There are posts all over the place about how using lists is one of the best ways to craft a popular blog post. Even at Podcamp Boston 3 this past weekend, Chris Brogan, made an entire point of using lists to make popular posts. In fact, while writing this I just Stumbled on a blog post called “7 Unmissable Tips For Writing Great Content For The Web.” Look at point number 1: “Lists Work Like a Charm.” Lists are everywhere!

Before I go on in my rant about why I don’t like list-based blog posts, let me be crystal clear in saying that I do recognize that lists work. I am in no way claiming that they are not a great way to get popular posts. If they didn’t work then their wouldn’t be a list featured on the front of just about every Cosmopolitan cover. (note that there are two lists featured on this cover)

My dislike for them, therefore, does not lay in the results they achieve. My issue is more ideological, or philosophical, or some other sort of -ical.

So why don’t I like lists? The answer can be found within the reason why so many other people do like them. As Abhijeet Mukherjee, author of the post I mention above, says:

The primary reason behind the success of list posts is that most people like to scan, and if it’s interesting enough, read it in full and maybe leave a comment. So, a list post that is carefully crafted with bold headings does a good job as far as grabbing the attention goes.“

Lists are great for scanning. But that’s it. Mukherjee indicates that lists allow a reader to scan and read deeper into what he’s interested in. I disagree. 99% of the time, there is nothing deeper to read in a list post. Therein lies the core of my dislike for them: they are educationally shallow.

Hopefully right now there are half of you booing and half of you cheering. If this is happening then we can have a list/no-list slugfest in the comments of this post and all get riled up. Before that happens, though, I will go into a little more detail about my viewpoint.

Personally, I like reading posts that delve deeply into the subject. I very rarely get any benefit from list post because they do not go deeply enough into the subject matter. If you write a blog post on the “10 best social networks for marketers,” I will learn which ones you like, but I will not know the details of how you formed your opinion. That means that more often than not, I will then look for a deep post on one or two networks that I gleaned from your list. That is just more work for me.

The second reason I do not like lists is really an offshoot of the first. Because lists do not delve deeply into the subject matter about which they are concerned, the writer doesn’t need to know anything about the subject matter. I do not know a thing about Linux, but I could go to Google, pull a random ten Linux-focused sites I find and craft I great looking post called “The Top Ten Sites About Linux.” Think of all the people I would mislead. Conversely, I could not write a post about why one specific site is the best Linux site on the web. That depth of analysis requires knowledge of the subject matter and therefore is much more difficult to fake.

My solution to this lists-work-but-I-don’t-like-them problem is to create a “Deep List”. I have not yet done one of these, but the idea is:

1. Make your list (e.g. “5 best social media marketing campaigns”)
2. Before you post your list, write a blog post for each of your five points going into detail about each one.
3. Publish each of your Deep Posts first.
4. Then post the list with each element of the list linking to it’s respective deeper analysis.

That way, you go deep, provide real value and expertise, but still get a list-based post with which you can rocket to the top of all your favorite social media sites. You get to use the list as a tool, but still provide value to those of us that want more than a surface-level understanding of things.

Welcome to PandemicBlog. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed so that you can stay connected. Thanks for visiting!

This is the first post of an upcoming series inspired by Barry Schwartz’s book, The Paradox of Choice. Return in the next days for more.

Several sources discuss various ways of increasing not only the traffic, but also return visitors to your blog. Active participation in social networks, quality content, and increasing friend count are just a few.

Most bloggers have tried out these strategies, but not all of them are satisfied by the results. Indeed these tactics are not a guarantee of returning readers.

In blogging, it is the small details that make the difference.

A blog post should not only concentrate on its main body to provide quality information, but also on the final impression it leaves. This can increase the returning visitors to your blog in ways that you didn’t expect.

Leaving a good impression

Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize-winning psychologist showed, that what we remember about the pleasurable quality of our past experiences

is almost entirely determined by two things:

1. how the experiences felt when they were at their peak (best or worst)
2. how they felt when they ended.

This “peak-end” rule of Kahneman’s is what we use to summarize the experience, and then when we rely on that summary later to remind ourselves of how the experience felt.

Peak Moments of Your Blog Post

Of course the major peak moment when reading a blog is the content of the main body of the post.
Depending on the quality of the content, the text leaves a negative or positive impression to the reader. This trace will play a fundamental role on persuading the reader to return to the blog or even subscribe. It is a logical conclusion that quality content means returning visitors.

The second peak moment is located at the end of the post. This is where you summarize your thoughts, pose your questions and invite the reader to participate in the discussion.

