How To Become An "A" List Blogger

Be wise, amusing, informative and Get Very Lucky

OK, end of bait and switch. I was reading David Deshcenes grumbling about how to promote his blog and it picked up on something I'm planning to do anyway; run a seminar series here in Sydney for people to use, and get the best out of their online presence by building blogs. So it might as well start here. The one thing all of us have going is the network. In fact, I think I'll call the course It's the network, and it goes something like this.

Writing and Posting is vital, otherwise why would anyone visit? But equally vital is contributing to other people's stuff.

Visit their sites and contribute comments; make sure to include a link back to your blog. Then repost the comments on your own blog as a post in their own right, maybe elaborate a bit.

Link to the source of the discussion, use trackback where possible.

Check your referrer logs and find out where people are coming from and what might have prompted the link. See what they checked on your site, follow up and see what they are saying on their site. Contribute again.

Look at your blogroll. How often do you use your favourite people as a springboard to some thinking and posting of your own? Make sure you credit and trackback.

Get a copy of Awasu (its the best newsreader I've come across and the tools are getting very cool) and read voraciously.

Think about what you want from your blog.
Why are you doing this?
Who do you want to attract?
What kind of an impression do you want to make on them?
How do you engage that objective in what you post?

Of course, I may be wrong.
=)

Comments

[Scott Allen]

Sorry for the much-belated comment, but great post, Earl. I've been spending most of my time lately up to my ears with activity from the online networks like Ryze, Spoke, Ecademy, etc., that I haven't really spent much time exploring the blogosphere, particularly in the context of our book project.

But when I read Lee LeFever's case study about achieving #1 rankings on Google using a blog, right as I was lamenting the shortfall of traffic to our site, I realized I decided it was time to dive in.

So, we launched the Online Business Networking Blog last Saturday. Much to my amazement, Sunday -- notoriously our slowest day of the week for web traffic -- was one of our busiest days ever, and more than double our average daily number of unique visitors (excluding the spiders, etc.)!

Now certainly it didn't hurt that we already had at least some name recognition with some A & B list bloggers. But your points here are really well-taken, and I'll be referencing them on my blog momentarily!

Scott Allen
About.com Entrepreneurs Guide
Online Business Networking Blog

P.S. -- Do you by any chance know Ed Swanstrom? With your professional background, I thought you might.

[BLOGMYWAY.org]

You're not wrong. Good and solid tips you got here. You should have included commitment and patience.