Blogs on Blogs on Blogs
While reading a recent article by Paul Chaney of allbusiness.com, I had to once again face the fact that my opinions might be in the minority or contrary to market wisdom. I firmly believe each blogger should write from his own experiences and observations or form a network of friends who express themselves though the blog. All too often I see lazy bloggers just point to other bloggers posts or websites where info points somewhere else. I do not believe you sustain readers if you keep pointing them elsewhere.
So lets examine this practice and see what benefits it may have.
1) Quick and frequent output - Thanks to Google and other search engines one merely has to do some minimal research and link to the articles or blog posts that meet the criteria of the day. This is especially evident in the CSS/Web Standards community. A few great minds make the discoveries, the other 10,000 web designers talk about it.
2) Free traffic for the originator - If you are so lucky as to have one of your posts picked up by the “commenter crowd” you can get a sudden influx of high quality targeted traffic which will hopefully come back beyond the current article to see what you have to say.
3) Makes commenter look smarter - By using the resources of professional journalists, bloggers, and other editorial content writers, the commenter appears to be smarter and very resourceful. There is a fine line between lazy pointing and commenting on an original work to illustrate a point.
4) Keyword driven traffic - The commenter will undoubtedly get some traffic due to the search engines inability to distinguish the copy from the original. Assuming users are seeking info on a given topic the latest commenter may rank higher than the original poster. This leads to sales opportunities for the commenter and perhaps missed sales for the originator.
5) Sneaky uses - For those maintaining multiple sites that merely front for another site, this is a good way to attract readers to the fronted site which creates sales opportunities.
Sharing information is not wrong. But let’s not be lazy in our blog writing.