What I have learned through blogging

The most important feature of blogging is first the feedback that you get from others, and second, that you only get feedback on what you do.

How does blogging work?

You blog and you tag.  You comment on other blogs and leave your blog address as a calling card.  People visit your site on the basis of what you put into the blogosphere as tags and comments.

Some examples

This is such a simple idea but so important.  One blog which is about diasporans from my country receives a lot of traffic about food.  But then much  of my early posts were about food.   I get considerable traffic around the word mbanje which only people who’ve lived there will understand.  I also get more traffic about Ethiopia than my own country because I’ve commented on their new commodity exchange.

This blog gets a lot of traffic about lawyers, Stephenson Harwood!  Oddly the most popular people that I have met in 10 months in the UK are lawyers.  Does that tell us something?

On Nouveaux Pommes, the line, ‘when you are tired of London, you are tired of life’, brings in visitors.

On Flowing Motion,  I get a lot of traffic following the poet David Whyte, whose poetry I quote in the title here.  Because I quote him a lot, I also know which poems are the most popular.  At the moment, people are searching for “Start close in”.

I have just started another blog on Serious Games called Mankala.  I  haven’t linked much there.  So far, the most popular link is a physics simulation of a large cloth on a washing line!

What you put in and what you get out

So there you have it.  It does help to understand your community at the outset.  That is what Search Engine Optimization does - it tells you popular words.

It is also interesting to learn which of your interests are interesting to other people.  It is fascinating, sometimes puzzling, but also fascinating to see the points you have in common.