Problogger — Don’t Forget the People or They Will Remind You that You Did

When we we’re children, doctors name the stages of growing up with cute names like “the terrible twos.” As a teacher, I can tell you that developmentally certain ages are, as a group easier to work with than certain others. Five year olds are gentle givers. Eight year olds are too. Nine year olds are little lawyers. And all bets are off when any age has the letters t-e-e-n in it.

Why am I telling you this? Well, believe it. Adults have similar stages. None of which I ever wish to return to.

Now, not all of us go through all of the stages for the same amount of time. but all of us experience them in some way or fashion and learn the lesson that comes with them. The lesson that I’m thinking of today is when I used to think

that being good and smart is everything. Yeah I was that way once.

It could be a stage we all go through.

What Could I Learn from Them?

Some bloggers focus only on SEO issues. When they look at another person, what they see is a series of statistics, that describes whether a relationship with that person is worth the time it takes to say “hello.”

In other words, people in their world are as flat as baseball cards.

Now that might seem like a way to get to the top of SERPs or higher in Alexa or Techornati, but, “problogger,” Search Engines don’t read your blog and often the traffic they send doesn’t stop long enough that to see who wrote the post.

People understand when we don’t care about them.

What’s more interesting is that, if we’re looking in the wrong direction, people will let us know.

First some will start to email, offering to write something for us. Some will ask whether we are okay. Some will begin to take back favors they’ve asked.
Whether we make a $1.00 or $1,000,000 doesn’t really matter. If we treat people as “less than,” they will find a way to let us know. Here are some ways that they choose.

• They stop reading our blogs.
• They tell other folks how they’ve been treated.
• They remove links or stop linking.
• They post about whatever made them feel that way.

Let’s face it. None of these reactions are particularly pleasant. Perhaps you can know even other ways that folks remind us they are people.

The fact is if we worry only about beating the system, and ignore the people who read us — we have to wonder why we’re blogging. It hard work to game the system and the gaming process never ends. . . .

But getting loyal readers and having strong relationships makes blogging easier every day.

So much so that I came back to this post — just to write that last sentence.
Liz Strauss