It has been a long time since we wrote a blogging hints essay. We continue to learn the system.
1. We continue to believe that it is almost a waste of time to blog if one does not blog daily. Yes, it gets to be a drag but there isn't a lot of point to having a blog without regular readers, and intermittent bloggers don't get or keep a regular readership.
If you blog daily and have a viewpoint, others take you seriously. You might not be able to shape events exactly as you might like, but you can impact them. If you succeed in impacting them, you shouldn't write about the impact you believe you have made or you will undo your hard work. There are exceptions to this "rule," for example when you might want to try to goad others into doing stupid stuff and don't really care what they do.
One of the best ways to impact others is to write about them and link what you wrote to something they, or their supporters have written. Every blogger follows page hits backwards, and this almost guarantees that they will see your comments.
2. This author has a love-hate relationship with Google Alerts. It is both very useful, and at the same time not nearly as useful as it could be. We often run into newspaper articles and blogging comments mentioning our alert subjects on which we got no alert. Some of the stuff isn't useful, but much is.
In the course of trying to figure out what articles make the alert and what doesn't, we think that a writer must mention the subject's full name at least twice in the essay, at the very beginning, and again not more than three or four paragraphs deep. The second mention is the one that is usually picked up.
If a writer only mentions the target name once, Google alerts seems prone to miss the mention. It may catch it singly when the target name is grouped among other names in a list.
3. BNN can be a source of hits, though they never get referral credit. If you write with BNN in mind, spread your posts out so that someone else posts between your posts.
Keep in mind that BNN quotes the first few lines, so don't be boring.
BNN has an influence ranking system that can be gamed quite easily and thus seems to be meaningless. They weight links more heavily than clicks. They don't count links from blogs that aren't on their list, so if a blog got linked by a national site, they appear to have no way of knowing it, or that it might be generating hundreds of hits. Now, that's influence!
There appear to be two bloggers who have figured out that links are the key to being high in BNN influence and so they link each other every day. It is fun to watch the gamesmanship, but we would guess that it doesn't buy either of them any more BNN eyeballs than if they just played it straight.
That's it for today.
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