Q: Please tell my readers a little something about yourself?
A: My name is Matt Stratton, and I am the the Manager of Technical Operations for a major real estate classifieds website. Previously, I have designed and architected systems for some of the largest companies in the world, including GE and JPMorganChase. In my current position, I am responsible for strategic decisions for the design and implementation of system infrastructure, and researching emerging technologies such as cloud computing.

I’m also an avid photographer and former independent filmmaker, and live in the suburbs of Chicago with my wife, twin sons, and a Sheltie named Scout.

My main blog is Good Old Rock, but I also maintain a blog for updates on my new twin sons at http://strattonboys.com and I am a contributor to Today’s iPhone.

Q: Hi Matt, so tell me about your blog, when and why you started it and how you came up with the name for it?
A: My blog technically started in 2001 as a LiveJournal. I don’t remember exactly what the catalyst for the initial startup was, but I wrote in that LiveJournal for about 7 years. Then, in late 2008, due to rumors of LiveJournal being shut down by Russians, I decided to migrate off of LJ to a self-hosted blog. I’ve had the domain name mattstratton.com for almost 13 years, but mostly used it on and off for website hosting and email. But I moved all of my old LiveJournal content to a WordPress installation on that domain, and the rest is history.

The name of my blog comes from a Simpsons episode:

Lisa: Look, there’s only one way to settle this. Rock-paper-scissors.
Lisa’s brain: Poor predictable Bart. Always takes `rock’.
Bart’s brain: Good ol’ “rock”. Nuthin’ beats that!
Bart: Rock!
Lisa: Paper.
Bart: D’oh!
– “The Front”

Unfortunately, there’s no actual reason for me to have named by blog after this episode, except for the fact that it always makes me laugh. And now…well, there’s just no turning back!

Q: Do you find blogging takes up a lot of your time?
A: It takes up about as much time as I allow it to. If I schedule myself well, I can usually write a week’s worth of posts in about 2 hours…but I am not as diligent about that as I should be, so I often find myself writing a post when I can squeeze in a few minutes here and there during the day. This month (Feb 2010) I have committed myself to the 28 Day Blogging Challenge, which has definitely added to the time I spent blogging each week. I also contribute to a major iPhone blog, which adds to the time that it takes.

Q: Where would you say most of your traffic comes from for your blog?
A: Up until last week, the majority of my traffic was organic Google traffic. However, last Monday I received over 25,000 visitors from Reddit, which really changed that game. Generally speaking, however, I’m all about organic traffic. The rest of my visitors either come from shared links on Facebook or Tweets.

Q: Do you use social networks to promote your blog and if so which ones would you recommend to other bloggers?
A: I use both Facebook and Twitter heavily to promote my blog. Every blog post is tweeted,and I get a fair amount of traffic from those tweets (depends a LOT on the post, of course, and how well I structured the tweet!). I used to share every blog post as a link on my personal Facebook page, but I’ve recently switched to using a Fan page for my blog (even though I hate the term “Fan” page), so that the links were more “opt in”.

I recommend both Facebook and Twitter for any blogger looking to build traffic, but I caution them to make sure that they don’t SOLELY use those networks to promote. People will not be interested in following you on Twitter if all you tweet are links to your blog, for example. If you engage in those social networks, your followers/friends will be far more likely to click on your links and read what you have to say.

Personally, if someone just uses Twitter to spew out links to their blog, I will tend to unfollow them quickly.

Q: If you could give some useful advice to new bloggers, what would it be?
A: Write. Write great content. Write a lot. Write original content.

Don’t worry about traffic. If you great interesting content, the traffic will come. Forget about SEO and keywords when you start. Figure out what you are smart about, or what you have a voice about, and write about that.

Write well. Use spellcheck. Like it or not, your reputation and credibility will suffer if you look like a lazy writer.

And finally – network! Get to know other bloggers, but more than just for a link exchange. Engage other bloggers on Twitter or Facebook and build relationships.

Thanks Matt.

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