I’ve been tagged by Bill Slawski in an interesting meme currently doing the rounds of search marketing bloggers. The meme is pretty self explanatory — tell the world why you blog (listing, ideally, five reasons) and then take a turn tagging five others. Michael Jensen of SoloSEO is once again tracking the meme, so you can wend your way to SoloSEO if you’re curious about where this meme has been.
But, for the moment, here are five reasons that I blog (cross-posted at Joe Dolson):
- I like to write.
I began to write articles during 2005 because I wanted to provide more information about my web design business and what I thought on my website. I also wanted to return to writing — having not written anything more interesting than a set of directions since I graduated from college. The process of writing something is very satisfying to me. Given a choice, I’d quite possibly choose to spend more time writing than doing hands on work with web design, honestly. My blog(s) give me a great outlet.
- I need to refine my thoughts.
In the raw, untamed lands of my brain, my thoughts run wild. Taking pen to paper (or, more accurately, keyboard to screen,) gives me a chance to domesticate my thoughts. I can spend my time writing down an argument in order to clarify, for myself, what it is I think. Sometimes, the results are inconclusive. The interactivity of blogging, however, enables me to gain very useful input from others who read what I wrote and provide their own viewpoints. Every refining detail is incredibly valuable to me.
- I like to ask questions.
It’s significant that a lot of what I write falls into the general category of “why” or “how.” I like to talk about the reasons for performing a task in a particular way — whether this is a question of search marketing, website accessibility, or some other topic I choose for the moment. In day to day practice, I only get to ask myself these questions — and I don’t always have the luxury of time to investigate further. My blogging provides a venue to ask these questions more publically. I don’t know the answers: but I’m absolutely willing to go out on a limb to make some statement, in hopes that others will make their own contributions.
- I work alone.
This is also the reason that I participate in forums — because my day to day work is solitary. I’m self-employed, and spend most of my professional time by myself. Sharing thoughts with co-workers is a valuable habit — having no coworkers, I try to share my thoughts with other members of the same industry. It’s a way of socializing. It may be very much on professional topics, but it enables me to form professional friendships which I would not be able to pursue locked into my home office.
- I like to teach.
Blogging is a good way to share my own knowledge. While being open about the fact that there are many specialists who know far more than I do, blogging gives me a pathway to provide solid information with others. I have no way to particularly guarantee that what I teach is accurate, but I’m far from the first teacher to be uncertain. Teaching helps me learn. All in all, the process of blogging is a very effective learning tool: I learn in the writing, others learn in the reading, then I turn around and learn from my commenters, who, with any luck, learned from writing their comments. Hey, it’s just a big educational orgy.
Who I’m going to tag:
Everybody seems to be writing about Twitter. I can’t decide whether it’s so big because people think it’s cute, because people think it has marketing potential, or because it’s just so popular that they want to jump on the bandwagon. Nonetheless, it seems like I’m reading something about Twitter just about every day. The Twitter “micro-blogging” phenomenon is pretty intense.
I can certainly see that it has a huge potential for marketing spontaneity: if your target market is the shopping spree/spontaneous spender type, you may have a winning possibility with Twitter. Woot! has jumped on board, and I think it’s probably got fantastic potential for them. I’m less certain how valuable it may be for others…
The characteristics Woot! has which make Twitter so useful?
- Very short term of availability. If you want to Woot, you need to know what’s up NOW.
- Very technological market segment — Woot sells a lot to gadget geeks. Twitter ALSO appeals to gadget geeks. Match made in heaven.
- Woot appeals to a sense of immediacy: if you make a decision quickly, you can get a great deal. Twitter appeals to the same sense of immediacy in human interaction, by keeping constantly updated about the activities of your Twitter friends.
There are definitely other companies who could benefit from Twitter — any business which makes heavy use of limited time offers, limited inventory sales, or daily featured items could probably make use of Twitter fairly effectively.
Outside of these? I’ve got my doubts. However, with the amount of attention it’s currently receiving in the blogosphere (and the search marketing blogosphere in particular,) it seems likely that we’ll see it applied in numerous creative manners in the near future.
It’s worth watching, at any rate. There’s no question that there will be plenty of very unique applications coming from Twitter.
Spotplex is an interesting idea. You install their code, and they’ll track how often your blog (in general) and our blog posts (in specific) are viewed.
It’s similar to MyBlogLog, in that it tracks visits to your site. It’s like Technorati, in that it provides ranking of blogs on the basis of popularity and provides links to current and popular blog posts.
It looks interesting — it’s in Beta right now, but I’ve requested an invitation — see what happens and what I can learn!
As a note, the only reason I’ve noted this is because it’s currently at the top of Alexa’s movers and shakers list, having shot up to 5,969 today from a previous ranking of 247,451. On Technorati’s Where’s the Fire, it’s been
described as a “Trafficracy.”
From Spotplex:
Spotplex provides internet users with real-time ranking of blog articles based on actual impression count.
In other words, you can find what is the hot news today, this week, or this month in real time at Spotplex. This is not a list of articles people recommended or voted for, but a list of articles read most in a given timeframe.
It’ll be interesting to see how this works. I feel there’s some risk that what will essentially happen is that the site will show most prominently whatever article is currently being Dugg, Slashdotted, or otherwise barraged by traffic from having gained prominence in one of the other major social aggregators. Still, I do like the absence of a visible vote/bury option: it’s just traffic.
In short: it’s not whether people liked your story — just whether they visited it. (Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is open for debate.)