Meme Week: 4 Things About Me
I told you yesterday that I’d give you my answer to the meme question. As you can tell from the title, I do indeed meme.
The consensus in the comments was that selective meme-ing is the best approach. I suppose I agree with that. In general, you want to add value to the conversation. Some memes add value, some don’t.
I prefer the first type, but sometimes do the second type, too.
It took me some time to come to this decision. I was worried, for a while, that doing these fun-but-silly activities would cost me readers or, even worse, cost me business. I’ve come to terms with those concerns, however.
As far as the professionalism question goes, it occurred to me: my blog is plenty personal, intentionally so. It’s part of the brand. Doing memes isn’t going to hurt my business. In fact, it shows instead that I’m part of a blogging community, and that I actively participate in the medium.
Now, some memes are silly, and add little value. Today’s is probably in that category. Tomorrow’s is, too. Hang in there, though. Thursday and Friday should be fun, and a great way to finish the week for us all.
So, without any further delay, I offer my first meme of the week. This one comes from Amy at Earnest Parenting. Amy is a good friend, who actually introduced Angie Pangie and I to the work of one of my blogging mentors, Yaro Starak. She tagged me way back in April, so I thought I’d start with her meme.
Here are the rules:
- Link to the person that tagged you.
- Post the rules on your blog.
- Share 4 things in these themes.
- Tag 4 random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs.
- Let each random person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their website.
So, here we go, my lists of 4s:
4 jobs I have had
- Dishwasher. My first job.
- Bartender at Chi-Chi’s. Really, I mostly just operated a blender.
- Telemarketer (I’m so sorry. It only lasted a week.)
- Order taker for a designer clothing company.
4 movies I can watch over and over
- Lord of the Rings (Considering all 3 movies as a unified whole here.)
- Empire Strikes Back - Best of the series.
- Casablanca. I’m a hopeless romantic and want to be Bogart.
- Iron Man. By far the best comic book movie ever, bar none.
4 places I have lived
- Davison, Michigan. Born and lived there until age 7.
- Linwood, Michigan. Grew up there, came back after I was married. Still live there.
- Marion, Indiana. College. Loved it. The perfect Midwestern town.
- Indianapolis, Indiana. My favorite home. Not too big, not too small.
4 TV shows I love
- Battlestar Galactica. *I* am one of the final five.
- Reaper. Best new show this past season.
- The Office. That’s what she said.
- American Idol. A guilty pleasure. David Cook rocks.
4 places I have been on vacation
- Florida. Twice in college, once with the family.
- Paradise, Michigan. Great camping in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
- Atlantic City, New Jersey. My last great bachelor trip. I may have drank a lot. I don’t remember.
- Chicago. My 2nd favorite Midwestern city.
4 of my favorite dishes
- Tater Tot Casserole. It’s like Shepard’s pie. Sorta.
- Tuscany Glazed Turduken in Hollandaise.
- Pizza. Duh.
- Anything Angie Pangie makes.
4 web sites I visit daily
- Escaping Reality. Only because I’m addicted.
- The Chatty DM. Love his take on all things gaming-related.
- The Drudge Report. A full menu of news from dozens of sources.
- Player vs. Player. Scott Kurtz and his funny-ness. Beware the pandas.
4 places I would rather be now
- Gen Con. Only 2 1/2 months!
- Camping. This is going to be a busy summer, don’t think we’re going to get to do much.
- England. My dream vacation.
- On a beach. I’m not especially particular. Any one will do.
4 bloggers I am tagging
Here’s where I’m going to break meme form. I’m of a mind that the best memes will reproduce themselves. I hate putting pressure on anyone to do a meme, and I fear the rejection of a meme being denied. Grab this one if you want, just let me know so I can follow along!
Or, If you’d prefer not to do the entire meme, you can pick one or more of the “4 Things” topics above and put them in the comments.
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Do You Meme?
One quick note. For those of you who are interested, I had the privilege of doing an interview with Harrison McLeod of Men with Pens on his view of gaming and the new creative writing RPG project over at Escaping Reality. Check it out over at my gaming blog.
The Internet is an odd place; the blogosphere even more so. We have our own language, our own technology, and even our own little games. At times, it can even seem as thought we have this strange community, isolated from “normal” folks.
