Comments on: Guy Kawasaki on Making Blogs More Viral

By: jennifer jones

jennifer jones — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 08:00:10 +0000

Pramod: glad you weighed in.
i had not heard the term blogging karma, thanks for sharing it.

By: Pramod

Pramod — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 07:16:56 +0000

Hi Jennifer and Mack
The discussion that you have raised here is very interesting. Infact, another popular term “Blogging Karma” is doing the rounds. Blogging Karma emphasises that only by being a genuine and active member of the blogging community, one can expect his/her own blog to be noticed. A theory similar to Newton’s 3rd law.
But if you ask me interms of priority, I think its the content: or else being just a good blogging colleague is of no use. Repeat visits can happen only when content is interesting and opens the reader to a new possibility.

By: jennifer jones

jennifer jones — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 22:24:52 +0000

Hi Mack: Thanks for the welcome. You raise a very good point about being a community member, and I would say that both content and community membership is important. My point about content was that I do think
there has to be a point of view on a blog, and to me it has to offer some thoughts that give people some sort of “ah-ha”. The community aspect is key though too. I like that you think it is more important. The phrase: Community kingdom…like that!

By: Mack Collier

Mack Collier — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 16:13:58 +0000

Jennifer welcome to Daily Fix! Now I’m going to have to disagree with you I think that a blog definitely has to have content that the reader can find value in, but that’s far from enough. Let’s assume that Paul’s figures are right, and that only 5-10% of the blogs out there have decent content. Let’s also restrict the discussion to the roughly 100 million blogs that Technorati tracks.
That means that there are 5-10 million blogs out there that have good content. That’s an awful lot of blogs to wade through, and even if we become more restrictive and say that only 50,000-100,000 of those blogs have amazing content, that’s still means that we’ll never read many of these blogs.
So I don’t think that producing great content is enough to make a blog popular. I think the key is to produce good content, but more importantly, to be a good community member. To leave your blog and comment on other blogs, to develop relationships with your fellow bloggers. To join discussions on their blogs.
I think this serves two very important functions:
1 – It gets the word out about your blog. You don’t have time to go out and look for my blog, no matter how great it is. But if I come to YOUR blog and leave a comment, the odds that you will follow me back to check out MY blog, increases greatly.
2 – Participating in discussions on other blogs makes me smarter. I get to learn from other bloggers, and that makes the content that I create on my blog, even better.
While I agree that you have to produce great content, I think being a good community member is more important. That helps get the word out about your blog, and it makes you a smarter blogger, which leads to your creating better content. Mike Sansone had a great thought a few months ago at Converstations, saying that if content is king, community is the kingdom it serves.

By: Paul Barsch

Paul Barsch — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 13:58:27 +0000

Jennifer, my take is 90-95% of blog’s don’t have content worth discussing. Is that harsh? Maybe.
Btw, welcome to the FIX!