Just a few years ago, Tony Pierce ran his own website (www.tonypierce.com) just like any other person yearning for their own piece of cyberspace. Not much happened. But then he converted his site into a blog called busblog -- and now he gets fame, fortune, and girls on a regular basis. How did he do it, and can you do it, too? The answers are contained within his new self-published book, How to Blog, in which he not only offers tips on blogging but also shows examples of them. In this interview, he reveals some his pointers and also discusses the mating rituals of the modern blogger.
How did you first get into blogging?
I had a website at tonypierce.com that was perfectly fine. The year was 2001, I used Dreamweaver, and before that I just did html myself. But a lot of the cam girls and the new people were doing blogs, and they would ask me, “Well, where’s your blog?” I was like, “I don’t need a blog – I’m doing full-screen, creative things every day.” Eventually, two things happened: I saw that you really did need a blog if you wanted to be part of a certain circle, otherwise people couldn’t categorize you and sometimes you kind of wanna be boxed in, you want to be able to come to the party. But I also saw that I wasn’t able to update my web page through the computers at work – I didn’t have Dreamweaver at work, or an FTP program. What was great about the advent of Blogger.com was that I could sit at my work station in my stupid cubicle, like a lot of people do, and during my 15-minute breaks I was able to write little fantasies of how I wished I was living my life. I started writing little stories about working for this FBI offshoot called the XBI, with people who were kicked out of the FBI. It was a really stupid way of getting my head out of work and just write for 15 minutes. After a little while, if you couldn’t think anything creative, you would just comment on daily events. That turned into the busblog.
Why did you call it “busblog?”
At the very beginning of blogging, everyone had a little name for their blog. A lot of them were stupid, but I was like, “Well, that’s actually freeing – I can have a stupid one, too.” At the time, and currently, I didn’t have a car. I was like, “What separates me from everybody else in L.A.?” And that would probably be it – I ride a bus to work. And for the rest of the world, with its ideas about L.A., this is kind of interesting: “Wow. This guy rides the bus. I didn’t think anybody rides the bus in L.A.” And so that was my little angle.
How did people discover your blog?
I started it in August of 2001, and 9/11 got a lot of people either writing or reading about blogs. What happened at 9/11 was, I did a photo essay, which is something that I would have done on my main website anyhow if I hadn’t had the blog. I did a photo essay called “Dear Kids of Afghanistan,” and I saw Yahoo! had a whole series of pictures of kids from Afghanistan, and I wanted to spin it. As you probably remember, we were all focused on the TV, and after a while it kind of overwhelmed me. So I wanted to spin it into a hopeful kind of a thing, and so I did a photo essay where I was saying, “This isn’t about religion, this isn’t about America versus you guys. This is about something way beyond me as a person and you as a kid in Afghanistan.” That got picked up by a couple of the heavy bloggers at the time, and that just got the ball rolling as far as people coming back to my site.
There are two things I’ve got to say about that: First, everybody’s going to have a spike from time to time on their blog. You’ll say something great, you’ll have a funny picture, you’ll be the first to break a story. That’s easy, but you probably shouldn’t pander to those little spikes. What you should try to do is have something worthwhile that, once the kids come to the site, they can see some sort of reason to stay. I would say that two of the reasons that they would want to come back is either you have something unique to say, or you say it every single day. If you said one cool thing in two months, you’re probably not going to get people coming back. So my advice is to practice every single day, even if it’s stupid every day for a month; after a while, you’re going to find your voice and you’re going be able to have something that when people do come to your site, they’re going to want to stick around.
How would you describe your own voice?
I would say it’s very honest. What you read in my blog is a lot like if you were to sit down next to me at a bar or a ball game. I think that’s unique because even in the blogging world, people feel like they have to have some sort of formality in their voice or in the way that they spell or in their grammar. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. If you were going to compare me to other writers, it would be a cross between Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye, mixed a little bit with Charles Bukowski, Bill Maher, and a drunken 8-year-old chimp at a typewriter.
If you didn’t have readers, would you still be doing this?
Absolutely. I’ve been writing in journals since I was a little kid, and this is a different type of diary in that I try not to bore people as much. If it was just a plain old diary being kept under my bed, I would probably do silly things like talk about what I wore that day or what I ate – little details that are so personal that nobody really should care. But because this is a public blog, I try to do my best. Even though I know it’s all going to be personal and probably start with the letter “I,” I still try to write about things that will appeal to people as a whole. But yeah – if I had 10 readers or 10,000, I would probably write the same way. In fact, if I only had 10 readers, I’d probably be more free, in a weird way. I think this is important for people to struggle with. If I only had 10 readers, I’d have nudity on there, I would be even more outrageous and even more offensive, if that’s what you want to call it. But because I know that there are so many people out there that you could reach, I try to tone it down, so there is a little bit of self-censorship there.
Have you ever thought of trying to make it a profitable venture?
I have thought about it. I really respect people who don’t sell out, and this week we talked about selling out a tad. I know I could – I get 1,500 hits a day, I could get more, and from those hits I could sell ads and do a lot of things. But to me it’s hard enough to write something good, and I know how influenced I am by a variety of different things – I’m sure I’d be influenced by advertisers or more lucrative deals. Right now I am very satisfied with the amount of hits I get and the things that I can get from those hits. For example, earlier this year I asked for an iPod from my readers. Instead of just having an ad and buying the stupid iPod, I avoided the middle man and I said, “Hey, I’ve got X amount of readers, if even a small percentage of you guys gave $10, I could have a friggin’ iPod in three days.” Sure enough, I had an iPod in three days. So I was able to do it in a nice way, the readers were able to chip in and it didn’t break them, and they felt like they were part of something good and indeed they were. It was a cool, little experiment, I didn’t have to sell out, all I had to do was ask.
