4 common misconceptions of the blogosphere that will RUIN your blogging

Misconceptions in the blogosphere are very common. One half of those practices are publicized by amateurs pretending to be geniuses, and the other half is created by geniuses acting like amateurs. (If you know what I mean :D) Whatever said and done, and despite how many individuals practice it, if a certain practice yields a negative output, then it indeed, in my humble opinion, is a negative practice and a misconception.

I sincerely hope you’d find these 4 big misconceptions useful. As in, to give up it’s practicing if you find that they’re something that you’ve been doing; or to practice them if you’re looking for the 7th day blogging doom.

Submitting your own posts to Social Media sites is the best way to initialize social media exposure

This is horribly, horribly wrong. Yet, practiced by many small niche-bloggers. Submitting your article yourself or submitting articles from the same blog using the same IP in a relatively short time period, can cause your blog to be banned from social media sites. And in sites like Digg, people will start figure out that you are submitting your own articles and will start to ‘bury’ your articles. And in sites like ‘StumbleUpon’, your potential in gaining traffic will decrease with time before your blog getting banned.

No matter how good your content is, avoid this practice if you’re currently engaged in it. A large number of people are benefiting from social media. If they find someone is indeed trying to manipulate the system, they will usually act before the admins in banishing the manipulator. Waging war against social media is not a good thing.

What matters most is great content

Not quite. To achieve blogging super-stardom, for every two minutes you commit to writing great content, you should spend 3 minutes promoting it. (Not that specific content, but rather, your blog in general) Social Media, Networking, Forums and etc. Max of blogbadly addresses this issue as “Content ISN’T King; Marketing Usurped Him Ages Ago“. And I tend to agree with him fully.

Great content is very important. But it doesn’t drive traffic to your site. What great content does is, it makes your blog more sticky. No matter how sticky the spider web is, the spider will die of starvation if it doesn’t put up a sign like “Free accommodation at the cobweb hotel!”.

E-mail subscriptions are better than Feed Reader subscriptions.

The wonder of e-mail subscriptions is that it doesn’t contribute to the subscriber count fluctuations. E-mail subscription count is a constant thorough all times.

Subscriber count fluctuations are caused by some people subscribed to your feed not using their feed reader in a particular day. In those days, FeedBurner - which reports back the statistics determines that those subscribers have unsubscribed.

The biggest con of e-mail subscribers is that you’re in a constant risk of losing them if your policy is not a “satisfy-all” policy. If you fail to satisfy the needs of a few e-mail subscribers, they will just not see the difference between junk spam and your post. Sometimes when I feel like I’ve done a bad job in an article or been a bit too offensive about something, half a dozen of “x had unsubscribed from your feed” notices await me in the inbox, the next morning.

You can’t run experiments on you posts if you have a lot of e-mail subscribers. Everyone regards the tidy-ness of their inboxes so highly that you making them a test experiment subject is the last thing they need. If you accept the risks involved, then, probably, it could pay out well for you. But my point is that “E-mail subscribers are not for everybody”. And people would be very reluctant to subscribe to a non-niche blog with e-mail, purely because the relevancy of content varies from person to person.

Long term practice of widely-accepted conventional means will rapidly promote your blog.

Let me tell you what I refer to by ‘conventional means’: Writing great content, commenting on other blogs, posting on forums, networking and conventional blog contests. These methods used to be very effective in a time when only 175 blogs were created each day. When the competition used to be less. Now we have 175,000 blogs created around the world in a day. All these new bloggers are fresh, new and they are exhausting these conventional means. And that’s why they don’t work as well now.

Don’t get me wrong. They still do work. But not as well.

In fact, in the long-term, some of these practices may prove to be not worth the investment. Every successful blogger surfacing online nowadays has his or her success formulae. Sometimes, a blogger might not be as generous as to share it with the world, since when he/she unveils it, half of the readers will try to duplicate that formula in their own blogs.

I’d never say that I’m a short-term success. But some people do so. And if you think I am, I’d have to say that the “10-second-entry-blog-contest” made me gain more than 100 new subscribers within one day. The idea for the contest was my own. I invented it, and had never seen something like that in the blogosphere before that. When other people saw the immense exposure that the contest gets, some of them started doing the same thing. As the inventor, I felt a bit annoyed. But I expected that.

Suppose that 100 people tried to duplicate my success and replicated the contest idea. They will hardly have the same success ratio. Why? Because

1. I only implemented a contest like that knowing the consequences and being confident I could satisfy the e-mail subscribers, but they do it purely to gain subscribers in the short-run.
2. Those 100 people will influence another 100 people and in a short while, 10,000 people will be having the same contest. If you come across 20 of these sites, (0.2% of the 10,000) would you subscribe to all 20 and flood your e-mail inbox? I guess not.

When a new new method is discovered and unveiled, over-time, it becomes an useless and an exhausted idea being replicated by many people. The long-term success is only achieved by your creativity and commitment to bring something new to the table. What works for someone else might not work for you.

- So what do you think? The topics are hereby open for debate.