THE BLOGOSPHERE, 30 June — In the immortal words of Jerry Maguire… no, not those immortal words… the other immortal words of Jerry Maguire,
Help Me, Help You
I’d like to encourage us to help each other.
By sharing links to each other’s posts, we can really get all of our work in front of a lot more eyeballs.
IDK if you’re familiar with Mark Granovetter’s legendary paper The Strength of Weak Ties – The idea is that if you’re looking for something, anything, a job, a date, whatever, that it’s not likely to come from Strong Ties (good friends) but from Weak Ties. Your strong ties tend to all know each other, have the same resource pool, and not bring as much new material in. But your weak ties reach out to a much more vast network with enormous resources. As a diverse group of authors and photographers if we take just a minute to Tweet, Facebook, etc, each other’s posts, we’ll all expose each other to way more eyeballs.
• Mark Granovetter / Wikipedia
At the bottom of every post you see these familiar icons: Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, G+, and of course “Like.” You should totally click these for your own posts, and for your fellow authors posts. I’ve scoured our data and I really can’t find any one big source for the traffic to our work, I see lots and lots of small sources. So every time you Pin your own post, or pin someone else’s, you’re bringing a couple more peeps our way. And if you drop a comment or two, doesn’t have to be long, short encouragement is great too, then just with us we’ll have a vibrant salon. And by bringing in all of our “weak ties” we might really be able to be heard.
If you don’t already have accounts on all those places, you could either just post on the ones you do, or take a few seconds and sign up. Signup tends to be painless, free, and fast. And once you’re logged in it’s just click, click and you’re done.
You all are doing so much beautiful work, but creating the compelling post is only half the job, getting it in front of eyeballs is the other, equally important half. And the great news is that half is really fast and easy,
SO… Help Me, Help You!
kk,
kk,
I know, I know, now that I made you think about it, you have to hear those other famous words of Jerry Maguire’s.
Of course I’ll help you… here it is…
Agnes Sharple
Botgirl Questi
Bumblebee (Wendz Tempest)
Canary Beck
Carissa Arthurine Somerset
Eva Marie
Fuschia Nightfire
George Coghill
Ironyca Lee
Jeremy Owen Turner
Joseph DeLappe
Kathleen Cool
Katie Vizenor
Krista Hoefle
Kristine Schomaker
Lizzie Gudkov
Aero Bigboots
RMarie Beedit
Marmaduke Arado
Isabella Medici
Nadya Tolokonnikova
Nathan Shafer
Pixel Reanimator
Ravanel Griffon
Scarlett Luv
Strawberry Singh
Tabitha Raincloud
Toni Tyldesley
Trilby Minotaur
Vanessa Blaylock
Xue Faith
Yordie Sands
Oh VB… I totally agree with you, the “if you build it, they will come” is just not gonna work unless there’s a miracle. I’ve seen solid stats that say there are 185,000,000 blogs, and if you cruise around for any period of time you discover there’s a lot of that feeling. It takes work to make a successful blog.
Many people don’t really care who sees your work or it their blogs are successful, even people with big names. That’s a personal decision and frankly, it’s a lot easier when you don’t have the pressure of making a site work. But once you get it in your head that you actually care (for me this was a i difficult decision), then you have to go to work.
I really need to get to work on photo ALT Tags and better captions. I work fast and I know I miss a lot of opportunities there. I’ve been trying to use Flickr for my photos and then using them in my blog but I’m starting to think it better to enter the photos at both sites. Not sure.
Btw, Alexa doesn’t track all 350,000,000 websites on the planet, so if you show up on Alexa you are already “In” so to speak. iRez has a very good Alexa ranking to build on. I think the one issue right now is “Sites Linked In”. My main blog’s growth in this area has been very slow because I didn’t really start trying to grow it till this past year. My sites linked in is like 60 but Berry has over 600 sites linked in. This is a key to traffic. So even those sites that scrape your stuff can end up helping drive “linked in” up. Sometimes nothing more than a comment will trigger Alexa to credit you with a link.
so on this one you’re ahead of me. Is Alexa good as in meaningful as in useful?
I see SO many sites, whether it’s Social Bro & Klout… or Alexa & Technorati… that rank your stuff… but I’m never certain if they serve any real purpose or tell you anything real. I find many of these big name sites very flaky and it seems very easy to have dramatic rises or falls in their rankings with no real change in our content or connections.
For sure Links-in is good / important. That’s a measure of interest and connectedness that search engines also key on. But I know of many links-in that Alexa doesn’t list for us. So is it just a “scam” to get me to go spend hours on Alexa feeding their site… so their look-how-cool-you-are engine can give us a bigger number for the connections we already had and didn’t really change?
haha, not to be cynical! For sure some things really do matter! But I think many things just feed themselves. Klout is a fun game, and no doubt if your Klout is 2x mine, then you probably do have more connections / interactions. But I don’t see that “feeding Klout” is a useful thing.