A very common mistake when writing an article, is that we mostly concentrate on the main content (the first peak moment of the blog) and we disregard the final impression it leaves (the second peak moment).

Conclusion

The belief that the impression your blog post leaves is also based on your final remarks, is not just a result of Daniel Kahneman’s psychological hypothesis.

Notice how you scan other blog posts:

Do you read the whole post word by word?

Do you comment on the questions posed by the author?

Spending more time on the final part of the blog post is much more important than we actually think.

• it leaves a final good impression to the reader,
• it shows that you followed a structured argumentation concluding to your remarks,
• it shows that you value the time of your readers

Not only your regular readers will appreciate this little extra effort, but also casual readers will recognize the value of your work.

One of the most known ways of getting regular traffic to your blog is writing daily posts. It is written in bold letters in the blogging bible that daily posts increase:

• the traffic to your blog
• your presence in the blogosphere
• your presence in search engines
• your readers
• your reputation

Check some of the popular blogs out there and you will see that daily posting is a very common, successful practice. Robert Scoble writes a couple of posts each day, Seth Godin too. But daily posts also have some negative effects on your blog which you should take into consideration.

1. Daily posts mean hasty readers. Writing a new article every day can give the impression that you don’t invest much time writing it. Why should others then spend much time reading it?
2. Daily posts mean low quality. This is a logical result of daily posts. Do you really have something interesting to say everyday? Most bloggers who write daily usually reiterate information and news that are already out there.
3. Daily posts mean fewer subscribers. Direct result of the above points is that your blog gets less subscribers. People don’t want to have a cluttered mail or RSS readers…especially when posts repeat themselves and don’t have much to say.Although I like Mashable, I unsubscribed from their feed. They post 10+ posts each day and that’s just discouraging for me.
4. Daily posts mean fewer comments. Let your readers think about what you write. Sending an avalanche of thoughts and information doesn’t give the user time to think things over. Blogging is a communication medium, it’s not an one-way monologue.
5. Daily posts mean pressure. It is a great time hog to write an article each day - even if it is just a short text. Why do you think most blogs are abandoned after a couple of months?
6. Daily posts don’t guarantee success. Success comes with quality, interaction and innovation. Say something new once a week and you will build a steady readership in no time.

The other side of daily posts

Don’t fully disregard the power of daily posts though. If you are a new blogger, daily posts can very quickly boost your presence online. During your first blogging steps the community doesn’t know who you are and what you’re writing about.So start with daily posts, let readers get to know you better and then relax and concentrate on quality. Readers will just keep on coming.

There are two major factors that define the success and popularity of a blog post: traffic and comments. The more traffic an article receives, the more comments are submitted - and the other way around. Articles with 50+ comments certainly imply that the content is of high quality. But, these highly commented articles are also carrying a heavy burden: They sacrifice productive communication on the altar of pageviews and traffic.Indeed, an increasing number of comments can act as an obstacle to the interaction of the community and the development of the whole discussion. Let’s first see why this happens and then get into how to improve your blog so that readers are encouraged to read and comment on the article.

Users’ Reading Habits

Jakob Nielsen, the usability specialist, has conducted a series of studies on the way users read online. His conclusion: they don’t.

People rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences. In research on how people read websites we found that 79 percent of our test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 percent read word-by-word.”

Blog visitors, don’t scan only the actual content of the site, but also the comments. When the reader notices a great amount of comments, she will certainly not read them one by one, she will scan them. The amount and length of comments also defines how fast the reader will actually scan the comments.

Users’ Commenting Habits

Take a step back and notice how you comment on other blogs. Where would you be more likely to leave a comment?

• in a great article with just 5 comments?or
• in a great article with 67 comments?

Leaving a comment on an article with just 5 comments gives the commentator the feeling that his contribution will be noticed and taken into consideration - not only from the administrator but from other readers too. A comment among 67 others seems like one more grain of sand at the beach. That’s why blog promotional strategies suggest being the first to comment on a popular blog. Because readers usually scan only the first comments.

