I’m glad we’ve met as well.

I hear you about traffic and readership. It’s a real catch-22. But you know, I continue to be exposed to new readers without participating in memes like this. That being true, then there is a trade-off between using meme-linking to increase traffic versus offering great content to your readers. I simply choose the latter.

And still, I’m grateful for those who have found me through the meme.

Dave,

Sure. It’s amazing how easy it can be to forget for a few moments what this is all about – at least for me. The draw of big stats can be enticing. That’s why, I feel, it’s important to be clear in our goals. I’m not blogging for traffic and rankings. I’m blogging for conversation and relationships.

Liz has mentioned you a few times as well. I love your blog, though I just recently joined in the conversation. I do look forward to growing our relationship. Thanks.

I’m looking forward to it.

I’m quite new to blogging, so I have yet to learn about RSS. Mark Blair gave me some excellent links for info on it. Now I just have to find the time to learn the process.

But I have bookmarked you to come visit I hope that you’ll stop by and keep on touch too.

Thanks for restating the reasons we blog: conversations and relationships. I found your site when you linked to me and Liz mentioned your name in a conversation. It’s a great start to what I hope will be an ongoing relationship. Love your stuff!

I agree with you in that many of thse memes can be a distraction to your blog theme and to your readers.

The Technorati train proved beneficial to me; I was able to find blogs / bloggers that I would never have found otherwise, and have made some great connections with some bloggers, as well as gained some new readers due to the exchange.

I also took part inthe Ultimate Guide to Productivity. Even though it doesn’t fit my theme, I feel it provided some good reads, with links to others involved for further posts on the topic.

I’ve seen a number of other memes where they appear more like link farms to drive traffic and have decided against being involved in them.

At ant rate, glad to have met you in the exchange.

Cheers!

Thanks. I do hope to see you around. Let me know if I can do anything for you.

Certainly. I read your blog regularly. And I’m interested in your 5-blog meme. I’ll join in some time next week.

If any of your readers are interested; I’ve started a meme that’s fulfilling your mandates – and mine.

If I could only read 5 blogs.

http://thepaperbull.com/if-i-c.....d-5-blogs/

Great, thanks. I’ve already grabbed your feed as well so perhaps you’ll see me too.

Mark,

Very interesting study. Are you going to write a post about it? I’d love to hear more.

I can certainly understand what you’re saying. When you look at the most linked to blogs, there’s no way to really evaluate whether it’s about link farming or great content. All I can say is I know what side of the fence I’m on. Now I feel like I’ve made that clear.

Thanks for your comments. And, you’re always welcome to leave long comments here. It’s about the conversation. And sometimes I need to listen before I speak.

You said, I don’t want to waste your time with writing about memes that are just about building my traffic.

Here’s the thing. Technorati doesn’t even build traffic–except maybe organically. Technorati ranking only measures traffic potential through in-bound links.

There are so many link farms and other link exchange scams out there. Even bloggers inside the top 10,000 can be virtually useless.

For example, this afternoon I was examining stats on a test we ran. I sorted the participating blogs by technorati rank–expecting mediocre results. 3 of the top 5 in technorati ranking were some of the least successful at moving traffic. I can only assume there was no traffic to move.

Their technorati rank was just aggregating their obsession with link farms. These entire blogs were based on empty memes. They were facades.

Meanwhile, one blog with a technorati rank of 300,000 outperformed 2/3 of the group!

Keep up the great work!

First, thank you.

I do agree with what you’re saying…bloggers do need, I feel, to look outside their circles for content. And many of use do, which is how we find each other.

I fully get that you and Maki have core missions that would make sense for you to experiment with a meme like this. And I commend you for doing so.

As you said, if you topic was different, this meme may have been more of a distraction than a benefit. That’s how I feel. I’m grateful to Maki for getting the word out. It was a good experiment, if for nothing else then it reminding me my core mission. And the added readers are nice too.

I do hope that my content fits your liking and that you join in the conversation from time to time. The relationships that I’ve built through my blog is why I’m blogging. I only wish that to continue…

That’s exactly what I thought. But going by the comments I was getting I felt I needed to be clearer.

At least this way I got to speak more directly about my blogging goal.

Thank you so much. I’m certainly interested in speaking to you about your needs. Perhaps I can help in some form. Best thing to do is take advantage my Free 25-Minute Phone Consultation. No obligation and we’ll know at the end of the call what we can do together.

I did want to point out that for both Maki and myself, the experiment was related to our core missions as we both focus on social media marketing in our blogs. Honestly, if I had a blog about golf or something, I feel it would have been a bit of a distraction.

Even my participation was limited because of my concerns about the indiscriminate nature of the linking and how it would be perceived.

I do think though that there are some big upsides in the exchange in that it gets some bloggers looking outside their bookmarks at some other blogs. I think this is one of the reasons I enjoy StumbleUpon so much as well.