Revolutionary Blogger | Political Blogging Guide | Political Blogging Strategies

I found another cool infographic that provides a list of twenty different types of content that we can be writing to gain readers, subscribers, followers, etc.

If thinking of things to write is something that gets in the way of your success as a political blogger, this list is a good place to go to get the creative juices flowing.

For the record, I think I could classify this posts as at least three of these:

I found a great infographic that outlines the future of Search Engine Optimization.  As HTML5 becomes the standard for most web pages, search engines are becoming more aware of the types of content on a page via a coding tool called rich snippets.  The result is that more types of content will be available as a preview on the Search Engine Results Page or SERP.  In fact you might have noticed more information showing up in Google seearch results over the last year or so.  The infographic below teaches the basics of what you need to know about rich snippets.  It also identifies several wordpress plugins that will make integrating rich snippets on your political blog a breeze.

A few weeks ago I read an article in the New Yorker by David Kushner titled, “Machine Politics.”  It is an article about the infamous career of Geohot, the hacker who cracked the iphone to work on all carriers and subsequently hacked the Playstation 3.  As I read the article, there were several passages that made me think that when a political blogger is “doing it right” they are acting very much like a hacker.

Here is one of those passages:

Hotz likes to hack according to the early definition of the word: getting inside a machine to see how it works, and changing it. To him, hacking is almost a sport, played against someone in a position of authority. “It’s a testosterone thing,” he told me. “It’s competitiveness, but it isn’t necessarily competitiveness with other people. It’s you versus the system. And I don’t mean the system like the government thing, I mean the system like the computer. ‘I’m going to stick it to the computer. I’m going to make it do this!’ And the computer throws up an error like ‘No, I’m not going to do this.’ It’s really a male thing to say, ‘I’m going to make you do this!’ ”

Don’t jump to the conclusion that I think blogging is like hacking because it is something you do on a computer.  That has very little to do with it.

Instead think of the different machines you might hack with your political blog.  Perhaps you are wanting to get inside the machine of a local political coalition that is enacting policies you don’t agree with.  Or maybe you want to get inside the machine of an advocacy organization to dissect how they are peddling influence.  You might want to divine the inner workings of modern mainstream media.  Yes, machines are all around us.  And in a world where we surround ourselves with automobiles, and computers, and ipads, and televisions, and countless other machines, it is easy to lose site of the machines that are made up of human parts as opposed to parts of metal, plastic, and silicon.

One of my favorite blogs, Ribbon Farm, contains a post that compares large bureaucracies to software.  While the post is lengthy, it is worth the read if you have got the time.  While I don’t want to discuss this comparison at length, I do want to operate on the assumption that a bureaucracy functions like a piece of software that is programmed to perform a specific function.  In this case, massive bureaucracies are a prime target for political bloggers to hack.

I think this passage from the Ribbon Farm article provides a good explanation of how to hack a bureaucracy:

There are only three ways to get a bureaucracy to do anything it wasn’t designed to do: by stealth, with secret and deniable support from allies in the staff hierarchy, by getting air-cover from a sufficiently high-up Sociopath who can play poker with whichever oversubscribed Sociopath is in charge of exception-handling for the specific process (i.e., jumping the appeals queue and calling in favors to ensure the required ruling), or through corruption and bribery.

While I will leave it to your imagination to determine how you go about hacking an organization, I think it is worth acknowledging that this work is crucial for political bloggers to perform.

For example, the default strategy of most political blogs that I read is to provide ancillary commentary to what is already being discussed in the current news cycles, which are popularized by the mainstream media.  Rather than regurgitate and repurpose what everyone is already talking about, it would be more fun and productive for a blogger to try and find out how this machine is working.

Consider this description of how Geohot hacked the iPhone:

Eventually, he found his target: a square sliver of black plastic called a baseband processor, the chip that limited the carriers with which it could work. To get the baseband to listen to him, he had to override the commands it was getting from another part of the phone. He soldered a wire to the chip, held some voltage on it, and scrambled its code. The iPhone was now at his command. On his PC, he wrote a program that enabled the iPhone to work on any wireless carrier.

