Who wants to start a blogging team?

Summary

Sporadic content is the death of a blog. Bad content is the death of a blog. Low visitor counts is the death of a blog. Many/most Steem authors (myself included) face one or more of these challenges. With collaborative blogging, fueled by beneficiary rewards, it may be possible to reduce these risks.

Work smarter, not harder

Unless Steem is our fulltime business, the time needed to contribute here competes with our daily lives: work, family activities, worship, travel and other hobbies, etc.

Unfortunately, building a blog requires hard work. To do it right, you need to produce regular content that attracts clicks and eyeballs, and the content needs to be promoted. And because we have lives outside of Steem, it's hard for many to find the time for that work.

In the book, The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles Behind the World's Most Disruptive Company, I learned about a relevant concept, termed "the fly wheel effect" (companion posts here and here.).

A fly wheel is a heavy wheel that's constructed in a way that stores rotational energy so that it can be harnessed to smooth the impact of irregular energy inputs. The way the wheel is constructed means that it's difficult to start it moving, but once it's spinning fast, it's easy to keep it going. The concept was applied to Amazon in the context of how they reinvest revenue in their business. Here's how I described it back in 2016:

This is a self-perpetuating cycle that happens when the business focuses on free cash flow, not margins. By driving down margins and pursuing volume, Amazon raises revenue. This revenue is reinvested in, "the holy trinity," price, selection, and availability. Investments in the holy trinity feed back into further increasing revenues.

In the context of our Steem blogs, the flywheel might be the effort that it takes to attract an audience. When we launch our blogs (or when we let them sit idle for a while), it takes high effort just to attract a small audience. But, in theory, once the blog has an established audience the returns on the same level of effort get bigger.

One thing that I've been thinking about for quite some time is that it might be easier to keep the flywheel going for any particular blog if multiple people are all organized into a team and working on it together.

Details can be changed, but here's how I think it could be done.

1. Choose a blogging topic and set up a blog account
2. Find founding team members
3. Agree on a reward sharing policy
4. Create and fill a blogging team with up to 5 roles
   1. authors who create content
   2. editors who edit grammar; do html, markdown and image formatting; and actually post the blog content.
   3. facilitators who manage the roster and team communications processes
   4. approvers who verify that the content is compliant with blog quality standards.
   5. content promoters
5. Authors submit their textual content to a designated location (Google Drive, discord, telegram, email, whatever)
6. Editors format the content to look attractive and submit it for posting approval.
7. Approvers approve & editors post (the approvers could also do other roles)
8. Promoters spread the post to relevant interest groups (could be as simple as "resteem" and post promotion)

Proof of concept

So my thought is to try it out. My suggestion for the first blog would be a blog that's dedicated to development on the Steem platform. Why?

1. The team would be publishing information that could go back into the blockchain by attracting, creating, and enabling new Steem developers
2. We already have some people publishing on the topic
3. It would be of interest to many people who are already using Steem
4. Initially, there would be a lot of manual effort for this collaboration, so the developers would be likely to create tools for automation. These tools could then be harnessed by blogging teams on other topics.

In short, this topic would be building momentum for a couple different flywheels, not just one. So, here's a simplistic version:

Let's say we start with a team of six authors, two editors, and a goal of three posts per week. Each author is expected to submit a post every two weeks, and each editor is expected to edit three.

For each post, a naive split of beneficiary rewards might look like this:

1. The author of the current post - 40%
2. The editor of the current post - 30%
3. The author of the previous post - 20%
4. The author of the 2^nd previous post - 10%

And here's how the rewards would be distributed across a 2 week cycle, according to the different roles:

Objection: Authors are getting less than 1 post's payout, and editors are getting less than 3 posts' payout. Answer: Authors don't have to edit, and editors don't have to create. Also, both roles are getting the audience-benefit from content produced and edited by others. (also, this is just an example 😉.)

Authors and editors take turns, and the whole team sets up some sort of approval/veto mechanism to make sure that each post meets some minimum quality standard.

All posts are published from a central account by the editors, who share the posting key, but no one has to trust anyone with rewards - except just for setting the proper beneficiaries.

Eventually, an interface could be built to facilitate this effort (perhaps using multisig), but at the beginning it would just make use of Google Drive or some other cloud storage service.

The key here is that any author is going to produce intermittent content, but when that happens, other authors give the audience something to read, and that keeps the flywheel spinning. Ideally, we'd like to see the team grow big enough to produce daily content.

Communities already address this?

There's an argument to be made that no individual blog needs to be active as long as a Steem community keeps churning out content. I would argue, though, that the ability to share beneficiary rewards and control the posting quality would provide a better mechanism for churning out regular content that actually attracts eyeballs. It might also make sense to make the blog account into the foundational account of a community where team members also contribute to discussions as individuals.

So... good idea? bad idea? worth experimenting? What are your thoughts?

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Thank you for your time and attention.

As a general rule, I up-vote comments that demonstrate "proof of reading".

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Steve Palmer is an IT professional with three decades of professional experience in data communications and information systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a master's degree in computer science, and a master's degree in information systems and technology management. He has been awarded 3 US patents.

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^{Pixabay license, source}

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