With blogging turning into such an amazingly popular activity, it was only the next logical step that some people would position themselves as tutors for the blogging novices. Internet marketing blogs, SEO blogs, design, writing and blogging tips blogs emerged and some of them became leaders of opinion in the blogosphere.

The advantage they had over other blog was their information. The quality, the relevance and the applicability of their guidelines finally secured their path to world wide awareness, authority and eventually success.

But, while everything works well from their point of view, readers trying to implement their guides and tips might encounter a few problems, or might have a hard time deciding on the most viable solution for their blog.

We need to dig deeper

How many times have you encountered this advice?

Comment on other blogs in your niche.

I’d say that you’ve seen it on probably every single blog tips blog. But how many of them go deeper, telling readers how to select those blogs that will deliver the best results? How many will tell them what to stay away from and what kind of discussion to engage in?

How many blogs talk about branding yourself and your blog without explaining to the common user what branding means and a difference between a poor logo, for example, that will most definitely position you as a “wanna be”, instead of a professional?

I’m not trying to point fingers here! I’m just saying that we need to go deeper when approaching certain topics, and not expect our users to be internet savvy people. We have the advantage of years of experience behind, so the best thing to do is to put that experience to use for those that need it the most.

Now, let me share my point of view over a few commonly misunderstood blog tactics, and I’m not talking from a “tips” blogger’s perspective, but from the reader’s side. From that side where I’ve been and where I had to learn things by the “trial and error” method.

Commonly Misunderstood Blog Tactics

1. Using Social Media

One of the most common advice you’re bound to find on blogs is to build an active social media profile. Some will tell you how well Digg works for blogs, or StumbleUpon, or Reddit, or Facebook.

There’s no general rule here. What works for a user, might not work for another. Also, being an “active user” on social media, might affect the quality or the posting schedule of some bloggers.

It’s not an easy task building a strong social media profile, without exposing yourself to risks like:

• Being considered a spammer of a specific service (due to a high number of submissions);
• Wasting time that you should be using for growing your blog;
• Positioning yourself as a Social Media Marketer, rather than a blogger.

From where I stand, the most important thing is NOT the volume of your submissions, but rather their quality and the quality of your network. Since most services don’t encourage submitting your own works, or even if they do, users tend to skip those entries, the best idea is to focus on building a strong relationship with your network.

For that, you have a few options:

• Find those highly ranked user profiles that focus on the same niche you’re interested in, or activate in and start building strong relationships with them. It’s not easy, it will take time, but it’s worth it. Help them, and in time, they’ll start to help you.
• Focus on delivering high quality content and encourage your readers to share it over their social media profiles. Most of your readers are also present on these services. Use that to yuor advantage and build up a network around your reader base.

If you’re interested in maintaining a traffic level based on social media usage, the best results come from loyal network users and readers. They are the one most interested in your content, thus being more willing to submit, re-share and vote on it. So, the majority of the incoming traffic will not be based on your own submissions, but on submissions of your content, made by users in your network.

2. Commenting on Other Blogs

This is one of those tactics that can have either positive or negative effects, all depending on how you apply your strategy.

Of course, the first thing you need to do is to focus on your niche. Commenting on high traffic blogs, may not always turn out to be efficient, due to the high number of comments they receive. In this situation, your comment might get lost in between many more other comments.

Still, you have two options to make you comment stand out (best results being delivered when combined):

1. Be among the first to comment;
2. Have a strong opinion on the matter and express it in larger comment. The majority of comments that high traffic blogs received are those “Great post!” or “Thanks for the tips!” type of comments. A more elaborate opinion is bound to stand out between those.

High traffic blogs are not always the best solution. Readers are constantly on the lookout for new blogs, written by not-so-famous individuals with fresh ideas and fresh content. By commenting on these blogs you expose your self to a whole new audience, an audience eager to discover new things and easier to engage in communication and to attract to your blog.

Do not over-promote your blog through your comments. Allow the community to base its decision on the quality of your opinions. If it’s top notch, they’ll want to click you name and thus visit your blog.

Also, one time comments will have no positive effect. Actually, they’ll have no effect at all. Why? Because making a user click you link is a matter of trust, and trust is not gained with one comment. Make a habit of commenting on those blogs from time to time, in order to gain their audience’s trust.