How to Attract More (Productive) Blog Comments

There are several ways to assist your community in reading the content of the comments and contributing more productive ideas:

• Separate your comments in categories. Trackbacks and pingbacks to an article are by default counted as comments. Instead of having a big block of mixed comments and trackbacks, customize your blog to separate trackbacks from comments.
• Advise your community to be more productive. Very often a large amount of the article’s comments are thank you comments, where readers just say how much they enjoyed the post. This is of course welcome, but certainly doesn’t promote the discussion. So, why don’t you install a small rating plugin and write a small note before the comment block saying something like: If you liked this post give it a rating or submit it to your favorite social site. Use the comments below to start a productive discussion about the topic.
• Don’t answer each comment separately. Wait a day or two and then reply to all the comments submitted so far. This will significantly decrease the total number of comments.
• Highlight your own comments. Highlighting your own comments is a very good way to increase the “scannability” of your comment block. Readers will be able to scan the post easier and it will also be less tiresome for the eye. Either use this simple hack or download this plugin.

Blogging is about creating interactions; it is about developing a discussion and not having passive readers. So give your readers the tools and possibility to react to your posts and promote interesting discussions. How do you promote interaction in your blog?

More questions than answers regarding the acceptance of plagiarism in social media.

The other day, I visited my favorite social news site, Mixx, and saw something that sparked a lot of questions in my head. It was an article, quite popular on Mixx in the few hours it had existed, that had an interesting title. The truly interesting part of the title was that it was only one word off from the exact title of an entry on this blog less than one month ago. Furthermore, the title structure (exactly the same between the two posts) was very specific. The title-similarity alone got my attention. I was further sucked in when I noticed the writer of the new article on Mixx had read (or at least voted for) the article on our blog when it came out last month and, yet, he had not even mentioned the original post in his new post. No link, no citing, no credit given even to the idea what-so-ever.

Intrigued, I read the post and left a comment expressing my confusion with the forgotten link or possible plagiarism (in addition to providing more standard commentary on the content of the post). Since the title and main thrust of the content was largely similar to the original post on our blog I really wanted desire feedback or at least explanation from the new writer.

While this is a predictable, emotional response (”he’s ripping off my partner’s ideas!”) it is not worth giving real weight to. The actual interesting part of this whole episode is not how I reacted initially, but the question “how I should react in the future?” It seems there may be some changing in the definition of plagiarism as related to social media. The aforementioned unanswered questions that burst into my head are:

1. To be honest, I liked the new post. I thought it added value to my morning and was definitely worth a read. Do these facts remove the need of the author to give credit to where credit is due? Is credit due?
2. It would seem to me that if I wrote a new book on sales/negotiation and titled it “Getting to an Affirmative”, I’d have some credit to give and a link to include (and possibly some royalties to pay). Is the analogous situation valid? If not, why not? If so, is this same rule not true with social media?
3. Occasionally some blogs or social news sites will tackle the same issues, ideas and content at the same time. This is an unavoidable fact of having 60 million blogs in this world. Does that mean “plagiarism” is no longer a problem in social media? Or has the rule merely gotten more lax?
4. If the rules have loosened, where do they stand now?
5. In the theoretical sense, if our population growth and internet usage continued to increase without bounds, we would eventually reach a point where there were identical (or nearly identical) posts being written by unrelated people concurrently. That wouldn’t be plagiarism as neither writer would have seen the other’s post prior to writing. Are we there already?

In the particular case, the author of the questionable blog post explained the genesis of his post to me in such a way that convinced me that he did not mean to plagiarize in any way. Does his good intent clear his name?

Personally I think the “plagiarism line” is definitely moving and re-hashing people’s content is becoming more acceptable due to increased acceptance in the community. I would guess these pressures come from the ever-increasing number of posts and the rather finite bits of news in any given day. If this is true, the biggest question that every one of us needs to consider is “is this changing definition plagiarism a step forward or a step back?”

I’m not so sure I have an answer to that one yet.

One of the best sites you can join to connect with other bloggers is Blog Catalog. PandemicBlog has had the good fortune of being able to sit down with Tony Berkman and Oscar Tijerina of Blog Catalog to discuss their past, their new widget and the future of the site itself. This is the second interview in a series of interviews which PandemicBlog will be conducting with movers and shakers in the worlds of social media and marketing.

For those out there who are new to the game, give me the one sentence description of Blog Catalog.

BlogCatalog is the fastest-growing member-driven social community for bloggers.

Isn’t BlogCatalog a lot like MyBlogLog? How are you different? How are you better?

BlogCatalog’s purpose is to help bloggers connect, share ideas, and grow through group and general discussions. It also provides a variety of tools, features, and widgets to help bloggers. So our emphasis is on building a community and helping bloggers rather than an interactive volume-driven blog directory. We also screen blogs to minimize splogs, spammers, and questionable content.

What are your vital stats? How long have you been around? How much have you grown? How many users do you have?

