Ironically enough I've just today added my Performancing blog to PFF. Please don't ask me why I've waited so long because I don't know myself. Sometimes the obvious just never gets noticed. :-)
A totally subjective post on my part:
I was reading Chris Garrett's latest post on "Blog Pulling Power" - Creating Flagship Content which had to do with providing your readers with an underlying theme to your blog. An idea or "message" you can build your blog around that your readers can point to and say "that's what this blog is all about". At least this is what I got out of it and it does make sense.
The same sort of idea has been true in anything that is or has ever been offered to the general public. A company's "idea" or "mission statement" or the overall theme of an advertising campaign. You can see it even in the newspaper business where a person prefers one city paper over another even though each paper runs the same stories as the other day by day. It's the "theme" or "personality" of the newspaper that makes the difference.
So how does this apply to myself and blogging? Read on:
Although I'm not new to writing I am new to blogging (since early May, '06) and the biggest difference I've found is that unlike writing a paper or a book or some such thing where public exposure to your writing is obviously severely delayed, public exposure when writing a blog is almost immediate and only delayed for the time it takes to upload a finished post to your blog host. In this, blogging becomes a very personal thing indeed especially if your blog is popular and you have a lot of readers just waiting to comment.
One of the first things I noticed when I began reading and researching blogs and blog writing was that the personality of each individual blog I came across just about reached out and grabbed me. Blogs have tons of natural personality where your average website does not. Chris's example of the very popular BoingBoing not having any of the things that he was talking about is what I'm getting at. "BoingBoing" may not have a running theme, message, or anchor throughout, (I love Chris's analogy of anchor stores at each end of a mall) but what "BoingBoing" does have is loads of personality and that alone seems to make it quite popular. What Chris points out is correct though. The other qualities he mentions are always a good addition to any blog or website.
This got me to thinking about my own personal blog that I've had on WordPress.com for a number of months now. I began blogging just for the fun of it (getting DSL made a heck of a difference) and that's why I've continued with it...I simply enjoy it and it gives me badly needed practice as well. The blog is certainly not laid out as good as it could be. I've let my various links and blogrolls go by the wayside for too long and it's certainly not monetized in anyway (not even AdSense or the like). Just plain content ranging within a mass of different, totally unrelated categories. Comments are a somewhat rare occurrence also. So what has this to do with anything?
A couple months ago my blog, apparently out of nowhere, attained a Google ranking of 4 and the Alexa rating dropped over 200,000 points into the mid to high hundred thousands range. Now this may sound like chicken feed to most but considering I had a previous Google ranking of 0 and no Alexa rating whatsoever it definately made my eyebrows waggle some.
So as I said, it came as a bit of a surprise when I happened to have the SEO extension enabled in Firefox and looked up at the top of my blog and saw that I had "made it into the phone book" as it were. The only reason for this somewhat personal phenomenon that I could think of is that for some reason, there are people out there that happen to like the personality of the blog and if I do have an underlying theme or overall message, it's beyond me. I may eventually find that I've had one all along but you can easily get caught up in all there is to learn about the art of blogging if you bother to try to find out about it.
I don't believe I would have had any understanding as to why this had happened if I hadn't read Chris's post even though that wasn't the main message he was trying to get across. Thanks Chris.
The only reason for this post is probably because it was such an eye opener for me which may not make sense to some but when you're (somewhat) new at this and driving your (somewhat) new blog from in front of your computer you can easily miss the obvious while trying to understand all the rest.
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