What is the baseband processor of the mainstream media machine that generates daily news cycles?

Once you have identified this “part,” how do you get it to listen to you and override the commands it is getting from another part of the organization?

Answering these questions will open a fun new world for you and you blog, but it is one that will involve reaching out and networking on a level that transcends getting a few links from other bloggers.  This strategy might require you to cultivate a relationship with a reporter or mid level staffer at a news organization.  You might have to befriend a communications director of political campaign of a candidate you support.  You might have to spend some time with a federal agency learning what they do, how they work, and who the decision makers are.

While there is a lot more that can be discussed when implementing strategies like this, the purpose of this post is to just get you thinking about two questions:

1. Is my blog pointless right now?
2. How can I give it more purpose?

These questions get to the heart of political blogging.  If you are blogging about politics, it is because you recognize that politics is simply the application of power to advance specific interests.  If your political blog isn’t participating in this process, your blog is just noise.

I suggest that the best way to participate in the grand project of acquiring and applying power, is to start hacking.

If you have been following my last two posts, you will know that I have been networking with the blog called Life in Greenland.  As a result of this networking, I hinted that I would like the owner of this site to link to my site with “political blogging strategies” as my anchor text.  He obliged my request, and it looks like this effort paid off.

Here is the most recent Google search for this phrase:

I have been optimizing my site for this phrase since the launch of this site, but as you can see, my efforts are really paying off.  I am currently holding the top four positions on Google in the organic rankings.  I guarantee you that everyone who searches for “political blogging strategies” will click on my site.

Now this was just an example for the purposes of this blog.  I would love to coordinate keyword optimization strategies with anyone who has a political blog and is interested in doing so.

If you are interested in coordinating these efforts, you can send me a tweet at twitter.com/miles_mason or send us a message to our Facebook page.

This is a very potent strategy for anyone who wants to own the narrative around a specific keyword phrase, and the more people that are networked together the more powerful they become.

It is worth noting that this networking has also led my post on Life in Greenland to be optimized for the phrase “leftwing environmentalism.”  If the owner of Life in Greenland were to start optimizing for this phrase, he would probably rank pretty quickly as well.

ICYMI: Here is the previous post, so you can learn how I did this.

In my last post, I highlighted a great new blog that is highlighting the craziness of Left-wing environmentalists called Life in Greenland.  In my post I demonstrated how I network with other bloggers.  I generously linked back to Life in Greenland in the actual content of the post, and I anchored my links with keyword phrases that were relevant.

I also subtly hinted that I would like Life in Greenland to return the favor, and as a fellow political blogger that completely understands how this works, the author returned the favor.

Check it out:

See the nice mention and context link

Not only did the author return the favor, he also anchored the link with the phrase “Political blogging strategies,” which is a phrase I would like to be found for in the search engines.

As you can see from the post title, the author also decided to play along with my suggestion of writing a post about Naomi Klein and Disaster Capitalism.

Boom!  Did you see that link at the end of the previous sentence.  That is a link from my page ranked blog back to the specific post on Life in Greenland with anchor text “Naomi Klein Disaster Capitalism.”  This is a perfect example of what I would like refer to as the political blogging equivalent of a sniper team.

We are two skilled bloggers, who have narrowed our sights on a specific target, and we are now poised to attack.  I chose the phrase “Naomi Klein Disaster Capitalism” because my keyword research indicated that this was a phrase that gets mid-range traffic with lower competition that two bloggers working together could likely rank with.  Some of the higher traffic competition keyword phrases would have been harder to rank for with the efforts of just two bloggers.  However, if 10-25 bloggers with page ranked sites were to participate in an endeavor like this, we could probably dominate any of the Naomi Klein keyword phrases.

