STOP Obsessing Over Social Networks and Get Back to Real Blogging
Steve Ruble recently twittered that we will soon be tiring of Facebook. So I thought I would take that idea a little further.
I’m recommending that you stop spreading your Google Juice all over the planet and get back to developing your real blog, because that is your real home on the web.
FACT: Social Networking sites are hogging your time and pagerank.You don’t believe me? Well then consider this.When someone leaves you a comment on Facebook who do you think is the main beneficiary of that transaction? It’s Facebook of course.Another example — when someone links to your MySpace (blog) who do you think is really benefiting? Right again — it’s MySpace (just look at their advertising revenues … they’ve gotten extremely rich thanks to you.)
So why on earth would you do that? It’s your real blog that deserves the Google Juice — not your fake blogs (i.e. your social network accounts).
Still don’t believe me? Then tell me which link is better:
http://www.myspace.com/blogbloke
OR,
You guessed it (I hope). But if you still don’t understand what I’m talking about then read the related posts below that will explain in more detail why you should be using your own custom domain instead of a subdomain on another network.
Notice that myself and the big blogs do not invest a lot of time and effort on Facebook, MySpace, BlogCatalogue etc. We might have a presence there but we divert the traffic back to our real blogs where it belongs.
Case in point: When everyone tires of Facebook and moves on to the next flavour of the month where will that leave you? Still writing back home at your real blog I hope. (I shudder to think of the consequences).
The bottom line is you should think of your real blog as your home base and your social network account (aka your fake blog) as only a marketing tool. Nothing more.
So my advice is to get your own Custom Domain Name for your real blog and hog all the attention for yourself. Focus on developing your real blog because over the long term that will bring you the greatest ROI (return on investment) for your time spent.
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Bloke — Every time I put up another post, I remind myself — it’ll be that much harder when you get your own domain name. I don’t know anything about how to do it. Don’t even know what name to settle on. All I know is if I get around to doing it, I’m coming back here to find out how to migrate it all. I really just want to pay someone to do it for me. I’m both lazy and unskilled in this area. Sigh.
Terrifyingly hard! Maybe I’ll just start out by buying a name. Even that’ll be a chore because junkdrawer.com is taken, as are so many others like. The closest I can get to that without making it too hard to remember is junkdrawerblog.com. Even that looks on the longish side.
Again, sigh.
You’ve convinced yourself that it’s hard, but it’s not. Hey, if I can figure it out so can you and I’ve already done all the hard work for you. Just buy a name from GoDaddy and read the tutorial and take one step at a time.
junkdrawerblog.com sounds good to me … one step at a time.
Good Post Bloke. Besides, once you have a website you are responsible for, you’ll loose the addiction to FaceBook/Myspace.
I only use FaceBook for keeping in touch with old friends and I visit only when I get an e-mail alert.
The first network I ever joined was Friendster. Then my friends moved to Hi5, Tag, Orkut, MySpace and now Facebook.
But while they are there, we gould you them to our advantage and build an audience. ProBlogger has an interesting post:
How to use MySpace to build a blogging audience.
Hmm … the guest writer suggests spending time developing a MySpace blog just to bring traffic to our REAL blog. Sounds counterproductive to me. Then you will have two blogs to worry about creating great content for. One blog is hard enough don’t you think.
The only way I could justify a strategy like that would be to put up a newsfeed link to my blog.
The writer also suggests using the MySpace “invite to my blog” button which I can’t stand. It’s just an easy way to spam other bloggers.
Amen to developing your own site over putting your content up on social networking sites. I spend far too much time trying to draw readers in from MySpace and Facebook as it is. I always view these (and other) networks as potential viewers for my own content, but I never think of them as a destination for original content, only a gateway to my own projects.
Yeah, it’s lame spreading your content all over the web at different sites. You’re just diluting your pagerank and web presence. Might as well make a link farm for that. (Just kidding Google
By the way, thanks for the link Jaffer. I hope I didn’t come across as being arrogant or putting you down because that was not my intention. I’m not sure what your take on it is but I personally wouldn’t use that approach. I’m also very surprised that Darren Rowse would even accept the guest post in the first place. Cheers bro!
O yea, Darren Rowses invites guests when “he need some time off and concentrate on other projects”.
A series of guest posts was done for a week last month !
Putting me down ? Not at all bloke in fact, your comment gave me an idea that one could put “partial” feeds on Facebook and drag people to their site if people were interested in reading more.
This way people would stop commenting on Facebook instead !
Oh I guess you meant that Darren would accept that particular guest post. My Bad !
I tried that with MySpace but it won’t accept javascript in the post body. Let me know how it goes with Facebook.
Bloke, I’m getting serious about buying my domain name, but I need help with who to host with. Someone suggested Hostgator. I’d like to know what others use. I’ll also poke around to see if you’ve written about hosting (I’m sure you have!). Thanks.
Kathy, I use GoDaddy. They’re not the cheapest but they are the biggest and very reliable. Also, by using goDaddy you can follow my directions for implementing it in Blogger. You can usually find a $2 discount coupon on Google.
Thanks, Bloke. I didn’t know they also hosted. I thought it was strictly domain-related. D’oh!
well, I don’t know if I totally agree
right now I don’t have the greatest user/reader base and I have found that I can drive a lot of valuable traffic to my blog by being an influence on one or more of these sites
but, In a way I still agree with you… I think that users of these sites must strike a balance between blogging and promoting. Obsessing over these sites is just plain wrong, as one person found out who posted on Darren’s ProBlogger website; they had quit blogging and went to spend 100% of their time instead working on their social media sites/profiles… they deeply regretted doing it and wished to go back and choose to blog
the fact is that, yes… you are promoting their website, but also, when you’re starting out, social media might be necessary to have people even see your content (especially if it’s in a very tight niche)
In the end, I strongly believe in balance
totally abandoning them could stop hundreds if not thousands from discovering your content.
but obsessing over it will make you become content-less and pretty much useless to the greater community
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