You Can Blog: Live (Part 5 - final)

Continued from Part 4 (Part 1)–

A few years ago, shortly after the release of the wildly famous Halo 2 for the XBOX, I had made an entry about a stats package that I was working on developing. I had posted about it and it turns out the project never went anywhere because of time or desire. Over a year later, that entry continued to be one of the hottest entries on my blog. If I wanted to, I could have rode that wave and continued to post about Halo 2. I’m quite convinced the blog would have performed extraordinarily well, but I had no real passion for the subject matter.

The point is that readers look for value. They want value. They want something that helps them become better people, become better workers; something that adds to their technical knowledge or even their ability to compete in Halo 2. On your end, there’s a lot of work to do. It’s easy to regurgitate information and it’s easy to link to everything and anything but your readers can go to those places and get the value they want. The best way is to add to their value yourself.

A Community of Interest

Have you ever noticed in your life how similar people tend to group together. Sports bars have core fan groups, often times in the middle of rival territory. Music lovers segregate into groups of musical genre and radio stations emerge dedicated to that style.

Bloggers are no different. Many bloggers keep a blogroll, or a list of links of folks that they read on a regular basis, and quickly assessing the links in the list often provide a good insight into the blogger and his interests. Blog networks are also effective in forging relationships among bloggers. Networks give bloggers access to each other and to the resources of the network. This can be

Blogroll Networking

There’s several blogs that I read that include blogrolls. Blogrolls are an effective way to share like-minded bloggers with your readers. As your reading list grows, though, blogrolls can become pretty unwieldy. One blogger maintains a list of 150 Women’s rights blogs and another has close to a hundred different links to techy blogs.

Besides the cumbersome nature of blogrolls, it allows your readers a window into who you are as a blogger and what interests you. It demonstrates that your reading, and hence your writing, usually tends to reflect the personality and interests that you hold. That is community and that is an unattributed benefit to blogging.

Some bloggers have an active community of readers already and have likely gained those readers over time and by presenting content that people have found, enjoyed and thus encouraged readers to continue to come back to. For bloggers who enjoy this kind of loyal readership, they may opt not to use a blogroll at all instead preferring to read their blogs of interest privately and filtering excellent content that will interest their readers. Either way provides excellent opportunity to develop relationships with other like-minded bloggers.

The Blog Network Effect

Blog networks are another fast growing trend in the blogosphere and lend an additional layer of support, organization and grouping. Everyone wants to belong. In the Olympic games, an uncanny propensity for citizens to rally behind their nation’s athletes in sports that otherwise would not interest them demonstrates this idea. As an American, I don’t comprehend the sport they call curling. But every four years, my eyes are glued to the television rallying behind Team USA. Why? Because it offers a sense of belonging.

Blog networks give bloggers citizenship in something. Suddenly, a group of independent minded bloggers pull together and feel a sense of belonging to something that is greater than themselves. It pulls community together and provides for the general well being of bloggers through linking, a new audience as well as helping bloggers meet and integrate with people they may have never encountered before. This is the blog network effect.

CALLOUT (not quote):
Major Blog Networks

• 9rules is a network developed by Paul “Scrivs” Scrivens, Colin Devroe and Mike Rundle and focuses on helping bloggers grow their blogs by driving traffic and revenue to them.
• b5media is a network developed by Darren Rowse, Duncan Riley and co-author Jeremy Wright and has since added Shai Coggins and her About Weblogs all-women blog network. b5media is all about developing the profile of bloggers through constant promotion and a strong internal network of communication.
• Weblogs Inc, founded by Jason Calacanis, is the largest of all blog networks and drives a lot of traffic to its bloggers. Posting requirements are steep but offers a lot of exposure.
• WeblogsSL is a spanish language network
• Shiny Media is a UK-based blog network that focuses on niche topics that are often ignored elsewhere.

Summary

Blogs are all about people and spotlighting them and their interests, strengths and ways of thinking. Blogging is an incredibly useful tool for developing relationships between people – readers and bloggers as well as bloggers and other bloggers.

Tagged as: Blogging, book, you_can_blog