Thanks For the Ride

by Anja Merret
Anja Merret

As experiences go, this one was quite something. Having spent almost ten months working at it, when it finally happened, the results were quite different to what I had expected. Possibly even slightly bizarre. There I was, prodding the sleeping monster with a stick and it suddenly woke up, went mad and dashed off in a totally different direction as expected. What a surprise.

By now you would be wondering what this monster could be. I just got attacked, chewed and spat out by the blogosphere. What a ride! Since January I have been plodding along with my blog. I have learnt many things about SEO, affiliate marketing, social bookmarking and some other bits. I have also learnt that it seems to be about two things and those are pagerank and traffic. With other words, is your blog loved by important blogs and is it the popular kid on the block.

A few months ago, after assembling some articles on my blog, I thought that now was the time to invite a couple of folks to come over for a visit. After reading my way through tons of blogs that provide all sorts of advice on this topic, I thought that nothing is better than jumping in boots and all and trying out the various suggestions. Nothing beats the experience gained from a good amount of trial and error.

So I signed up to social bookmarking sites which seemed to be number one on the big hit list of every advice site. During the last few weeks I have spent hours on several of these sites, making friends, reading other people’s submissions, voting and commenting on them. With other words I was making my contributions felt and being a good internet citizen. And one has to be a very hard working citizen, the demands are made 24/7.

Four days ago, I submitted an article to these social bookmarking sites plus of course any other sites I thought might get more traffic galloping through the homestead. It was an article on one of the favourite topics on the internet, self-development. A video of a talk by a Harvard psychologist at TED had made me think about the self-development movement happening on thousands of blogs near you, in hundreds of books and in large numbers of conferences and seminars.

In a, what I thought at the time, light hearted way I commented on what this expert had discovered through running some controlled experiments on the topic of happiness and freedom of choice. They were quite different findings to what one would expect. In a nutshell, and somewhat paraphrased, he found that humans have the ability to synthesise happiness and secondly that in a particular experimental control group he found that people with less choices were more content than those with more options.

Somehow my speculations on whether I could agree with these two points must have hit a raw nerve. Or perhaps I had just not experienced a blogosphere reaction before and this could be considered a totally normal occurrence. Out of the 43 current responses, the range of emotions expressed were from agreement - very few - to total disdain - very many - for the opinions in the article. And some folk even slated the video of the talk I was referring to and had referenced a link to.

One visitor to the site was so incensed that she wrote an entire article to repudiate my post as well as the video and linked to it from her comment on my site. Over and above this there were the standard, I suppose, personal attacks and some name calling. Where did that come from? I can’t even imagine leaving that kind of vitriolic attack behind on somebody’s blog.

That was one of the very surprising elements to this happening. The other point that made me sit up and take note was the fact that there was a huge snowball effect. Almost like a viral attack, an internet tsunami. It started off with substantial traffic coming via one of the social bookmarking sites as I had hit the critical point of number of votes in order to get the article onto the popular pages.

It didn’t stop there. Following the traffic on one of the traffic counting and analysis sites I use, it was amazing to watch where traffic was suddenly coming from. For my little blog, with its regular visitors of about 500, the increase in traffic was extraordinary. Other social bookmarking sites were picking up on the story and people were discussing the issue on Facebook and some other sites I had never heard of.

So what did I learn? Besides getting used to the fact that some people like to make a point with a sledge hammer and learning something about how traffic can multiply, this was a fabulous experience. And in the firm belief that all opinions, no matter how heated, are important, all comments were accepted. Wouldn’t want it any other way. And universe, bring it on again!

Article submitted Thursday, October 11, 2007 & read 2410 times.

Anja Merret lives in Brighton, UK. She is a professional article writer and supplies The Digital Archives' Article Writing Service with top quality material. The Digital Archives have a special offer, not to be missed, right now.

Check the deal here, and sign up if you need top quality articles for your blog or site at http://thedigitalarchives.com

She also has a blog on health and diet issues. Having battled all her life against her own bulge she and a nutritionist coach Tanya Stocken are helping people with their battle of the bulge without suffering too much.

Visit http://easywaydiets.com for words of encouragement, goal setting tips and tricks and good advice on a healthy lifestyle.

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» left by Jean Horst (4 years 120 days ago.)

Welcome to the wild, wild west of the internet, Anja! You know the next best thing to being popular is attacking someone who is popular. But you survived - Bravo!
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» left by Anja Merret from Brighton, UK (4 years 120 days ago.)

Thanks for your encouragement. It was quite something!
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