Background bits:
- Even when there are very few actual visitors, blog posts that contain very specific terms get found via a search or two. It’s nice to be needed, and found. Search is cool.
- Some of the posts that were the most fun to write got the most attention from friends, especially when I kicked back and philosophized. I like this, too.
I see a parallel to the post where I asked readers to tell me what they want. My request got two responses right out of the gate, one from Dazzlin Donna requesting posts about using the Internet to build community, and one from Miriam Ellis who would like to see a tutorial about the WP ecommerce plugin. The community thing is my tagline, and I’d talked at one point about trying out the WP ecommerce plugin.
Does good tutorial plus active community equal content that rocks? I’ve got to say, in my ever so humble opinon, the answer is a definite maybe.
Come back soon and see what Donna has to say. I’ll be interviewing her about community in an up and coming blog post.
More Tutorials – Good and Good For You
I like tutorials. Making a readable record of what I am exploring helps me be remember what I did. The CSS float: left I will remember. I will have to look up the exact name of WordPress template tags that can make a blogroll, and I may or may not remember the parameters that go with them.
Not having to look up the parameter is not the biggest reason for writing out a tutorial for myself. If I write something out, I learn it better and wider ideas percolate. Things I may not need at the moment go into the idea hopper for later. For instance, when I made the blogroll footer tutorial I learned that I can use a parameter to order blogroll links according to how recently they were updated. At some point, if I want to add a short list of recent reads list to my sidebar, I can pull that list from favorite blogs and prioritize it by freshness. Nifty, huh?
Search is sharing is fun. Use a set of super targeted terms and get found by people who are searching for those terms. Will they “convert” and pave me a path to probloggerhood? Not the point, even if I decide to head in that direction. Money follows mission, not the other way around. Right now I’m at sharing, and sharing the process is a way of giving back to (you guessed it) the community.