Win Friends and Influence People
I would define “webmaster” as anyone who creates and maintains Web sites and Web pages.
In only the last few years, blogs have fundamentally transformed the nature of “webmastering”. It’s not just that making and updating sites is easier today than ever before because of blogs. What blogs have done that is so very special and important is they have made it possible for regular folks to command the attention of tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people everyday. Before the advent of blogging, to get a lot of traffic, you either had to buy it, win it from the search engines with SEO “tricks” or participate in complex link trading schemes with other webmasters. To be successful by any of these methods, you had to have significant money, experience or both. But today blogs offer an alternative method for the acquisition of enormous amounts of traffic… that is, essentially, FREE and REALLY EASY
A blog is a lot more than an “instant Web site”. The benfits of blogmastering, over keeping other types of Web site, go far beyond the fact that you don’t have to worry about building the site itself. It’s great that all the basic, “getting started” types of things that used to occupy the webmaster’s time for days or even weeks — the making of the site, the linking together of individual pages, the visual design, the creation of navigational structures — are all taken care of from the very first moment you “turn on” your blog. But the miraculous power of blogs to acquire traffic does not relate to that. It comes from the ways in which blogs are designed to interact with other blogs and with third parties.
I have recently grown fond of telling people that “Blogging is a social activity”. I like this phrase not just because it is catchy but because it leads folks away from an old way of thinking about web sites.
It’s obvious that there is a direct correlation between strong social skills and success in pretty much every avenue of life. Dale Carnegie’s famous "How to Win Friends and Influence People", first published in 1936, remains relevant today because the principles he defined are timeless. What we are observing in the context of the blogosphere is that they also remain true even in the New Medium.
Though Carnegie’s principles for friend-winning and people-influencing are old (far older than 1936, even), the methods and mechanics of their application by bloggers in 2006 are new and have to be learned. In many important regards, nothing is different: You want for people to like you. You want for people to support your views and perspectives. You want for people to feel that your success is their success. What follows now is the question, how does this work between bloggers?
Without getting bogged down in too much techno-speak, it’s important to understand that blogs are designed to work together. Blogs communicate, and (though the explanations are technical) the effects are pretty easy to understand. There are three ways in which blogs communicate: the trackback, the comment and the ping.
In a nutshell, a trackback is a link that is automatically created on the blog being linked to when another blog creates a link from a blog post to another blog post. A comment is an entry anyone may make in response to a blog post, directly on someone else’s blog. A ping is a notification event that informs a third party (usually not another blog) when a blogger has made a post.
Taken together, trackbacks, comments and pings work to weave an individual blog into the network that is the blogosphere. Each establishes links, which generate traffic directly from the linking site, or indirectly, by increasing the credibility of the site being linked to in the eyes of the search engines. Generally speaking, the more extensive and the more numerous the linking relationships an individual blog enjoys with the rest of the blogosphere, the more successful a blog it is, in terms of traffic.
It’s not quite so simple as it sounds, however. Although these automated link-creation mechanisms work very well, they can still be over-ridden by the humans controlling the blogs. Comments and trackbacks are exploited by spammers, who may make thousands of low-quality blog posts every day, in the hopes that some of the links they create on other people’s blogs will stick. A diligent blogger will spend some time every day removing these worthless links from his blog, much like scraping the barnacles from the hull of a ship after it has been at sea for a spell.
The key is to make comments and to create trackback links which the recpient blogger will be happy to receive. To do this right you have to understand the benefit relationships between the various parties. Let’s say I have made a blog post, and someone makes a comment and leaves a URL. The exchange of value implicit in this is that my blog is increased in value by the comment itself, and that I will show my gratitude for the “deposit” of content value by permitting their link to remain. Similarly, when I excerpt a blog post from another blog on my own blog, I am taking some of the content created by another blogger, and enriching my own blog with it, in exchange for which I will place a voluntary link to the blog post I am excerpting in my own post. This link creates a trackback link on the other person’s blog, and we have what I call a “handshake” — a reciprocal linking relationship between two blogs involving the same posts.
By now all of this may have begun to sound a lot like Social Networking. That is no accident. Social Networking is a network model (a topology) that was popularized on the Web by such sites as Friendster.com, and more recently by Myspace.com. They operate by creating representations of real human relationships within the scheme of electronic networks. The expectation is that social networks, once created, enhance the usefulness of the overall network by allowing individual users to engage other users as well as shared resources in ways the reflect pre-existing relationships. For example, if I know Bob, and you know Bill, and Bill and Bob know each other, it’s possible that you and I might want to meet and that we would discover that we have things in common, or at least things to talk about.
Popularity is a term with significance in both the realm of electronic networks and in the world of Dale Carnegie. In the real world, we know that a person is popular because lots of other people seem to know them. They are always invited to all the best parties, where the photographers on hand are always certain to take many pictures of them. In the blogging realm, popular people (or their blogs, that is) have many links, they appear in many blogrolls, they are often excerpted, their own posts receive enthusiastic commentary… they get a lot of traffic. Why? Because they create thoughtful content on their own blogs that makes people want to link to it, because they leave thoughtful, relevant comments on other people’s blogs, and because they observe the appropriate protocols when they excerpt content from other blogs for use on their own blog.
These are the basics, the fundamentals, the bare-minimum needed to be a good blogger. To be a great blogger, you have to do as Dale Carnegie espoused, you have to win friends and influence people… you have to do the very same things all successful people have always had to do. Now go get a blog.