Out And Away From Facebook

As many of you may know already, I decided to suspend my Facebook account. In fact, I decided to suspend my Facebook activity, the account suspension was just a consequence of that. From now on, I will focus my activity on Google+. Here’s a link to my account on Google+, if you want to add me. Also, you can find it on the right sidebar (discretely replacing the Facebook icon, of course).

Facebook Unfulfilled Promise

One of the most important reasons for this move was the amount of time I was (uselessly) spending on Facebook each day. Initially, I had two main reasons for being there: blog promotion and networking.

All in all, I managed to get some traffic from Facebook, but I highly doubt it was because of Facebook. A significant part of that traffic was coming from posts which are already floating on the social media for one or two years now and which are constantly shared on Facebook too. Just take a look at the titles in the right sidebar and you’ll know what posts am I referring to. Also, I was getting a few comments on my posts, but nothing spectacular. But the saddest part is that, in order to get even that tiny slice of traffic, I had to cope with all the other “noise” that Facebook was adding to the game.

As for networking, I don’t think I had more than 20-25 real life interactions on Facebook since I was using it. It’s true that I managed to discover (and interact with) a handful of very interesting people from around the world, but if I do the math, I think I found far more of them via Twitter. I also discovered a few high school colleagues and a few distant relatives (Roua is a pretty uncommon name even in Romania, if you wonder, so I was an easy target). Apart from that, my entire Facebook activity was just a lousy excuse to procrastinate.

Lately, I also found quite disturbing to be approached on chat by a person I never met in real life. Most of the time, there were requests in games, or just for “likes” to various contests or polls. It was even one guy who was bluntly trying to sell me something without even knowing how to spell my name. I think I created a new definition for the term “microsecond” that day: it was the exact amount of time needed to click “unfriend” after I saw the selling line.

So, although the people are there and they do spend an incredibly amount of time, the result is under the promise.

Facebook Good Points

Believe it or not, there are some good points in using Facebook too. Something that is used by a few hundreds millions must have something useful, all you have to do is to isolate it from the trash.

So, one of the best things on Facebook is it’s ubiquity in single signon API’s. I still use this “Sign In With Facebook” functionality on a few sites. I think I will replace those credentials with others on a “first found, first replaced” basis.

Also, being used by such a huge amount of people, it creates an incredibly useful playground for learning. On Facebook, people are almost expecting to be used, stalked, involved in threesomes or something along these lines. So you can learn tremendously about people reactions, expectations and behaviors. Of course, these are social media behaviors, not real life behaviors. As a matter of fact, I observed an incredible difference in the Facebook discourse versus the real life discourse for many of my Facebook acquaintances. Either way, it’s a fantastic place to learn, to interact and to play. But way, way, way to noisy for my taste.

The Google+ Strong Points

It’s simple. No Farmville. No Events. No Groups in which I am added without my consent. No intrusive chat (only hangouts). And, on top of that, I get the Circles functionality. Meaning I can fine tune the privacy of my stream, something that was heavily lacking from Facebook. And it’s simple, folks. Did I say that already? Yes? Then I’m gonna say it one more time: it’s deadly simple.

Human interaction is probably the most complicated thing in the world. If you put on top of this natural obstacle a set of worn out tools which are mostly adding to the noise instead of fading it out, you’re not helping.

So far, Google+ seems to be doing a good job at fading out the noise and letting a clean stream of interaction flowing in and out. So, I’m sticking with them for a while.

Life After Twitter And Facebook

You know those apocalyptic strategy games, where a huge catastrophe strikes Earth? And everything is dark and sad, you don’t have any resources left and you gotta make it by yourself? Well, let’s imagine that for a second. But instead of all the Earth being hit, let’s pretend that only two major things are hit: Twitter and Facebook. Lets try to imagine our life after the sad end of Twitter and Facebook.

