Blogging Sueblimely

My lack of regular posting recently has not been due to any lack of motivation or ideas, rather a lack of time. Part of the reason for this is a consequence of blogging itself which has led on to other activities. Even the social networking aspects have had to take a back seat lately. I concentrate on Stumbleupon as a voting site, diigo for my bookmarking and belong to a few active Ning groups and forums. Digg has taken the back seat. I never really did enjoy using it so never put in the time necessary to make it work for me. One aspect I have regretted having to neglect is visiting and commenting on blogs I enjoy.

This blog has become my base in the online world, a world that has expanded greatly in the time it has been running. Membership of social networking sites aside, running and moderating forums, developing and customizing Wordpress themes, starting up and running blogs for business and non profit sites and an increase in my website building jobs have been the main consequences of being a relatively long term blogger.

I look forward to expanding my involvement even further; making money from blogging itself is on my agenda too although this has been in the ideas and planning stage for quite a while now and I have yet to take more than a few tentative steps towards this. I resigned from my last remaining accounts job recently, a remnant of a former life, which means I must rely on income from web design and blogging. Wish me luck

Please let us know if your blogging activities have led to extra activities too, on or offline.

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Darren Rowse of ProBlogger has declared today an unofficial Blogger Appreciation Day with the aim of spreading acts of random kindness and encouragement amongst bloggers. Darren was prompted to start this initiative because of messages he had received from bloggers who were feeling disheartened.

I often talk of social networking and its value in bringing us visitors, backlinks and increasing our rankings. Certainly an increase in subscriber count, visitor numbers or pagerank can be encouraging and a boost to the ego but I can get that from the static websites I build. The beauty of blogging for me is being able to enjoy the more personal benefits of a network of blogging friends. Without those people who have offered me their help, support, encouragement and kindness I am sure I would not be blogging today. I am going to show my appreciation by updating my blogroll which is very much out of date.

We can all show our gratitude on an ongoing basis by making an effort to visit our friend’s blogs regularly and leaving comments and help them out where we can – which can range from praise for a good post, giving them some link love in our own blogs and helping them promote their sites with Stumbles, Diggs or whatever is their favorite favoriting site.

Thanks Darren, it is good to be reminded to take care of the important things in life, with busy schedules it is too easy to neglect showing appreciation for the people in our lives.

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“Ask yourself the secret of YOUR success. Listen to your answer, and practice it.”- Richard Bach

While I was sitting on a page rank of 0, until the recent Google updates, I started changing tack in my attitude towards PR, deciding that I wanted to be able to run this blog with less of the restrictions this was placing on me. . You may have noticed that I have been writing more posts with links to other sites; far more than are coming my way. The SEO gurus would probably shake their heads at this. I get a pagerank of 2 in the recent updates as compared to 4 with my old blog but I have already got more subscriptions than I had before. Posts where I have included links to resources or to other bloggers have been my most successful.

Provide a more complete resource

• Giving value and a complete picture often requires links to other sites. It is impossible to cover every aspect of a topic yourself.
• Why cover topics that others have already written about unless you want to particularly highlight them or add more information?
• There are experts in certain areas who know far more about a subject. Linking to them allows those interested to delve further.

Providing a more complete resource, even if this means a plethora of external links, should bring you return readers.

Practical Considerations

• If your current regular readers have not come your way via search engines why concentrate your efforts on pagerank.
• Because of time constraints, efforts should be concentrated on places which do bring you readers.
• If you blog in a niche area, why worry about ‘advertising’ to the whole world via search engines. Participating in social networking sites where you will find people interested in your subjects is much more fruitful.
• Social Networking sites have become hugely popular over the last few years. Search engine ranking alone is not as important as it was but old habits die hard.. Use social networking and bookmarking sites can lead to you having a higher position in search engines albeit in an indirect way.

Blogging Ethics

• Give credit where credit is due.
• Be honest and do not claim kudos for yourself for someone else’s efforts.
• Support and help promote your friends with links to their site and posts.

I am not saying that pagerank is not of any importance, but that putting too much emphasis on it can be counter productive; on your time as well as your results. Pagerank can look after itself if you are using methods of getting your site known that are more targetted at your own subjects and own blogging community of readers and friends.. Providing quality content is far more important in bringing you readers, developing blogging friends and contacts. Concentrate on providing what readers want not what Google wants.