When Angie Alaniz and I acquired it last year, BlogCatalog was a basic blog directory with a heavy emphasis on adult content and splogs. Our team cleaned up the membership and began integrating robust social network features such as a general discussion board, groups, and neighborhood feeds. Since then, we’ve added a number of tools and campaigns that strengthen the community and help bloggers improve their blogs. Right now, BlogCatalog has approximately 100,000 blogs indexed. More than 15,000 are submitted for review every month. Traffic, in the same period, has gone from 30,000 a month to well over 4 million.

We hear you’ve got a shiny new widget. Tell us about it?

Yes, that’s right. We just released a News Feed widget. It is a powerful little tool, that when added to your blog automatically displays what you are doing on social networks.

The widget is a member-driven application. Bloggers were telling us that they wanted to streamline networking, stay up to date with friends across the Web, and share their own social network activities without having to visit eight to twelve networks. So the widget was a logical next step in that it made this information customizable and portable. Portability is the next evolutionary step in social networks. People want to manage when, where, and how they share data. This widget helps do exactly that.

So it’s like social network cross-pollination! What is the biggest benefit of this for the average blogger?

The biggest benefit for most bloggers is that it allows your friends to know what you’ve said on Twitter, what article you’ve submitted to Digg, what site you discovered on StumbleUpon, or what song you’ve listened to on Last.fm where ever you place the widget. This also allows them to connect with you on Twitter, Digg the article you submitted, check out the site you stumbled, or discover that you have some of the same musical interests. It makes sense because people tend to connect online with people who they share interests with.

How many people have begun to use the widget since launch? Is it too early to ask?

It’s too early to say. However, what you might find interesting is that many bloggers have already found that the widget can be used for a number of additional applications. Some bloggers are using it for a recommendation tool, some bloggers are using it to update one blog across multiple blogs, some are using it to increase their opportunity for a viral post and some have set it up in a way that only displays their affiliate marketing links. It’s become their product recommendation engine. It’s surprisingly versatile in ways we never considered; every day, different bloggers are trying to find new uses for it. We originally looked at the widget as a way for bloggers to make their social network activities public on their blogs. No matter how you use it, it adds real value to a blog.

The widget connects with your social dashboard on BlogCatalog, right?

Yes. Except, rather than share information about all your friends, it only shares your activities. Unless, you point to your friends post, link, or StumbleUpon, Digg, etc. submission.

When the widget is placed on a blog will it increase page load times?

Not that we are aware of, at least not in any noticeable amount.

You mention on your website that this widget will help things to go viral. How will it help?

As I mentioned, if you submit an article to Digg, anyone who subscribes to your widget or sees the widget on a blog or site might Digg that article. Even more amazing, if your friend Diggs it and also has the widget, then all his or her friends might also Digg it. That’s a very powerful way to share information.

Isn’t the “viral potential” something that is still very dependent on the number of people following an individual? If I don’t have a large community of friends then just because I Digg something doesn’t mean that it will now go viral.

There are never any guarantees that something will go viral. However, the size of your friend network or number of blog readers is not part of that equation. We know several bloggers that have very few friends and readers by comparison to top ranked bloggers. Yet, these bloggers are read by top ranked bloggers. So sometimes it’s not about the quantity of people you know, but the quality of people you know.

Other than the potential for more efficient viral spread, do you think the widget has potential for marketers to reach consumers in new ways? Have you thought about that at all?

I suppose there are applications, but we really didn’t develop the widget for marketing purposes. We developed it to help bloggers.

What’s next for BlogCatalog in general? In terms of widgets?

What would you like to see next? … Maybe we’ll do that!

Is there anything that could make you leave/abandon BlogCatalog? (a tough one, we know)

There was a time last year when I was speaking with several potential investors, including venture capitalists, about the possibility of making BlogCatalog the next bright and shiny new object. But I decided to pass because it seemed to me that every proposal would require us to move away from our core values. Maybe one day BlogCatalog will be the darling of the Internet, but right now I like the idea of being a diamond in the rough. It gives us the opportunity to stay focused on helping bloggers and working to enhance their experience as opposed to always thinking about ourselves. It’s more fun our way, don’t you think?

_____________________________________________________

We’d like to thank the entire BlogCatalog team for agreeing to this interview and sharing their insight, history and vision. It will be very exciting to see how this new feed widget affects social media as a whole and to watch Blog Catalog grow in the coming year.

Keep an eye out for future interviews from the social media world.

There are countless guides about increasing the popularity of your blog. More or less, they are all concentrating on socializing, participating and of course creating quality content. Indeed, these are the most direct methods of getting your work noticed. These techniques are more or less taken for granted for everyone who has been in the blogosphere for a while. But there are also more indirect, more subtle ways to increase your popularity. One of them is the way you manage to combine your blog with your persona, your avatar.

