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Bloggers know: playing your part in a meme brings links, increases traffic to your site and it’s fun. They don’t need special definitions to understand the meaning of “tag, you’re it.”

When that Technorati statistic says so, when the “link love” comes with your name on it, there are but two alternatives: either you play along or you’re out. The choice is yours. You don’t “have to” play if you don’t like the topic of the meme, you don’t owe it to anyone to participate and tag other people at your turn. It is really a matter of personal preference and you don’t have to force others into joining your meme if they don’t want to.

But what is a meme anyway? Hard to say. There is a general definition circling the Internet: “a unit of cultural transmissions, or a unit of imitation.”

Personally I like the idea of “cultural transmissions” but blog memes are not reduced to “transmitting” cultural values. A blog meme employs more: it engages a response and it challenges new ideas and additions to the initial concept. Usually you can trace back the original source, but in special cases like the “five reasons why you blog” meme that’s rather difficult.

Tease me, tease me…

Blog memes vamp up new concepts but they can also become really annoying, especially when the topic is lame, or when they have no other purpose but generating links. If you are not yet familiar with the “fave the site” type of memes, you’ll find a few by simply typing “fave train” into the Google search box.

Memes reveal a lot about the participants and about their intentions. You’ll instantly know who initiates a meme to linkbait and who does it for a noble cause. You’ll know who’s online for fun and who means business.

Authority bloggers stay away from memes like “five things”, “eight random things” and so on. The less popular bloggers, or those who blog just for fun, don’t mind a silly meme every once in a while.

On business blogs and authority blogs you’ll notice a special kind of meme, hidden under different descriptions like “group writing projects.” The only difference is that group writing projects do not force people into participating by tagging them and they have usually more serious topics.

The Memes and Their Online Marketing Advantages

Are you familiar withThe Thinking Blog Award? This is a well disguised meme initiated by the mysterious Ilker, who lead us on for months before giving up her real identity.

Despite the Natalia Oreiro avatar Ilker displayed for months at MyBlogLog and everywhere else (and by the way, Ilker, you look a bit like your favorite Uruguayan actress), Ilker used to tell us that she is a man. Those where the days… Now we know. And we still love Ilker, just as she is.

But back to The Thinking Blogger Award. It is a meme. It started with Ilker tagging 5 authority bloggers with blogs that all had a very good Google PR, and continued with other blogs, from all possible niches, with or without good PageRanks. Back then The Thinking Blog had no PageRank, so it easy to understand why Ilker chose her tags so carefully and why she didn’t just tagged 5 random blogs.

Thinking Blogger Award. If you start browsing the WHAM blogs at MyBlogLog and even blogs from other niches, you’ll notice that many display proudly The Thinking Award badge: that little gold or silver alien embryo on a black background. And you know what? That’s The Think Blog logo. The Thinking Blog brand.

And this is how Ilker’s blog becomes more and more popular. But what really keeps Ilker’s popularity is her ability of finding topics that engage the readers and really make them think. Her blog covers all the “hot” topics you may find on the first page at digg, and sometimes her own entries make it to the first page at digg, because if there is one thing Ilker really knows that is how to write her titles and her content.

So what do we learn from this story? We learn that a smart meme can skyrocket your search engine rankings, your PageRank and promote your brand effectively.

And from Ilker we learn… how to become a power blogger.

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