1. Instead of being happy when somebody is following you all of a sudden, you just start asking yourself “why”. Especially when the following is taking place on a dark alley.
2. When you really like something, you just smile. You don’t look desperately for the “like” button.
3. When you meet someone new you don’t get automatically in your mailbox a letter promoting his latest hugely discounted ebook.
4. You finally start noticing that trees are actually growing around you, not inside computers, when you press that tiny button called “Farmville”.
5. If a guy promises to retweet you if you do the same for him, you suddenly decide to cross to the other side of the street. From where you can safely shout at him: “You dirty pervert!”.
6. When they’ll want to stalk each other, people will revert to the old fashion way of using private investigators.
7. Some of the unadapted will start talking out of the blue in short, witty and somehow cryptic sentences, not longer than 140 chars. They will be called “Tourettes” and usually avoided at parties. When they’re not the party attraction, of course.
8. Historians will be puzzled by the unexplainable extinction of an entire species, called “social media expert”. Much like the dinosaurs. No living proof of that species will ever be found again.
9. If friends will want to send you photos from the last barbecue, they’ll send you photos from the last barbecue. They won’t tag you, that is.
10. Poking someone you barely know will usually trigger a lawsuit.

Many years after the complete extinction of Twitter and Facebook, a brilliant (yet strangely unadapted) student, dumped by his girlfriend, will want to show to the whole world that he’s not as bad as he looks. Of course, he writes a web app for that. The app eventually explodes into an incredibly popular site. Student becomes billionaire. Hundreds of millions are using the site. In an old, dusty chronicle, a historian finds out that it was a prophecy about that web site. Many years before, an entire civilization, in a desperate act of survival, left a cryptic message. Within weeks of hard work and thousands of super computers involved, the message is finally decrypted: “Social media is not dead, you idiots. And it’ll never be”.

Of course, a small faction of historians will give a completely different interpretation to the message, claiming that the first ones used the wrong decryption mechanism. For them, the message will look like: “A venti latte, please. With sugar on top and lots of cream. Presto!”.

How To Build Reputation With Your Blog – Interact With Your Audience

This is the third article from the How To Build Reputation With A Blog series. If you came here directly, you may want to check out the first posts in this series:

• How To Build Reputation With A Blog – The Series
• How To Build Reputation With A Blog – Clearly State Your Expertise
• How To Build Reputation With A Blog – Write Constantly

Today will talk about an important part of this process, namely the part in which you start to interact with your audience.

Listen To Them

The first and most important part of this process is to listen to them. Period. They are your audience, they are consuming your products and they know better than you what they want. Really listening to your audience is especially difficult in the first stages of a blog, when all you want to do is to get “out there”, make your message heard and be sure it’s heard by as many people as possible. In this stage, every negative comment will be taken personally. That shouldn’t be a problem. unless you respond in kind. Bitterness and irony are the most common reactions to negative blog comments, especially in the beginning. Well, don’t. Don’t answer in kind.

Taking it off of your chest will make you feel better, but I don’t think it will add to your reputation, on the contrary. As you advance in the blogging world you’re going to realize that negative comments and positive comments aren’t different at all. They’re just reactions. Some of them are signs of a positive reaction you ignited with your post, some of them are signs of a negative reaction. And it’s ok to be like that. You’re not the beholder of the absolute truth and you don’t know their personal circumstances. They have the right to say whatever they want. And you have the right to take from their comments whatever you want. I had my own share of negative comments in some (quite popular posts), you can find one of them here: 33 Ways To Start Your Day.

I started (a little abruptly, I admit) with negative comments because they are pivotal part in the blogging process. The moment you’ll start to generate negative comments is the undoubtable mark of popularity. You’re becoming important. Your words are counting enough to get on the people nerves. You’re bringing in a change and change is always received with rejection (people love their comfort zones, you know). I’m not saying you should hunt for negative comments, that would be equally easy and lame. I’m saying that if you do your job constantly, at some point you will create some opponents. It’s natural, don’t be upset. Don’t get nervous. Don’t panic. Go on and do your job as usual.