The Avatar

The avatar is your face in cyberspace. It represents you in the networks in which you participate, it even says something about you: if you have humor, if you like cartoons, if you have artistic tendencies, what combination of chromosomes you have. It is only natural that you spend some time choosing this avatar. After all this is the first impression you leave.

A more wise, careful selection of your avatar can significantly boost your position in the networks in which you participate and, consequently, the popularity of your blog.

Let’s first see why and then concentrate on how.

Pavlov’s Dog

Ivan Pavlov’s famous experiment with his dog showed how animals (and humans) can be trained to respond in a certain way to a particular stimulus. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that people just react on signals without any critical thinking, but there are studies that prove that people tend to categorize objects and information. One simple reason is that it helps them manage their narrow memory scope. The study of social representations is just one theory explaining this natural human function.

In simpler words, our mind combines…

…logos with products…



…ideals with colors…



…dressing styles with music…

..and avatars with blogs.

That’s why if you make a very good selection of an avatar, it will help you increase your authority and your popularity.

How To Choose an Avatar

So your purpose when choosing an avatar is to combine it with your blog. When people see your avatar, they should immediately think of your blog. There are two main ways to do that:

Consistency

Be consistent. When you choose your avatar, use it in every network you participate. This doesn’t necessary mean using your blog logo. It can be the style of your blog, or its colors, even the type of images you use in your blog. Be creative. But when you choose this avatar, use it everywhere.

Mark Dykeman’s avatar is a very good example. His blog is called broadcasting-brain and his avatar stays on topic. I’ve seen him in at least 4 social networks (digg, mixx, SU, Sphinn) and he always uses the same avatar. After a while, the name of his avatar becomes irrelevant. The image is doing all the talking.

Difference

Try to be different. Choose an avatar, that draws attention. Remember, an avatar is your face and a mirror to your personality; you don’t want to look like everybody else.

Wouldn’t you click at Rhea’s avatar, to check her profile? Wouldn’t you go to her blog?

Conclusion

We sometimes don’t pay too much attention to details and choosing an avatar might not seem that noteworthy, but it is one of those small details that can really make a difference.

To prove my point here’s a question for you:

Can you guess whose avatar is this? (click on it to find out)

This is a guest post by robojiannis. He writes at changemod.com about social networks and the evolution of the web.

On February 19^th I posted an article called “The Paradox of Self-Promotion with Social Media.” I was honored by the success of the article. The post made the front page of Digg, became popular on Mixx, and sat atop a couple of keyword lists on StumbleUpon. This attention was valuable not just because of the traffic driven to this blog but because of the conversations which resulted.

I have spoken with many people via email and social sites about the paradox of self-promotion. Agreements were offered, disagreements put forth, and from these discussions I realized that the original article is not actually complete. Or perhaps it is complete, but engenders another question. That question is:

“When do I stop promoting myself?”

This question is just as important as any of the questions tackled in the original post. In the first post I argued that self-promotion in the social media world is not only possible, but necessary in the early stages of your blog/video/website. But what did I mean by “early stages?” At what point are your done with the early stages? Unfortunately, there is not sign post along the road to give you an incontrovertible landmark by which to travel. To know where you are in your journey, you are going to have to experiment a little. These experiments are not hard, they just require some willpower on your part.

But why bother to experiment, why not just keep promoting all of your own stuff? This is also a valid question. The answer is two-fold. First, self-promotion can be time consuming. The labor might not break your back, but think of all the time you could save if your readers and fans had assumed the mantle of promotion for you. Second, if you continue to rigorously submit all of your own content to sites like Stumble, Digg, Reddit, and Sphinn then you lose the possibility that a more powerful user will submit your content. Think about it, MrBabyMan might have submitted your awesome new video to Digg and that would have counted for a lot in both viewers and chance of reaching the front page, but if he were the second to digg it after you, you would have lost all that potential.

So when do you stop promoting yourself? When do you perform this little test? Right now. If you are anything other than brand-spankin’-new, then take a chance and don’t promote you next post/video at all. You won’t know if anyone likes you enough to submit you to social sites if you don’t give them a chance. I see so many people submitting their own content to every site right after they publish it. I too have been guilty of this. So take your next post, suck it up, be willing to forego the 100 stumble visitors that you would have gotten, and see what happens. If the experiment fails miserably and after 3-4 days nobody submits your content anywhere, then you know you have more work to do. Go back to your content creation, work on building subscribers and fans, and go back to helping yourself along by promoting yourself. But don’t forget to take a chance once a month and see where you stand. You never know, next month you might have twice as many subscribers and realize that TheNanny612, Zaibatsu, and DoshDosh all think your stuff is great. You wont know if you don’t stop for a second and take a look.

