An Investment Banker's Take On Life: Saturday Ramblings: Surviving the Blogging Sandbox

I used to devote Saturdays to my posts about blogging, Sundays to my musings about life, and weekdays to my views about investment banking and current finance issues. You might say this blog used to lack focus, given the fairly wide "scatter" of the topics I wrote about. But there was method in that "scatter". It was part of my experiment in generating natural or organic visitor traffic to this blog, to get me out of the blogging "sandbox".

Actually, if you'll ask the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) gurus, they'd probably laugh at my approach. You see, the conventional thinking in generating visitor traffic is to carpet-bomb your keyword or meta tag/s with posts that drill deep into those tags. But then I wanted to march to a different drummer and see what happened. At the end of that long experiment, I concluded that I was wrong and they were right, LOL!

And so, my "Saturday Ramblings", as I uniformly called my posts about blogging, will take its final vow today with this post, and with it will go the word "blogging" from the above sub-title to this blog. Henceforth, this blog will represent just two keywords or meta tags--"investment banker" and "life", as it should be. In other words, anybody who Googles the tag "blogging" will no longer find his way accidentally to this blog. It is better that way to avoid confusion on the true character of this blog.

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But the story doesn't end there because while I will indeed drop the "blogging" meta tag from this blog, I simply moved it over to where it should be in the first place--a separate blog with its own address (no longer a Blog*Spot), titled "Surviving the Blogging Sandbox". I launched it quietly by simply adding it to my Blogroll here in the meantime that I was building up a decent number of posts (very difficult to find time to write in view of my tight schedule) before I "brag" about it. Now that I have the decent minimum number of posts to attract prospective readers with, I can come out in the open like this.

This new blog of mine is very narrowly targeted at non-bloggers who are at the point of deciding whether or not to blog, and neophyte bloggers who are non-techies like me. Everything I will discuss in this blog is based on my personal experience. Since I know the many aggravations that a non-techie newbie blogger will go through as he or she moves up the learning curve, I have designed this blog like a how-to tutorial complete with graphics and screenshots where necessary to illustrate a particular step, process or concept. Thus, if you're already a blogger, this was not conceived with you in mind. However, if you'd like to satisfy your curiosity on what an investment banker's take on blogging is like, you are welcome to drop by for a look-see.

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MarketLeap.com is a website position verification site. One of its free online tools is for Keyword Verification, which allows you to check your site's placement with the Internet's Top Search Engines and Directories. I tried this tool to verify this blog's placement in the search engines using the keywords shown below and here are the results:

Keywords: "Investment banker blog"

What the results indicate is this--that in out of 6 major search engines, this blog was listed on page 1 of the results of the 4 search engines that really mattered. When I consider that each keyword search contains over a million results, on the average, it is gratifying to note that this blog consistently landed on page 1 of these search results. For a blog that earlier on worried about being trapped in the blogging "sandbox" and not making the grade, that's not bad at all.