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How to build blog influence and recognition

by Richard McKinnon at 08:03PM (PST) on March 7, 2006 | Permanent Link | Cosmos

Blogs are emerging as a fundamentally new media. Blogs can rise quickly, sink faster. To attract a wide audience you need a series of factors to come together.

Linked In Bloggers is a forum which combines members of a business networking group (which so far has hadn't been at all useful to me) with members who run blogs. The forum is on of the best listservs I've used. Last week the first organized Blog Boost was held where everyone in the network targeted one blog; EMail OverLoaded. This is a summary of what happened; (summarized from comments of the target blogger)

16 bloggers (mainly LinkedIn Bloggers) posted items linking to the blog. These brought an extra 102 visitors
At some point the blog entered the del.icio.us/popular list, giving an extra 39 visitors.
The sharp increase in traffic got the blog listed at the bottom of the 10 fastest-growing Wordpress.com blogs. This list is seen by 120,000 Wordpress.com bloggers on their dashboards when they log in. This gave an extra 96 visits, and started it climbing to become #1 on the list.
Robert Scoble, Wordpress.com's most famous blogger, must have seen this list on his dashboard and promptly Scobleized the blog. Although he called the blog a "Z-list blogger", he did have a creative explanation for it :-)
Being Scobleized caused the numbers to continue to shoot up, getting the blog onto the list of the day's 10 hottest Wordpress.com blogs (distinct from fastest-growing), that is displayed on Wordpress.com's front page. It held at #5, and attracted an extra 46 visitors.
On the second day, traffic started arriving via Lifehack.org and Lifehacker.com, which both posted excerpts of the targets posts, and 43Folders.com which added the blog to their Recent Links list. More people delved deeper into the blog, and commented on the posts.
Google ranking improved:
email productivity: was #12 (page 2), now #1 (page 1)
email overload: was #60 (page 6), now #1 (page 1)
Google was fast to recognize links and traffic, Technorati was slow: didn't increase its count of number of blogs that linked to the target.
A small community of coordinated bloggers acting in unison can set in motion a process that brings a large amount of traffic in a short time. The paradox is that the bulk of the traffic does not come from these blogs -- it's due to the threshold effect
Once you exceed the threshold necessary to become listed on a popular "top 10" list, the rate of acceleration increases significantly, getting more traffic with less effort.
700 extra visitors generated 1000extra page views, which means that the majority of these opportunistic visitors landed on the site, but did not click on any internal links. Until the boost traffic had been very targeted, so visitors typically read more than just one article. On the other hand, there were 9 comments, each a chance to interact with a reader.

Bottom line; blogs influence with recognition and links from other blogs.This is influence built by a grass roots community. A tough demanding community to satisfy and master.

Keywords: blogs

Technorati Tags: blogs

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