Technorati is weird to me. They’ve been the leader for ages. But our exact same blog on Blogger they gave a rating of 1 to… move it over to WordPress and the ported over content suddenly got a 470. Yes, a 469 point increase for changing platforms! It’s been impossible to move technorati over from our old “vaneeesa.com” to our new “irez.uk” and in dealing with, and honestly this may sound like an emotional word, but it is in fact a technical word, dealing with the IDIOTS at Technorati, I just can’t see how anybody is home there.
So if you think Alexa is “real” I’ll go feed it… but I’m skeptical of these sites and their stuff like – if you put an Alexa badge on your site your ratings will go up…
oh PS: you may have noticed our little SHARE buttons got rearranged. I was looking at our “referers” (links in) and discovered that Reddit & StumbleUpon, even though we’ve barely ever used them, were responsible for more incoming traffic than Facebook & Twitter, even though we feed them all the time! O_o
so I rearranged the buttons! 🙂
It sounds like Technorati is blog centric? Perhaps Alexa is more site centric, but yes, Alexa is for real.
I don’t know which is the premier ranking service, however i believe it’s at least among the top five. And as for links in, this is a big mystery to me how they do it. I only know that their process is excruciatingly slow. If you were to double your actual links today not all of them would show up on Alexa at once, some not at all and some would come as if from outer space (meaning, who the hell is that linked in?) As for feeding links in, I never looked into that, there dashboard is pretty basic.
Be sure to “Clain Your Site” on Alexa. It’s a simple process of signing up. Sounds like I need to sign up for Technorati too.
Yes, there is a lot of todo about Klout (mine is 59). I’ve never done anything to improve my own Klout; however, I’ve given away a lot of Klout both as friendship and as service on missions from Empire Avenue. In essence, on EA people can create “missions” where they pay you to give them Klout. These are easy missions to do, so I do a lot. There is some method to the madness though. Many brands run contests trying to boost their Klout. So when someone on EA feeds them Klout in their name, the person paying for the mission gets in the running for a reward from a brand. This goes on every day. If I were you, I’d sign up for Klout. Klout is a link, I’ll give you some Klout to get you started. But don’t get involved in trying to drive it higher. If you have Klout you will find that your klout score will rise.
haha, well just to throw one more on the heap, if you want to do the “Google rel=author” thing, you have to have your G+ profile linked on the home page. If you want to do it, LMK and I can add a link for you. (of course now you’ll have to go google what that all means! 😛
Dang, Vanessa… i’m running as fast as I can. hahahahha. Yeah, been meaning to open a G+ account. Is all the real name identification delt with now? I used to write (my own regular guest column for a year) for MSN/CNBC under my real name (haven’t in several years tho) but I want to keep that separate.
it’s actually my impression that they haven’t changed anything re pseudonyms even though they said they did.
or maybe they’ve gone more “don’t ask don’t tell” in the sense that in the beginning Vic Gundotra was sponsoring those Official Google Witch Hunts, and that seems to be over.
I never signed up till very recently. Even though they said pseudonyms would be allowed, they rejected the name “Vaneeesa Blaylock” even though I’ve had that name on many google products for 3 years. So I went through their appeals process offering as many “demonstrations” of my name as a commonly used name online as their forms would allow me to submit. I received a 2 word reply to my appeal, “appeal denied”
So I forgot about G+ for a month or so. But I keep hearing about the value of rel=author, so I finally went back to G+ and changed my name to meet their needs, just as I did 3 years ago when Facebook rejected my name… I simply typed “Vanessa Blaylock” and G+ said (so to speak) “No problem, welcome to G+”
So, since “Yordie Sands” is more like “Vanessa” than “Vaneeesa” I think you’d have no problem.
I think psudeonyms are important as brands, but also as protection against privacy protection. It’s still the wild west on the Internet.
I occassional use Stumble but FB, Twitter then newly G+ are my faves. I only use Tumblr for EA tho.
it’s weird, if you look at our stats, Reddit has tremendous traffic – like half the total of Facebook, with us feeding FB all the time, and never even feeding Reddit… unfortunately, so far I’ve found Reddit really frustrating to use…
Stumble Upon comes in next, a fair ways back from Reddit, but still pretty strong, AND I find SU very easy to use, so I’m trying to focus on it now.
Surprisingly, for ALL the feeding we give it, our clicks from Twitter are actually pretty minimal.
So I guess I like FB+SU right now… and might throw myself against Reddit again sometime later.