Just Say Maybe to Blog Jewelry

I like data mining del.icio.us bookmarks as much as the next person and also enjoy building blog cross-linkage models using technorati, as many of you I’m sure do in your spare time, but I think when it comes to blog jewelry people need to take a good hard look at their blog in a mirror and ask themselves if adding blog jewelry is really a good fit for them.

In some cases it might not be.

In many cases, a given blog post will only appeal to a couple hundred people. In which case the blog jewelry probably won’t help you find the next hundred readers any more then leaving printed flyers on the bus. On the other hand if your posts already get tens of thousands readers then what’s the point? Blog jewelry shows a certain solidarity and savviness but realistically won’t be the make or break to get to a million readers.

But what about the middle levels, the layers in between, the cross-over posts, the ambiguous items, real satire drafting on current events?

So if your blog design already has lots of extra stuff, an abundance of quasi-complimentary colors, a mix of columns, rows, tables, text, banners, animated GIF files, AddCents panels, blinking thingys then OK you got me, then blog jewelry is probably a good fit. Otherwise think about it.

And just to be clear here: one mini-icon is a pin , two mini-icons are earrings, three mini-icons are earrings with a nose piercing and more than three mini-icons is a necklace.

For example, “my lemon basil lovers blog used to have earrings but I decided a necklace was better” or “I went from a pin to an earring for my bio-diesel monster trucks blog”.

It is possible to have multiple pieces of jewelry, such as a necklace and earrings like:

But that’s advanced and can’t possibly be covered in today’s post.

Tags: blog jewelry, mirror, look, addcents, earrings