Pro Blogger Guide

The way most people do it

There is no doubt that the best way to increase the profile of a website on the net, whether it is about enhancing search engine rankings, or about getting more targeted traffic - is to get more quality incoming links to your site, and with that in mind, the commonly used methods of getting backlinks are like article submissions, adding to directories, commenting on other blogs and basically leaving your URL wherever you go.

However, think about it. There are only 24 hours every single day. Let’s just say you work from the moment you turn out of bed until the time your mother or spouse starts to nag at you for being a computer addict… that will be about… 20 hours! And imagine each submission takes 3 minutes.

In total, you will get 400 backlinks in 1 day! That sounds pretty nice doesn’t it?

But look - this is a finite number, because your time is the scarce resource.

Consider the “quality content” strategy.

You may spend 6 full hours putting up one solid blog post of 400 words. (I’m sure you could do with 2 words per minute?) You could have spent most of this time doing research, reading other blogs, thinking through, and structuring your argument.

But that one post would be so addictive, so intriguing, and so viral! What happens now is that while you are asleep, people are reading this post and they will recommend it to others. Your content will automatically be Digged - readers online just cannot wait to share what they have found with their own readers and the world.

One post is enough to make 400 backlinks… and maybe even more. And the most magical part is - you don’t have to do any of those linking work! These people WANT to link to you, because being a reporter of a good post makes them credible as well! Moreover, you get linked in people’s blog post itself, not in the comments!

How powerful can that be?

Granted, not everybody is a born writer, and not everybody can entertain with words or have perfect grammar. However, I think what is more important than the words is the argument or the opinion - the thinking that goes behind the post. Both writing and thinking can be learnt, and they have to be learnt through constant practise. Liz from Successful-Blog.com posted her thoughts a while ago on the benefits of writing everyday, and the first in her list is “Writing every day makes us better thinkers.”

Drawbacks and Strategy

One drawback of this strategy is that you need a small readership to start with. Afterall, you need to have people to come in and read your post in order for them to share it with others.

So what I would recommend is that for the first phase in building your blog, you could do a 50-50 focus on writing and marketing.

But after the first three months, after you get a consistent readership of about 100 unique visitors a day, you can pay more emphasis on building quality content. At this time, one well thought post is more than worth 10 quick posts, because quality content is the best marketing tool, ever.

The rules of the world don’t change. Well, at least not so quickly. What goes on in the offline world will be duplicated in the online world, only quicker and more effectively. Academic professors in the top universities today spend years doing research on one single topic, and summarizing that into a 20 page journal paper. That paper will be the one cited by other researchers, and used as case studies in course syllabuses all around the world.

One quality paper is enough to make them world known. One quality blog post is enough to make you famous.