Social Blogging – Don’t Forget To Touch First Base

Writing by Social Marketing Journal on Saturday, March 15, 2008 Comments (1)

Keeping your social blogging simple is getting more and more complicated.

You know there are a gazillion distractions these days, making it tough for your articles to get attention and tougher to keep it. You want your writing to pay off for you, so you optimize.

  • You optimize a headline that offers a great benefit and/or arouses curiousity and/or is controversial.
  • You optimize the first sentence of your blog post because if the headline got them this far, now you must hook them into reading the rest of your article.
  • You study StumbleUpon and Digg and the other social bookmarketing media so you can optimize your entire blog post to capture votes, not to mention hearts and minds.
  • With your keyword list in hand, you optimize your post to attract your target market searchers who use the search engines.
  • You go back over each sentence to find the places where you can optimize the humor or irony or alliteration or word picture or plain old intellectual impact (See? Alliteration!).
  • You optimize “you”s vs “I”s, so you are writing about your reader, not about yourself.
  • All these optimizations have certainly left something messed up, so you go back over the whole thing and re-optimize spelling and grammar, so the darned thing makes sense.

Pretty good plan. Have we missed anything?

Well, yes. How about … was there a point to your post? In the midst of all this optimization to attract eyeballs, did you actually give them some valuable insight or information? It’s not that unusual in social blogging to totally lose sight of the fact that a real live reader is looking for actual value. And if you trick them into reading something without value, they won’t be back.

So, definitely keep it simple. But add one more optimization to your social blogging: make it good!

Comments (1)                      Category: Social Blogging                      

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1 Comment

Comment by EH

Made Wednesday, 30 of July , 2008 at 2:23 pm

Thanks for the great tips on improving your blog.
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Social Marketing Journal is a Blog that discusses all aspects of Social Media Optimization, Social Media Marketing, Social Networking and Reputation Management for the new and advanced reader.