Monday, September 21, 2009

How Bloggersbase has influenced my blogging, and why



I don't think that it will shock you to discover that this blog does not receive as much traffic, as, say, Robert Scoble's blog. Therefore, the feedback that I receive on individual posts is rather limited. Many posts receive no feedback at all, and the feedback that I do receive (primarily via Disqus comments, FriendFeed comments, and the like) tends to be qualitative, rather than quantitative.

But one of Bloggersbase's features is that you can get quantitative feedback on every post that you submit - provided, of course, that someone gives feedback. Well, perhaps I'm lucky, or perhaps I'm in the right Bloggersbase circle of friends, but many of my posts HAVE received feedback. For example, as of early Sunday evening, here are the ratings for my most recent posts on Bloggersbase:



Now perhaps these are small data points, but Bloggersbase is giving me more data points than I am getting from my own blog. Not that I'm going to use the ratings to completely guide me - if I want to write about Serbian pottery sellers, I'm going to do so.

The Serbian pottery sellers post that I previously wrote, however, doesn't have any ratings within Bloggersbase. That's because I never submitted it. In fact, as time has gone on, I find that I have taken one of three actions with the Empoprise-BI feed that is being fed into Bloggersbase. (At present, I'm not feeding posts from my other blogs into Bloggersbase.) Every post from this blog is reviewed by me when it hits Bloggersbase, and I can take one of three actions:

  • Don't submit it to Bloggersbase at all. In my mind, the Serbian pottery sellers post, and some of my other posts, don't necessarily belong in Bloggersbase. So I simply cancel the submission.

  • Submit it to Bloggersbase, but only to my personal blog. I don't want to overwhelm the main Bloggersbase blogs with my writings, so I've found that I've become somewhat selective.

  • Submit it to one of the official Bloggersbase blogs (usually the Business & Finance blog, although I did make one submission to Quotes and Insights). When I'm in the "Goldmine" area, I can only submit one post (a "nugget") per week, so I have to be very selective. When I'm promoted above the Goldmine, I can submit as many posts as I want, but I try to only submit my more...um...businesslike posts to the main Bloggersbase blogs.
So, what will I do with this post when Bloggersbase becomes aware of it? It's clearly not a business post as Bloggersbase defines the term, but perhaps it will fit within the Blogging category as a nugget.

So we've seen that Bloggersbase provides you with a way to get feedback on your writing. But if you're not on Bloggersbase, what are the best feedback methods that you can use?
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