The negative effects of a commenting strategy come from poor quality comment repeated over long periods of time. This will affect both your online image – your brand – and your schedule, as you’re wasting time that you should dedicate to research and publishing.

I recommend that you read this excellent post on how to develop and maintain a good commenting strategy, by Caroline Middlebrook.

3. Networking With Other Bloggers

Link to other blogs. Email other bloggers. Subscribe to their social media profiles. Comment on their blogs. I’m sure you’ve read all these tips. But, do they actually work? Or, better said, in which conditions do they actually deliver results?

Linking it’s nice. It’s a sign of blogger appreciation. But to be true, linking can develop into a relationship only if it’s a repetitive process. You have to be ready to put out a lot of links to the same blog. Would you do that?

Commenting works too, but mostly on small sized blogs. Only because you risk being one of the 200 hundred people using the same commenting strategy, when it comes to big blogs. You’ll only be a small fish in a big sea, trying to generate some waves. It’s hard.

Following bloggers on social media could work too, but again, it they are high profile bloggers, chances are you’ll be just one of another 2000 or more followers. no much of an exposure there, right?

So, we’re left with emails. Networking through emails has its own set of rules, that most people tend to ignore.

I’ve been getting non-spam emails on my private address (which contains my real name) starting with: “Hi Blogsessive”. Is it really that hard to use the name? That’s a mistake that many people make.

Also, I’ve been getting emails being asked to read a certain post, or exchange links with different blogs, based on this sentence “I’ve been a long time reader of Blogsessive.” OK, that’s cool, and thank you for that. Sometimes, I’ll take time to read those posts, sometimes I won’t. But surely not because I’ve got an email from someone claiming he/she is an avid reader, that I’ve never even seen commenting on the blog.

My readers can confirm that their emails are responded, mostly quite fast. But the ones that get responded have the decency of reading my about page, using my name, not asking me to do things in exchange for their loyalty. Networking is not “emotional blackmailing”.

The best way to network with a blogger is to be the first to offer help, instead of asking for. I can assure you that help will come back 10 times more quick and efficient. Also, try and build a strategy by combining most of these networking tactics to support your main networking strategy.

Over to You

As I said before, these are things I had to learn in time from experimenting. From making mistakes and fixing them. You’ve certainly been in the same position, so I’d love to read your opinion on the above matters and how you’ve dealt with similar situations and blog tactics.

And remember that everything you do contributes to your online image, you brand.

Photo credits to Rodolfo Clix & channah.

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These days we keep hearing about authority bloggers, about how they manage to build and maintain successful blogs and aside project, about the massive traffic they receive. Along with them, more and more people start new blogs dreaming of becoming successful and making money blogging.

It’s not an easy task, but if you approach it from the right perspective, you are more likely to achieve your goals.

Your Main Goal is to Make Money Blogging?

That’s alright! As long as it is a legitimate activity, no one will blame your desire to improve your lifestyle. Sure, we’ve talked about how many fail when starting a money making blog, but that’s only because they’ve based their strategy on the wrong premises.

A strategy is like planning a chain reaction towards your ultimate goal. It’s OK to think and dream big, but act in small steps.

So, as you can see, it all starts with the desire to satisfy our needs, but only a few are willing to take the required actions.

Believe it or not, becoming an authority blogger is not that hard, but it starts with really wanting to be one and doing so by respecting 3 basic principles.

The Basic Principles of Being an Authority Blogger

1. First and most important, you need to have a good expertise in the field you’re blogging about. It is obvious that experience is needed in order to guide people into following your advice, otherwise, why would they follow you?

2. People have needs, just as you have. Put your expertise at work for your followers. Share, help, educate.

3. Always expand your knowledge. An authority blogger is open to new ideas. Experiments with new concepts and shares the results with his readers. Communication skills and a good relationship with his community are vital.

The above principles relate solely to your own actions and don’t depend on external factors. It’s only a matter of personal choice and action.

The Wrong Perspective

There’s this idea that authority bloggers are those able to attract massive amounts of traffic. While it’s not entirely wrong, it’s not the healthy way to approach this matter.

Sure, traffic it’s a pretty important factor when it comes to judging a blog’s success, but there are enough examples of people getting great traffic and making a fair amount of money through blogging while their opinions don’t count for much.

