Blogging - 2/37 - TheWayoftheWeb

What is ‘The Way of the Web’

February 17, 2012 By Dan Thornton 2 Comments

When I started blogging years ago, I had no idea that one day it would become the main public face of my business and career. It started because I’d made a few attempts to launch websites before becoming employed as a journalist, but had never made the effort to learn how to code and develop a decent site, so when technology offered me a way that I could publish whatever I wanted with no Editor, it seemed like a wonderful freedom.

If you’ve ever tried to name a website, business, book or band, you’ll identify with the problem of coming up with a name for something – until it’s established and familiar, most names just sound odd. Considering I was once guitarist with a band named ‘Inflatable Hostess’, this shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise!

But as the site has grown from friends and family to thousands of people every month, I’ve been increasingly asked about the name (Although not as much as my Twitter username ). So with a lovely new logo now in place, it seems like a good time to explain what on earth I was thinking…

What does ‘TheWayoftheWeb’ mean?

The name of the site was inspired by a number of things, but is mainly inspired by my interest in Japanese culture, particularly around martial arts. I’d read the ‘Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai‘ not long before launching the site, having seen it referenced in the film ‘Ghost Dog‘. It’s an interesting book of notes provided by the samurai Yamamoto Tsunemoto, around the time the samurai class switched from being mainly warriors to administrators.

But the main inspiration comes from the philosophy behind Bruce Lee’s Jeet Kune Do. If you only ever considered Bruce Lee a film star, then the insight into his approach to martial arts and fighting styles might be a little bit of a surprise, but the key element that inspired me is that Jeet Kune Do isn’t a fixed style like Karate. It’s fluid and changing, hence why it’s often called a ‘style without a style’, and that a good martial artists should be like water, and moving fluidly without hesitation.

And that’s the personal hidden joke within the name.

There is no one set ‘Way’ of the Web – the important thing is to set out on the journey and find the way which works for you and your business.

So what does ‘TheWayoftheWeb’ do?

The succinct business philosophy is simple – it’s much easier to find what works for you with experienced help. The longer version is providing:

Content creation - Content is a foundation of success in digital, whether you’re a publisher, retailer, manufacturer or service provider. Sometimes it’s hard to see how you can produce amazing writing from inside your business, which is why hiring someone with experience in journalism and writing online can really transform what you’re doing by asking the right questions.
Marketing – You need people to see what you’re doing. But how do you achieve that with the ever-changing state of search engine optimisation, or the constant launches of new social networks? What you need is someone who can advise on where to start, and give you a solid foundation to work from.
Training – Whether or not you want someone to provide content and marketing services for you indefinitely, at the very least you probably want to know exactly how to measure whether it’s successful or not, and the world of analytics and social media monitoring can be daunting with so much potential data to turn into insight. And if you do plan on transferring content and marketing to an internal resource, then you can shortcut a lot of time, money and experimentation.
And lastly there’s this site – which aims to provide insight and guidance into journalism, writing, and marketing in a digital world, with the occasional more personal post to avoid becoming an endless stream of tutorials, and to provide an insight into the actual person you’re hiring – the most qualified person in the world won’t be effective for your business if you decide within 10 seconds that you hate them, so by taking a look around you hopefully get an idea whether there’s a fit with your business.

And that’s it in a fairly large nutshell. Of course, it also provides you with a way to Contact Me, and who I am.

Your turn: I’d love to know how you came up with the name of your own blog/site/business and how it came about… And what you think of mine!

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Filed Under: Blogging, Dan Thornton Tagged With: business name, business philosophy, content services, dan thornton, marketing services, naming a business, thewayoftheweb

I can haz new logo

February 15, 2012 By Dan Thornton 1 Comment

I’ve been running a personal blog for about 6 years, including early experiments on Blogger. Prior to that I’d had a simple homepage, along with some other static websites to play around with.

Over time I’ve managed to attract a reasonably large audience every month with a range of articles mainly covering writing and content, marketing, social media, SEO, and technology. But until 18 months ago, it was very much still a passion for my spare time, along with the videogame sites I’ve launched.

But after starting a freelance business, and with the ambition of growing, it was time to get things more organised – and about 18 months later I finally made use of a talented and friendly designer who was foolish enough to agree to provide a logo (I won’t say who as I don’t know if he’s accepting any more business at the moment).

So here it is, the logo for TheWayoftheWeb – your friendly content marketing, SEO and Social Media company.

It’s pretty simple, but I think it’s effective. Trying to come up with something to illustrate Content + Social Media + SEO was a challenge, particularly as I picked such a vague name years ago, and didn’t just want a name and strapline until I’ve done a bit more work on the exact proposition, as you could also have it as Writing/Content Marketing/Social Media/SEO/Training and a bit of Community Management/Affiliate Management as needed.

The Facebook Page and G+ pages already look massively improved. There’s still a bit of design work to do here, but I’m working on it. One of the great things about a self-hosted blog is that it forces me to actually get involved in the HTML and CSS myself on occasion, and I still feel smug when I manage to get something right first time without breaking everything!

