NewsWatch: Life Cycle of a Blog Post

I clicked “Publish.” Now what?

Wired magazine has deconstructed the blogging process in their latest issue, following your blog post from the moment you publish it, all the way around the world as aggregators (feed readers like RSS), scrapers (spam blogs) and spiders (search engines) all chew on your information.

What’s darkly funny about the process - and anyone who has ever tried to run a commercially successful blog, rather than just a personal journal, will tell you this - is that the reader is the absolute last person considered in this process. Marketing a blog is not about how many hits you get or how many people are commenting, but rather who is linking to you (and in what way) and how important Google’s algorithms perceive you to be.

Wired’s deconstruction inadvertently calls attention to this through the way their graphic is designed - the reader is not the center of attention, or even close. As the process criss-crosses back and forth, the reader sits at the end, waiting for something keyword-rich to spill out onto their screens.

For those bloggers who want to be found - and why else would you create a public blog of any form? - it’s too late; there is no way out of this marketing web. To be noticed, you must compete among the SEOed and marketed content that was designed precisely for these keyword-hungry computer bots. You have to know about H1 and H2 tags and how to use them. And meta data? That’s so five years ago.

Word of mouth isn’t even what it once was. We used to recommend things by sending emails, IMs, or mentioning it face-to-face to a trusted friend; now all we have to do is click a conveniently placed Digg or Technorati button. (We won’t even get into how quickly you can make a “friend” these days, through sites like Facebook and MySpace.)

Being found, if it ever was simple on the Internet, clearly isn’t anymore, and the “Life Cycle of a Blog Post” is absolutely a testament to that. If you’re not already rushing to download WordPress’s All-in-One SEO Pack, or propagating your RSS feed into every blog directory on the planet, you might as well be in the dark ages - what did we used to call that?

Writing in your diary.