One of the distinguishing marks of the blogosphere, in particular, is the idea of the meme. By “meme,” I’m not talking about a trope, like LeRoy Jenkins or Niebu. Rather, I’m talking about the “Pass this around” meme, where one blogger writes about something, tags a bunch of other bloggers who write about that same thing, and then those bloggers tag new folks. And so on, and so forth, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
Here is the question I face, however: If your blog is an extension of your business, can a meme affect your credibility? I’ve heard arguments on both sides of this question. I’ve seen some fairly high-profile bloggers whose blog is an extension of their business do memes. I’ve also seen some of those types of folks swear off doing memes.
I’ve never done a meme on this blog, although I’ve done them on my hobby and personal blogs.
But, I’m curious what you all think? Do you meme? Do you worry that it affects your credibility when you do?
I’ll give you my answer tomorrow, but let’s discuss it today, shall we?
* For your enjoyment: LeRoy Jenkins, courtesy of YouTube:
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4 Characteristics of a Useful Link Post
I made a point the other day that linking to other blogs is an integral part of being useful to your readers. Specifically, I mentioned this in the context of the link post, and how we tend to put up link posts on low-traffic days. While this isn’t true for everyone (John at PoeWar has link posts every day, for example) many of us follow that convention.
At any rate, an interesting discussion broke out in the comments of that post. Here are a couple of the reactions:
I link out a lot - just about every post I think, but I don’t write that many “links posts”, mainly because I find them dull as a reader.
I often skip over them unless they’re well written (tempting me to explore) Anything with more than 5 links makes me think there’s no way I’ve got time to explore them. So I skip to something else. - Joanna Young
I love to link to other bloggers simply because I LOVE a good blog. I get almost as excited about finding a great new (to me) blog, as I do about a really good book, and I just can’t resist the desire to share it. - Lisa Wilder
Now, I think the value in linking to other bloggers within the text of a regular article is without dispute. Linking to another blog and then adding your own thoughts and commentary helps to carry on the big conversation. But, what about Link posts?
There are several characteristics that can make link posts useful:
Useful link posts provide context.
Link posts are most useful when there is some context to those articles. Offering your reader a link with a headline probably gives them little more than what they already have from their feed reader. If the headline wasn’t interesting enough when they scanned their feeds, odds are it isn’t going to be interesting enough in your links post. By providing context, even if that’s just a few sentences, you describe the value the reader gets from clicking the link.
Useful link posts have useful links.
It’s not enough to describe what’s on the other end of the link. You’ve got to make sure that the page you’re describing is indeed interesting and useful to your reader. This means that, no matter how close you and I might be as colleagues or friends, if I don’t write anything decent in a given week you need to leave me out of your link post. Obligation links don’t serve anyone. If you link to a weak post of mine, the odds that the reader will click through next week decrease.
Useful link posts center around a theme.
In many cases, simply keeping the links related to your niche is enough. However, the most useful links posts will hit on several articles that touch a related topic or question. This puts the meta-talk in context and allows your reader to get the big picture and carry on the conversation. In some cases, a themed link post may become the new hub of discussion for the particular topic.
Useful link posts consider length.
A useful link post might be as small as four or five links, or it may contain several hundred. Each of those two extremes has its place. A post with four links and a paragraph or two about each is not that different from a regular blog article. This sort of link post relies on you to add value to the links, giving them context and telling the reader what you think about the links in depth. Short link posts are likely to create more conversation.
On the other hand, you might create a master link list of every post you can on blog traffic or grammar rules. Those link posts become enduring posts, rarely read in their entirety but often referenced. In some cases a post like my 178 Ways to Improve Your Internet Writing, while not intended as a links post, can fall into this category as well.
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Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that other forms of link posts or that link posts that don’t follow these rules can’t work. What I am saying is this: making your link posts more useful increases your value to your readers. It also increases the likelihood that more readers will click through those links, positioning you as a potentially significant source of traffic to the blogs you’re linking.
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4 Sure-Fire Ways To Make Your Blog Useful
The more I read about blog promotion, the more I begin to think that some folks are missing the point altogether.
Heck, even I miss it, from time to time, and yet it is one of the main themes of this blog.
