Is this the most unpopular blog in the world?: Marketing 101

I noted yesterday that I had a seven digit technorati listing which, in laymen’s terms, means that this blog is currently as popular as [insert amusingly unpleasant thing here]. Today that number has got bigger so that it now stand at 1,637,743, which either means that some long-tailers have got a new link over night or else a brand new blog has risen from the underworld up into the charts above me. O shame of it. Now I know that pub mythology argues that the only way to raise the popularity of a site is to scrawl viagra, breast or free beer all over the page but it turns out that there is a little more to it than that in blogosphere. For example, a brief search of the blogger site turned up 'Promoting your Blog' by Biz Stone. While most of the suggestions in this article are rather blogger focussed, however, it does also provide some more generic marketing advice for folks that run their own blogs.


The first item mentioned in the article was to “turn on ping weblog.com”. Now, I can see the point of a ping as it lets key sites out there know instantly that you have fresh material on your blog. This is particularly important if you are providing topical fare that needs to be read in real-time. It is also possible to put an automated ping to technorati and others agrregation sites on your site. This means that all those good old reading folks will be able to do a technorati search on this article (among many others) from the moment that it is posted.

The blogger article next recommends that you activate your navbar (Navbar? - It comes in three delicious fruit flavours…). This is one of those features for serendipity lovers as it provides a button at the top of the blog which when clicked takes the reader to the next Navbar-enabled blog. Blogger observe that ‘it turns out this couch-potato like way of flipping through blogs is very appealing”. So greetings potato-people, you are most welcome.

Next up comes - Install Email This Post .This provides a nice e-mail icon by the side of the post which is supposed to encourage your serendipitous potato-chips to e-mail your witty musings to all their friends.

The Blogger article also provide a number of other technical suggestions, such as ‘Turn on Post Pages’, ‘Turn on Site Feed’ and ‘Add your Blog to our Listings?’ which were all done for me as defaults so I can’t blame any of these obvious things on my failure to have a Technorati ranking of 1. Would it be embarrassing if I simply asked you to 'Love me. Please love me!'

The generic marketing items in Stone's list are also well worth taking note of. For example, the author suggests that you should:

Write quality content and do it well.
Publish regular updates
Think of your audience..
Keep your posts and paragraphs short.

The article also suggests that you submit your address to the smaller blog search sites and directories such as http://www.popdex.com- However, perhaps best bit of advice given was to link to other blogs. Biz Stone notes:

"This is a great way to get traffic. Here's what happens when you link to another blogger: she sees you in her referral logs, checks out your blog, and then very likely links back to you or at the very least makes a mental note to do so."

So watch out folks the link man is coming your way. Let’s hope you are keen to link back to me!