Comments Policy

A blog is about interaction more than it is about broadcasting. The huge success of this phenomenon is due exactly to this part. Traditional media is a one way communication process. Blogging (and social media) is a two way communication process. Your readers can openly state their opinions. And that’s a very good thing.

As a general rule, I think you should keep your blog open to comments. And to answer to as many comments as you can, if possibly, to all. There will be milestones when you could get rid of the comments, but only in some special contexts, I’ll talk about them in a second. In the beginning, you should keep your blog open. And pray for some comments, too. Answer to them carefully, even if the are just short sentences like: “nice post, I like it”. Just say “thank you”. Answer to them even if they are (or especially if they are) negative comments. Try to find out why they are negative. In other words, don’t get offensive or defensive. Try to start an interaction.

From a certain level, managing comments could become harder than maintaining the blog. Especially if you get 50-60 comments per post or more. From this level up, I think you could update your comment policy. You can gradually go to answer only to certain comments, and then you can leave your readers only share their opinions or discuss. Some of the most popular bloggers found an interesting way to keep the interaction going on, while getting rid of the chore of maintaining or answering to hundreds of comments for every post: they created special forums. On these forums people will still have a chance to make their opinion heard, but it will be a much more open discussion space. I think Steve Pavlina did that a couple of years ago, and also Leo Babauta did that recently.

Email Strategy

A good part of your interaction will be hidden from your blog. Namely, you will be contacted directly, most of the time by email. You should have a strategy for answering emails as well. Some people think that because of the private nature of this communication channel, it wouldn’t count as much as comments and tend to be a little lazy when it comes to email, or even ignore it completely. I think this is a mistake. Not only it will create a (maybe false) image of an isolated individual, but it will make people reluctant to get in touch with you in the future.

Almost my entire business communication related to my blog is done by email. I couldn’t imagine how I could create some revenue with my blog without creating a more personal approach with my audience. Some of my readers become my blog business partners and I become a blog business partner for some of the blogs I follow. Not having a proper email strategy in place will create a serious financial handicap in the long run. Seems hard to believe but it’s real.

I usually receive three types of emails: people are asking for advice, people are asking for business opportunities and people are just telling me that my blog helped them. Didn’t got any angry email so far, but there’s time. And I have patience . I had my share of online hatred and irony, mostly from Romanian bloggers, but no direct email so far. Anyway, my email strategy goes like this: if I can give advice, I give it within the time frame of a week. If I can’t, I refuse politely, usually in a day or two. If the business opportunity looks interesting, I follow up. A few of my most profitable affiliate deals were created as a result of some long email discussions.

Social Media Strategy

I said it before, I’ll say it again: your blog goes beyond your blog. You’re not having only a single outlet, you have access to a lot of streams which can carry and deliver your message pretty fast to a huge audience. And that’s social media. In my experience, as a blogger, there are only a few places which can be of interest: twitter, Facebook, StmbleUpon (since I already talked extensively about StumbleUpon before, and since SU is mainly a promotion outlet, I won’t talk about it in this post, feel free to check out this post: The First Six Months Of Blogging – Promotion) Some people may have had good results using digg or reddit or delicious. I had a few myself, but not enough to draw some clear conclusions or to create some  repetitive processes out of them.

From a reputation point of view, being at least on the most popular social media networks is a must. People are hanging out there. And they will expect to find interesting people there. It’s like everybody hang out in the big cities and if you chose to isolate yourself in the countryside, it will take a while to make those big city guys know that you’re around. You may still do it, but you’ll have to shout a little louder.

Twitter

It’s a “hit and run” network. It has a very good link generation potential, and it can also act like a reputation enhancer. Your followers can act like broadcaster for you, transporting your message to their followers and so on. A few people told me they discovered me not through Google or direct recommendation, but by Twitter. The structure of this network will make it very easy to propagate your message to a potentially very big audience, very fast.

