Is Blogosphere a Graveyard of Ideas?

Do you realize how many blogs are available out there? I have lost track of the statistics, but I’m sure tens of thousands blogs are created every day. New voices, new ideas, new conversations.

I am worried that the blogosphere is turning into a graveyard of ideas.

The reasoning, simply, is that there are lots and lots of unrecognized voices out there. Brilliant ideas, interesting reads, all drowned within the noise of so many cats blog (i.e: blogs that just tell about what the blogger’s cat just ate, and such).

Some, hopefully, are indexed properly in search engines, waiting to be picked up by someone with the correct keyword. The rest, I believe, remain in the dark. This brings me into thinking that if you cared about your idea, it’s really important to be responsible about it. By responsible I mean that you must do your best to let people know about it, let conversations grow around it, let it stand the test of time under the scrutiny of your audiences.

Leaving your precious ideas in the hands of fate or (ahem) search engine indexes might not be the best plan to have.

If your idea is important to you, then there’s no other way but to learn how to let the rest of the world know. No, simply writing it in your blog is not equal to letting the rest of the world know. Brilliant idea tend to illuminate itself by default, but without proper marketing skill we had better prepare a new tombstone celebrating its tragic death.

It’s a huge world out there, the blogosphere. Most of them burial grounds. I hope your (and my) blog is out there doing crazy things to keep it alive and thus, negating the dark and gloomy atmosphere of the graveyard of ideas.

The First Step to Successful Blogging

Actually, this is a general rule for pretty much everything you wanted to be successful in. Applies perfectly to blogging, of course:

The first step to be successful is that you must have no problem believing in your dream.

That is all. Have a nice day, my kind readers.

What Our Heart Can Teach Us About Blogging

I am sure there are lots of things we can learn from our it-felt-warm-when-I-fall-in-love heart. But did you know that we can also learn a lot from our dude-I-pump-blood-everyday heart?

Here’s the story. I’m not that good in Biology, so I’ll keep it short.

We all know the amazing task about our heart. It must distribute blood to every other places inside our body, about 60 times a second or double that if you’re in the middle of an embarassing situation (like misspelling ‘embarrassing’). Blood, of course, carries oxygen and other important stuff that our cells need. To put it simply, we can’t live without a heart.

And, what does that have to do with blogging?

You see, sometimes blogging is like being a heart. One of the most important advice in blogging is that we are better off writing for our audience. We pump blood to them, distributing valuable materials and hope that someday it may touch someone’s soul.

But here’s the little secret of our heart:

Before it pumps blood to other parts of our body, it pumps blood to itself first.

This little secret is crucial. Just like any other part of our body, our heart needs blood as well. And so, with it being a very important organ, its survivability is of higher priority.

Now back to blogging. I firmly believe the value of writing for our audience. I strive for it. What worries me is that I might get trapped in that way of thinking, I ended up neglecting myself.

Learning from the story above, I’d say this:

Before we bring value to our audience, we must make sure that our writing enriches ourselves first.

Remember the heart.

Here’s How I Judge The Success of My Blog Post

Is the number of comments on a post indicative of the post’s popularity and success? Is it the traffic that comes to that post? Is it the number of trackbacks? Is it the fact that the post got dug by Digg or linked to from a popular traffic-driving site? Is who linked to your post part of your determination of a blog post’s success?

Those are from Lorelle’s Blog Challenge this week. And needless to say, each of those factors is a very valid success measurement of a blog post.

Well, but I have a problem here.

My blog is not well-known. I have small-to-nothing traffic.

In other words, if I were to use those factors to see whether my post is successful or not, then damn, I’m screwed up.

I’m not one to let myself get depressed of course, so here’s my own success measurement:

My post is successful when it manages to convey what I truly want to say from my heart.

With this, I can proudly say that I do have a bunch of successful posts. Yes, some (even most) of them aren’t that good in terms of bringing traffic or trackback or whatnot, but I’m happy reading them myself since they sound honest and true.

As per the worldly statistics and such, I think it’s more of a question on how I judge the success of my traffic-and-link building strategy.

And that, my friends, would be the question for another day.

The Worry-Free Way to Find Great Blogs to Read

Continuing The Worry-Free Blogging quest, now is the time to find blogs to read. As a reminder, here’s the two steps idea for Worry-Free Blogging:

1. Focus on creating valuable content.
2. Join the conversation.

Finding blogs to read is part of plan #2 on the list above. Let’s not delve further on plan #1 because we can easily find many articles written on this topic by people smarter than I am. For starters, here are some illuminating posts from Lorelle, Copyblogger, and Stephen Downes. Jakob Nielsen also had a good article that forces us to think whether we should create blog posts or articles.

Now that the first plan is covered (by others, fortunately), I can resume thinking about plan #2.