Compelling reasons to read at work

I can`t remember the last time I actually hung on every word a blogger wrote; taking tangents of thought away with me. Jane Copeland`s Snake Oil in Disguise post over at SEOmoz got me thinking. There is indeed a lot of bad advice on SEO out there; particularly incomplete information. People offering to get companies top rankings in 2 days; hawking this hazy concept of “great content”; or handing out PPC campaigns like sweets. This one, particularly, made me smile. But you know, the good advice, the voices in the wilderness, are often similarly abused.

It seems as if 10% of the ground breaking stuff on the Internet is diluted across 90% of the unimaginative posts that just repeat, repeat and repeat the correct facts to adoring audiences until the news streams run dry. Why did people love Maddox, the Pirate? Why does wacky, slipstream news hit Digg`s front page day after day? It seems as if agreement is unified and disagreement is memorable. But that is not a worthy reason for you to stop reading.

Read Write Web published a great post recently giving the three reasons why reading industry blogs - and I`d venture to say reading those who are writing about SEO, whether it`s in forums, or on Twitter, or in Digg - is a noble activity to better your understanding of SEO. And those three reasons are:

1. Being the first to know the news
2. Knowing what people are talking about
3. Finding information, pure and simple

On the first reason, blogs aren`t newspaper sites. They don`t have managing editors and journalists and strict publishing red tape, which means often they`re first with the news. That creates the First Mover Advantage, which I`m not going to go into, but in a nutshell, you get kudos for being first. Congrats.

On knowing what others are talking about, you get take part in the conversation of the market. The internet, as SEOs know, is not hypodermic, and interactivity is crucial. Blogs, commenting and interacting is all in a day`s work. If you know what your customers are saying, you can anticipate their next question. Would you like a packet with that?

And lastly, as bloggers gain stature on the wires, and they take a piece of the journalism, PR and even fiction writers` pie, and they collect a lot of useful and verifiable information in neat and accessible archives online. Their work becomes a wealth of information that is useful for your sales efforts in your market sector.

Jane recommends that when you see content that bites, vote it down, and rather than being lazy about creating “tips and tops ten” posts when you`re having an off day/week, challenge the mode. Marshall at RRW says that only 11% of us who use the web at work are reading industry blogs. And yet there`s so much out there at our disposal. I`m not surprised. Are you?