« Home | New Website Update for HowardStern.com »
Blogs to Riches - Secrets for Blogging Success
If you like the Jointblog, we encourage you to link to us. This week's New York magazine does an excellent job explaining why.
In it, New York looks at the Web's most popular blogs, how they got there, how they stay there, and how you, too, could possibly start your own A-list blog. Blogging, like Google's Page Rank system, is all about links -- the more sites that link to you, the more popular the blog, inevitably.
For example, Boing Boing, a site for tech community folks (which we link to here on the Jointblog), is the Web's most popular blog, according to blog measuring firm Technorati, with nearly 20,000 links. Once you hit that kind of popularity, the traffic will keep coming -- and keep coming back, too, as long as you post as often as you possibly can. A-list blogs also tend to link to each other, ensuring that blog users keep going round and round the same community of sites.
For advertisers, of course, the whole lure of blogs is that they're cheaper than regular newspapers, TV and media Web sites, and often, they serve up tightly focused niche audiences, which advertisers love. (Note: the Jointblog remains commercial-free). Blogs are also social connectors, because if one starts a conversation about, say, an ad, others will scoop it up quickly. And soon, the message is out to a vast network of tightly focused niche groups.
This blog boom just may be the most democratized revolution in media ever (well, since the days of street criers making their public announcements; heck, anyone could be a street crier if you had a voice).
Starting a blog is ridiculously cheap; indeed, blogging software and hosting can be had for free online. There are also easy-to-use ad services that, for a small fee, will place advertisements from major corporations on blogs, then mail the blogger his profits. Blogging, therefore, should be the purest meritocracy there is. It doesn’t matter if you’re a nobody from the sticks or a well-connected Harvard grad. If you launch a witty blog in a sexy niche, if you’re good at scrounging for news nuggets, and if you’re dedicated enough to post around the clock—well, there’s nothing separating you from the big successful bloggers, right?
Well, right?
Read the latest New York magazine cover story
posted by Unknown @ Wednesday, February 15, 2006,
