Blog her? Yes, sir!

I've just bitten the bullet and created an account at blogher.com. If you don't know what that is, don't worry - neither did I when I decided to keep this blog regularly. Despite posts dating back to 2007, I am still pretty new to the world of blogging in the terms of the "blogosphere" concept.

My entry into this conceptual zone was marked by the decision that a) despite declaring that I don't blog, I actually had been, and that b) if I was going to blog, shouldn't I get some readers?

So I did a bit of research (we call this googling) and found a lot of places to put my blog. I signed up, then they asked me for money, so I went back and did a bit more research, and found some free ones. I'm now listed in several directories. I am sure you can find me easily if you search for my social security number or go to page 3456. But better to be listed at the bottom than not listed at all.

And the traffic flooded in. People came to my blog in droves. I watched them clicking over my stats meter and saw what pages they read. I wondered who my regular reader based at microsoft was. Maybe it was Bill Gates? I came crashing down to earth when I found out that it was the bing bot. I found out half a dozen of the other regulars were yahoo and google.

Even worse, some real people came to my directory page and left me a message "hi I visited your site, I clicked on your ads! Please come to mine.". Ok then... I don't have ads. So you sir, are a liar. Did you even set a twinkling digital foot upon my site? I think not.

Back to the drawing board!

It occurred to me that if I want readers to come to me from a directory, then I should give back something by reading and commenting (where appropriate) on other blogs. I tried to use the directories to find some that appealed to me. That was easier said than done. It struck me just HOW many people there are blogging their faces off. A stupidly enormous number. Stupormous number.  By chance I managed to stumble over a few that I enjoyed. I learned that there is a whole genre called mommy* bloggers. I found that often blogs have blogrolls where they list all their mates' blogs. These lists of blogs are so long that they drop down in front of you and trail over your toes. Luckily, bloggers seem to travel in packs. So within the pack of bloggers that I started to read, the blogrolls start to repeat. But they are still too many to read regularly.

It hit me one day that the rss news reader I have in my applications folder actually has a use. I put all the blog feed urls into it for the blogs I like. Now I can read new entries if they come in. What I need now is some sort of plugin to allow me to assign a rating to those that are just failing to be interesting so that I can dump them after a few entries. Harsh, but necessary, with another hundred waiting to take their place!

Apparently some people make money off blogging. Well blow me down. Not only make money (from the ads and sponsored content) they also get free stuff. And to start with I figured the very biggest, most well known - 300 comments at a time - blogs would get free stuff sent to them. And yet this is not the case. If I was to pick myself up and fly to a blogher conference, apparently it's all about the swag.

Or to put it another way, it's all about mommy* marketing. Let's face it, we - the mother of the household - are the brand guardians. We are the ones who choose what gets bought. Who put their foot down on whether sunpack peanut butter is better than craft. Whether Nestle is allowed in the house at all, and whether we buy into to Oreo mindset. The advertisers want to market to mother's directly. So who was the clever clogs who first noticed the blogging sensation and thought "let's have some of that... a new media waiting to be tapped!" And off they went, smooching and schmoozing the mommy* bloggers, paying them to put their products in the body copy, with gratutious photos of their kids smeared in whatever food constituent is present.

It makes me think of that comedy sketch that illustrates what would happen if product endorsement was placed within the sitcom or soap, rather than in the ad breaks - and not just one product, but a constant barrage of different products. Sadly that comedy sketch isn't that far fetched anymore - consider the ABC soap "One Life to Live":

Tea: I warmed up some soup for you. I don't want you to go to the police station on an empty stomach.
Todd: What kind of soup is this?
Tea: It's Campbell's. It's healthy, good for your heart.
Todd: (spooning away) Yeah, it's good.

While it's quite probable that a conversation in your own kitchen could well involve the merits of one brand over another, you don't really want it force fed to you in your media.

I've looked at a few blogs recently that seemed to be entry after entry of product endorsement. They don't last long in my rss feed. I don't really care about the new snack you're testing on your kids. I want to read social comment, opinion and humour. I read blogs to get away from the ads, not to have them reguritated to me in less sophisitcated writing.

But then, I've been on the other side of that fence. I know just how despicable the marketing world is. There is no altruistic side to advertising. I was, and still am morally outraged that French Connection think it's OK to put "FCUK YOU" on a t-shirt that a kid might wear. Or see. The advertising concept was great, but it should never have been shown before the watershed. It certainly shouldn't have walked down the street. Trevor Beattie had a brilliant idea, but someone needed to give him a sense of boundaries. The CEO of FCUK, Stephen Marks was quoted saying unconvincingly that "there was no thought of it being rude". ORLY? So saying FCUK YOU is ok then.

That was over a decade ago, but the fact still holds that advertisers are not always thoughtful or truthful. It's something that we all know quite well. And yet people are quite often duped by the niceness of a company that wants to give them free stuff.

Nestle is one company that has tried to bring the mommy* blogging force onboard to help promote them as a family company. It caused an uproar, because apparently nestle have a lot of detractors in the breastfeeding community (there is a community just for breastfeeding? That doesn't sound quite right). I wonder if - once all the screaming and kicking and calling names had died down - whether the overall PR was good for Nestle. It probably was. Anyway, the 30 invited bloggers got free stuff. Win win, eh?

So, back on topic - this entry was really about how to market MY blog. It occured to me that I am not even sure what niche I am in. I don't see myself as a mommy* blogger (or even a mummy blogger) because I can't bring myself to babble on about how much my kids mean to me, and how I see sunshine in their hair. I am not suggesting that OTHER mummies are babbling - just that I would be. I might see sunshine in their hair, but that will only be whilst I am doing a nit check. Is that really the kind of thing that people want to read about?

I think that I modelled my thought processes on the type of newspaper column I always enjoyed. The back page column, or Kate Muirs OLD column in the Saturday Daily Mail. It was a personal take on a public concept, with added humour. Plus I don't really want to parade my random depression or box of crazy in public. Not when I've hooked my blog up to facebook, so people who remember the time I climbed a tree and flashed my boobs at the work party can read it.

And I've started to stitch extra bits onto my blog with badly placed sticky tape. A bit of allotment news here, a bit of photoblogs there. And the daily snap which I've decided needs to be re-thought. So I might have a shuffle and and polish and change a few bits here and there. Or I might simply do nothing, and hope that someone invites me to a brand conference and gives me free stuff.

* mommy - yes, I know it's WRONG. Bloody Americans. But they coined the phrase. They might get confused if I say "mummy bloggers" and think that there was a whole new Eqyptian artifact community of bloggers. Not that that wouldn't be REALLY interesting, no siree.