The Pros and Cons of On-Blog Advertising

It’s a funny thing sometimes, consulting for our client’s blogs. Often, our clients express identical opinions and questions to those we’ve expressed internally at one time or another. Specifically when it comes to the debate around on-blog advertising, I often find myself telling clients “you wouldn’t believe how much we understand your position right now”. While sounding ’salesy’, it couldn’t be more true.

Running a company blog, you’re bound to think at one time or another “hmmmmm. Maybe this blog can help the early stage of the business by generating ad revenue!” Before immediately dialing up Google (if you still have dial-up that is) and jumping on the Adsense bandwagon, I’d suggest that you take a moment to consider some pros and cons of having ads on your blog.

Pros:

1. Ads provide additional revenue for your business. Especially if you’re a self-funded start up, squeezing money out of every opportunity might be your M.O. and blog ads can definitely help in this area. For example, at an entrepreneurs meetup event on Tuesday, I met a blogger who was making $5k/month from just the Google ads on her blog and her other ad services did even better (she gets 12 Million page views a month). Clearly, if you have the traffic, you can can make the ca$h with very little effort.
2. Ads can provide readers with additional resources. Don’t have a resources/library/learn/etc link on your blog where readers can go to find additional related info? Luckily, well-targeted ads (provided through a good service), can benefit your readers by providing additional, related resources to augment your content.
3. Ads can put your readers at ease. While initially counter-intuitive, I personally think this point has great merit. On-blog ads are not common on most company blogs. So by having ads, you are subconsciously making your company blog appear more like a regular, non-company blog, thereby putting the readers in a different mindset. If the company blog also provides great content (aka the blog is useful in its own right), the presence of ads can have a similar effect on the readers as viral marketing videos have on their viewers. By putting the blog readers at ease, they are more likely to let down their “I’m being sold to” defenses and consider your content more fairly and openly.

Cons:

1. Ads clutter your blog. Many blogs are already so cluttered by widgets and unwieldy blogrolls that ads might not be the main problem in this area. However, adding ads to even a clean blog can cause the blog to become cluttered and unwelcoming to the eye. Even if you think your blog exists solely to promote your business, the reason people come to your blog is to read, correct? Don’t lose sight of this; readability is of the utmost importance.
2. Without proper planning you can accidentally advertise competitors. Even with a well-targeted ad service, it may be hard to ensure your competitors don’t get onto your site to steal your readers/business. Unless you’re extremely diligent in babysitting your ads, that new destination URL your competitor created last week isn’t going to be blocked by your ad service. Before you realize it, your competitors may have taken precious loyalty and attention away from your brand. Is the revenue stream provided by the ads worth undermining the business the blog was created to promote?
   
3. Ads look unprofessional. People have different expectations of a company blog than other blogs. A professional look and feel is often one of those expectations and ads detract from this professional look. Do you want to enter a competitive situation against a competitor that looks more professional than you in any way?

As you can see from the layout of this blog, we’ve chosen to remain ad-free. Most companies have more to gain from improving their consumer touch points than from advertising on their blog. If the world-at-large has an exceptional experience with your company blog, that can’t be a bad thing. Think about who your readers are and how they will react to ads on your blog. Then apply the Golden Rule.

If you need help figuring out whether your business can support ads, I’ve created a flow chart that takes you through the high-level questions quickly. Points in the chart that require further clarification are marked by purple numbers and will be discussed below.

1. By “probably fine” I mean that I’d be willing to bet it wouldn’t have an adverse affect on the success of your blog. Clearly some people will prefer no ads in all situations, but I view these people (myself included) as the fringe.
2. “Significant Revenue” could be clarified further by saying “revenue that would have a significant impact on the success of your business”. Significant, here, refers to business needs, not some subjective measure of dollar amounts.
3. Web-based companies often use their blog as the main way to reach the online community. If the blog is the main way people interact with your brand, meaning your company hasn’t begun to utilize other interactive online avenues, I believe ads are not worth the ‘Cons’ they bring with them.
4. As outlined in the ‘Cons’ section above, ads in many cases can drive business away and otherwise decrease your conversion rate. The ‘cost’ I’m referring to is any lost business caused indirectly or directly by these ‘Cons.’

