Do You Call Yourself a Blogger?

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This might sound like a strange question for someone behind a site called ProBlogger to be asking – but do use the word ‘blogger’ to describe what you do? In this post I want to explore some reasons why I’m using the term less.

In short there are three reasons why I’m using the term ‘blogger’ less and less to describe (and think about) what I do:

1. Your Competitors Don’t Limit Themselves – Why Should You? – to think that you’re competing just with other blogs can actually limit the potential that your web publishing might have. I spoke to one blogger recently who told me that he had one of the biggest blogs going around in his niche – he spoke as though he’d ‘made it’. I congratulated him but then pointed out three other sites in his niche (a review site, a forum and a news site) which had significantly bigger traffic than him (according to Alexa).

2. Your Readers Don’t Really Care What Format Your Site is – I’ve lost count of the conversations that I’ve had with friends who tell me that they’ve never read a blog before – but whom when I question them about the sites that they read find that they read blogs everyday week without knowing it. As bloggers and web savvy people we are often very tuned in to what type of site a site is – however most web users couldn’t care less and read sites not because of their format but because it meets a need for them in some other way.

3. Positioning Yourself for the Future – blogs have had a ‘cool’ factor about them for a year or three now – but there are constantly new types of websites constantly being developed. More and more we’re seeing bloggers morph with other types of websites. While they continue to have a blogging component – they’ve been adding forums, social networks, bookmarking, newsletters and other mediums to them.

Let me say before ending that there’s nothing wrong with calling yourself a blogger or even marketing your blog as a ‘blog’ – however there are good reasons to explore stepping out of this mindset also.

What do you think? Do you call yourself a blogger? Why? Why not?

I’m looking forward to some good discussion.