Photo Credits: mahatma4711

Beginner bloggers face the daunting task of growing their readership, getting people to subscribe, and building their authority. Here are some tips on how to build an authority blog from three of my favorite Internet marketing bloggers.

Lee Odden:

Lee publishes Toprank, one of the world’s most popular marketing blogs. Approximately once a week, he nominates a small group of selected blogs to become part of his coveted Big List of the Best Search Marketing Blogs on the Net.

Before he nominates a blog he makes sure that the candidates meet some basic criteria, besides having quality content, like:

• Post at least once a week.
• Have a pleasant blog design.
• Take it easy on the blatant AdSense ads.
• Make it easy to tell what your blog is about.
• Make it easy to find out who is writing the blog.
• Make it easy to subscribe to your blog.
• Make it easy to find past posts through categories, related posts, archives, tags, text search.

These guidelines sound basic, but most blogs don’t follow one or more of them.

Skellie

Skellie is an Australian blogger who publishes Skelliewag and also writes for top blogs in the industry, like the Technorati 100, Problogger and FreelanceSwitch. Skellie’s approach to building authority is to provide plenty of value by writing deep, well researched articles.

She also has some interesting insights on how you can project authority by emulating the way authority blogs look:

• Posts on authority blogs show plenty of comments.
• Authority blogs have large subscriber numbers.
• Authority blogs have a professional looking unique design.
• Authority sites favor the 125×125 pixel banner ad format and other understated forms of advertising.

She reminds us that some of these characteristics are self and mutually reinforcing. For example, a large number of comments usually triggers more comments and more subscribers.

Skellie has written at length on how to implement these tips in our blogs in this interesting post.

Aaron Wall

Aaron is an authority on search engine optimization and the author of the famous SeoBook, the first book on SEO supported by a regularly updated companion blog.

He recently published a value-packed articled titled “The Blogger’s Guide to SEO”, from which I am extracting the following tips:

• Don’t host your blog as a sub-domain on sites like Typad or Wordpress. Instead, register your own domain and host your blog on your own web host.
• Write descriptive headlines if you want to maximize your click through rates in the search engines results pages.
• Write more emotionally captivating headlines if your aim is to propagate your posts in social media.
• Use meme trackers, social media sites and competitive websites to find out what ideas are spreading and write about them.
• Highlight your best content in an easily visible “Top Posts” section, so that your users can get more familiar with your site and your brand.
• Tag each post only under one category (the most relevant) to avoid confusing search engines and generating duplicate content.
• Link to other blogs, so other bloggers can find you and eventually link back to you.
• List your blogs in a few popular, high authority directories like Yahoo! and Business.com
• Do some “push” marketing at the beginning, buying ads in Google Adwords, Stumbleupon, etc.
• Don’t monetize too soon: bloggers that slap Adsense above the fold too soon will hardly get any links from high authority sites.

Aside from these tips I would add the following:

• Use the above the fold section of your blog to highlight your most important calls to action.
• Use social media sites like MyBlogLog to build and grow your network.
• Follow these basic trust building guidelines.
• Submit your best posts to social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.
• Dress up your posts with high quality images.

What other things do you suggest?

Technorati Tags: blogging branding seo marketing copywriting social media

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 at 2:04 am and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.