Friend of our blog Darren has a great post up about how long it takes to get into the Technorati 100.
While I would never encourage someone to put their efforts into getting into a list (building a great blog that happens to get into a list is a far nicer goal, heh), his research proves (in an unscientific way) what we have said for a while.
For your blog to be successful you need to stick with it.
Half of the blogs in Darrens study have been around two years or more. I would say give your blog a year before expecting big numbers (traffic or income). It can take a good few months to get noticed by other blogs, maybe longer to get them to link to you for more than one-off posts.
Sticking with it means keeping up with the posting for the long haul. Don’t take the easy route of just re-posting stuff you read on other blogs, put in original or hard to find material too. Make friends. Be generous, link out and help people in forums. I really do believe what you give you get back tenfold and it has never been more true when it comes to links.
One of the benefits of having a long term view is the pressure is off to be a success today or tomorrow, you know the work you are putting in is money in the bank to be paid back with bonuses at a later date.
Think of each post as a couple of dollars in a high interest account. The future you will thank you for it.
11 thoughts on “Proof, as if we needed it …”
I’m just getting started in blogging but I realise that you have to work for the long haul. It’s nice to see that the rest of the world agrees with me.
As Chris said “it is worth putting the work into a beefy archive”. Everybody starting a blog on platform which has no nice archive structure should thing twice!
I just want to underline Chris statement and format it bold and red 🙂
True enough, I think I’ll get a guest to write regular articles, especially as I have less time now but even more inclination!
I started blogging around 1999 but didn’t stick with the same blog for more than a year since then until more recently (I used to change hosting, content, layout, technology .. never the same url for a page for longer than a few months). My favourite personal blog is coming up for a year old and building nicely when I have time to look after it. My oldest blog still ranks and provides adsense income even though it hasn’t been touched in two years or more. Shows you should keep links/page urls permanent AND it is worth putting the work into a beefy archive.
It’s going to be a year since I started blogging. So what’s the result? I now have six blogs and maybe more on the way. I have a few readers. Learned a little about html. It hasn’t hurt me any.
Very good point. I would like to accentuate the point you mentioned by saying: yes, there IS hope! Keep on blogging by writing quality material, make friends with other people around the blogosphere, and eventually, the clicks, comments, and repeat visitors will come!
I’ve maintained my blog for over a year and am now in the top 50,000. I’m not sure what the numbers mean, perhaps that I’m providing a useful service, but I do agree perserverance pays off.
I have found with my own blog people are quite forgiving if you lapse in posting frequency so long as you come back with good stuff and *try* to post once in a while. Another thing to do is bring someone else to cover if it will be a long gap.
I like to think that’s true, but I guess only time will tell. Sometimes the pressures of having to do ‘real’ (as in paid right now) work means I have hardly any energy for blog posting. However, I certainly try to keep it updated as often as possible. I do hope it’ll still be around for a while yet though!
I agree that I’ve noticed my technorati links grow as I have more and more in my archives. New links are about half for the blog as a whole and half are links to items in my archives (more than a week old).
If you’re new and want that sort of authority then I think you have to simply build your archives by posting more. Keep an eye on search strings to see what brings people to your site and either focus on delivering what people are looking for or what you want them to find.
I completely agree with what you have said.
The more you put into something the more likely people are to notice it and you will grow just by the wake you leave behind from all the every day things you do. My site is only a couple (2.5) months old but is showing a pagerank of 3 already and I don’t really promote it overly.
I know pagerank isn’t an overly good indicator of anything but it does give some idea of how Google is seeing my site and the relevant links to it. I think it just goes to show that if you do keep plugging away you will see things blossom.
Thanks!
Steve Terjeson
Comments are closed.