Marketing Ninja

I’ve been due for a post about blogging for a while, and sorry I’m a bit behind. I spent the better part of this weekend getting Community Server 2007 (express edition) to work on my new blog, which I will be promoting in a couple of weeks.

In this post I’d like to discuss the influences that drive bloggers to write about particular subjects; specifically I want to touch on the notion of letting the tail wag the dog, or letting keywords/traffic sources be the sole influence in what subjects you write about.

I read an article the other day (I can’t remember where) but the author said thus:

Use Google Analytics to determine what keywords are sending the most search engine traffic to your site; based upon what keywords are sending in the most traffic, you should write articles about the subjects of those keywords accordingly to boost your traffic.

This notion makes sense from a search engine optimization standpoint, in fact I’m pretty sure I read the article from an SEO blog, but it is a HORRIBLE way to blog.

What if the keywords that send in the most traffic to your site are for subjects that you’ve only covered in passing and don’t really want to spend a lot of time on?

Succumbing to search engine keywords and allowing them to become the dictator of your blog’s content means becoming a “traffic-driven blogger,” which is comparable to a poll-driven politician.

• If you only write about the small one or two subjects that send the most traffic to your site, you’re ultimately going to burn out or lose interest because your own blog’s content may eventually drift apart from the interests that you wanted to blog about in the first place!
• What happens if your listing for those top keywords starts to drop as a result of increased competition or a decrease in the quality of your work? Wouldn’t having a ton of content on just those one or two subjects ultimately hurt your search ability in the long run?
• Narrowing your blog’s focus to a handful of SEO keywords will reduce your overall visibility in your blog’s domain; the best blogs are ones that are ubiquitous across their respective domains.
• The traffic delivered by SEO keywords is very temporal for the most part; the popularity of certain keywords ebbs and flows just like every other hot topic.

The biggest danger in being a traffic-driven blogger is simply losing interest in blogging entirely as a result of the keywords. Do not let the tail wag the dog!

On the other hand, being an entirely self important blogger isn’t any better. Self-important bloggers do not care what the audience wants; it’s all about what the blogger himself or herself wants!

• Self-important bloggers will drive away readers with irrelevant posts; readers come to blogs to learn about subjects. Only bloggers with a degree of celebrity can maintain a self-indulgent blog and get away with it, and even then they have to make sure to appease the audience from time to time.
• Dividing your blog over too wide an array of subjects, namely whatever strikes your fancy, will spread your blog over several domains. You may yield bursts of traffic from time to time but in most cases you will not be able to maintain steady amounts of traffic in the same way that targeted blogs can.

Hitting the Target Area: Meet in the Middle

• Hitting this target area, letting your wants and the audiences’ wants influence what you write about, is the best approach.
• You get the satisfaction of sharing your experience in subjects that are of interest to you.
• Audiences get access to the information they want to read about.
• You will be able to build a much more steady, stable readership as a result of being able to hold influence over what subjects you blog about, since you can direct the flow of your blog to evenly cover an entire domain.
• You will be able to build your audience around a domain instead of a few keywords, which ultimately give you access to a broader audience.

What are your thoughts? Please drop a line.

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