In order for traffic to turn you into an authority blogger, it has to:

1. Convert into community traffic, those loyal readers I keep telling you about;
2. Convert into referrals, people that promote your articles and blog out of their own desire to help;
3. Convert into relationships. Of course, networking is and has always been an important step in authority building.

Are You an Expert? Become an Authority Blogger!

If so, all that it takes to become an authority blogger is to start helping others. Genuine desire to help will always set you on your path to success.

Free PDF eBook: Corporate Blogging Guide by Blogsessive

I am always astounded at the speed I can do research nowadays. What could have taken weeks or a few months suddenly can be accomplished in 30 minutes or less. When it comes to blogging, you can now gather a lot of data for free.

This can help you even before you start a blog around that topic, so you are aware of the amount of work you need to do to be one of the best in the market.

A simple competitive analysis, for instance, can help you determine what you should do next and create a strategy to better penetrate the market. (Like it or not, when you blog, you are communicating with the market.)

What’s astounded me most is the fact that more bloggers don’t take advantage of the Internet from this standpoint.

For example, if you are looking forward to start a blog about gardening, it is impossible to dominate that niche alone unless you have a team working full time for years to build massive content for for the blog. Gardening is a huge industry. You are more likely to get into the top 10 if you target a sub niche. Rose gardening comes to my mind — not that I know anything about growing roses.

By the way, why getting into the top 10?

The Beauty of Being the Market Leader

Don’t get me wrong. You can make very good living by keeping your business small and self-manageable, if you prefer to be a solopreneur. A friend of mine is silently making six-figure income by selling to a quite crowded niche. He was not even known as the expert in the market. If that’s what you want, it is perfectly fine.

However, if you want to grow big, here are a few facts. You need to think about the 80-20 (Pareto) principle. Basically it says that…

“For many events, 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.”

In niche blogging, perhaps the number is more like 95/5 or even 99.9/0.1. Only a few blogs are really going to make it to the top. Consider yourself lucky if you find a crowded and rabid niche with moderate amount of competitions.

A top 10 niche blog is only going to be more successful because of the following reasons:

1. It will only grow stronger. Once you have a lot of traffic, every time you update your blog, there will be tons of people link to you, sending you even more traffic.
2. People want to be part of it. Engagement rate becomes higher. People will spend more time on the blog than any other sites combined.
3. Credibility and trust. If you sell anything online, you should know how trust affects sales.
4. Higher advertising rates. When a lot of advertisers compete to tap into the blog’s audience, you can charge even more.

How to Become One of the Best

If you have the chance to start over, or even if you don’t, you can do the following to focus (and refocus) on your niche to zero in on something that you can possibly handle with the amount of resources you have, and become one of the best blogs in the topic. Take into account that you can always hire or outsource once you are getting the momentum and start earning from your blog.

So here it is. The key to dominate and win the game is to study the battle field and the enemies. Find out what they are doing and create strategic plan to do better. Simple enough, but how do you actually implement it?

Identify the top 10 blogs in your niche

Use keyword research tools to determine top 10 most frequently searched keywords in your niche and feed those keywords, one at a time, into Technorati or Google.

Write down the list of blogs that appear in the result pages. For Google, you may have to go to the second or third page before you come down to the 10th blog.

Using a Firefox add-on like SEO for Firefox, you can get a lot of data like Google PageRank, number of inbound links from Yahoo, Alexa and Compete ranks and other information.

Tips: You may find spreadsheet software extremely useful in organizing these data.

Perform a Detailed Analysis of What They Do

Once you get the list of 10 blogs, now it is time to visit them and do some home work.

• Subscribe to the RSS feed. You definitely want to get the blogs’ feed into your news reader. Chances are good they have a strong blog’s subscriber base.
• Pay attention to their content model and see why it works so effective. Popular blogs doesn’t always keep their blog updated several times a day. You may be able to determine the publishing schedule based of the pattern you notice.
• Observe the writing style. Some people have natural talent in writing. If that is a factor that contributes to the success, you want to know it. You will be surprised that a lot of bloggers really don’t write perfectly. They just have the passion to write conversationally and get across their message very well.
• Identify marketing strategies. You can’t always see what they do behind the scenes but sometimes you can figure out things by doing a bit more research. If you see a blog post that is very popular in social media, start thinking strategically what made it work.
• Find out how they build responsive audience. If the bloggers choose to enable comments, you will often notice a blog with 1,000 subscribers will have far more comments per post than one with 10,000 subscribers. There should be a reason behind it. I recommend make it a part of your analysis.

