictive, and there are places that can help you with your addiction. (that last line was sarcasm, in case you weren’t paying attention…)
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Jason Calacanis, one of the most influential bloggers on the scene right now, founder of Mahalo, exploiter of twitter and facebook, has announced he is going to quit blogging. What has the world come to? Eh, maybe it’s for the better.

I’m waiting to see a social network popup just around ‘betting’ whether or not he will come back to blogging. After-all I’ve quit blogging for a bit usually during the summer slow-down, but I always come back. For a true blogger, it’s almost an addiction, I can’t see how one can claim to completely give it up..but we will see.

After all Jason is known for link-bait scams, perhaps this is another one of his publicity stunts.

My personal message to Jason Calacanis: If this truly is the end for you, I tease, but I hardly know you, I regret not having the opportunity to get to know you better, or form any kind of relationship. I do however wish you the best of luck in any endeavor that you go to from here. Have a happy retirement!
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From the Pipeline - 7.11.08

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I launched this blog a year ago this month, and when I first launched it my primary focus was to make money. I’ve learned a lot in that year, and made many mistakes. I actually gave up on this blog for about 7 months.

I came back to it on March 15th of this year. In fact I had lost all the previous posts, I’d done and had to start anew. (Roughly 130+ posts gone). My original theme was using the law of attraction to bring $1 Million into my life by the age of 30, which I believe was perhaps a bit over zealous.

My new goal - apply what I’ve learned in my year of blogging, and help other’s become successful. I’d also like to launch a few social related businesses eventually, that are currently in the ‘idea’ stages.

My 50 States Roadtrip / American Blogger Directory is just part of gaining an keeping an audience.

You’ll notice the most successful blogs out there aren’t just individual people talking while everyone listens. The most successful blogs are communities, where people interact with what the blogger is writing.

You’ll notice almost every post they write gets tons of comments, trackbacks, pingbacks, etc… It’s no coincidence - without this community atmosphere on your blog it is nearly impossible to keep your blogging growing.

Without interaction from your readers your blog will die. Just as a flower needs sunlight to live, a blog needs comments / reactions from the community at large.
Here are some tips to build your Community.
1. Tweet ALL posts to Twitter. There are some good wordpress plugins for this like Twitter Tools or Twitter Tools for Tweetburner. I highly recommend tweetburner because of it’s statistics and shorter urls.

2. Build your Social Presence. Many might call it spamming, but if you look at Robert Scoble, and Jason Calacanis this is how they got huge. They built up the max number of friends on facebook, and they have 15000+ followers, a lot of those were gained by initiating the follow, ie following first.

3. Comment Frequently on other blogs. There is a secret power method for this which I will mention in another upcoming post, I will show you how to build hundred of incoming links extremely fast and easy.

4. Respond to your Audience. If someone sends you an email, drops a comment, replies to a twitter comment you made, etc.. Take the time to respond. Now when you have 10,000 hits daily it can get hard, and you might miss a few here and there - in blogging you don’t need to be perfect, just do your best.

People like to know they’re being listened to, this will go along way towards building a large following.

5. Ask a lot of questions. People like to be heard, and asking your readers questions via blog posts is a great way to give them this opportunity to voice their opinions. This makes it more fun to visit your blog, and increases the interactivity of your blog.

A lot of times I will ask a specific question at the end of my blog posts, and it will usually garner a lot of comments.

6. Be kind to those who are kind to you.  When someone takes the time to follow you or add you on a social networking site - reciprocate. Also when someone takes the time to link to your site - go to the post and leave a thankyou comment.

7. Stumble incoming links. If you stumble all of your own links, you’ll eventually end up getting banned. One secret is stumbling any and all incoming links. If someone is kind enough to link to you in a post, go ahead and stumble or digg it, and you will get a lot of traffic, plus you’ll help them get traffic. It’s a win-win scenario.

8. Link to other blogs often. I’ve talked about this a lot - but linking to other blogs will get you on their radar as it shows in the dashboard on wordpress, and secondly you’ll get a pingback / trackback from their site.

9. Start a meme. My Twitter Meme: Feed the Twitter Monster, has taken off hugely and gained a ton of incoming links and traffic, be creative though, and make it your own idea. Do something unique.

10. Start a resource for bloggers or website owners. I’ve just launched my American Blogger Directory, but it has already received a ton of hits and results. This of course is also part of my 50 state roadtrip, which is looking to be getting a lot of acclaim online as well.

11. Network with other bloggers. Friends will always give you more attention, and having more blogger friends never hurt anyone.

You can use some tips from my article on becoming friends with A-listers, many of the tips relate to networking in general.

12. Build your subscriber feeds. Market it anyway possible. The simple fact is you need subscribers, if you haven’t read it - here’s 39 great ways to get more RSS Subscribers.

13. Make your posts simple to follow and you’ll have mass appeal. Make sure the text doesn’t run together, as most people have low-attention spans and can’t be bothered with reading whole paragraphs anymore. Lists are huge in fact I try to write 1 list every week, as they tend to bring me a lot of traffic just because they’re lists. - I know it’s crazy!

14. Get active in Forums. If you have the time, you might want to try being active in popular forums, or just answering questions on the different answer sites like yahoo answers, this will help build credibility, and lead to more traffic.

15. Share and share alike, then share some more! When you launch a new resource, pillar article, etc you definitely need to tweet / send it to your social networks. However, you should also retweet it, if it is bringing in traffic, and subscribers.

I generally send my rss feed link to twitter once every 3-4 days asking for more subscribers. Especially when I get close to the next big number like 200 - asking people to help you ‘break’ a number is a great way to get them to actually subscribe, it might be tricky but it works.

I also send my best links, resources, and posts to my followers on twitter and ask them to digg or stumble the posts. This usually brings in a huge amount of traffic. When doing this make it extremely simple, though. Send them the actual link to digg or stumbleupon, so they don’t have to work. People are lazy and want instant gratification.

Another good tip is to help out other bloggers by forwarding their promotions to your followers, they may do the same for you some day. This can lead to some very interesting viral marketing.

16. Write your damn content, already! Last and foremost the #1 method to building a community blog is frequent posts. The more the better, I’ve said it a hundred times the more content you have,  the more traffic, comments, and interactive your site will become.

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