According to a post by Louis Gray the importance of blog linking is in decline. Louis is finding that even when he gets a link from a giant blog such as Mashable, TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb the link sends only a few hundred visitors.
When you consider that these sites have hundreds of thousands of visitors it’s clear that something is going wrong.
The first problem is that big blogs don’t really have hundreds of thousands of daily RSS readers. The actual number of people reading the stories is probably in the tens of thousands. The next issue is that when somebody reads via RSS and clicks a link it shows the referrer details of the RSS reader they were using rather than the blog so it is hard to track.
How to build a blog
The general advice handed out to new bloggers is that to be successful then need to do three things:
- Write quality content
- Get links from popular blogs
- Get traffic from social media sites
Unfortunately links from popular blogs are proven to send very little traffic, even if they have hundreds of thousands of readers. If you are starting a blog in a niche with very few major blogs then building any traction at all is going to be hard.
We know from experience that social media sites can send huge amounts of traffic but that the visitors barely hang around long enough to read your article, let alone subscribe to your feed.
So how on earth can a new blogger expect to build a truly popular blog?
The answer is extremely simple and amazingly difficult at the same time. You need to create a blog that people feel they simply have to subscribe to otherwise their life will not be quite as good as it could have been.
Perhaps your blog is very useful, breaks the latest news before every other blog, has funnier jokes, better pictures or higher quality SEO tips. Whatever hook you choose if you can make people think that by subscribing to your blog they will have a better life or make more money online then you have a chance.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
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Links from authority blogs may send little traffic but it means that you are respected enough to deserve that link. You are correct on how to make a popular blog by being the first person to write a news article. The hook part is correct to, everyone needs a gimmick for their blog. People need to start coming back and this is the same for other services like youtube. People create a niche, stop motion animation and if you are making your own great videos people are going to like those. Hardest part of writing a blog is finding the niche but constantly keep it updated.
Cognitive page., man
Where there’s a will there’s a way. It might not be easy, but it’s always possible.
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