Know Thy Reader, Know Thyself!

Part 1: Know your goals

There was a big “hoopla” over at Seth Godin’s blog yesterday.

He posted an entry about how to build traffic on your blog. It was filled with contradictions. Seth seems to be a pretty smart guy, so I’m sure they were intentional!  

My interpretation was that building traffic on your blog really depended upon your blogging goals. What type of audience do you want? What do you want that traffic to do? Different things attract different people. 

The last item was bolded (none of the others were). That line read: “Write stuff that people want to read and share”. No matter whom your audience is, or what you want them to do, you should do this. 

Part 2: Know yourself 

The interesting part was that he turned the “comments” feature on for this post. Normally, you can write about a topic Seth covers and link back to his site with a trackback, but you can’t comment on his blog.

The audience went wild! They loved comments and (you can see by the very long list) that they used them liberally. Many people added points to his entry. But, alas, the next post went back to “no comments allowed”. 

Seth explained in his next post that he feels compelled to address comments – especially those where someone may have misinterpreted his meaning. He just doesn’t have the time to do that. He also finds that when he enables comments he writes differently – in anticipation of the comments.

Part 3: The bottom line 

You need to know your goals and you need to know yourself. Structure your plans in a way that takes both into account.

Technorati tags: Business, "Seth Godin"

Comments

[ming2.0]

This post seems a little off topic for you ;)

i'm one of those who went wild on the comments, and i loved the contradiction!

[Ann Michael]

I think that people often get into trouble because they don't know what they want to accomplish and they don't know their own strengths and weaknesses. That part is on topic. Try implementing change if you don't know who you are and where you're going!

Thanks for stopping by - you always make me think! I like that!

I actually loved the contradictions too - the idea that we need to know what we want to accomplish and do what's right for us.