Self Promotion: Clever or Just Annoying?

Nowadays, it seems like everyone and their mother has a “blog”. And in many ways, these blogs can function like mini-web sites. Almost anyone can get one for no cost at all from blog service providers such as WordPress, Blogger and Typepad. And most times you can tell who the newbies are from those who are actually using their blogs to try to gain revenue.

Separating the Newbies from the Business People

Typically, the newer the blog user is, the more focused they are on expressing themselves and trying to find their own personality via blogging. Often, these blogs will have personal anecdotes, pictures of family and friends, short stories and links to pages as well as other bloggers they like. These bloggers tend to have more fun with writing, as they feel no restraints in what kinds of topics they can write about.

On the other hand, there are those bloggers who (increasingly so) are out to market themselves in an effort to bring attention to an issue; but more often than not, it is to make some sort of revenue from the blog. These blogs are peppered with AdSense ads, and other nonsensical things, which tend to cloud the reader’s ability to focus on what should be the most important part of the blog: the content. Now, don’t get me wrong; there are some decent, high-quality blogs out there that do a really great job with providing quality content while making some money on the side. However, this brings up the whole notion of self promotion.

There are many schemes for earning revenue for all of the blogging that a person can stand to do in any given week, month or year. A lot of times, bloggers will promote their blogs or other blogs that they are earning revenue off of by promoting it on other sites. This is where the whole “do follow” and anti-spam rules come into play. Recently, for example, I have noticed that there are a lot of people who have been sending me messages on MyBlogLog.com. The thing is, though; they’re not actual personal messages. Instead, they appear to be mass messages sent out to hundreds of viewers simply saying something like, “Please check out my site at www.—-.com and leave a comment”. Would most readers consider this form of self-promotion to be spammy? While it may seem clever to spread the word about your blog (because admittedly, sometimes I will click on a link out of sheer curiosity), more often than not I just find self-promotion annoying half the time.

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