I was exploring about some online statistics and the increased rate of blooming blogs made me think about bloggers. Can we really call ourselves, "Bloggers"? Mmm... If we have and manage our own blog, we might start calling it ourselves eventhough we don't find what's blogging is in the first place. It will take time and effort to be recognized as a valuable blogger instead of being just the blogger who has a blog. What really made me think that, the people who known as bloggers misusing the idea behind blogging. Don't you have a blog yet? There are many free blogging platforms for you to start with. Start one today and you will be ready to call yourself a "Blogger". BUT?!
Bloggers are not of different or same kind, but unique with their personality and different personal attributes. You can come up with different names such as a Tech blogger, Internet Marketing blogger, Pet blogger, Pro blogger and so on. It defines you and what you have been blogging about for some extent. But the real deal is how your audience defines you. Have you thought about that? :) What has the better value ~ Is it you calling yourself a blogger or someone else identifying you as a blogger?
Stop Calling, Start Proving
Bloggers are still human beings. Bloggers do mistakes and can keep doing the same mistake over and over, unless they wanna start blogging better and successful in blogosphere. Eventhough you don't know what blogging really is, you can keep blogging and call yourself a blogger.
Eventhough you can categorize bloggers in to different types, I'd like to pick two types of bloggers right now.
● Bloggers who enjoy blogging
● Bloggers who blogging for direct or indirect benefits
If I ask bloggers whether you enjoy blogging or not, I can expect "YES" from almost all bloggers. We can't really say what's behind the blogging always, but we can identify when we read blogs that whether they are generously create value for their audience or trying to show off value in there.
If you ask me, I love bloggers who enjoy blogging. The thing is they are always creating value and generous enough when it comes to value creation. It's not about competition for them though most of them lead the competition. The value they create will return the favor.
Bloggers who expecting direct or indirect benefits might be creating the value for their audience, but starts to discourage by the fact that they are not getting what they expected. They expect more and more, and count on traffic, SEO measures, revenue and all sorts of tangible benefits they can gain instead of giving away. More of a complicated scenario in the long run :)
The numbers doesn't necessarily imply you are creating more value for your audience as nowadays there are many marketing strategies involved in blogging to make it possible. Still, the original and quality content is a primary factor which defines how much value you have created for your audience. Let your audience define what type of blogger you are. STOP calling and START proving it :)
Characteristics of
The thought starts to bug me to do a post which reflects some characteristics of people who call themselves a blogger. I don't know how true I am, but you can decide now whether I can call them bloggers or not. Let's talk about few characteristics and hopefully I believe it might add knowledge for bloggers and prevent misusing for some extent.
Eventhough you can categorize bloggers in to different types, I'd like to pick two types of bloggers right now.
● Bloggers who enjoy blogging
● Bloggers who blogging for direct or indirect benefits
If I ask bloggers whether you enjoy blogging or not, I can expect "YES" from almost all bloggers. We can't really say what's behind the blogging always, but we can identify when we read blogs that whether they are generously create value for their audience or trying to show off value in there.
If you ask me, I love bloggers who enjoy blogging. The thing is they are always creating value and generous enough when it comes to value creation. It's not about competition for them though most of them lead the competition. The value they create will return the favor.
Blogging for Benefits
Bloggers who expecting direct or indirect benefits might be creating the value for their audience, but starts to discourage by the fact that they are not getting what they expected. They expect more and more, and count on traffic, SEO measures, revenue and all sorts of tangible benefits they can gain instead of giving away. More of a complicated scenario in the long run :)
The numbers doesn't necessarily imply you are creating more value for your audience as nowadays there are many marketing strategies involved in blogging to make it possible. Still, the original and quality content is a primary factor which defines how much value you have created for your audience. Let your audience define what type of blogger you are. STOP calling and START proving it :)
Characteristics of Bloggers
The thought starts to bug me to do a post which reflects some characteristics of people who call themselves a blogger. I don't know how true I am, but you can decide now whether I can call them bloggers or not. Let's talk about few characteristics and hopefully I believe it might add knowledge for bloggers and prevent misusing for some extent.
