I switched over to the laptop and checked GoDaddy for viralworthy.com and it was available. I grabbed it. I mean, why not? If I could easily post the stuff that I think is really worthy of attention, I become a filter for others. If people happen to like the way I filter, maybe they’ll pay attention to my website.

A few weeks ago I had stumbled upon a site called waxinandmilkin.com that was very simple, just great pictures and comments. It was elegant, simple, and engaging. I liked their taste. I liked it so much that I poked into their source code and saw they used a site called Tumblr to create their blog. I made a mental note–must do something with Tumblr.

You see where this is going, right? In less than 1 hour, http://viralworthy.com went live. I plugged in a few quick favorite videos, a quote about advertising, and set up my Twitter, Gmail, Disqus, and Facebook feeds. I downloaded the Tumblr iPhone app, scheduled a few posts for later release, and I’m rolling. Easy Peasy. Too easy.

The experience has left me with a number of unanswerable questions that can be distilled to this: When creating a web destination is so easy, does it diminish value or enhance value of the web community? I’m glad it’s easy. But I’m also glad that I don’t make my living designing web pages anymore. Both web design and programming have become a commodity. And when the bar is lowered, the noise floor rises exponentially. It becomes increasingly more difficult to find the quality among the rubbish.

The more the bar is lowered, the more filtering we need. The best filters will always be people that you trust and respect. Brands who engage in social media should take notice. The more noise in your channel, the more people will tune you out. Understand what your social media priorities are and keep them in focus. Be dynamic, be personal, but don’t make noise for its own sake. We have enough of that already, thank you.

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I had never heard of EveryJoe.com until a few days ago and I was instantly curious. Here’s a brand new blog site clearly designed for men, only weeks old, and already tracking 64k monthly uniques. WTF? I needed to know more.

It didn’t take long to get the story. A Canadian blog network called b5media made the bold move of aggregating their hundreds of blog properties into a set of four web portals, each with a slightly different flavor. EveryJoe is a guy’s clubhouse. They cover sports, entertainment, games and gadgets. Splendicity is for the women. They’re about beauty and style, fashion and bargain-spotting. Blisstree is a little more down-to-earth, focusing on cooking, crafting, parenting, and raising healthy families. Then there’s Bizzia. It’s all about the career and building wealth. From a bird’s eye view, it’s easy to spot the trend. b5media has created 4 buckets, loosely based on the single guy, the career guy, the homemaker, and the career woman.

Each of the four sites launched during a one month period between February and March of this year. Each quickly gained traffic and in total have so far captured around 400k unique visitors in the past month. They’ve found a demographic sweet spot and I’m sure that’s no accident. Each of these media portals are targeting people with money or influence over purchases. b5media makes their money selling advertising. They’ve created a platform that simplifies the process of deciding where to put the ads.

While it is too soon to say whether this reshaping by b5media will make them a giant in the blogosphere. Their regular readers may disapprove of the new format. I’m predicting success. I believe they’ve made a brilliant move and that after some initial shake-out, all four sites will grow their readership as they are discovered through search and social media.

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You may think that good writing is good content when it comes to websites, especially if it engages the reader. While that may be true, there’s nothing better than good writing that people come across easily because it’s composed in a way that search engines love. The best way to improve your chances of being discovered by readers is to write the kind of copy that search engines eat like candy. If this sounds intriguing to you, then read on.

You need to start with keywords. A keyword is a term that people search for, and that is relevant to your client’s product or service. You want to identify the keyword that you are most likely to get results with, which usually means it has a high search/competition ratio. The more often a term is searched and the lower the competition, the better your results will be. You can research keywords with Google’s keyword tool.

When you compose a topic, make sure you use the keyword in your title. This is very important. You also want to think about synonyms for your keyword. In the case of this article, the keyword I am optimizing for is the phrase search engines. As I write, I want to mention this term, as well as words like searches and phrases like search engine results. Ultimately, my goal is to populate the copy with at least a few occurrences of the term, but not over-saturate my copy with it. I should mention that there are other words in this article that are also being optimized, including copy, article, and keyword. There is some argument about the appropriate word density, but in my experience, an average of around 6-7% is more likely to earn higher search engine rankings.