What’s going to be interesting is seeing if there’s any increase in traffic/business to back up the horror designer friends have shown when I’ve launched and run sites without having a logo or branding in place first…

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Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: branding, content markeitng, journalism, logo, peterborough, seo, social media, thewayoftheweb, Writing

The book that inspired my career…

February 4, 2012 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always been fascinated by surfing. Something about the elegance of seeing someone balancing on a board floating over the forces of nature manages to be both inspiring and relaxing to watch. But despite a period of trying to conquer skateboarding, I knew I’d never be a surfer. Partly it was down to geography – Kent in England is not necessarily a hotbed of surfing talent. More importantly, I combined a lack of balance with a dislike of swimming.

But around the age of 11 or so, I read the amazing Walking on Water by Andy Martin. Like me, he grew up in England, and didn’t become a professional surfer – but due to his fascination and obsession with it, he did spend time in the water, and the book covers his journey to Hawaii to speak to the leading stars of the early 90s and to cover the world championship at the time.

What really hooked me was one passage, in which he describes being stopped at airport customs and asked what the purpose of his journey was. Having been hired to do some freelance reporting on surfing for The Times, he pulled out a busines card stating ‘The Times, Surfing Correspondent’, and that allowed him to carry on his journey. (I’m writing from memory as I suspect a previous loan of the book led to it never returning to my possession).

It’s followed by amazing writing, characters and stories as he gets to meet all his heroes and surf Hawaii, but the key thing that stuck with me was this:

You can be an expert, earn a living, meet your heroes and be utterly absorbed by something as a writer, and sharing that can be as powerful as actually doing it for a living.

Suddenly I realised that I might never be paid to race cars or bikes, but I could earn a living by sharing my obsession and knowledge of motorsport and all things with an engine.

Having applied that approach to motorcycles, cars, technology, and writing itself, I’ve had the enormous good fortune to be published by leading publications in their field, visited foreign countries, had amazing experiences and spoken with a number of my childhood heroes. Less than 1% of racers will ever get to legitimately be in the MotoGP paddock, for example, but as a journalist I was able to experience it, which I’ll always treasure.

And there’s another key lesson.

You might think that ‘those that can, do, and those that can’t, write ‘ (to adapt a hackneyed quote about teaching). But many top sportsmen and women can’t explain what they do and how they do it. It’s not their job. They have to concentrate on whatever it takes to get to the top and stay there, and not consider anything else. It’s why quite often the most talented people are the worst instructors, because they have no idea what it was like to be an untalented beginner!

That’s why it’s our job. And why it’s my passion and obsession to share the things I love in a way which could inspire the same passion in others.

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Filed Under: Blogging, Books, journalism, Writing

Why artists want to kill ‘content’, and why they’re wrong…

January 12, 2012 By Dan Thornton 1 Comment

A massive and heinous crime has been committed by the internet against writers and artists. And it isn’t piracy, electronic distribution or increased competition for attention. If you really want to offend a creative person, just watch their response to the prose, film and art they create and love being referred to as ‘content’.

First it was businesspeople talking about content as something to fill the empty space between adverts. Then those SEO types came along and messed around to game the search engines and fool users. And now there’s a growing army of marketing people talking about using artistic methods to power ‘content marketing’ and prostitute noble work even more.

Don’t they understand?

Writers, artists – it’s OK when people say ‘content’

I consider writing a massive part of both who I am, and also of my occupation. I’ve held editorial roles, and received payment both for writing, and using all forms of media as an integral part of marketing. And I have absolutely no problem with anyone using the term ‘content’, as long as they’re not assuming it magically appears and doesn’t deserve time, resource, effort and reward.

After all, words only have the meanings we infer on them, which is why I might apologise to a section of you still reading who may have been offended by the Lego imagery above. At the same time a section of you might have found it amusing, or just not cared. It all depends on the signification you get from the use of that particular word.

And yes, in a business and web development context, ‘content’ is often almost a dirty word, as if in retaliation against all the people who declared ‘content is king’ for so long in the past.

But it doesn’t have to meant that. All it means to me is a shorthand way to avoid repeating ‘text,images and video’, everytime I want to describe what I do, or what is meant to go on a page. And that’s all I hope it will mean to you in the future…

A Wordle for TheWayoftheWeb. Pleased to see how big 'People' appears

How your work can avoid being just ‘content’

Here’s the thing to remember – ‘Content’ refers to what’s contained in a box as defined by a dictionary. It isn’t how the people reading or viewing your work are going to refer to it, especially if you achieve something remarkable. Noone in the history of the world, even in business, marketing or SEO, has come home from a day at work and told their partner or family about the ‘amazing piece of content’ they saw. Instead they’ll share an amazing story, a stunning picture or a moving film.

Content as an adjective is about being mentally or emotionally satisfied with the current state of things (the Swedish have one of my favourite related words, ‘lagom’, which is translated as being ‘just right’ ‘not too much, not too little’ etc, and to some extent it continues to permeate Swedish culture). If you’re doing just enough to satisfy the search engines, or the need for some promo text, then why do you deserve to be refered to as more than ‘content’ anyway?

Writing, photography and film-making are not inherently more noble than serving fast food or working in a factory. There will be people who are far more passionate about serving the perfect burger up with good service than some writers are about churning through the latest press release to just get something up which might get a bit of traffic.

So instead of spending time and effort bemoaning how people could dare refer to artistic output as if it was just the result of someone working, just do three things:

Create stuff that tears through any box it could be put in.
Share and reward the brilliance of others. Comment, tweet,like,donate,flattr,recommend to publishers/studios
Don’t settle for crap. Don’t be lazy and settle for something which is filling space for a brand or media company.

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