You Don't Express Yourself
Blogging is a media to communicate with people. Now blogging is just not about writing. You can communicate through your voice, videos with more visual impact and there are more methodologies you can make use of. I'm not gonna talk about the informational content as anyone can have them from anywhere, placed on their blogs. But who made it possible?
What's the point of having someone else's content on a professionally designed blog while having so called passionate and expert bloggers behind it? :) Experts can't write their own content? They might getting traffic for someone else's content which has been published without an explicit permission of original author, but it's not blogging. Now would you think they can call themselves, bloggers? It's killing the meaning of blogging and reflects that they are not dedicated bloggers but content scrappers.
I just wanna ask you, can you call them bloggers? Purge the content you have got from other resources and start doing it by yourself if you wanna eligible to be a blogger. Express yourself folks :)
It's Not What You Know
Do content generates automatically? NO! There is always a person authors each and every content. Bloggers do write, let their voice out or create videos if they are capable of. You have freedom of speech online, but you need to use it effectively. You may always hear that you need to be yourself on your blog and of course, that will depict your personality all over your blog. Eventhough you write your own content, the question is whether you express what you know or what you think you know?
There's a BIG difference. Let's take my recent post about HootSuite as an example. You can either take a look at its features and go through HootSuite help articles to see how could it be a wonderful tool for people to make use of. That's fairly an easy way to research and you have all information you need for a new blog post, plus save you more time too. But if there is a mismatch with what it claims and what it really does, you gonna be in a real trouble as you haven't done what you intended to do. Faking hurts :)
Else you can take some time to explore its features by yourself and use it personally to see how it helps you to manage your Social Media accounts as it claims. It will take more time to research but when you write about it, you know exactly whether it does its job as it claims. You will able to point out what could be possibly go wrong with it or what other features that can make use of. Even if someone really start using it after reading your post, it proves that you have done your homework well. Also you are ready to address any kind of questions as you have been using it.
The best thing about writing what you know is that the readers can see whether you have done your homework or not. It improves trust on you and they start to believe that you are something they can count on. That's where the new and strong relationships starts to grow around you and your audience wouldn't hesitate to recommend you.
Now, this is not something that can identify at first sight but the bloggers who fake it will get into hot water. Would you rather prefer a blogger who express what they know or what they think they know? Who would be the one to reward as a blogger? :)
Now, this is not something that can identify at first sight but the bloggers who fake it will get into hot water. Would you rather prefer a blogger who express what they know or what they think they know? Who would be the one to reward as a blogger? :)
You are Not Passionate
You might call you are passionate enough but your audience is always there to determine how much dedicated you are depends on the tremendous value you provide on your blog. Passionate bloggers count on blogging first and touch other aspects afterwards.
It's true that blogging open up more opportunities and can make a living out of it too. Bloggers have things to aware such as SEO to deliver their content to right people. They need to aware of blog traffic to measure performance and improve experience in future. But once they obsess with those factors instead of the primary goal, which is blogging, things gonna change. The passion will broken into pieces.
If you are not focus on the primary goal on your blog, you gonna do something wrong. You need to aware of the blogging on your blog first and then other type of efforts. I have few questions for you,
○ Can you recall a moment that you stop by on a blog and distracted by advertisements?
○ Can you remember a post you read on a blog that has lot of keywords and makes no sense?
○ Can you recall a blog that always ask something from you instead of giving you anything?
○ Can you remember stopping by on a blog with 1000s of subscribers or higher PageRank and wondering how with such a low-quality content?
Can you... Let's STOP ;) Now I think you get what I mean. Such incidents reminds that still people out there who focus on showing off, instead of giving the value. Can you call such bloggers, the passionate bloggers?
I'm asking you - Would you think they preserve the true meaning of blogging? Still, can we call them bloggers?
If you have been doing such mistakes as a blogger, yet it's not too late :) You can take action, make a change and start afresh with a new begining for a wonderful blogging journey :)
Now, I'm calling you for action. Do you think such characteritics have been killing the meaning of blogging? What are the other types of mistakes that people do and kill the true meaning behind blogging?
