The other day I was working on a blog post and I was looking through my collection of past notes that I keep stored neatly in Evernote. While perusing through the seemingly never-ending stack of notes I came across a word I haven’t seen in years.
“Technorati.”
I was taken aback and somewhat shocked!
If you’ve been in the blogging game for any number of years you are probably familiar with the site. And you might even be remarking to yourself, “heyyyy, I remember them!”
Technorati was a blog index back in the day where you wanted to register your blog. It would boost your value and also provide a way for people to find blogs related to topics they liked. They had a ranking engine and your blog would move up and down accordingly. Sort of like a social stock market for blogs.
I looked at their about page today and I’m not exactly sure what they are doing now. Some sort of advertising mumbo jumbo.
Old social media accounts are cluttering your life
The important piece to take away from this trip down memory lane is that there is an extensive footprint of your online platform out there in the hinterlands of the Internet. Much you choose to ignore due to the lack of time or simply forgetting that it exists.
Given this vast wasteland of accounts from signups past, it’s important to remember that your blog is still your most important asset and to recognize that it’s just one small piece of a much larger puzzle.
Your blog serves as a slim portion of your overall online platform. If you are unfamiliar with the term “online platform”, it basically means all parts of the Internet in which your brand or company is represented. This includes your blog, maybe a podcast, your social media, and any other websites representing your brand (e.g. Technorati).
How you reached the point where your online platform was out of control
What happens to most bloggers is as their time online increases so too does the number of outposts of their brand. You start to accumulate accounts in every new platform, even those you have no intention of using.
Do you have an account on blab? Do you have an account on Anchor? What about Vine? Or Meerkat? Or even Periscope? At one point each of these platforms was the new hot toy on the market that everyone “needed” to be on. Now, they serve as abandoned corners of the Internet where only a few folks remain.
The problem with most bloggers is they tend to neglect their ever expanding reach on the Internet.
Bringing clarity to your confusion – Blueprinting
In order to clean it up, or gain control over it, you first need to understand what it looks like. That means you need to start documenting where you exist online. This is not a trivial matter as you’ll soon find out. But, it’s an important step in optimizing how you do business online.
I call this process “blueprinting” and cover it extensively in my course Ready to Blog. It’s a process I’ve used in my day job as a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for many years.
At a high level, draw a square in the middle of a piece of paper and label it “my blog” and start to document each part of your online platform that connects back to it. It may take some time but it will help you better understand how your platform is constructed and set up a framework for how to cultivate it moving forward
To truly optimize your process going forward you need to first understand what the hell the current environment looks like. Only then can you strategically address each area.
Too many bloggers simply forget what their environment looks like. By documenting each operational component, you can then figure out which portions of your platform should be pursued and which can be abandoned, deferred, or outright deleted.
Couple this documented analysis of your environment with a deep look at your Google Analytics you will discover that you can quickly cull your environment and make your blogging life much easier. Get rid of that clutter and start to accelerate your blog’s growth moving forward.
If you are ready to optimize your blog and position your online platform for sustainable growth, click HERE to sign up for the Ready to Blog course.
