MindThe Beginner

It’s almost every day that you notice how unhelpful people can be. Everyone is minding his or her own business and not caring about what others do or what they can do for the other. Self first is the way to go it seems.

But doing things alone has two major disadvantages:

• You’re restricted to only the knowledge you have yourself and your perspective on things
• Your social network stays small

Working together might not be for you but through the internet there are certain things you can work on together without ever having to see eye to eye. In this perspective online life doesn’t mirror real life. Online we seem to want to help others with just about anything we can. Social networking is a force to be reckoned with online. Take the problogger challenge I took part in for instance.

It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Soon after starting with that challenge the realization came to mind that doing it (building a blog) all alone won’t be easy. You need “blogging buddies” who can help you when you’re stuck and who can help you promote your blog. This of course, works both ways. You might even get guestposts both ways. One of the powerful tools to reach a bigger crowd.

The need we have to work together and to tell others about our discoveries lies at the basis of forums. There are thousands (millions?) of forums on the internet in every single niche you can imagine. There are people there who are interested in the same things as you. This is especially useful when you’re in a very small niche as finding people in real life with the same interests might be very had indeed. The problogger forum that accompanied the 31DBBB helped me reach a bigger crowd. Everyone there is a blogger so specific questions still got answers.

There was another possibility however that got set up. A blogger’s collaboration. For beginning bloggers it’s hard to get noticed and to build traffic. There is only so much you can do by yourself. You can tweet all day long about your blog but you’ll only reach your followers (a few hundred?) and if you get lucky you get a retweet and you instantly reach more people. Other channels might be digg, stumbleupon, del.ici.us. They all depend on luck however.

Influencing luck

Can we help luck to be in a our favor? Sure we can: Find other bloggers who are willing to help a bit. It’s quite simple, digg their blogposts, stumble them, tweet about them, help them with questposts on your blog. Scratch their backs an they scratch yours. And if you have blogs-specific questions you have a group of bloggers you can ask to help. There’s bound to be someone in the collaboration who is good with webdesign. Another might be a wizz with twitter and everything he retweets can count on loads of traffic.

The results:

• Reaching more people
• A fresh perspective
• A bigger social network
• New friends
• A helping hand is never far away

Get out there, set up accounts at twitter, digg, stumbeupon, facebook, del.ici.us, technorati and any other place you can think of. Ask your readers if there are people there who want to work together for the mutual interest of building a better blog. Help yourself by helping others. Blogging is only one of many ventures that can benefit from working together. At the very least you get a fresh perspective on your preconceptions. At best you might end up with a friend for life.

In the near future I’ll be guestposting on other blogs and others will be guestposting here. It’s all part of the collaboration I’m taking part in that resulted from the problogger forum. There are fourteen bloggers in this collaboration and I must say, there are some real gems in there.