But it has a few downsides too. Being so fast, it means others are waiting for their messages to be delivered too. Your message will get out of focus almost instantly. If you’re not “floating”, meaning if you’re not generating enough retweeting activity, your links, after a 5-10 minutes spike, will become almost dead. The biggest interaction happens in the first 5-10 minutes on Twitter.

This “floating” can happen in a lot of ways and I don’t think this is the time and place in this post to cover all of them. The most common situations are: your tweet has been retweeted by an influencer (an influencer is a twitter person with at least a few tens of thousands of followers), you have a very big audience (hard to believe it will happen in the beginning) or you just got lucky, creating some very powerful viral content. I’ve experienced the first and the last of these situations quite often, especially the last one. There are few posts which are still retweeted daily even after a year: 100 Ways To Live A Better Life.

How do you create reputation on Twitter with your blog? Well, first of all, maintain a clear profile. Create and maintain a twitter landing page. Tweet your posts. Engage in conversations if people are asking you. Tweet other, non-blog related, stuff. People will know that you’re real and not a WordPress plugin. Create interactions.

Facebook

It’s a place for human interaction rather than link sharing. In this respect it’s more human than Twitter, but it’s also more picky. Building a strong presence on Facebook will ensure a constant (albeit small) flow of links. If you get links from Facebook, you can be sure that those who shared those links are really enjoying your content. There is no reciprocal “pay-off” for sharing, as it may be in Twitter, when reteweeting is often a currency for supporting each other.

I admit I didn’t do much of an effort to create a Facebook presence, other than placing a link to my Facebook profile on my blog sidebars. And yet, I get friendship requests on a daily basis. Many of these friendship requests are generated by my blog. In fact, almost all the requests are generated by my blog.

Being mostly centered around relationships, Facebook will be a nice place to hang out with like-minded people, chat, exchange ideas or just seeing other people lives unfolding in front of you. If you got an organic Facebook audience, I guess the most important thing is to be consistent. Sharing stuff on your wall which has little or no connection with your blog will dazzle your audience (I did it a few times and it does ).

Why Is This Important And What Are The Benefits

Direct interaction with your audience is a great gift. You have instant access to what people really like or dislike about you or your work. You know immediately if you did a blunder or if you hit it big. And you have a chance to meet a lot of people in real life. I personally met a few bloggers I respect while I was traveling last year and it was a fantastic experience.

Reputation is not something you carry on yourself, show it to somebody and they will recognize it. It doesn’t work like this. Reputation is in fact created and maintained by your audience. You may brag about how good and skilled you are as much as you want, if other people won’t agree with what you say, it will mean nothing.

So, if you really wanna know if you have built reputation don’t look in the mirror, don’t re-read your blog posts, don’t get out in the front of your house and shout out from the top of your lungs: “I’m the best guy in my field!”.

Just look at your audience.  Your readers will never lie to you.

The 30 Secret Rules of Social Media

Every now and then I try to relax and look at see things from a different perspective. A few months ago, I imagined a world formed by social networks, each network being a country (if you think a little, the total population of those social networks could easily be higher than the population of an entire continent, so it’s not that strange anyway). But no country is a real country until it has a set of secret rules. Here are the 30 secret rules of social media (take them with a little bit of salt and pay attention to the last one, especially ).

Twitter

1. You are what you retweet.

2. Don’t DM without permission. It’s like trying to sell elephants in a porcelain store. Your goal may be achieved, but the price may be higher than you think.

3. If you tweet more than 8-9 times per day, your followers will be worried. It’s like getting out in front of your house and saying: “man what a nice weather today” 8-9 times a day. Your neighbors will be worried.

4. Don’t trust a follower with a nice woman picture as an avatar but with a nickname containing more than 4 digits. The photo is most likely a fake and you’re dealing with a nice looking spammer.

5. If you stop tweeting for 7 days in a row you should get yourself another account, your current one will be officially marked as obsolete.

6. If you see the fail whale, do continue to tweet on post-its. Don’t lose your momentum. Stick them on the walls of your office.

