Share and Share Alike

Last May I decided to start this blog as the key driver for my personal branding strategy. The idea was that, in order to attract attention, I would share my most valuable ideas and insights. My geeky side loves to teach and share, but my business side tries to prevent me from releasing potentially sensitive information that might give my competitors a leg up and negatively impact my business.

For years I had been part of that big group of SEOs and Internet marketers that enjoy great success, but don’t necessarily see the need to risk reducing their share of the pie. So in the spirit of the holidays I want to share what I’ve learned about sharing so far. If you are part of that tight-lipped group that think in the same way I did before, I want to tell you why you need to change and what is in it for you if you do.

The rewards of opening the door

After a few months of blogging and trading ideas for attention, I have achieved something that money and favors could never have bought me: a good deal of respect. It is truly humbling to see my name on the same list as some of the brightest and most talented SEOs in our industry. Amazing individuals that I’ve been reading about for years have offered me their recognition and approval. It’s tremendous, and priceless.

Maintaining and updating this blog at the quality I want to keep it takes time, which I don’t always have because of my current obligations, so I decided to sit back and reflect about the real benefits I am getting from my blogging activities.

1. Improving credibility and trust. This is probably the most important benefit. Trust is something that is really hard to earn. When you share your best stuff, others will expect the best from you, and reward you by spreading your ideas. It requires a lot of work, but it is definitely worth it.

2. Improving original ideas. Multiple minds think better than one. It doesn’t matter how good you think your concept is, others will find ways to improve upon it. I have seen this happen time and time again. My readers provide very insightful comments—angles that I did not initially consider.

3. Meeting on-line rock stars in the industry. When you are an unknown, some of the A-list bloggers may not reply to your comments, let alone your e-mails or pleas for links. But when you raise your profile by blogging high-quality posts consistently, they are more likely to pay attention. (It is a good practice to contribute to their blogs too, of course!)

4. Generating good will. When you give people your treasured stuff, they naturally feel the need to reciprocate. Many of my readers are also bloggers and I regularly find them quoting and linking to my posts. Some share their projects and ideas via comments or e-mails, and others even share improvements to the art on my blog!

5. Generating positive word of mouth. It’s a fact: people don’t trust you because of what you say, but because of what others say about you. Share your best ideas and secrets and your regular readers will become your passionate evangelists.

How to create knowledge worth sharing

Let me share a geeky conversation I had a few years ago with our former Lead System Administrator, Carlos Johnson, who went on to work for Skype in Estonia.

We had some technical problems due to the way we were doing the load balancing of our servers. We were using some monitoring scripts that polled our servers and if one of them went down the scripts would update the DNS entries to direct people only to the live ones. The problem with this monitoring was that it messed up our stats and was very unreliable. After thinking hard about the problem, I came up with a very simple but effective solution. I proposed that instead of doing a DNS round-robin, we should do the fail over at the DNS registrar. (How? I should probably write about this in more detail in a future post!) 🙂

When I explained this idea to Carlos, his immediate reaction was: “Where did you read about this?” To his surprise I raised my eyebrows and laughed hysterically. “Do you think that everything has already been written?” I said. “How come I still see people writing things down all the time?”

There’s a lot left to learn—and to share. Of course not everyone has secrets or great ideas to blog about, especially when just starting out. Research is what creates knowledge and if you want to know what nobody else knows (and gain a competitive advantage), you need to make it a habit to research. Study competitors, study search engines, study as much as you can, and then brainstorm. Think about practical uses for your insights, and most importantly, test. Test, test and test.

An idea is just and idea, until it is put into practice. To all my readers, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

P.S. I plan to write a few posts and schedule them for delivery, as I am taking a few weeks off for a long overdue vacation. I’ll be back next year full of energy and, hopefully, will up my post frequency even more. I expect you to raise the bar even higher on commenting too! 😉