In my earlier post (SEO tips for WordPress), I’ve mentioned that it’s good to be controversial (although, it can help in downgrading your image over a period of time) however, sometimes it can help you in showing that you are stupid as well. In the example which I’m going to show you, you’ll see both the aspects of being controversial! Not only the guy helps the company get lot of linkbacks and stirs up conversation, it also shows that he’s nothing but another stupid fellow, who just wrote the article without thinking that how stupid he’ll look in front of everyone and that it could hurt his profile in any way.

Paul Boutin, who is the very special correspondent for Valleywag (actually it’s a blog) recently wrote an article on Wired Magazine saying that Twitter, Flickr, Facebook make blogs look so 2004 and gave examples of Jason Calacanis and says that how search engine results are ruled by professional online magazines and newspapers -

In 2002, a search for “Mark” ranked Web developer Mark Pilgrim above author Mark Twain. That phenomenon was part of what made blogging so exciting. No more. Today, a search for, say, Barack Obama’s latest speech will deliver a Wikipedia page, a Fox News article, and a few entries from professionally run sites like Politico.com. The odds of your clever entry appearing high on the list? Basically zero.

And with all these examples he suggests that one should quit blogging and should stay on social sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc. as one can’t compete with these.

What positives you can take from Paul’s post ?

1. Perfect Link-bait - These are the kind of posts which will always attract people to make a post or that will stir conversations around it. Even I got sucked in this trap and now you are reading a post which revolves around what he said.

2. Guest post on popular places - Always write something good and post it on blog which are popular. He chose Wired for this which far more popular and thus helped him attract more followers.

Where exactly Paul went wrong ?

I’m not saying that the points which were made by Paul are completely wrong however, they are slightly baseless too. If he gave examples of Jason, Robert Scoble etc. then I would like to give example of Darren Rowse, John Chow, Leo Babuauta, Steve Pavila and hundreds of others, who’ve been making good enough money, who’ve been appearing in search results (and that too higher than those online magazines & mind you, they don’t have a team of 30 professional writers) and doing good enough that they make 6 Figure income out of their blog!

Now a days, it’s just not the word “blogging”, it’s slightly diversified as “personal blogging”, “blogging for business” , “corporate blogging” etc. It felt that he wasn’t clear about what he wanted to focus on as on one hand he quoted Jason’s comment about blogging that “Blogging is not impersonal anymore ?” Hang on! this comment came from the guy made million bucks out of blogging and who got bored with and now going ahead to build a search engine!

I’m sure there are thousands of guys who have personal touch as they are into personal blogging and if you go and ask them, if blogging is impersonal to them or not, then you’ll get the real answer.

Now, where he went wrong again -

As a writer, though, I’m onto the system’s real appeal: brevity. Bloggers today are expected to write clever, insightful, witty prose to compete with Huffington and The New York Times.

This is only for those people who are interested in making money or who are doing the other sides of blogging i.e. “blogging for business” or “corporate blogging” and not for those who want that impersonal touch in their blogs.

What I can say is that - Twitter, YouTube, Facebook all of these are platforms to help you in connecting with people and you should choose the one which suits you the most and which fits your need and guess what, all the tools can be integrated with blogs! I’m sure that you are smart enough to know that what you should learn from Paul’s post and what you shouldn’t!

And while I sign off - I would like to ask a simple question - If at all you were the business owner, will you ever publish such a post or will you hire writers like these who may hurt your businesses profile ?