Blogs are 'conversations' ?! Yeah, right!

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That’s what I told myself for many years. With good reason.When I first started blogging in 2001, hardly anyone read my posts. The only person I could have had a ‘conversation’ was me… and doesn’t that sound a bit schizoid?!

Later, when my blogging became more varied, and some of the blogs gained popularity, they were visited by many people – of the wrong kind! I had to delete archived posts that had grown to 10 MB in size – with 9.9 MB of it being spam comments and trackback pings!

Trouble was that I had spent time and effort climbing the steep learning curve of blogging on the Movable Type platform – and was reluctant to migrate away from it.

Remember how that worked?

Tweak Template –> Save –> Republish All Files –> View Site –> DAMN! –> Tweak Template AGAIN

Well, that reluctance lasted 3 years, while WordPress launched, improved and became the default standard of many bloggers.

I became a ‘late adopter’ of WP, and soon discovered the bliss of ‘Akismet Nirvana’ (Akismet is the popular spam-blocking plug-in for WordPress blogs)

All of a sudden, it became possible to view blogs as ‘conversations’ again – but the blogosphere was now a lot more crowded (cluttered?) than it was in 2001.

But even then, for a few years longer, I blogged as a method of “spam filter proof one-way communication” with my client and subscriber base, just using my blog as an alternative to the increasingly unreliable email autoresponder.

This continued until a few months back… when my thinking shifted from an insightful realization.

It happened when I made a controversial blog post criticising something a well-known expert had done – and comments on the blog as well as personal emails from readers revealed an interesting trend…

They Said I Sounded More REAL

That was an eye-opener. A decade earlier, even with my mailing list boasting 15,000+ subscribers, I had multiple one-on-one conversations with my readers. It helped keep the communication we enjoyed through my email newsletter ‘real’.

I understood this had diminished, maybe even vanished, over the years as I became more ’sophisticated’ with my marketing and interactions online.

Blogging was a simple way to break down barriers of communication and engender two-way dialog – but I had missed the bus because of my choice of a platform that didn’t have an easily implemented solution to beat spam!

Ok, time to revise my approach with blogging. And another strategic decision helped in this change of direction.

A long, hard look at my business, specifically sources of traffic and revenue, revealed a shift from the early days. Where I had once depended upon joint ventures with affiliates and partners to attract subscribers, clients and members, I was now getting meaningful referrals only from a handful of partners – the rest were either happy existing clients, or people who found my business directly (organic search, word of mouth, or other ways).

That changed the dynamics of my blogging significantly, because I could now tread boldly where before I had tip-toed as if walking on egg-shells! I don’t mean I had earlier pulled any major punches, but I definitely didn’t hit as hard at soft under-bellies or things that made me squirm.

Not any more. Now I will. I’m getting ‘REAL’, as my blog reader said!

And lo and behold, conversations have started happening. Real ones. Sharing opinions, points of view, comments. Not the sanitized ‘can’t say anything wrong or critical about folks, or they won’t like me’ bullshit that’s the politically correct thing to say and do most of the time!

I can speak my mind a lot more openly and confidently now, without blunting rough edges or honey-coating my words… and express my point of view clearly, with little worry about how it might offend or delight someone else.

As Dave Winer puts it in “Blogs: The unedited voice of a person”:

“If it was one voice, unedited, not determined by group-think — then it was a blog, no matter what form it took. If it was the result of group-think, with lots of ass-covering and offense avoiding, then it’s not.”

I’ll just continue being more REAL. I’m liking it already. And hopefully, conversations will happen more often – because people like communicating with other REAL people.

Maybe this approach will backfire. Maybe there’ll be folks who’ll criticise my waiting to do it until now. What do I say to that? “You’re correct – I should have changed sooner. But better late than never!” I’ve decided to do this now because I’m convinced it is really true…

Blogs ARE Conversations

So, what do YOU think?