You may have guessed that I am not such a fan of Google these days. The fact that I use the term search engine and Google interchangeably is a concern too. It always makes me wonder what I may be missing out on by relying so much on this one resource, their one method of doing things and a perhaps natural bias towards themselves. I am looking forward to the Firefox type alternative; which broke my reliance on IE.

This was intended to be an introduction to what is becoming a weekly reading list of links to other sites but it ended up being an insight into my thought processes as I pondered the ways which I do not wish to be a slave to the search engines.

As with my post on Carnivals I am intending to provide lists of resources which will include masses of links to other sites. Please give me ideas of what you are interested in the most. I have taken my blog description off here for a while, trying to come up with something less general and more representive. Maybe I should have a slogan that says “Blogging for readers, not Google”?
Thanks to Saboma of Maryannasville for leading me to find Richard Bach quotes in her post Jonathan Livingston Seagull and her StumbleUpon shout to this YouTube video:

Isn’t this so serene and peaceful?

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Reading the condolence messages for Benazir Bhutto led me to search further for information that would fill in the glaring gaps in my knowledge on current day Pakistan. Reading newspapers gives me some (hopefully) factual information but this does not tell me how people live, feel and think in countries where the overall culture is different to mine.

My natural reaction, since starting blogging myself, is to search for blogs that will give me this sort of insight. I started writing this with a heavy heart, having read posts by people trying to go about ordinary daily life in countries torn by civil strife, people with the same daily routines, hopes and aspirations for life that are typical world wide. I was inclined to stop reading and go on to something more pleasant, things that made me feel better. The truth is, that this is what I normally do; after all there is nothing I can do about it is there? I do not normally comment on such blogs, feeling I have nothing worthy to contribute, and move on to something that makes me feel more comfortable. I wonder if I am unusual in this? I wonder if I bury my head in the sand more than others?

Then it occurred to me, I often leave comments purely to offer support, as a thank you for a good post. I give link love by mentioning posts here, to create backlinks for blogs I want to help promote, so that they get more exposure and more readers. I develop friendships with people worldwide. I may not be able to offer words of wisdom, or solutions to problems that those far far wiser than me have tried to solve, but I can do this. As a29th December resolution (I don’t see why they should be restricted to New Year) I am going to take more advantage of the world that blogging has opened up; to learn and understand and try to get to know those of different cultures and lifestyles, their likes and dislikes, their hopes and dreams, their daily routines.

My mood brightened then, realizing that I am not so powerless after all; blogging means we have the privilege of being able to reach out to people world wide. I do not have to read all sad stories, those that cast a heavy shadow over me. Delving further into the blogs I looked at showed me that they were far from sad, even though my initial search had landed me on stories of that nature. This has taught me that I should not read a blog ‘by its cover’ but delve deeper to find the richness within.

Now I am going off to find some more really wonderful and inspiring reading. I will keep you informed of what I found but would appreciate your input here too, to point me in the right direction.

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I am always really interested in reading of blogs that are running activities aimed at building blogging communities, giving new bloggers some exposure or generally helping out other bloggers. Here are a few that I have read about this week:

Snoskred is asking for guest posts from bloggers who want to Get out of their Niche and write posts on any topic they like. I sometimes think it would be good to write about matters other than blogging and wonder about starting a more personal sort of blog. Then I see sense, knowing that I am busy enough as it is. Opportunities like this are an excellent way of satisfying this need.

Lightening is asking if anyone would like to join her in posting ‘Smiley Saturday‘ posts. The only criteria is that you post about something that made you smile or might make your readers smile. I enjoyed reading this weeks entries. I would be inclined to join in but as I write about blogging I am not sure I would be able to come up with enough funny things to sustain a weekly post. I tried it once but my posts just petered out after a while.

Liz Strauss invites everyone to Tuesday Open Comment Night. You can find details of the most recent at The Mic is On: We’re Talking about December Travel. I had a look at the transcripts of some of the past comment nights and laughed so hard at this one  – Aliens leave behind the Link Leak Virus. I thought the comments were brilliant. I am not sure how I have not come across this before as I often visit Liz. I value her blogging values. She believes that the strength of the blogosphere comes from “relationships, interconnectedness, and community” and I thoroughly agree with that. Her SOB program is one of the ways she encourages this. This is an acroynm based on her blog name Successful and Outstanding Blogger. I could not do this with my own blog as it recently occurred to me that it forms the rather unfortunate acronym of BS. Some of you may think that apt

If anyone knows of other blogs who are running such community building activities, please let me know so that I can post about them here. I would like to make this a regular feature.

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