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February 13, 2006

Free Your Blogrolls and Your Backlinks Will Follow

New York Magazine has just published a great series of articles on the current state of blogging and what it takes to make it as a blogger today.

In particular, there's a lot of attention paid to the outsized advantage of being an "A-list" blogger, and how difficult it can be to get your blog seen if you're a B- or C-lister:

There is enormous inequity in the system. A very small number of blogs enjoy hundreds and hundreds of inbound links—the A-list, as it were. But almost all others have very few sites pointing to them. When Shirky sorted the 433 blogs from most linked to least linked and lined them up on a chart, the curve began up high, with the lucky few. But then it quickly fell into a steep dive, flattening off into the distance, where the vast majority of ignored blogs reside. The A-list is teensy, the B-list is bigger, and the C-list is simply massive. In the blogosphere, the biggest audiences–and the advertising revenue they bring–go to a small, elite few. Most bloggers toil in total obscurity.

Most of us who write blogs are guilty of perpetuating this imbalance. Look at my own blogroll. Who's there? The SearchEngineWatch Blog. Google Blogoscoped. John Battelle. Do these guys really need any more links? They write great search blogs, but so do hundreds of other bloggers. Do we need to contribute to their continuing dominance of this particular niche?

True, they earned it, and there's something to be said for making your site a hub linking out to the top sites in your industry. However, I'm proposing that we diversify our blogrolls a bit. I've actually begun to do so myself

If you're a fellow C-lister, and you've got a blog that's of good quality, relevant to the field of Internet Marketing, and would be a good match for my readers, let me know, and I'll consider blogrolling you. It's got to be good and relevant, though, and posted to at least a few times a week.

This isn't really a blog about blogging, so this post might seem slightly off-topic. However, blogging, in many ways, represents the leading edge in Internet Marketing and SEO. Forget the keywords meta tags. So much of SEO is now about guerilla marketing and public relations:

"The good news is that it's still possible to create a top-ranked blog," says Shirky. "The bad news is, the way to get into the top ten now seems to be public relations." Just posting witty entries and hoping for traffic won't do it. You have to actively seek out attention from the press. "That's how they're jump-starting the links structure. It's not organic."

Blogging is a crash-course in the networking and self-promotion skills we're all going to need if we want to continue to make a living driving traffic our client's sites. Finally, here's one last piece of advice I found interesting about the importance of consistency and why blogging can suck up so much time:

What's more, a blog is like a shark: If it stops moving, it dies. Without fresh postings every day—hell, every few minutes—even the most well-linked blog will quickly lose its audience. The A-listers cannot rest on their laurels. Federated Media owner John Battelle recently published a book on Google, and while on the book tour, he neglected his own well-trafficked blog (No. 81 on Technorati’s rankings) for several days. "And suddenly I was getting all these e-mails going, 'If you don’t get your shit together, I'm out of here,' " he recalls. He stayed up late that night frantically adding posts. "If you start sucking," he says, "it's through."

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