Imagine Your Reality

My blog is now on Alltop. You can find it in the Marketing section. You can also find it on social media today and a number of other blog directories. Each time I learn about a new blog directory or resource site, I get my blog listed on it as soon as possible, in order to build up backlinks to the blogs, and also to expose it to a wider audience.

If you post on a regular basis and you think of your blog as a professional platform, it’s worth your time to get it listed on different blog directories. Not only does it build up credibility for your blog and your professional standing, but it can also help you get more readers and followers who find your blog on those sites.

I already mentioned backlinks, which are related links that push a website or blog’s rankings up on google, Bing, and other search engines, but something you can also do is add your blog/business website to local search engine directories as a way of building those backlinks and also making it easier to find your presence on the web.

What’s key is that you get active about getting out your blog out there so that other people can find it and read it. You can’t expect that readers will come to you, if you don’t make your blog available on different sites beside the one its hosted on. And also make sure you post your latest entries to your social networking site. The more consistent you get about it, the easier it will be to attract readers and develop interest in what you are doing.

I’ve heard some pretty interesting claims that email will eventually go away because of the emerging technology that is providing us access to quicker ways to get information. I’m not sure I really believe those claims, if only because I think email is a fairly useful communication platform and something that provides some level of privacy that social media doesn’t provide. Something which surprises me is how many bloggers don’t include a subscribe by email form on their blogs.

I think more bloggers should include this service because it allows people to get the latest blog entries in their email. I recognize that people can also use an RSS reader or a tool such as yahoo pipes to accomplish, and some of it may even reduce the amount of email in your inbox, but not everyone wants to use those tools. Some people, myself included, like using email. A subscribe by email form allows me to get the blog entry in my inbox, without having to go anywhere else to look at the information.

I don’t think it’s ever wise to to write off one form of communication in favor of others, mainly because there are people who will prefer to be communicated with the technology they already use. This is why, for instance, I believe in the power of a hand-written card. Some people will prefer, even as others prefer phone, RSS feeds, or email. For a blogger, I think it’s essential to make email subscriptions available t readers so that they can increase the readership and enable potential commentary. I read the blogs I email subscribe to and sometimes comment on them as well.

Also from a marketing standpoint, providing multiple means of disseminating information can only improve how that information is received and dispersed by others. An email subscription form or link isn’t hard to set up, and very likely could improve the number of reads your blog gets.

Michael Szul, owner of Overmortal Technologies and I chatted for a while last night about social media. Today he sent me a blog post he wrote about our conversation and what he got out of it.

There’s a couple of interesting blog posts about social media out there today:

What about the in of social media

and Jeremiah Owyang’s commentary on how media brands are building their own social networks.

Social media is about an exchange of information, on one level, and on another level is a relationship building activity. Both of the above mentioned blog entries focus on this subject from different angles.

The first blog post discusses the need to invite the conversation to come in. Reach out and communicate, but also be prepared for feedback, and for letting the people you connect with into your circle. It’s quite true and important to let people into your circle, as well as reaching out. In fact if you only ever focus on trying to reach as many people as possible, but don’t necessarily invite them to really get to know you, it can be very hard to really connect in a meaningful way. It instead becomes a superficial method of touching people.

The other blog post is discussing how some companies are starting to create specialized social media sites as ways of further branding what they do, while also reaching out to the online community overall. It’s a novel idea, but also a further commercialization of social media for corporate purposes. At the same time, having specialized branded social media sites could in fact invite the depth of conversation I mentioned above, though not necessarily in as open a forum as regular social media sites offer.

My take on all of this is that what we’re seeing is the continued evolution of social media. It’s not just about reaching out, but also creating relationships where we get to know each other, so it’s not just selling the brand, but also dealing with the criticisms of that brand. And branded social media sites are essentially inviting that kind of depth of conversation in, while also continuing to advertise the brand, in an effort to sell it. What social media users need to decide is if that will create a genuine relationship, or just be more of trying to reach out, without actually engaging the social media users.

On Web Strategist Jeremiah Owyang’s blog, he had a blog post about monetizing blogs and whether it was more important to create a relationship based presence or to monetize the blog for monetary returns, and ecommerce. There were some interesting arguments from both sides.

My own approach is to take a mixed strategy. I think it’s important to offer quality content and create strong relationships with my readers, but I also believe that enabling monetization offers another stream of income, which can be useful for building a sustainable business. At the same time, I don’t the blog should be given over to ads and promotions so heavily that people only see that.

If you’re going to monetize your blog, keep the following in mind:

You still need to provide quality content that will make people want to read your blog. Put simply, engage your reader with interesting material and information that will keep them wanting to come back.

Be sensible with your ads. It’s true that you can have ads put on your rss feeds, your actual blog, etc. Give some careful thought to what strategies you want to use for monetizing your blog. Right now, for instance I’m trying monetization via a google search bar, but i’ll probably incorporates ads as well.

Remember that at the end of the day your blog is a blog, not an advertising page. People don’t want to just read advertisements and if that’s all they feel they’ll get from coming to your blog, eventually they won’t read it.

I’m still figuring out just how much I want to incorporate monetization into my blogs. I do agree with Owyang that building quality relationships is likely the best way to go to develop business, so that influences my own monetization strategies.

What are your thoughts on this subject? Please leave a comment.