Blogging 101: Building Brand vs. Traffic

I received an e-mail yesterday from someone asking if it was alright if they included my blog posts on a “content collector” that offers people access to a wide variety of Canadian blogs, Web sites, podcasts and video. While it's flattering (and I appreciated someone actually asking for permission), I'm of two minds about the idea. On one hand, getting more exposure can help build a bigger (and better?) brand because, in theory, more people will read your posts. The question, however, is whether many of these readers are curious enough to also visit my blog or whether they're happy to get the content somewhere else. I'm not sure about the answer, although I recently had to tell someone to stop using my material because they were taking (scraping?) every post, including the graphics without permission. In an ideal world, these aggregators would offer a summary of your blog posts and then have a “read more” button that would take re-direct them to your blog. That way, the aggregator get to provide a “sampling service”, while the blog author gets more traffic. It's your perfect win-win scenario) You could extend this brand vs. traffic argument to RSS readers  and e-mail services such as FeedBlitz or R/Mail given many people never visit a specific blog again after subscribing to the RSS feed. The big question is whether it really matters. If people are reading your posts – whether it's via e-mail, an RSS reader, an aggregator or your blog – isn't that enough? For most of us, it's probably not a big issue. That said, if you're trying to make money through advertising, you want as much traffic to your blog as possible.