How to use your blog to your advantage

David & I melt the camera. (Photo March 07)
DISCLAIMER: This is a blatant plug.

Last night I went out for okonomiyaki with my Spanish mate David. David's gig is a PhD in Nara, but he's more well-known for his blog. And I don't mean like, World Famous In New Zealand kind of famous. I mean like, Borderline Political Influence famous. There are people who read his blog besides the people he's already met. His blog pays a percentage of his mortgage on his house in Madrid. Even more exciting is the term connections. Especially when accompanied by the term business.

So, naturally, the first thing I did was tactically grill him for his fame-inducing techniques. Lord knows my middle name is I-want-to-be-famous-in-Japan. After an hour of conversation over garlic chips, beef&konjac okonomiyaki and beer, I had learned next-to-nothing. No get-rich-quick schemes, no secret password, not even a phone number for blogging consultants.
However, like I said, I learned "next-to-nothing". David got his blog famous by accident. OK, that might be stretching the concept, but he didn't go out of his way to get there. The two things he did do were:

1. Post every day.
2. Comment on everyone else's blogs.

And lets not forget

3. Write in Spanish.

If you're clever, it only takes 20 mins a day to do the first, and around 20 mins a day for the second too (NB: I'm not clever. It takes me hours to post. I'm the equivalent of a writer who balls up the paper he's writing on and three-points it in the trashcan every 5 mins). But number three? Damn, got me there.

These days everything imaginable has been blogged, at least in English. The Spanish advantage comes in that the ratio of English to Spanish blogs has got to be more than 3:1 (Wikipedia will tell you that English, as a first or second language, is used by around 1.8 billion people). Add in the fact that Japan is having a vogue phase in Spain (both in culture and business), and suddenly people want to know what you have to say. Loads of his followers are Japanese language students in Spain & South America, hoping to lift a bit of information about the country they're studying.

All this made me feel fairly inferior, but mostly confused. What does his blog offer that my blog doesn't? I can read enough Spanish to know I'm a more creative writer than he is - isn't that all people want in literature? Something that's interesting to read?
I think I've sussed it out though. Firstly it was the information he supplied in his blog: telling you stuff you might be able to learn in books, but as more of an "eye witness", confirming that yes, Japan has temples and tanuki and silent trains. Now it's got to the point that the following is the self-sustaining point about it. It's almost like a BBS with a forced topic each day. He sets up posts to go off daily, sometimes weeks in advance, and plans out topics for up to a month's worth of blogging. Talk about turning it into an industry.
99% of money he gets in the blog is from banner ads requested by companies (eg. La Liga betting), but occasionally he gets a mail from some company who want a bit more in the way of "product placement". "We'll pay you 200EUR to mention that you used our flights website to get the cheapest flights back to Spain." That's perfectly good business, but does anyone else feel a bit dirty when they read that? As far as I know, David doesn't write anything he doesn't believe in, so rest assured, you can trust his word. (Having said that, he's a convoluted bloke when it comes to relationships, something I both envy and think is a bit wrong. But then again, it seems to be the status quo for any guy in Europe to have a few on the take)

For those of you who read Español, check out David's blog (Flapy). For those, like me, who just want to look at the pretty pictures, check out his Flickr (Destebani). He's not too shabby with a camera.