What’s Up With The Apple Maps Blog?

Regular readers may have noticed my new Apple Maps blog getting a lot of my blogging attention these days at the expense of this fine collection of pixels.  I thought it might be of interest to one or two of you to explain what’s going on.

A couple of months ago I realized that I had been writing Local SEO Guide for five years.  I have gone through plenty of phases where I was blogging every day and plenty where I was lucky if I could get a post out once a month.  I was even luckier if the post was worth reading.

When I first started writing about local SEO, I think I was pretty much the only one out there, or at least it seemed that way.  Pretty quickly Mike Blumenthal and David Mihm were on the scene with great blogs and the next thing you know, the blogosphere is littered with local SEO blogger-wannabes.  And while Mike does an amazing job of keeping up with the latest Google Places wackiness, in truth, I didn’t feel like my insights or voice were any more interesting than what other smart people out there were writing about.  I also was pretty fried about writing about Google.  That combined with the explosive growth my enterprise SEO consulting business has seen in the past year made it hard for me to get excited about pumping out the Local SEO Guide content week after week.

Then Apple Maps comes along like a beautiful woman jumping out of a cake made from screwed up geo-spatial data and out-of-date business listings wearing an iPhone bikini.  A truly inspiring vision.  It fired me up.

The Beatles claimed they pretended to be Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band because they thought it would be liberating to make music as people other than the Beatles.  That’s kind of why I started AppleMapsMarketing.com.  It’s my version of Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds (without the acid).  It’s been fun figuring out what to write about and starting to see it take off.  Within two weeks, the site has already received several thousand visits, has been featured on SearchEngineLand, the home page of SlideShare and on scraper sites all over the world.  And it will be awesome to look back on it a year from now, if I last that long, to see it grow into something with a life all its own like this blog.

Anyhow, if you haven’t been over to see the new site yet, please check it out.  And add a comment or two.  It could definitely use a bit more community interaction.

For you LSG faithful, don’t worry.  I still have plenty of posts up my sleeve that have nothing to do with Apple.  Working on a good one now.