Blog Training and How-To Guide for Business Blogging

This blogging tip is courtesy of Dan Smith, staff writer and Vice President of Publishing for Know More Media.

Easton and Kimberlee wrote such helpful and instructional posts on blog networking this week, it’s difficult for me to know what else to add. Easton discussed why networking is important, how to do it, and where to find relevant blogs; Kimberlee gave excellent advice on how to then build those relationships with other bloggers. Today, I will be focusing on a successful example of plugging in to the waves of a large power blogger.

In January, Dan Tudor on LandingTheDeal.com experienced the best month of traffic for that blog since last May—almost a year—and a 40% increase over December’s traffic. And this occurred in a month when we lost much of Google’s love for half the month. How did he do it?

One significant reason is his attention and connection with the grandly popular Seth Godin of sethgodin.typepad.com, which receives an immense amount of traffic. Now, I don’t think Dan is on a first-name basis with Seth Godin, but Dan reads Seth Godin’s blog regularly and doesn’t hesitate to chime in with a comment or write a post on LandingTheDeal which he then tracks back to one of Seth Godin’s relevant posts. Two cases in point:

sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/01/workaholics.html

sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/01/the-last-intera.html

If you go to these posts, you can see that on both of them, Dan’s trackbacked post lists at the top of the comments. Many people have read Seth’s post, then browsed down to the Comments section, saw the link to Dan’s interesting related LandingTheDeal post, and clicked through to LandingTheDeal. By doing this for a handful of posts in January, LandingTheDeal received a 5% increase in traffic from Seth Godin blog referrals alone. Those are great results—tapping in to the heavy traffic of a high profile blogger.

And if you leave particularly insightful comments and trackbacks on a high profile blog, the blogger may likely take notice of you & your blog and start actually mentioning you and linking to you in the posts themselves, which will really bring in some new readers to your blog.

So: finding the high profile bloggers, reading their content, connecting to their content. It all centers around the quality of your writing, your own credibility, and if you can add to the high profile blogger’s conversation—in this way, quality content wins every time.