Clearly, putting ads on a company blog is an involved decision. Our experience speaking to clients going through this exact decision has provided us with insights that I’ve attempted to aggregate here. I hope my thoughts help anyone going through this decision process.

Any opinions and insights are welcome.

INTRODUCTION

Social media is a beautiful thing. The internet is finally living up to its potential as the first truly democratic medium. The traditional gatekeepers (to use a Seth Godin term) of mass-media no longer control the flow of information. In fact, I would argue that the term “flow” of information will quickly fade into our linguistic past. Web 2.0 has introduced us all to the “currents” of information. Things are far less linear than they used to be. On the new web–the social web–information is carried on numerous currents, moving back and forth, and changing at the whim of immense social forces. This fundamental change in the mechanics of the dissemination of information has engendered, and is further propelled by, the evolution of social media. Entertainment can now be created by anybody and shared with everybody. The relative worth of a news story can now be voted upon by anyone who wishes to participate. It has never been easier to report on the news, to assert one’s opinion, or to spark controversy with unparalleled tools of demagoguery. The web is now a social creature.

This new social creature has rules. If you are a blogger, a user of the myriad social websites, or a plain old internet jockey, then you know these rules already. They combine to form a sort of codex of etiquette for the social media world. In fact, the blogoshpere is already rife with the proto-”Miss Manners” books of the social media age. You don’t have to look very hard to find lists of tips like:

1. If you want to contact a blogger about featuring you, make sure you subscribe to them first. Read their stuff so you get a feel for who they are. Comment intelligently on their posts over the weeks that you are getting to know them. Only after you have built a rapport can you then approach them.
2. Do not spam people. It will get you banned.
3. Always respond to people who comment on your blog posts. This helps foster a relationship and will help increase subscribers.

Are these not the “Men should stand when a woman enters the room” of the digital age?

THE PROBLEM

This new social web and the etiquette evolving within it have been a fascination of mine for some time. I guess you could say that it’s one of the reasons I do what I do. Of particular fascination to me is the paradox of self-promotion. One of the major rules of social media is “don’t promote yourself.” It is enforced with varying degrees of severity in different communities, and there are certainly places like MySpace where self-promotion is the apparent modus operandi. But when it comes to tools like Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Del.icio.us, Mixx, Sphinn, and others, the paradox becomes much more apparent. In many ways, it appears to be the digital extension of the real-world impoliteness of talking about one’s self. As my father always told me, “Don’t brag. Let your actions do the talking.” Wise words. However, the sheer enormity of the internet presents a problem with this way of thinking. Here’s my definition of the problem.

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The Paradox of Self-Promotion with Social Media:

Social media generally frowns on self-promotion, in many cases admonishing outright those who practice it. But with the sheer numbers of new videos, posts, sites, pictures, and stories appearing each and every day, self-promotion is a necessity for anyone starting out and hoping to gain any sort of foothold.

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THE SOLUTION

I assert that self-promotion is vital to the launch of any new social media endeavor. Whether a marketer or an individual, whether starting a blog or making videos, you have to be your own #1 fan and evangelist. There are plenty of people out there who will love your content, but you have to help them notice it. There is nothing wrong with this, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. However, there are some things you can do to help obfuscate the paradox and take those vital steps to gaining a foothold in the wild west of the internet.

