Wednesday, February 15, 2006

How do you become a blogging A-Lister?

Scoble wrote a post about becoming an A-Lister in blogging because he gets asked that question a lot.  While Scoble’s post is interesting, I like Jeremy Wright’s take on how not to become and A-List blogger, which I found very interesting — you should check it out.

Fundamentally Jeremy’s post causes me (maybe you too) to question why it is that you are blogging.  I freaked out the other day when I say that direct visits to my site had dropped dramatically; I comforted myself by checking distribution of my FeedBurner feed and the number of subscriptions to my feed on Bloglines.  Then I reality-checked myself: I started this blog for me and if others happen to read it, that’s great.  Certainly it’s nice to be famous and nice to be able to say how many visitors you have; I think at one time or another everyone is focused on the amount of notoriety that they can get and blogging and social software certainly makes it easier than the old metrics of getting your name in the newspaper.

I’ve resolved that I’m not going to look at my tracking metrics for the rest of the week, which, considering that I used to check them more than twice a day, is a big thing for me. Perhaps once I break the cycle of looking at them all the time, I’ll never look at them again.

Why are you blogging?  Who are you blogging for?  Do you really need to be an A-Lister?

Link — Jeremy Wright

1 comment:

COD said...

Jeremy has it exactly right. The few times I've poked fun at an A-Lister it was scary how fast they and/or their minions found their way to my dark corner of the Internet. I think Kottke is the only A-lister left in my blogroll.The A-list is just one big echo chamer.

I went on a traffic reduction program last year and reduced my incoming hits by over 50%. I weeded out some images that generted a lot of traffic, and I shut down trackbacks completely. I'm much happier this way.