7. If you appear in more lists than the total number of your followers, that could be a pretty solid confirmation that you have a multiple personality disorder.

8. You know you had too much Twitter when you’re looking for the “follow” link on the business card you just received.

9. Automating your tweets is like sending clones to the social events you don’t like. Sooner or later, they will catch you.

StumbleUpon

10. Laws are changing every day in this country. Your friends are not your friends but your subscribers, which in turn may or may not be you visitors.

11. Stumbling is actually highly valued in this country. But do not fake it. Try to genuinely stumble otherwise you can be accused of inappropriate behavior in public.

12. StumbleUpon is the Hollywood of social media: it can make you famous in a single day, but you can also be forgotten in a week.

13. According to a number of experts, the SU toolbar could be the most widely used mouse click exercise on Earth. Emptying your SU bar from 100 shares in 10 seconds is considered pretty common sense. If you don’t know what a toolbar is, or what a share means in SU, then, by all means, don’t try to find out. Just stay happy.

Reddit

14. If they talk bad about you, don’t talk bad back. It’s not polite. Being talked bad in Reddit is a sign of high appreciation. Sometimes is a sign of pure rejection too.

15. Ask a question at least once per month. Don’t pick a specific topic, be as random as you can but do ask a question ever once in a while. Asking questions in Reddit is like drinking beer in Germany.

16. Starting your own subReddit is the equivalent of graduation. Everybody does it, sooner or later.

17. In Reddit, you actually accumulate karma, you don’t burn it. You’ve been warned.

Digg

18. If your link got buried, be happy. It’s the first sign you’re becoming important.

19. In Digg, who you are as a person is not even remotely as valuable as who you know. I also saw that in business. A lot.

20. Reaching the front page of Digg is equivalent in some cultures with winning the lottery. The probability, I mean.

21. If you get comments on your submissions, but no diggs, you’re doing something extremely wrong. Nobody will tell you exactly what, get used to it.

22. There’s no real difference between friends and fans: both can bury you alive.

Facebook

23. If you want to say something nice to some of your friends, think twice, there might be an app for that.

24. There will always be some causes to join at some point in your life, so don’t rush on the first one.

25. Farmville is a very crowded city in Facebook. Rumors has it that some people who entered Farmville never got back from it.

26. If someone likes your link that doesn’t mean you have to automatically invite him/her on a date.

27. You will receive crazy, totally useless, nice looking small gifts. Get used to it. It’s not spam. It’s gifts.

28. It’s compulsory to have your own fan page. If you don’t, people will assume you want to become somebody else’s fan and act accordingly.

29. Never respond to a message that says: “You have just been accepted in Mafia Wars”. Real mobsters don’t do that. They send someone over.

The Final Rule

30. If you’ve read everything on this list and agreed with at least 50% of what’s in it, you badly need a life. A real life.

Twitter versus Facebook

In the last 5 years, the most important digital places I spend time in are Twitter and Facebook. Surprisingly enough, they seem to be the most popular social networking sites too. Recently, I had a short morning conversation on Twitter with one of my followers about what  question these sites are answering. What is the reason Twitter and Facebook exists, after all? The following post was born out of this interaction.

Twitter and Facebook Question

The Twitter question is undoubtly: “What are you doing?”. As simple and dumb as it seems it responds to a fundamental need of human beings:  curiosity. It may have killed the cat, but made the humans happy too in the process, that’s for sure. A part for answering this question, Twitter is not doing more. I’m reading this, I’m cooking dinner, I’m hanging out with friends, these are typical Twitter actions. Sometimes, a conversation can last for hours, sometimes it ends in a tweet.

The Facebook question poses a little bit of difficulty, but in the end I think this is: “What are you up to?”. In the beginning, Facebook was just a place to keep in touch with friends, sort of a digital address book. In the last 2-3 years, the increased interactivity, fueled by a wave of new apps built on top of their API made Facebook more of  an entertainment place in which you are invited to play. Games, interactions or causes, all are sharing a subtle entertaining vibe on Facebook.