1. Don’t Just Promote Yourself: I am starting with the most obvious one on purpose. I met someone on a forum the other day who was asking for people to Stumble his blog. I looked at his blog and then checked out his Stumble profile. His Stumble account was two months old (about as old as his blog) and in that time he had only Stumbled 27 pages. All 27 pages were his own blog posts. If he wants to use Stumble as a self-promotion tool then he better start acting like a real stumbler and promote the pages of others in addition to his own content. The same goes for any social bookmarking, news, or voting site. If you are trying to use Digg to get your blog noticed, you have to Digg other things as well. Embrace the tools and become a real user. This will not only increase your power as a user, but will vastly increase the potential for making friends and connections who will be more likely to vote on what you submit. I have even read some articles saying that you should not submit any of your own material for the first two months of your account. While I don’t think there are any hard and fast rules, I think it is very important to commit time and energy to your social media tools. USE the services, don’t ABUSE them.
2. Pick Your Battles: There are more social sites than I can count on my fingers and toes. Hell, there are even more than I could count if I used your fingers and toes as well. While it is certainly a good idea to have sharing links to at least five on them on your blog, you really need to pick 2-3 to begin your self-promotion work. As I said in #1, you have to be a real user and vote for more than your own stuff. But, you can’t be a real user of more than three of these sites and still have much of a life left to do whatever it is that you want to promote in the first place. I know this because I tried to run my business while building multiple accounts and I cracked like an eggshell. Hopefully, when you have gained a loyal fan/reader/user/friend base, you will have plenty of people who can share your best stuff on the sites you are not on. Don’t spread yourself too thin.
3. The Golden Ratio: I have a friend over at Mixx who says he has found that he can submit one of his own posts for every ten other things he submits without being seen as “spammy.” This is his golden ratio. I have another friend at Mixx whose ratio is more like 1:2. He submits his own stuff all the time and no one seems to care. What’s his secret? I have no idea. The important thing to realize is that you will have your own golden ratio. There are many factors to take into account such as: how many friends you have, what topics your content deals with, etc… You must experiment. Start with at least 1:10 and see if you can work your way down from there. My ratios are often more like 1:20 on Mixx and 1:40 on StumbleUpon. But that’s just because I spend a lot of time reading other bloggers and I like those sites, so I am naturally submitting a lot of things.
4. Stop Shouting: Almost every social site has some form of the “shout.” Whatever it’s called on your site of choice, it is the way you can send a little message to other users that you are connected to, and I think it is the most abused tool in the social media world. I don’t care who you are, you cannot be so good at scrubbing the net that everything you find is worth sharing with everyone you know. Shouts work best when used in moderation. There are people on Digg who send me ten shouts a day. Multiply that by 10 friends and I have long ago reached my overload point. I have switched off. I don’t even look at shouts any more. The biggest favor you can do for yourself (especially when you are still submitting your own content from time to time) is to reserve your shouts for very special things. Make your shouts mean something because people are very good at noticing which of their friends seem to shout anything and everything.
5. Study Your Playing Field: Some sites (such as Newsvine) say in their Terms of Use that users are not supposed to submit their own content. Other sites (such as Sphinn) welcome the submission of your own material and even encourage it because it allows for more accuracy in titling and tagging. The important thing is to know your sites. Know the rules (and the community sentiment) toward self-promotion for each site you use. This bit of work on the front end will save you a lot of headache down the line.
6. Make Friends: I know it is hard to believe, but being social is a cornerstone of social media. Take a moment to let that sink in. Making friends has two main benefits. First, it can help increase the power of your account. While no one knows the exact algorithms of these sites, it is the popular belief that profiles with more friends/fans/groups/reviews/etc have more weight. Secondly (and most importantly), the friends you meet through the sharing of what you’re into are the most likely candidates to become submitters of your stuff. If you’re into SEO, and have an SEO blog, then make SEO friends and they just might like your stuff. It’s a great feeling when you see that a friend of yours from Sphinn added your new post to her del.icio.us.
7. Full Disclosure: This last point has worked very well for me in the past, but it is based on having followed the previous six suggestions. It is never a bad idea to disclose that you are submitting your own material. This is a sort of preemptive strike at the would-be naysayers. As long as you are not submitting your own stuff all the time, many social media communities will be very tolerant (even receptive) to the submission of your own material as long as they feel you aren’t trying to deceive them. Social media users HATE being duped….or, better said, hate feeling like they were duped. Being transparent about your self-promotion allows you to get your stuff out there and ensure that it is properly tagged, while limiting the potential for negative response. I consider full disclosure to be a more effective and more sustainable alternative to the next suggestion.
8. Alter-ego: Although I do not use this method, I would be remiss if I did not include it here. Many people would suggest that, in the beginning, you can circumvent the paradox of self-promotion by creating a secondary account for yourself on social sites that cannot be traced back to you. While this practice is exceedingly common, and many still recommend this solution, I think it is becoming increasingly obsolete. In addition, it violates the terms of service of many of these sites. The biggest downside though, is that having two accounts on the same site spreads you time and attention. You should be focusing on building one respected user, and the attention required to nurse a second user could be better used elsewhere. An alter-ego may be fun to test with, but don’t rely on it as your primary way to self-promote.

In conclusion, I would like to say that I think the acceptance of self-promotion within the social media space is increasing. But that doesn’t mean it is easy. The goal of anyone—be it individual or marketer—is still to reach the point where your fans/readers/subscribers become your evangelists. Seth Godin doesn’t have to share his own posts, nor do Kevin Nalts or Chris Crocker need to share their own videos. But they didn’t start out that way! Don’t be afraid to be your biggest fan, and don’t feel like you need to hide behind a secret second account to share your content. Use these tools to get yourself started and you will be on your way.

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