“So who gives a shiitake?”

Hope everyone had a delicious and food coma-filled Thanksgiving!

While educating myself on some of the finer points of blogging, I read a few articles on Copyblogger, which mentioned a golden tidbit from Guy Kawasaki:

Answer the little man. Now that you’re thinking of your blog as a product, ask yourself if it’s a good product. A useful test is to imagine that there’s a little man sitting on your shoulder reading what you’re writing. Every time you write an entry, he says, “So what? Who gives a shiitake?” If you can’t answer the little man, then you don’t have a good blog/product. Take it from someone who’s tried: It’s tough to market crap, so make sure you have something worth saying. Or, write a diary and keep it to yourself.

Friends, writing a professional blog is nothing like writing in your personal blog. You can’t spew whatever thoughts and ideas come to your brain and still expect your friends to read it.

Trying to come up with relevant content to entice complete strangers with is darn hard. And to keep them coming back… that’s even harder. How do you make them give a shiitake about what you have to say? How do you make your voice heard in the millions of blogs already out there?

The place to start, I think, is to have a topic of focus to your blog. In my case, my topic is the mobile app world and how one goes about marketing and promoting the darn things. Narrow your focus in order to find a smaller niche of potential readers: in my case, I’m writing this blog as a noob (beginner) who’s first entering the field. The hope is that if you appeal to a small niche and can write good content to make them dedicated readers, then you can slowly start expanding outward to a broader audience.

The main point of your blog isn’t to sell or advertise to your readers, it’s to create a relationship with them – and that is immensely more valuable than anything you could sell to them. So put your heart into your writing, let your readers in on a few secrets. The more you give, the  more you get back.

And that, I suppose, is the start to getting your readers to give a shiitake about you.

 

P.S. Guy Kawasaki is one of my celebrities – ever since I found his post on “everything you wanted to know about getting a job in Silicon Valley but didn’t know who to ask“, I’ve been a huge fan of his.

Appulous is finally up… nvm.

I am relatively new to the whole app thing and thus, had never heard of Appulous until I happened across a link one night. “The solution to a flawed iPhone App Store”, it read. “How curious!” I exclaimed! HOWEVER, I was unable to find exactly what the solution was, as the site was protected by a troll bridge (as the site moved to a new server)! The questions were all beyond my knowledge and research abilities and so the question remained a mystery until last night, when I randomly clicked on the link again and ABRACADABRA I was taken to a troll bridge-less site!

The solution is quite good. Find downloadable previews of apps to test them out before you pay a fortune for them at the app store. Content generated by its huge network of users.

Alas, the troll bridge has been put up again! For good reason, I suppose – the site was a little laggy last night, still. In the meantime, I’ll keep checking! Major updates are said to be coming to the site to make it more functional for users.

Zedge provides a library of shared mobile content for Android users

About Zedge
With more than 20 million unique visitors per month, Zedge is one of the largest mobile content distribution platforms in the world. The site can be accessed via the web, mobile web, and Google Android. Over the last 5 years, the Zedge community has created a library of more than 3.5 million unique pieces of content. This represents the quality, diversity, creativity and self-expression that Zedge members are known for.

 

Today, I learned on LinkedIn that Zedge had ported its huge existing network of users onto the Android platform. Within the first two hours of release, had around 1,000 downloads. Impressive indeed, especially when they haven’t done any external promotion yet. I was curious as to how they were getting new users now, and asked if they had done any marketing since. No, they responded that they hadn’t spent any money marketing and had just focused on the product and “small details”. Important lesson to learn!

Zedge offers its huge network of shared mobile content, including: wallpapers, ringtones, themes, videos, games, and more. It even allows you to build your own!

Get the app here.
Check out their blog here.

Facebook app tries to organize the mess that is Apple’s app store

Good news, everyone! Apple’s app store is notoriously messy, disorganized, etc, etc, etc and mplayit has decided to do something about it!

And in a rather ingenious way too, may I add.

Who better to recommend apps to you than your friends? mplayit has built a Facebook app on which you can recommend and share iPhone apps with your friends. Additionally, apps come with full videos, pictures, and text describing functionality.

The smartest thing about this is that the social media network already exists. The developers don’t have to wait for the iPhone app sharing network to slowly build itself. Oh Facebook, you really are useful after all!

[theAppleBlog]