What is it we miss? Usefulness. Blogs are supposed to be useful to their readers. That’s one of the big things that differentiates them from simple static SEO websites. We’re all about building loyal readers, customers and clients by providing something of value to our readers, right? At least, that’s what we say we’re about.
But sometimes, we get off track. Feed stats and page views take precedence over providing true value.
Instead of helping other Internet writers to achieve their dreams, I focus a little bit too much on achieving my own dreams. In doing so, I work against my readers and, paradoxically, my dreams as well.
Take, for example, the idea of the links post. Everyone knows that it’s a good thing to link to other blogs. Not only that, there are almost always a large number of posts out there that our readers would find useful, maybe even more useful than our regular posts.
So, we collect a week or two worth of useful links and put them up on… Tuesday, right?
Nope. Links posts never go up on Tuesday through Thursday - those are typically our highest traffic days. No, we offer links when our traffic is at it’s slowest, preferably on a Sunday afternoon.
Why is this a problem?
In our quest to promote our blogs, we wind up being useful, but not too useful when it comes to pointing out other great resources. We also make the conversation on our blog that much more narrow and secluded by not engaging with other bloggers in our niche.
OK, so you move your links post to Wednesdays. Good form. Promote the pack and, in turn, the pack will promote you. Some of your readers will even remember who gave them all of those awesome links. That’s the first way to increase your blog’s usefulness:
Make links to other blogs a top priority.
What else, though? What can you do to make your blog more useful?
James Chartrand from Men with Pens asked recently, on Twitter, if bloggers ought to be allowed a posting vacation. I’ll leave it to James to gather and analyze the results of his little poll, but it got me thinking:
How often do you I post something truly useful on my blog? Let’s face it: sometimes, you post for the sake of posting, especially if you missed a day or three. Your forced content winds up being, in many cases, less than useful.
There are ways around this, of course. You can do like I did on Friday and count on your readers to make the post useful. (Which you all did, and for which I’m grateful.) You can’t do this all the time, though, or your readers might just catch on and take the conversation elsewhere.
So, how do we apply this idea?
Only post useful content, even if that means posting once a week.
A revolutionary idea, I know. Will it cost readers? Maybe. but so will the alternative, I think. Some of the biggest bloggers post on an irregular schedule, so daily posting isn’t a hard and fast rule.
There’s something else that can make your blog more useful. This one should be obvious, but I think it is so obvious that it becomes easy to miss.
Have you ever tried to read a blog with light gray writing on a white background? I’m 35 years old. I’m not old, but I’m no spring chicken. Reading gray on white is a pain in the ass. I can’t make it out. Same goes for that tiny print that the kids want to use these days.
I know, I know. Get off my lawn.
Seriously, though, your blog layout and design is an important part of being useful to your readers. If you make it difficult for readers to find archives or don’t offer a reasonably easy method of navigation, you’re making their job harder. At some point, readers will decide that it is not worth the extra work to find out what they were looking for.
Now, I’m not a designer. The “WJ” badge at the top of my blog is evidence of that fact. But, I do what I can to make my blog easy on the eyes and easy to get around, and I do that by trusting my instincts but also asking for advice.
That’s another way to make your blog more useful:
Make readability and navigation priorities in your blog design.
Do what you can. If you have a crappy “WJ” badge until you are willing to invest in a better banner, then at least make sure people can read your blog.
So, what else?
If I had to add a 4th way to make your blog useful, it would be this:
Foster a true conversation with your readers.
I don’t need to tell you how this works. You already know the drill. Put something in the comments and I’ll write back. Let’s do this one together, shall we?
What do you think? How can you increase your blog’s usefulness?
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The Violent Truth of Branding
Some of you may already know this. Others may not.
For the majority of the early part of my writing career, I wrote under a female pen name. My alter ego produced literally thousands of articles on parenting, pregnancy, conception, and child rearing. Chances are pretty good that, if you’ve spent any time researching some of these topics, you’ve read my work.
While I enjoyed the work and it helped to catapult my writing career, the time finally came when I needed to break out, and develop my own brand.
Check out The Violent Truth of Branding over at Freelance Folder today to learn how I did it, what worked for me, and what pitfalls I fell into along the way.
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While you’re at it, make my friend Ritu happy by visiting my post, “The Exponential Power of Collaborative Effort“ over at Marketing Hackz today, too!
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