API Usage

Twitter is giving an API for creating different clients for the same environment. You can access the same rules, via a different skin or device.

Facebook is giving an API for creating different meta-environments. You can create your own rules, and engage users in a different, sometimes totally unexpected type of interaction.

General Context

Twitter keeps the context fixed, while Facebook changes the context frequently. That means, Twitter has a limited set of features, which remained fixed for a long time. The learning curve is faster than on Facebook, because of this simplicity. On Twitter you can focus only on interaction, on Facebook you keep focusing on adapting to the environment.

On Twitter you reach out to people, on Facebook you reach out to challenges, apps and complex interactions. Reaching out to people is spontaneous, unexpected and builds up social skills. Reaching out to challenges and complex logical interactions builds up intellectual skills. While they are surely more engaged than usual Twitter users, typical Facebook users are not as social as you would think they are. The abundance of social tools (poking, commenting on walls, liking, etc) masks the genuine message.

Adapting to a difficult environment is clearly one the most important evolution processes. While Twitter maintains a rather loose environment with fewer rules, Facebook is constantly loading it with new restrictions. Coping with every new change and improvement in FaceBook frustrates users but at the same time is making them stronger. On Twitter, the only challenge must come from within, there is only the internal motivation: to manage an increasing number of connections in small, standardized chunks of actions. Facebook users may become stronger but their social motivation needs constant challenge. Twitter users are building up social skills in a more natural way.

A typical Facebook user is a little more stressed than a typical Twitter user. He knows he have to cope with a new challenge at any given moment: being it a new environment rule (like tagging users or changing the look of the feeds or of the site) or being it a new gift or other request he receives from a new app. It’s like being prepared to face a new threat every second. It surely makes them more powerful but I don’t know if it’s making them enjoy their presence more.

A typical Twitter user is most of the time concerned only with his incoming or outgoing interactions. He can chose the level of those interactions by limiting or expanding the number of users he follows. He has a greater control of the game than a Facebook user, who, regardless of the number of friends, is exposed to an increasing number of stimuli. A Twitter user usually enjoy his presence or at least is constantly refining his game in order to enjoy his presence more.

Social Media Vocabulary

By “vocabulary” in social media I understand the interaction units. In a language you have words as interaction units, in a social media site you have a set of actions by which you can play that specific role.

On Twitter you have a limited and pretty much standardized vocabulary: tweets, replies and direct messages. You can post links and that’s that.

On Facebook, you have a virtually unlimited vocabulary. You can express with hundreds (if not thousands) of apps, you can play Farmville or Mafia Wars, you can write on walls, poke, or become a fan.

Usually, languages with a simpler vocabulary tends to become more popular. English surpassed French during the 20th century as an international language, partly because it has a simpler vocabulary.

Twitter or Facebook?

I favor simplicity in face of complexity. In my opinion, if it keeps the actual strategy, Twitter has a bigger evolution potential because it has fewer rules to be followed. It’s a simpler, much robust digital organism. Facebook is like a wrestler on steroids: impressive, hugely complex but ready to crush at any given moment. Its complexity is becoming its heavier burden.

I think in the long term the stake will move from adapting to a complex environment (Facebook) to adapting to a complex stream of interactions (Twitter). We, humans, are already incredibly complicated machines, we don’t need to create another hugely complicated environment to adapt more. What we need is to interact more, to create around us a new social model. In this regard, Twitter allows a bigger freedom and the human interaction throughput is higher in Twitter.

FaceBook keeps the game closed. The rules are changing and they are seldom changing by popular request, on the contrary. Facebook may succeed in creating a challenging environment, like a huge amusement park, where you want to go every once in a while for some thrills, but you can’t live your real life in an amusement park. Real life is outside an amusement park, real life is made of simple human interaction, of spontaneity and unexpected. I like a roller-coaster every now and then, but I can’t work and become useful in a roller-coaster.

