Gatekeeper conspiracy: what gate?
August 17th, 2006 12:01:00 pm pst by 
Sterling Camden
Reality: not one A-lister has ever prevented any other blogger from posting.
But the disillusioned bloggers were expecting the A-listers to promote their content. That’s like starring in a high school play and then moping by the phone because Spielberg hasn’t called yet.
John Koetsier has some great reality-check material on this subject.
Shel Israel picked up my thoughts and connected them to some of the ideas in The Long Tail. If your only hope for success as a blogger is to be in the Technorati Top 100, then you’ve got to spend your blogging career humping the head of the tail, where there are few providers competing over a big, monocultural audience.
But the long tail of diverse audiences contains plenty of opportunity, if you can only connect to that part of it that wants to hear what you have to say. Kami Huyse shared some good insights on that part of the equation in the comments on Shel’s post. You can also read more about my self-promotion strategies here.
Shel’s post goes a good way towards defining the meaning of success for blogs. It’s about reaching your target audience, not about becoming a world-renowned rock star.
Unless, of course, your only measure of success is Adsense revenue.
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Shel has more questions about the nature of the gate in this Open Letter to Nick Carr
If my measure of success is Adsense revenue then I think I’m failing at life.
HA HA HA I’m all with that, Tracy! I’m almost up to $13 — ALL TIME.
holy crap. You could retire off of that loot.
That is US dollars, after all. Not those weak Canadian deals. Uh oh.
From what I can tell, getting to the “A-list” actually takes some work, work that most of us (myself included), are not willing to put in. I am happy with my respectable 10,000ish ranking.
What I always find funny is that the bloggers who start this meme every few months are always A-listers like Nick Carr. How strange that is, the A-listers fighting over the A-list.
I am loving John Koetzier’s take, which is essentially, life isn’t fair, get over it and how he points out that we need to realize how far we have already come if we are even above 100,000.
How true, Kami. Thanks for reading and commenting. BTW, on Shel’s recommendation, I’ve subscribed to your feed.
And I yours. BTW, I am not complaining about my rank in any way, I think being around 10,000 is respectable, but it doesn’t mean much either, from what I can tell. Shel first linked to me when I had zero links.
Kami, rank affects your visibility in the search engines for those who don’t know you yet, because it is a reflection of how many links you’ve got. But you’re right, all it takes is a few good links to get placed pretty well in Google for relevant content. And just pinging Technorati and including tags in your posts will get you noticed on Technorati searches.
Shel is a great guy who looks for good content and likes to promote it.
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