Thursday, January 19, 2006
Smart blogging tactic? Or kinda intrusive? I go with the former.
Recently I received an email from the blogger, Mr. Snitch.
It was clearly a mass email that basically said "since you linked to post xxx I thought you might find this post I just wrote to be interesting too." And he provided the link.
I thought that was quite clever and showed an attention to his audience, and a level of commitment to his blog. Although, with nine blogs, I do document when I've blogged where, I certainly don't make the effort to take each post I complete, figure out what similar posts I have written, who linked to those posts and decide to send them the link to the new post. I mean, if you did that regularly, and made sure your emailed links were scrupulously relevant as promised, it would have to biuld traffic and increase subscribers.
Back to Mr. Snitch: I of course clicked to the post.
And herein lies the dilemma, because relevancy is in the mind of the beholder.
Now, to me, the emailed post is only sort of related to the original post. His original post was about "7 Styles of Blogging", and was, somewhat ironically, included in a post of mine about how to manipulate your blogging to increase traffic.
The new post is about the emerging business models for bloggers to make some money, focusing on a new Boston-based content-aggregation endeavor, Gather.com.
As it happens I am interested in Gather, but I'm still not sure if the two posts are all that closely-related, and that makes me wonder if some people would just find this tactic intrusive and too self-promotional.
I decided that I certainly didn't mind...and here I sit linking to Mr. Snitch several times. But then I know I'm on the mercenary capitalist side of the blogging equation. So I appreciate his ingenuity and commitment.
What do y'all think? Would this be convenient or would it bug you?
It was clearly a mass email that basically said "since you linked to post xxx I thought you might find this post I just wrote to be interesting too." And he provided the link.
I thought that was quite clever and showed an attention to his audience, and a level of commitment to his blog. Although, with nine blogs, I do document when I've blogged where, I certainly don't make the effort to take each post I complete, figure out what similar posts I have written, who linked to those posts and decide to send them the link to the new post. I mean, if you did that regularly, and made sure your emailed links were scrupulously relevant as promised, it would have to biuld traffic and increase subscribers.
Back to Mr. Snitch: I of course clicked to the post.
And herein lies the dilemma, because relevancy is in the mind of the beholder.
Now, to me, the emailed post is only sort of related to the original post. His original post was about "7 Styles of Blogging", and was, somewhat ironically, included in a post of mine about how to manipulate your blogging to increase traffic.
The new post is about the emerging business models for bloggers to make some money, focusing on a new Boston-based content-aggregation endeavor, Gather.com.
As it happens I am interested in Gather, but I'm still not sure if the two posts are all that closely-related, and that makes me wonder if some people would just find this tactic intrusive and too self-promotional.
I decided that I certainly didn't mind...and here I sit linking to Mr. Snitch several times. But then I know I'm on the mercenary capitalist side of the blogging equation. So I appreciate his ingenuity and commitment.
What do y'all think? Would this be convenient or would it bug you?
// posted by ElisaC @ 3:58 PM 