For me, Twitter is Auckland, Facebook is Las Vegas.

I’m A Twitter Citizen, Work In StumbleUpon, Occasionally Travel To Reddit

Last month StumbleUpon had around 7 million registered users. Twitter is coming up pretty close, with around 4 million registered users, while Facebook watches all this from a distance, with more than 200 millions registered users. Why are those numbers important, apart from dry media statistics? Because they are not just numbers, they represent populations.

One of the most surprising and most important effects of social networking is the creation of a new type of country. A country which is not defined by physical borders, but by domain names. A country which is ruled by Terms Of Service, and not Constitutions. A type of country which, in some cases, is far more rich than most of the traditional, physical bordered countries.

If you’re surprised by these affirmations is good. It means you are from the old fashioned generation which thought email is the final frontier. If you’re not surprised, I bet you are one of the happy citizens of those new countries. You are already an active member of that population and help the economical growth of that specific country.

Well, for those still surprised, I will try to uncover in this article why and how the social media is shaping the new digital-political structure of the world, the structure that will overlap in the end the familiar geo-political structure.

Traditional And Digital Countries

A traditional country model is defined by borders, physical borders. A citizenship is defined by a special identification document, by which you are recognized. The traditional model of a country is territorial. You can’t really DO something outside the physical borders and your citizenship. The value is defined inside a territory, where there is a currency which you can trade for value. A traditional country is defined by fixed factors, like geography.

On the other hand, the digital countries are defined by interactions. Your citizenship is your username. In the Amazon country, you interact by buying things. In the eBay country you can do even more, you can sell your stuff too. And in the Monster country you can hunt for a job. All of these are interactions. And all digital countries are defined by interaction, instead of physical borders. Interactions performed over the internet. (more…)

The First 6 Months Of Blogging – Promotion

The first 6 months of serious blogging are crucial. In today’s post I’ll share my experiences with one of the most ignored activities by the beginners, and that would be promotion. This is the second post from a bigger series, so I recommend you to read the introductory post, if you came here directly. If you want to know more about the first post in the series, you can go to The First 6 Months Of Blogging – Writing. And keep in mind that this post is also pretty big, over 2000 words, so you’d better book some free time to read it at ease.

Broadcast Your Message

Promotion accounts for at least 40%-45% of the overall time I spend “blogging”. If this sounds surprising, I must confess that I feel I’m not promoting this blog as I should. I feel I’m not doing enough for it.

I cannot stress enough the importance of promotion in the early months. As always, I learned this the hard way, from experience. In the first 3 months, my traffic was constant, but low. Shamefully low, as opposed to my expectations. The vast majority of traffic came from search engines and since the blog didn’t had a significant number of inbound links, my page rank was low. It still is, by the way, only this doesn’t matter now anymore.

Here’s my traffic breakdown for the first 3 months:

Search Engines – 58%
Referring sites – 28%
Direct traffic – 14%

During the first 3 months I didn’t do anything to promote this blog. I waited to be picked up by search engines. It happened sooner than I thought, only the traffic I received was extremely low. I was indexed almost instantly but the traffic was not as expected.

So, after 3 months of stagnation I decided it was time to actively involve myself in promoting this blog. I realized something extremely important: the world of blogging is really crowded. There are literally millions of blogs out there. Tens of millions. The vast majority are low quality, it’s true, but even if we accept that 1% of the blogs are really good, 1% of 50.000.000 of blogs is 500.000. You have an enormous competition: 500.000 sites! If you have a little bit of decency you realize that you really cannot wait for the search engines to pick you up and send you in the first place. You can’t afford to do that. You have to actually control the process. At least until you can automate some parts of it and assess some progress. If you do nothing to promote your blog, your chances for a steady, growing traffic are extremely low. You act on a field with enormous numbers.

So, after I started to actively work on my blog promotion, my traffic breakdown changed dramatically in the last 3 months. Here’s how: (more…)