Bye-Bye Groups

One day, I looked at my groups and decided it was time to clean house.  I had over 38 pages of groups.  What is that...hmmm...38 pages times 20 per page...that's 760 groups.

That first day that I started my group house cleaning, I whittled the number down to 33 pages or 660 groups.  A few days later, I whittled the groups down to 28 pages or 560 groups.  I still plan on weeding them out, but I'll work on it gradually.

The first groups I'm ditching are the "everything"  or "anything" groups, especially those with thousands of members.  Sure, it might seem that one would get more page views from being in a group with that many members.  But with the way our feeds are constructed, if only half of the group or 1,000 members posted something to the group within a few hours of each other, my post has a chance of being lost in the feed and never seen.

Posting to "everything" or "anything" groups does not require any thought.  But I'm not convinced that my posts get read by posting there.  In fact, I've seen proof of the fact that if I target a specific group, I'll get more page views. 

Besides, I've taken the words of Pam Johnston seriously.  In one of her posts she wrote:

After carefully selecting your hot topic, keyword and secondary keyword phrase - it's time to share your post. Please, share wisely! The biggest mistake you can make is to over-share your article. Publish your post to five or fewer groups on Gather. And be sure to share it with the appropriate Gather Essential (News, Politics, Family, Entertainment, Books) to get the biggest bang for your buck. Search engines love the Gather Essentials and visit those groups often to find relevant, original content.

Here's the link to that post:  How Did My 'Adam Carolla Fired' Story Get So Many Page Views?

Whether we're here for fun or for points, for friendship or for voicing our concerns, we all want page views.  Pam has the right idea.  Selecting groups wisely is the key.

So...I'll continue to clean out my groups.  I'm hoping to get down to about 10 pages of groups.

I finally figured out that if one day I write something about "elephants", I can locate a group about elephants or about wild animals or about zoo animals - or all of the above - and join that group or groups.  Then, after posting to the group(s), I can delete myself from that group, and my post will remain there unless or until the group itself is deleted or unless or until that group owner deletes my post.  Or so I understand.

So...if you've noticed that I'm no longer a part of one of your groups, please don't take it personally.  I'm just trying to simplify the process of sharing to groups.  I do hope you'll understand.