Strategically networking like this has several benefits:

• My political blog is now a weapon – not just a sounding board for my opinions that no one cares about.  It has PURPOSE.  It is worth pointing out that this is why political blogging is very important.  We can’t just camp out on social networks all day and think we are moving the dial there.
• I have made a new ally who is likely to become a casual if not dedicated reader of my blog.  I would rather have ten dedicated readers that will share my content and read everything I post than a thousand readers who come once and never come back.
• I now have a new topic to explore with my blog.  Instead of staring at my screen for an hour with writer’s block and getting distracted by social networks I sat down and knew exactly what to blog about: Naomi Klein and disaster capitalism.

On that note, here are my thoughts on Naomi Klein and disaster capitalism.

The picture of the book cover above is a from Naomi Klein’s book “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.”  (by the way the picture of the book cover is an affiliate link, so if you don’t yet own this gem, I recommend you support Revolutionary Blogger by clicking on the image above to purchase it.  I don’t really care to have more people reading this book, but as a greedy capitalist I would like to make some money off the labors of someone else.  No one said you have to actually read it.  For all I care, you can take the cover to its logical conclusion and use the book for target practice).

I haven’t read the book, but according to the Amazon review here is what it is about:

Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine advances a truly unnerving argument: historically, while people were reeling from natural disasters, wars and economic upheavals, savvy politicians and industry leaders nefariously implemented policies that would never have passed during less muddled times. As Klein demonstrates, this reprehensible game of bait-and-switch isn’t just some relic from the bad old days. It’s alive and well in contemporary society, and coming soon to a disaster area near you.

Sounds like what she is trying to do with this book is a little nefarious to me.  Its like she is trying to destroy my love for capitalism, and in the rubble of this epistemic disaster area she is playing a reprehensible game of bait and switch and nefariously transmitting ideas into this ideological vacuum that I never would have considered during less muddled times.  As if this wasn’t nefarious enough, she is doing it through a mass-produced, mass-distributed book, which is a product of the capitalistic system of excess and exploitation that she so despises.  Naomi Klein has mastered the art of disaster capitalism so well, she has become one of its greatest practitioners.

Didn’t Stalin say something about capitalists and ropes?

I came across a new political blog the other day that struck me as the perfect example of a political blog that has found a great content niche.  It is a blog that takes on some of the crazies in the far left environmentalist movements, and it does so with the precision of a sniper.

The default content strategy for most amateur political blogs is to regurgitate the daily news cycle that is generated by the mainstream media.   If you really want to take your blog to the next level give it purpose and give it focus.  In the case of Life in Greenland, the author didn’t just focus on a big topic like environmentalism.  The blog actually focuses on a small faction of the environmental movement.  This is where bloggers can truly shine over their counterparts in the mainstream media.

The author has asked for some link love, and since link-building is a strategy I like to focus on, I would like to point out that I linked to the site in the body of my content, and I gave the link the title “Life in Greenland.”

To be more helpful with his cause I am also going to throw the hefty page rank weight of Revolutionary Blogger around to give some great keyword-based contextual links as well.

It is clear that Life in Greenland, is focused on exposing the radical ideologies of various left-wing environmentalists.

This image is a screen capture of what I entered to create the link above for “left-wing environmentalists:”

In doing this, I have helped Life in Greenland become keyword optimized for the phrase “left-wing environmentalist.”  Of course, I am also going to include this phrase in my meta keywords and meta description.  It would also be good to put this phrase in my title, but I haven’t figured out a way to work it in.  As my own page becomes optimized for this phrase, the link juice I send back to Life in Greenland is even more potent.  Now if ten other page ranked blogs did the same thing.  Life in Greenland would be on a path to formidably hold down the top google rankings for this phrase.

Also, if Life in Greenland wanted to return the favor, the author of the blog could write a blog post about the virtues of blogging and link back to http://revolutionaryblogger.com with the phrase “political blogging guide” or “political blogging strategies” as the keyword anchor text.

Just for fun, I am going to suggest that Life in Greenland write a post with the words Naomi Klein Disaster Capitalism in the title, the meta description, and the meta keywords and several times in the post.  Then I will write a post with optimized context links for this phrase to demonstrate how to colonize keyword phrases on the search engines.  I would like the subscribers of Revolutionary Blogger to see how this works.

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