What the Romans did for Blogging

Unless you live in what was once part of the Roman empire, you probably don't watch the TV show called 'What the Romans did for us', although you defiantly would have been influenced by the Romans in one way or another (ever heard of the butterfly effect?).

Even to the most un 'historically aware' person it is more than obvious that the Romans didn't write blogs, due to the plain and simple fact that they didn't have computers; but they did have diaries and records. The word blog, is short for 'Weblog', and for many of us a diaries is a form of log. Therefore, the Romans had one of the first blogs, they just weren’t 'online'.

I am currently studying Tacitus, a Roman historian. It is interesting to note that his motives for (b)logging is to form a record of the past and to entertain his audience, which by the way, I would say he needed to work on a little!

I do joke about how boring he is, but the truth is he does use some useful techniques that make some parts of is 'Annals of Imperial Rome' actually quite enjoyable.

Methods We Can Learn From
Getting the dirt on the individual. Like it or not, people like gossip, and mentioning names of the specific 'celebrities' you think your audience have a knowledge of is a great way to get them hooked.

Example Tacitus lets us know about how the emperor Nero tried to kill is mother Agrippina (who he committed incest with many times) by putting her in a mouldy old boat, so that she fell through the bottom. She then escaped by swimming!. While Nero clearly needed to work on his assassination methods, that little story probably didn't affect the course of history very much, but its inclusion by Tacitus made my day.

Don't spare the gory details. I have read many a blog that is full of 'okish' content. The blogger clearly knows what he/she is talking about but they leave out the figures and fail to give the details that led them to that conclusion. Tacitus includes every possible detail, making for a lengthy read, but an entertaining one.

Example Tacitus writes about how a Roman legion was being punished for rumours of a mutiny. The commander chose to have them 'decimated' like in the 'olden days'. This is when the men are all lined up and every 10th man is flogged to death. Pretty extreme? Call me sadistic, but it kept me reading.

Talk about the Scandals
This is one of the more well known blogging techniques, to get the 'scoop' on a scandalous story and milk it for all it's worth. Of course this can't be done too often or you risk losing credibility.

Example Tacitus didn't let the emperors off easy. If anything he was quite the opposite. He recorded how on one occasion Nero had a secret door built into the senate building and a Vail set up so he could hide his mother Agrippina behind it! Women were defiantly not allowed in the senate and at the time this was totally outrageous. It's even slightly funny because it shows how Nero was a 'mummas boy'... in every possible way.

The Grand finale
Hopefully I have proved that we can learn a lot from Tacitus's records of the Romans, but not that much from the Romans themselves (although Tacitus was a Roman... ). Stay tuned for more tales of interest.

I Like Big Blogs ... and I Cannot Lie!

All you other bloggers can't deny that you are not going to re-visit a blog that has less than 10 posts. You probably still wouldn't bother even if contained a few more than that. The point is that the bigger the blog the bigger the traffic. It's commonly written that past blog posts continue to get search engine traffic even after the blogger has long since met his/her grizzly end, (or at least stopped blogging); but how true is this?

Case Study - Of Myself
You may remember several weeks back when I was busy setting up and writing the content for my other site I failed to post every day on this blog, and for about two weeks it became an 'every other day' affair. Believe it or not that affected this site's traffic in a massive way.

Just before I started this brief period of posting every other day, I received a link from JohnChow.com for winning his Guess my February income contest. This boosted this sites traffic up to its all-time high, of 310 page views for that day, which went down to 256 page views the next day and gradually decreased down to a fairly constant 200 page views each day. Constant, that is, until I failed to post each day.

The reduction in traffic was overwhelming. Within a week of posting every other day traffic slumped from 200 to 40-100 pageviews per day.

But what could be the cause?
At the moment 32% of this blogs readers are returning visitors. From my experience this is a pretty high percentage and can help explain the traffic drop. If a sizeable percentage of my readers don't find this site via e.g. Google, then that means that when they/you see I haven’t posted they/you don't bother coming back for a couple of days. This is just my theory; your ideas are greatly welcomed!

If you wanted to know about the current state of traffic, my response would be that it is 'sort of middelish'. Meaning, my search engine traffic has dropped, due to loosing my page 1 in the Google SERPS for phrases like 'AGLOCO scam', which used to rake in a lot of traffic. I am not actually disappointed with this. To maintain a page 1 in Google for that phrase I would have to post about AGLOCO every few days, which I know is not what most of my readers want.

What does it all mean?
You could call it a failure of SEO planning, or a success of focused content writing. Call it what you like, the two lessons to be learnt are:

1. Posting daily has its benefits. It’s a fairly well known phrase, to 'post only when you have something to say'. I agree with this wholeheartedly, but I have found that if I have the time to do more surfing the net, or finding another source of mental substrate I end up having something to say.

2. Find keywords and stick with them. This is a pretty obvious one, which I have implemented on my new site. However, with this being my first ever site; when I started it in on December 30th 2006 I had never even heard of keywords! Now if that isn't learning while earning I don't know what is!

What the Ancient Egyptians Taught me about Blogging

Blogging down the ages

You may think there can be no way in the afterlife that there is a link between one of the oldest civilisations on earth and one of the most modern pastimes, but you would be wrong. The Ancient Egyptians blogged in Stone.

Mans desire to communicate and make a statement to the world is as old as when we evolved from homo-erectus. Bloggers, much like Pharaohs want to leave a Legacy. To do this their blog or 'Stella' must be eye catching. The Pharaohs did this by having no ads and focused on quality content. They gave the populous what they wanted and needed, which was a belief system (a mental routine). As an added bonus the Pharaoh would become deified in the process (linked with the god, AmunRe) and gain a form of immortality.

Cartouche's, (see image below/left, are the engraved pharaohs name encircled in a loop) I like to think of as the hyperlinks of the ancient world. King lists were engraved on walls of temples and much like the Technorati Favourites Train which had a viral effect. There are now 100s of copies of them recorded by numerous past civilisations not to mention the 1000s of modern copies. They wanted to be remembered and those that had their names engraved deep enough, backed up with quality content succeeded. When a new dynasty came along they would (try to) destroy the records of the past one, re-branding it by rubbing away the past cartouches and writing their own one over them. Over time the names were engraved deeper and deeper to make it harder to write over. The beautiful thing about the Internet is that you can re-brand yourself whenever you like!

Bloggers know that controversy can be a path to traffic and a reputation. Akhenaten, the heretic king is a perfect example of this. In the New Kingdom (1567-1085BC) he set up is very own city (using Wordpress ;) at El Amarna and made everyone worship the sun disk, which was known as 'the Aten', hence his name, Akhenaten. If he hadn't done this, he would have been 'just another pharaoh' and I probably wouldn't have even studied him. In being controversial, he set him self apart from the competition and even changed the nature of art itself. Blogging is an art and top bloggers have the power to change it.

There were competitions between different cult centres, e.g. the cult of Osiris at Abydos and that of Amun at Thebes. This caused the peoples 'mental routine/belief system' to change and the pharaohs (who are the bloggers in this analogy) had to account for that.

If my archaeology classes have taught me anything, it is that certain rules apply to everything. They key points here are:

1. Have a mental routine, but it needs to be adaptable so it can change when the need arrives.
2. Engrave your writing deeply by writing strong unique content.
3. Be eye catching and not plastered with tacky banner ads (as well as other ads).
4. Use the power of viral marketing, it’s for the greater good, of the clever minority....
5. If you don't like your blog, re-brand it! This may happen very soon with this site...
6. Be controversial, but not to often. Note that Akhenaten’s new city and religion were destroyed after his death and El Amarna has never been re-discovered!