Your Blog Is Like an Ecosystem: Know It Well and It Will Have a Long Prosperous Life

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A blog isn’t just its domain name or a dashboard or even a blogger. No. Blogging has evolved into a wide web of very complex ecosystems. To get the most out of your blog, to know how to achieve the goals you have for your blog (if you haven’t defined them yet, you should), it is becoming crucial to understand your ecosystem well.

A Blog Ecosystem Explained
A blog ecosystem consists of all the people and their ideas interacting with an impressive array of support systems (tools, social media, platforms, plugins, themes, an editorial assistance like Zemanta, etc.). The entire array of people and their ideas inhabiting this ecosystem is called a community. How many people make up such a community – ecosystems vary in size – depends on a number of factors, making it very fluid. A blogger, the center of this ecosystem, has to know and understand well himself and other biotic components (people) of his community or those who are likely to join. He must also understand nonliving, abiotic components well in order to know how to reap their benefits – to engage with the ever growing community. The blogger must supply the needs of his community, such as relevant and engaging content. If the community’s needs aren’t met, it will move to a better blog (ecosystem). Therefore, you should regularly step out of your ecosystem and investigate other blogs and even interact with them in order to make your own better for your community.

The Earth flag — How big and prosperous is your ecosystem? (Image via Wikipedia)

The Center: A Blogger
The center of this ecosystem is in my opinion a blogger; all the other components, a community and the abiotic ones, are his support system. A blog, a new ecosystem, is born in his head or their heads (if it’s a corporate blog). There are boundless reasons, why someone decides to blog – usually they have a more or less clear agenda: to share their views on issues, to position themselves on the market as opinion leaders and experts, to increase the sale of their products and/or services, to make a lot of money etc. Virtually everyone who decides to blog wants to accomplish something with it. The blogger thinks, contemplates and updates his blog. If he understands and knows his growing community well, he will make the right decisions, such as what about and how many times a week to blog, how long blog posts should be, what else they should include etc.

Blogger Needs a Good Support System
Everybody else, i.e. the community, and everything else make a support system that aids with making the blog (ecosystem) effective. Like in Nature, such an ecosystem can be permanent or temporary. How long will your ecosystem live, depends on how you utilize the support system.

In the next two weeks I will go into detail about biotic and abiotic elements that make our blog ecosystems live and prosper. I’m going to outline the elements of support systems to utilize them efficiently and discuss best practices.

How well do you know your blog’s ecosystem? What do you think of my view of a blog as an ecosystem?