sharing Archives | Ian M Rountree

The Full-Circle Approach – SEO for Bloggers Part 7

July 25, 2010 by Ian Leave a Comment

As much as we bloggers love to focus on it, SEO is really a small consideration for us – or should be.

The heck, you say! Getting found is the paragon of publishing success!

Yes. It is. But let me explain.

Search Engine Optimization, as a process, is fairly straightforward. It’s about giving a robot, like Google, a very precise, very clear view of what your content is, how it relates to the rest of the web, and why you deserve more points for quality and relevance on certain subjects than other websites do. It’s an almost religious-scale obsession for some web workers, because we know so little about how the robot works, and what really has an effect on the rankings.

Bloggers have it fairly easy. Where some sites struggle for rankings on their own business names, we have an opportunity to work both towards our readers’ benefits, and align our sites with the robots’ required signs of quality. How? Because we know the following;

The robot loves content. New, fresh, refreshed sites draw the robot back for more. If we’d just write our darn blogs, we can already have a head start over other classes of website.

The robot loves consistency. If we make sure our content is on purpose, rather than shooting off on tangents, we’re sending signs that we’re worth authority.

The robot LOVES consistency! Schedule, will you? Keeping on top of our internal calendars gives us yet another advantage.

People love taking action, and the robot loves seeing action taken. Bookmarking, revisiting – any actions the robot can tell are available to the visitors of a site send signals that interactivity is available. It’s good for the people, thus good for the robot.

People like to share – and when sharing happens (in certain ways) the robot takes notice. Having your pieces passed on, or passing on the work of others, sends yet more signals that your site is worth paying attention to – not just to the robot, but to the people who are looking for something to pay attention to!

We all love to talk, especially to each other. Content is relevance. Updated content is increased relevance. Discussion on, around, or about your site is a huge indicator that you may be engaging with people, and the robot loves signs of interactivity. So do people, by the way. don’t we?

Back up and thing about that for a second. Content is relevance.

Bloggers have unique opportunities. Where business, individuals, and all manner of website creators have to think about information architecture, content strategy, and minutiae of all kinds, for the blogger, the content IS the strategy. We can say whatever we like, sure, but building a set of guidelines for ourselves, encouraging people to get on board with what we’re saying, and over all making our blogs useful, puts us far ahead of the game.

How can you put this into action for yourself?

Like this? Get more! Subscribe by RSS and never miss a post.

Or, read the entire SEO for Bloggers series from the start to see where we’re coming from.

Just Write
On Purpose
The Editorial Calendar
Get More of This
Let’s Share!
Join the Conversation

I’d like you to join the conversation. What have we missed so far? What needs revisiting? What kind of opportunities can we take from developing our content intentionally?

Image by Frerieke.

Let’s Share – SEO for Bloggers Part 5

July 23, 2010 by Ian 2 Comments

Sharing is a pretty complicated idea, and of all the major methods of blog promotion, one of the trickiest to manage. How people share, when they share, and what they like to have shared with them is both intensely personal, and increasingly communal.

Building a community around what we do is key to any ongoing human endeavour.

So as a blogger, you may want to ask yourself;

What am I sharing when I write?
What benefit can my audience get by passing these shared things on?
How easy can I make it for my audience to identify what they can share?

And, once identified, how easy will it be for them to share what they now have?

Deceptively simple questions, aren’t they?

Thankfully, these days, it’s also deceptively simple to share just about anything you find on the net. From Twitter, to Facebook, to any of the many social bookmarking sites out there, the tools are available to let us pass on the things we want to.

How can we encourage this on our blogs? We can add buttons, widgets like ShareThis, to our posts to help people feel as though they have permission to share. We can include instructions, or requests in our writing. Any of the soft and hard asks are at our disposal.

How, as end users of the blogs we read, can we take advantage of the tools and begin sharing, even if blog authors don’t add these buttons or make these requests?

We can;

Get toolbars like the one from StumbleUpon
Add a Google Reader bookmarklet to our browser, or do the same with tools like bit.ly to share on the go
We can write reactive posts on our own blogs, or
We can make an offer to the blogger to write a guest post on our spaces.

We have many tools at our disposal to not only encourage people to share our work, but to share the works of those we find interesting. It’s important that we keep this exchange running in both directions. Blogging is becoming more of a self-sustaining community every day, and we need to make sure we’re in the camp that’s encouraging conversation. Not the camp that’s relying on being broadcast.

Broadcasting is a great tool. But it’s not a human action. We share, in both directions, because that’s the essence of community.

Image by kevindooley.

“Read It All Week” – An Open Challenge

July 12, 2010 by Ian 6 Comments

How much time do you spend actually reading blogs?

Yeah, self-serving question – hear me out here.

Justin Kownacki and I are offering a challenge, between July 19th and July 25th, for anyone interested to measure the size of their personal libraries. this came out of a discussion we had about why people share, what they share, and where the perceived benefit is in being in either position; the sharer and the receiver.

We subscribe to blogs almost on an autonomic basis now – last time I counted, before this challenge, I had about 60 blogs on my reader, only three of which I could identify immediately. Why did I add them? What process have I used to flush low-value streams in the past? How can we streamline our intake, and not miss out on high quality content that comes up every so often in the more esoteric feeds we’re aware of?

More appropriately, how much benefit to our weekly routine is the act of consuming all of this content?

In order to measure this – or at least to bring attention to it, even if measurement is difficult, we’d like to offer you a challenge. Here are the guidelines:

Preparation:

Mark All As Read right now – This isn’t a week for catching up, it’s a week for staying on task, or getting ahead, with your reading.
Set aside some time every day to read. Maybe it’s an hour before work; maybe during lunch; maybe just before bed. Maybe all of these.
Assess which physical media you’ll be including in this experiment. Magazines, newspapers, news television – whatever you include normally, be sure to add that to your planned list.
Catalogue your current content commitments. Even if its just a number, write out the amount of media you’re planning to attempt to keep up with. For example, my week will consist of [x] blogs in Google Reader, [x] hours of news television/radio, [x] podcasts and [x] print media.
Mark the time, if you like, by reposting these guidelines to your blog if you have one. Letting people in on the process is a big part of any experiment.

During The Week:

Actually read everything. Getting to “Reader Zero” is a noble task, but it requires that you actually read everything to assess its value.
Resist the urge to subscribe to new blogs, just for this week. Bookmark new sources for review later, by all means, but consider that adding the commitment to new sources in mid-experiment changes the nature of the work.
Take notes, if it helps. By all means, keep a running log of the experiment – I’ll be using #ReadItAll on Twitter to mark my observations.

Wrap-Up (Post experiment):

Now is the time to anti-curate your findings. Which sources turned out to be most useful? Consider promoting them or sharing their content. Which ones turned out to be more detriment than benefit? Unsubscribe immediately. Which ones showed mixed results? Unsubscribe, but bookmark for later review.

Mark the fall-out from your experiment. How many blogs did you start with, how many have you kept? How many bookmarks did you make, finding interesting streams for review? What has this experiment revealed about your reading – and sharing – habits?

Mark your experiences with a follow-up post on Monday, July 26th.

The real goal of the week here is two-fold: to increase understanding of how much we can reasonably consume in a week, and to ensure that we’re consuming media that we both want and need during that time, rather than what we feel we ought to.

Bonus round: Self-examination.

Part of the methodology behind this experiment comes from the patterns Justin and I agreed on noticing in how, and what, people share with others. We’re not trying to discourage sharing, or speculative subscription. That said, what’s beneficial should stay around to provide lasting improvement and information, while uninteresting, or less useful items piling up and frightening you away from your reading should be discarded.

What do you think? Are you in? Join us in examination for #ReadItAll week!

Update: Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins posted a very insightful explaination on SiliconAngle about why #ReadItAll isn’t for him – go check it out!

Relating By Narcissism

January 11, 2010 by Ian 3 Comments

Gosh, that looks like someone we know.

I retooled my Google Profile recently because it felt barren and devoid of any purpose other than being a placeholder. I’ve gotten a bit wary of leaving accounts this way. Outposts are one thing, but building my own ghost town? No, thanks.

The experience was a bit weird, and it’s not really finished. I need to write a better self-bio, but it’s slow going because I don’t write much copy. Also because I’m very unused to writing about myself (hello, meta) as much as I do self-reference here. It’s a totally different feel, doing something from a purely outside view, rather than telling a story like I would on my blog, or just about anywhere else. It feels empty, unemotional and, above all, narcissistic. But then, I thought, isn’t all sharing this way?

We can bash all we want on the idea of people using social media and social networking to get themselves out there, but it’s one of the most common, misunderstood behaviours we have. If you tell me you broke a finger, I’ll tell you I stabbed myself with a screwdriver. It’s not being self-centered (unless it is, which is less common), rather it’s a great way to make sure you understand that I’m not just spouting platitudes. It shows, if not a common experience, at least that I understand what you’re saying and have been through a similar trial.

It really sounds like I’m making it about me. But I’m not. I’m proving to you that I know what you’re getting at. Where it falls down is if I fail to stop at the end of the example, and continue with the whole story, totally derailing yours. That’s narcissism for you. If I’ve been good enough to relate and stop, and let you get on with it – trust me, I’m using relational proof, not turning the tide of conversation.

I’ve decided to be a bit more sharing, despite the obvious “Go Me” undertones. I don’t really do Delicious or Digg, but if you use Google Reader, go ahead and follow my shared items. I made them public during the writing of this post, and they’re going to stay that way. I’m very picky about what I share, so expect scarcity for a while as I build up my list. I promise I’ll try not to annoy you.

I’d also like your advice (because we’re in this together, and I just told you a story – it’s your turn to tell me one of yours). In addition to social bookmarking, are there any tools you use for not just getting yourself out there, but for getting the things you think are worthwhile and interesting out to the people who follow you?

We can’t talk about ourselves all the time. But we can’t talk about other people all the time either. There’s a happy medium. Have you found yours yet?