Blogging for Attention
Posted on March 28th, 2006by Michael Gray in Advertising
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If you’re a regular reader you probably know I’m a big advocate of using pen names. Whether it’s to fulfill people’s impression of who a blogging author might be, or building a more intriguing “character” , if it makes it more interesting, I just do it. You may also remember my post When A Pen Name Backfires where this actually caught up with me and I lost an opportunity to get some free publicity for one of my blogs. I’m not sure what is about that blog but it’s really good at getting attention.
First of all it’s a product blog, saturated with contextual advertising and blatant affiliate links. It’s not some secret undiscovered niche, it’s really fairly well covered. In fact the idea isn’t even original, I found a link in someone’s Digital Point signature checked it out, took the concept gave it my own look and feel and ran with it. In all honesty it’s really not that great a blog, in fact the weblog review gave it a 1 out 10. It only got the 1 because it is updated every day. It’s not even profitable it’s made less than $100 in 6 months.
Here’s the strange part it’s my only blog that has ever spawned a media request for an interview. It’s my only blog where articles I’ve submitted to submission sites have gotten handwritten emails asking for more articles (yes I can tell hand written request from an auto generated one). It’s my only blog that has people using the syndicated articles writing and asking me for more. Here’s the kicker, last week I got an email from a Woman’s magazine that is starting a new blog on line and is looking for guest authors to write one or two columns a month. It’s not Cosmo, Lucky, or InStyle, but it is still a magazine I’ve heard of and seen on the newsstands. Really makes me wonder what it is about that blog that attracts so much attention.
Sphere: Related Content
March 28th, 2006 at 12:11 pm
Is it is all about “women”. Have you looked at some of these womens blogs and there PR and backlinks? It is amazing really, they are natural marketers, but don’t expect them to link to you. Women absolutely hate marketing, I know, I had Danah Boyd yell at me in a hostile email the other day. She looks at my blog like it is a strip club or something, that doesn’t go over well with women who love women, ok I better shutup, she might find this link! ;-0
Back to the point, the media loves women because it is made up of women and gay men, prove me wrong. You want to go viral, get some real women blogging for you bud!
March 28th, 2006 at 12:45 pm
Hmm looks like Graywolf does well enough posing as a woman already
April 27th, 2006 at 8:00 am
[...] The Experiment Because I’m a tinkerer I conducted some experiments to see how many friends I could get with different approaches. I created three fictional shill accounts. Now while I’m not a woman, I’m getting pretty good at playing one on the internet (Blogging for Attention) and guys are just easier to scam (see Pretty women scramble men’s ability to assess the future) and would help me reach my conclusion much quicker. [...]