I saw a post from Facebook friend David Hinson recently that suggested to get your blog listed at Alltop, all you need to do is send an email to Guy Kawasaki, the well known enterpreneur and venture capitalist in silicon valley. Sure, it's that simple. And I have an offshore account in Kuala Lumpur where I will wire you $500K if you just send me your checking account routing number and your social security number.
Blogging for me is a hobby, a way to force me to think about the world outside of day to day challenges in consulting. I know I don't write as often as I should. I've had this blog up and running for a few months now, I'm enjoying writing, but I can't truly say I'm a blogger. So when I got a response from Guy merely 5 minutes after a late night email, saying, "We'll add you to socialmedia.alltop.com. Your stuff is good," I consider that a significant boost of confidence to continue writing and seeing where this leads.
Alltop is a content aggregator site that Guy created more or less on a whim, seeing the success in driving traffic to some of his other sites from other aggregators like popurls.com. Alltop has many categories and doesn't have an 'algorithm' – there is a staff manually reviewing content and placing it on each page to give it a human element of what they recommend. (My suggestion would be to add a Digg like feature to perhaps build up credibility in some of the content, but what do I know). You can read more about Alltop here. With a "persuasive email" you too can be included in their directory, in exchange for adding banners like this:
or the one I included on the right.
Thanks again Guy, for:
a) being responsive,
b) including me (it will definitely give me incentive to continue writing and focusing on providing the best content that I can), and
c) creating a cool new way to get at information rather than trying to follow blogrolls, del.icio.us links and other informal ways of finding good blogs and news sources to read.
Have you checked out Alltop yet? Here's a screenshot of this blog post from http://socialmedia.alltop.com:
