Most of them don’t seem to be too concerned about traffic at all. It seems the goal is to document their academic research and other professional findings about user behavior and things like that.

I started reading those blogs because as a marketer, I want to better understand the user behavior, etc, so I can market to it more efficiently.

Thanks for your reply and for your compliments. To answer your questions – the main thing the guest blogging helped me to do was to keep up a commitment I feel like I have to my readers of producing useful marketing content on my blog. A side benefit was that it was my way of offering a compliment to small group of bloggers who I really respect – to hand over the keys to my blog for them to run with. I wouldn’t say that I got large numbers of new readers from all the guest blogging, but I did get to see a friendly and collaborative side of the blogosphere that you rightly noted is so often missing as other bloggers were more than willing to help out. The opposite, commonly called “snark,” is something we all know too well. I have been pretty vocal that snarkiness is not part of my personality. I’m glad you took it that way too.

thanks for the comment!

First of all, congratulations on your son! What a happy occasion! And of course you must be busy out of your mind.

Second of all – my apologies. I hadn’t noticed that you had dropped the “interactive”. (That’s actually an interesting observation – I suspect that the name of a link often makes a bigger impression on my mind than the actual name of the site. It’s just all part of the design). Anyway, if you’ve dropped the “interactive”, then no need to review you on this aspect.

Third, re the guest post – I had actually seen that you just had a birth and suspected that there were so many guest posts because of that but didn’t have time to find out. Do you have a lot of new readers? What do you think, if something like this occurs again, perhaps each guest post could be prefaced by something like, “another guest post to stand in for Rohit, who is busy being a new father” or something like this. That way your new readers know what’s going on. Your already established ones already know what’s going on. (I had a similar experience in the spring when I was becoming a first-time grandmother).

In coming back to your blog for the third time, I notice that one of your bloggers actually DID mention that he was a guest because you were having a baby. However, I did not find that out until I took the trouble to go back to your blog for the third time. I did that because of your comment here; it made it worth my while. What are we learning from this? A) that interactivity is very important and B) that some people, me including, do a lot of content skimming. If there’s really important information, how do we catch the skimmers’ eyes?

Lastly, Rohit, I just want to say that you have just risen highly in my esteem. In the sometimes acrimonious climate of the blogosphere, there are not many people who would have a) replied to a little-known, new blog like this and b) would have given such a friendly, measured reply to what clearly was a bit of criticism. Thank you.

You took the words from my mouth there, I couldn’t have said it better myself

Thanks for mentioning me. I’m truly honored and I will continue to think about being social.

I have to check up those sites too.