Imagine Your Reality

I’ve mentioned before that I see the word connection thrown around a lot and I’ve question what connection really means in the context of social media. Let me tell you now what I believe it can mean, provided a person is willing to re-orient his/her perspective about it. What connection can mean is the ability to think of other people you can introduce someone to, in order to help both people. You can do this via social media or in-person, but what’s vital is that you actually think about what each person needs, so that they actually can help each other out.

Connection probably sounds like networking, or at least what networking can be, if its done with the goal being to help other people as opposed to just getting referrals from someone. And to me that’s the point of connection. It’s not about you, but about your network and your ability to help you network. And whether you do this via social networking or offline networking the point is that connection doesn’t mean something if you aren’t actually doing some kind of connecting.

I approach connection as a kind of game. Can I find the right person or people for this person’s problem? And usually I can, because I want to know those people anyway, partially to help them out, partially because I want clients, and partially because I can refer them to someone. And that’s what connecting can mean, if we don’t think of it as just an activity showing off how many followers we have or who the most influential person is that you are connected to (Personally I’d like to be the most influential person I know, because then it means other people are coming to me to get help of some sort).

So what does connection mean to you and what can it mean to you? How can you help your social and/or offline network and how will you help them?

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.