Yester­day was my first Word­Camp, held all day at the Mis­sion Bay Con­fer­ence Cen­ter in San Fran­cisco. I’ve been caught up by Word­Press fever since early this year when I switched from Type­Pad.

Some 730 peo­ple turned out at Word­Camp, about dou­ble last year’s num­ber. Here’s a Flickr set of Word­Camp pho­tos I took.

The biggest learn­ings came right at the out­set, when Tim Fer­riss (pic­tured above), author of The Four-Hour Work­week, gave a deep dive into what has worked and not worked on his well-trafficked blog. (I finally got to meet Tim and invited him to attend a future Trav­el­ing Geeks trip abroad.)

Learn­ings: What works in a blog post

Ferriss’s sug­ges­tions were use­ful not just for begin­ning blog­gers but also for vet­er­ans who like to pick up a trick or two.

• He uses CrazyEgg (which has plans at $9, $19, $49 and $99 per month) and Google Ana­lyt­ics for all his blog met­rics and checks them religiously.

• For archived blog posts, just a sim­ple change in the title word­ing from the default “Cat­e­gories” to “Top­ics” increased click-throughs sig­nif­i­cantly. (I did this on my blog years ago.)

• Tim uses Slinkset as a polling mech­a­nism to ask his read­ers ques­tions, and they in turn vote options up or down. He calls it “a per­sonal Digg.”

• He finds RSS “less and less valu­able” because it reduces traf­fic (and thus, pre­sum­ably, the poten­tial for adver­tis­ing income) and gives uers an easy excuse for stay­ing away from his site.

• Fer­riss likes to exper­i­ment. He added the word “Gear” to the top nav of his Four-Hour Work­week blog and it quickly became one of the most-clicked links on the site — even though it’s just a hold­ing page. Now he knows that putting up con­tent there will attract vis­i­tors. Smart.

• He deem­pha­sizes the dis­play of the date on his older posts. “New vis­i­tors are biased against old posts,” he says. Absolutely.

• For new blog­gers, “the most impor­tant thing is to have a voice” — that is, to iden­tify a writ­ing tone and style that reflects the real you rather than try­ing to write the way you think oth­ers may want you to.

• Write about things that get you excited. “Pas­sion beats polling and focus groups.” Also, if you don’t overdo it, he cited author Po Bron­son’s sug­ges­tion to “write about makes you angry” — as long as you don’t attack any­one and write about the prob­lem, not the person.

• Here’s a tip I never heard any­one else sug­gest: Fer­riss says to cre­ate a lot of drafts of blog posts — and pub­lish only 5 to 10 per­cent of them. “Put your resources into drafts,” and then flesh out the posts that will have an impact.

• Get in touch with your bio­ry­thms. That is, find what time of day or night works best for your writ­ing. Tim is most pro­duc­tive at 1 am to 5 am. (I’m a late-night owl, too.)

• Ignore search engine opti­miza­tion (SEO) for first drafts. Cir­cle back when you’re nearly ready to pub­lish and add in terms to draw higher search engine rank­ings. Oth­er­wise your posts will sound phony and artificial.

• To find those key terms that users are look­ing for on Google, use Google key­word search and check the last three months of key­words on the topic you’re writ­ing about. Make sure to include the most pop­u­lar search terms.

• Make sure your post focuses on just one idea. If you dilute your post with mul­ti­ple top­ics, it won’t have the same impact.

• If you use video in your post, make sure you sum­ma­rize the high­lights of what the video is about in text in the blog post. “Noth­ing trav­els faster than text,” Tim said.

• Don’t chase top­i­cal news. “That’s a los­ing propo­si­tion,” he said. Those kind of posts don’t have much ever­green value and other sites are prob­a­bly doing it better.

• Make use of the mil­lions of free Cre­ative Com­mons pho­tos on Flickr to dress up your site. (That’s exactly what we’re doing at Socialbrite.org.)

• He men­tioned two Word­Press plug-ins he likes: Pop­u­lar­ity Con­test (deter­mines which of your posts are most pop­u­lar) and Redi­rec­tion (web­site management).

• Be ruth­less in zap­ping the lunkheads who leave vit­ri­olic, off-topic or offen­sive com­ments on your blog. “There’s enough neg­a­tiv­ity in the world, you have no oblig­a­tion to put it on your blog.” Agreed.

• Take user sug­ges­tions with a grain of salt. “The sure path to fail­ure and mis­ery is to try to please everyone.”

• Fer­riss sug­gested using Seesmic Desk­top to get the pulse of con­ver­sa­tions around par­tic­u­lar topics.

• He uses Media Tem­ple for host­ing his blog.

WordPress’s explo­sive growth

I tweeted some of the ses­sion but kept my pow­der dry for this blog post.

Some met­rics from Word­Press founder Matt Mul­len­weg (I inter­viewed Matt and will post that soon).

• There are now 5.5 WordPress.org blogs (such as this one) and 3.4 mil­lion hosted WordPress.com blogs.

• There were 58 mil­lion Word­Press blog posts this year com­pared with 31 mil­lion last year.

• Word­Press blogs had 22 bil­lion page views over the past year, about dou­ble from the pre­vi­ous year.

• 42% of down­loads came from inter­na­tional users, com­pared with 27% last year.

• WordPress’s Akismet plug-in (which Matt wrote) killed 4.9 bil­lion spam com­ments and track­backs this year, up slightly from last year (when Matt said “this year” I assume he means June 2008 to May 2009).

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.

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