Blogging: Help others to help yourself

Blogging is by nature sharing.  It's putting my thought out in the open so that everyone else can take a look.  Anyone can take the idea, use it, play with it and build on it.  When people do, the idea gets stronger, more refined.

The final product is no longer my idea.  It might have come from me typing away on my blog.  But all the life experiences and perspectives it gained from traveling out of my blog is certainly none of mine.  I was in effect medium.  The idea was the one that traveled from person to person touching their lives in many unexpected ways.

This is collaboration in its essence.  It is an act of sharing.  Act of giving.  Act of helping others.  Only when we help others and make an impact on people's lives, we can truly appreciate the power of blogging. 

If I put myself in the focal point, I would not be able to add value for the readers.  People will not bother reading it.  Who would put up with self-absorbed product manager who rambles on about his worthiness?  My blog will then become a self promotional tool that no one cares about.

Therefore the focal point has to be the reader.  This does not mean that I need to be self-conscious of how I position myself.  Instead it means I need to be mindful of writing a helpful content to my readers.  My goal should be to make something of value to my readers.

By creating helpful content and sharing it, I get to help others.  If people actually get value out of reading my content, I also get value from having my own voice among the community of like-minded people.

In other words, blogging is helping others to help yourself.

I wanted to share Rand Fishkin's slide deck that he presented at SEOmoz Meetup back in May of 2012.  I have a feeling that Fishkin and I are talking about the same elephant from two different perspectives.

The Content Marketing Manifesto from Rand Fishkin