How come there aren’t more “honest” SMB blogs out there?

I get this question often..

My standard response is to just shrug and say that most people that are willing to put serious effort into something expect to be compensated.

For the rest, there is a significant penalty for being open – no matter what you say, someone will be offended.

So somewhere between the cost of time and lack of pay, there are a few popular blogs. Followed by half a billion whore blogs that spend half the time on self promotion and the other half pounding Google Analytics trying to figure out which comment spambot just landed there and if they can justify writing another blog post nobody will actually read 🙂

These days everyone is concerned with the eyeballs:

You know how I know if people read my blog? I ask if they know who I am. Yes? Have I offended you?

If I haven’t, you haven’t read this blog 🙂

There are three types of blog posts:

1. Bashing someone or something. Popular, everyone loves to watch a train wreck.
2. Top 10 list. Opinions are like assholes, everyone has one and they think they are right.
3. Boring crap nobody reads.

Most of your blogging fits in category #3: helpful posts, insightful thoughts, self-promotional posts and announcements, product reviews, etc. You know how I know I wasted an hour of my time? When someone comments with “That’s helpful, that’s insightful, that’s cool!” – it’s a packrat response – post bookmarked to be lost in a workstation reimage later.

You know how I know I’ve spent an hour on something useful? When someone who has never met me starts talking to me like they know me at a conference and I ask them what they use for spam filtering..

And you know what’s just friggin awesome? More people have read this post and clicked on that link than our own newsletter.

Always. Be. Pimpin.