I’m sure there will be some other things I have missed, so be flexible and creative when analyzing those blogs.

Expand Your View to Include More Blogs

One reason why we only perform detailed analysis on the top 10 blog is to keep you from a syndrome called analysis paralysis. While this is important, you should not overdo it. At the end of the day, what really matter are content, promotion, and networking (with the audience and other bloggers).

However, once you have done the analysis above, you can expand the horizon and enrich your research by including more blogs. Not all top blogs are going to have the best of everything. Some ideas will be available in other blogs.

What you can learn from those blogs:

• Design details. I got the idea to include a content feed icon at the end of every of blog post from a new blog. I really like that idea so I test it. Perhaps it will turn more of the social media traffic into subscribers but I haven’t figured that out yet. (It seems like a few other more popular bloggers also use the same technique so I’m quite sure it will work.)
• Diversity of content formats. I started to see a few smaller blogs complement textual content with video and audio podcast. Some of them were doing very well when they posted reviews. There were always a surge in comments every time the bloggers posted new reviews, perhaps due to how he balanced the information between the drawbacks of the product and promotion.
• Methods to jazz up the posts. In recent years, I’ve seen bloggers include images from Flickr and other image hosting sites to make the structure of the blog posts more dynamic.
• Additional moneymaking opportunities. Many smaller blogs that provide monthly earnings report show that creating an e-book can help building traffic and also income. This is an example of one of the most overlooked promotion strategies bloggers make. For beginning bloggers, this means a tremendous opportunity to reach people who are otherwise not available if they don’t tap into this one idea.

Ideas are around us. You can often trigger your mind by stimulating it randomly, such as what we use in this section.

Review

I hope you jot down ideas as you go through the process above. Based on your notes, you should now have an idea about what to do to build your blog and dominate the niche.

It is hard to work based on scribbles of notes though. The next step is to plan your approach to produce content, promote it and use marketing strategies appropriately.

Finally, if you haven’t yet implemented an action management system like Getting Things Done, I recommend you to take a look at it. It will make your life more organized.

Take action!

Photo credits by Luis Alves.

About the author

This is a guest post by Hendry Lee.
Hendry Lee helps bloggers overcome technology challenges in starting and growing their blogs. Get daily tips, techniques and strategies by visiting his blog at http://blogbuildingu.com.

Free PDF eBook: Corporate Blogging Guide by Blogsessive

Seriously, you don’t want to make money blogging, not from the start. If this is the goal that you’ve set for your blog, then it should be your ultimate goal; not your first, not your second, but last!

What you need is a step by step strategy.
What you want is to set goals that are realistic, tangible. Goals that are not only meant to get you closer to your ultimate goal, but also help you become better, become a PRO.

Start by looking at the source

Money does not fall out of the sky. Money comes from your readers, through clicks and affiliate programs, through reviews, through advertising, which you won’t get without a strong readership / traffic.

So, your primary goals should be about making yourself heard, making a name for yourself, becoming an authority.

Think big, but plan in small steps

Let’s say that by the end of the first 6 months of blogging, you would want to have at least 1000 RSS subscribers. 6 months is a long period of time and many things could happen. So, don’t worry about those 6 months, worry about your first month. Think about how to get your first, let’s say 20-30 subscribers. Think about how to gather natural, organic, targeted traffic to your blog. And if you achieve your first goal, try harder next month.

From month to month, raise the bar until you get closer to your target. I’m sure that you’ll find it a lot easier and sometimes even more rewarding than thinking on how to get 1000 subscribers from day one. You might even end up with more than you’ve initially planned.

Why is it important to develop a plan with more, smaller stages? Because strategies will fail you. Rest assured, they will; and it’s always better to lose a battle than the war. By making a mistake in stage one, you allow yourself to learn from it and not repeat it in stage two.

Remember, think big

Are you serious about blogging? Then, the ultimate purpose seams a bit like an ongoing one. Set your mind on being the better blogger, and if you achieve this goal, making money will follow.

“Wealth, like happiness, is never attained when sought after directly.
It comes as a by-product of providing a useful service.”
Henry Ford (1863 – 1947)

Free PDF eBook: Corporate Blogging Guide by Blogsessive