Once your copy is written, there are a few more steps that you want your webmaster to follow through with. A picture might be included in your post, and in the HTML code, you will want to provide text that will act as a substitution for the picture, if the picture can’t be loaded. In code-speak, this is called ALT text. The ALT text should include your keyword or key phrase. Also, your webmaster should provide links from your article to other articles on the website, and those articles should contain at least one instance of the keyword. Your webmaster should format the title using an H1 tag, and make one occurrence of your keyword bold, using the bold tag. It is important that these steps are done, but not overdone. Otherwise, the search engine algorithms will not take your copy seriously. The idea is to make your copy appear to be relevant and important, using the few semantic devices available to the search engine robots.

There’s one more step to this Ninja tactic. You want to create inbound links to your copy once it’s published on the website. If you know people who are highly interested in the subject of your article and write blogs or articles, ask them if they’d be interested in mentioning your copy and linking to it. This creates an inbound link from another person’s website. Even if you don’t know someone, you can still create inbound links yourself. There are more than 100 million blogs out there, and surely there are a few active blogs that your article is relevant to. If that blog allows comments, you can write a comment that references your story, and create a link to it. In time, the search engine spiders will find this link, and recognize that it connects to your article, sweetening your popularity.

There is no guarantee that your article will become #1 in Google’s rankings, or anyone else’s, but you will improve your results by following these steps as they are outlined here. It may seem unfair or even corrupt to write copy that influences the search engines, but is that any less fair than writing copy that influences readers? I don’t think so.

For another perspective on blogging, please consider this article.

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When I started blogging I had a goal in mind, to provide a healthy and unique perspective on matters that are important to our business and our customers. It seemed a simple enough task but the longer I consider what it means to participate in the conversation, the more I am drawn to write for other bloggers and social media pundits rather than the people whom our agency serves. Am I falling into the same trap many others have already succumbed to?

Blogging is about communication and recognition. The reason people blog is to communicate with others who want to listen. But once the blogging starts we all like to think that what we have to say has merit, which we measure by how many people actually read the darn things. Measuring yourself by your readership leads you down the always present path of writing to increase readership rather than writing to share original ideas. One quick way to increase readership is to make controversial statements that cannot be ignored in a forum where you will be noticed.

This technique is nothing new. People like Rush Limbaugh have been doing it for years. Being noisy and controversial agitates, polarizes, and motivates people to take action. One clever attempt at baiting social media bloggers was one where “social media experts” were clumped into several broad categories and then described somewhat unflatteringly. Calling out everyone who considers themselves a social media expert in one swipe was a small stroke of genius and it had the intended effect. People responded overwhelmingly, polarizing around whether the author had gotten it completely right or completely wrong.

Posturing makes me suspicious of an author. As a result, I pay more attention to what their motive might be rather than what they have to say and that depreciates whatever value I might have gained from their insight. If bloggers want to architect their work to gain numbers and recognition, it’s their business. But are they speaking honestly, or are they just creating a bunch of useless noise like those brainless political pundits who will say anything to improve their ratings? And are they really helping anyone understand social media any better, or are they just filling space with garbage to be consumed by readers who are attracted to the controversy the same way kids are attracted to a schoolyard fight?

I’d like to think I’m better than that, that we’re all better than that, but the straight and narrow road is long and lonely. In a perfect world, original content and a uniquely valuable perspective will always win out, but it’s not a perfect world. Originality takes time and thought for both the writer and the reader. We all value an easy idea and a quick read because it demands less of us. But once in a while, perhaps we all need to think about why we’re blogging. Are you blogging for fame among other bloggers, or is it because you have something to say that is worth the time it takes to say it, and more importantly, the time it takes to read and consider it?

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