The Cosmopolitan Blog

Which site(s) do you consider the most popular web 2.0 / social bookmarking sites out there? Vote now in the poll on the right (scroll down a bit if this is the latest post of this blog). Also, i want to hear from you. Which sites to you like? Which work well? Which don’t? What features do you like? Which are the easiest to use? Which ones do you use for self-promotion, and which ones do you use for a collection of interesting links? Am i missing some crucial sites in my list (see poll)?

Write your comments below after you voted (in the poll, you can pick as many answers as you like).

Blogs are funny that way. They’re a historical log of your thoughts and opinions over time. Except that sometimes, your opinions change, so it’s worth remembering to post updates. So here’s me making an update to a post dating back 6 months called “Someone Please Explain Twitter To Me” to state that i am still a Twitter user, i’m addicted, I’ve integrated it into my blog, my facebook account, all my desktops and into my life, and still, i don’t understand it!

I don’t make very many twitter updates, considering some people twitter every 2 minutes, but apparently what i say matters, because i now officially have more “followers” of my updates than i have people following me (apparently, that’s a good thing, say the experts). I still agree with someone who commented on my previous post, that this just means i have an extra 20 stalkers (YAY!), but the good news is i get to “meet” people, and out of those 20 stalkers, 1 might actually have something insightful to say other than that he had sushi for dinner.

Turns out that twitterers (well those on my list anyway) are all quite techy, which suits me just fine, so i end up hearing of events, podcasts, posts and conferences that are sometimes interesting. Also, there is what is known as “twitter royalty”, such as Robert Scoble et al., and well, I’m not sure what to think of those guys other than they’re funny sometimes and conceited most of the time, but definitely worth following.

After all that, though, Twitter has become something i love to hate. I’m in touch with a bunch of strangers, and it takes time out of my day for nothing, and it serves no purpose whatsoever… just the way i like my applications.

So i’m back to exploring how to best promote a blog, and realized that i a friend of mine owns a very prominent blog, and here’s the recipe to his success: find yourself a niche, make sure it’s not to restrictive but not too widespread, stick to it, post often and promote it.

This is nothing new. But it’s important, and it’s really the bottom line. Blogs are amazing still, because they are indexed by search engines a million times faster than static websites, simply because their content changes so quickly. Which is why, for example, when in summer i wrote about Al Gore, minutes later, i noticed that my post was featured on Al Gore’s Live Earth website. So, deconstructing the advice above, we have:

1. Find yourself a niche

You need to be a specialist in your topic. No, that doesn’t mean you have to have a degree in it. It just means you have to have something to offer in that topic. People have to have a reason to come to your blog, whether it’s just that you understand a specific topic, that you have great political insight, or that you’re a master at a playing a specific game. So pick a niche, it them becomes “your thing” that you’re known for.

2. Make sure it’s neither too restrictive or too widespread

Well, now that you’ve found your niche, let’s see. Are there only 3 other people interested in your topic? In the entire world? If so, while your blog may be the center of the universe for those 3 people, it won’t be for very many other people, so your blog probably won’t get a world-famous reputation. On the other hand, if your niche is discussing the latest Hollywood scandal or when the last time we spotted Britney Spear’s underwear (or lack thereof), then, well, um, you may not be the only person who talks about this, and so your message will get diluted in the masses. For your blog to gain a reputation, then, will be extremely difficult.

3. Stick to it

If you found a topic / niche, then stick to it. Don’t go talking about other stuff, because that’s not what you’re known for. If you digress too often, readers will stop coming. If you have a million topics (good tip, check the number of categories you have, there should be max 3-4), it will be hard for readers to understand what the value of your blog is, and so promoting it will be tough.

4. Post often

Well, this is the nature of a blog, it’s meant to be alive. If your topic is amazing, people will want to come and read. But if nothing gets updated, then they’ll come once, read what is there, and be done with it. If they see there is a new post every 4-5 days, then they will subscribe to your RSS feed, and keep up to date with what you’re saying.

5. Promote it

Write posts that encourage people to comment, thus generating traffic and discussion, again, a surefire way to promote your blog. Then, of course, use the tools out there to stretch your word. Link to your blog from Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Technorati, and even Facebook and Twitter if you want! Go visit other similar sites, and comment on their posts, remembering to link to your blog. Allow trackbacks to your posts/blog. Keep up to date with the latest places where you can promote, and that way you can be one of the first!

Well, now, all i need to do is eat some of my own dogfood, right? My readers will know that i don’t post often enough, if fact, i go through 3-4 day spurts where i post a lot, then i’m silent for a long time (ahem, *cough* *cough* 2 months *cough* *cough*). But this will change now that i have a super tool to update my blog with my twitter updates. The other thing i know would make my blog more popular is if i stuck to one topic, not tried to tackle politics, food, blogging and personal opinions, and if at least one of those topic was a little more “niche-ish”. Ah well, i never claimed by blog was perfect, i just like to use it to ramble

Waow, that was insanely complicated! So, i’ve just upgraded my blog to Wordpress 2.5 (no, no, THAT was the easy part), and i found this new plugin called “Twitter Tools” that seemed to do everything i needed:

1. If i write a new post, it will send an update to my Twitter, to notify my contacts of my new post. This is good because it takes care of some of my blog promotion, since this is still an exercise i’m working on.

2. Also, the tools promised that if i put a new status update on Twitter, it would create a blog post about it, thus achieving another goal of mine, ensuring that there are fresh posts on my blog regularly. Since i Tweet more often than i blog (tweets are just 140 character status updates), i figured this was a good way to let people know what’s going on in my life.

Of course you techies out there can picture the problem right? Every Twitter update creates a new blog post. Every new blog post creates a Twitter update. And here we enter the hell that is application circular reference. BUT, i checked the plugin’s documentation and it assured me that this scenario had been thought of and told me, specifically, that it would NOT “cause the world to end in a spinning fireball of death“.

And as you can all vouch for, the world is still here, and we’re not burning or dead. BUT, if you follow my RSS feeds, you might have noticed some crazy activity this morning. After I added the plugin, i also did some edits to my old blog posts, as i had found some typos here and there (well, you know, nobody’s perfect!). And apparently, everytime i edited a post, the plugin assumed it was a new post, and added it to my RSS feed and to my twitter updates!!! So all my contacts (all 1.5 of them) got about 20 new twitter updates from me in the same second, referencing supposedly new blog posts, but they were all, old posts!

So this is me, publicly apologizing to all my Twitter buddies, all my blog readers, and all my RSS feed subscribers, sorry for dragging you into hell for a few hours! Oh, and if you’re wondering, i’ve disabled the function that created a new twitter update everytime i write a new blog post, so here’s hoping that hitting “Publish” on this post won’t make the world explode again!

It’s been 2 months since i’ve posted, and if i still have anyone reading this blog, then i’m extremely lucky!!

Dear readers (all 2 of you, one of which is probably my mom!!), yes, i’m still here. The past few months have been filled with family visits, trips overseas, religious festivities, a couple migraines, and the highlight of it all, the acquisition of my very own PDA, finally! Yes, i know, once a geek always a geek…

So this is my resurfacing post… Worth noting, in an effort to stay as present as i can on my blog, i’ve added the twitter plugin (see right column), so you’ll always know what i’m up to… I’m new to twitter, and apparently, no one i know is on there, so i you want to add me as your friend, i’d be eternally grateful… lol, needy much?

Next, i’ll post a review, i guess i owe you all at least that!