Authority Archives - Successful Blog

5 Keys for Positioning Your Successful Blog

November 4, 2008 by SOBCon Authors 1 Comment

Last week we talked about how you can drive a successful business through your blog and without being a salesperson. Today we will go over some of the steps that you can take to position yourself as an expert and your blog as a valuable resource.

Remember, while the goal is to increase the presence and reach of your blog in order to grow your business, it is not all about you. It is about getting positioned properly to showcase your customers and how their problems were addressed successfully.

Creating Value as an Authority

Use your blog as a platform to communicate value. What benefit do your readers get from coming to or subscribing to your blog? Is that benefit immediately obvious? Is there a suggested path that readers can take to find the information that they are looking for? Also write about your customers and vendors, featuring them as the hero of the story. They will spread that story around for you.
Use offline resources as well as online. Newspapers, while losing circulation (and, increasingly, any objectivity or relevance) still have some readers, and may be your only method of introduction to the less-than-savvy consumers that are not frequent blog-readers.
Offer your services as a speaker. Your local Chamber of Commerce is an ideal resource for networking and exposing yourself to the business community. The Chamber is always looking for speakers and presenters at a variety of events. Your presentation should focus on an aspect of the business market that showcases your knowledge and expertise, but not your business specifically. For example, if you are a motivational speaker or job coach, you could give a presentation on employee morale and how its ups-and-downs affect productivity and the bottom line.
Become active in your trade association. There is an association for nearly every industry and professional service. Get involved. Go to the meetings, volunteer to lead a group or head up a project. Get to know the movers and the shakers, and learn from them. Soon your knowledge and credibility will be at a point where you can offer to teach courses or give a presentation at a regional or national conference.
Cultivate a different presence. I am not advocating crazy or risque attire, rather something that sets you apart from the rest of the pack. Everyone has a business card, you can hand out CD-ROMs, or flash drives, or something else particular to your industry. Computer-related items are particularly useful for adding value to your marketing, as they can include links to your blog, your portfolio, and other examples of your online presence.

I happen to know that the SOBCon crowd is particularly innovative – and I invite you to share your own positioning tactics. What would you add to this list?

Want Technorati Fixed? Link to Janice. Give Janice AUTHORITY.

February 15, 2006 by Liz Leave a Comment

Yesterday I wrote about David Sifry’s State of the Blogosphere–Part 2 Message. I ended that post with the question, What will you do? I wasn’t really talking to Niall Kennedy, but he did something anyway.

Technorati’s Still Broken, Niall Leaves, and
We Get Bells and Whistles

This via Duncan Riley at the Blog Herald: Niall Kennedy left his job at Technorati. Mr. Kennedy doesn’t discuss his reasons for departing. Click the logo to get to the Blog Herald Story. Then come back to find out what to do about it.

Duncan isn’t the only one concerned. Martin is wondering in the comments here why Technorati is introducing new features when their basic engine and tracking service is broken. So are lots of other people. I’m getting daily emails on the subject.

Use a Whistle–Give Janice Technorati AUTHORITY

The way I see it. Janice Myint needs more than Janice to fix what’s wrong at Technorati. It’s time to get throw some real support behind her. So why not use the whistle David Sifry just handed us–AUTHORITY.

Let’s give Janice Myint Authority, by getting everyone to LINK TO JANICE.
We’ll need to do this with some saavy. We don’t want Janice to end up in the Google sandbox. I propose we work together on the honor system. Are you with me?

For SEO reasons, we need a variety of link types and a variety of link names. Keep these guidelines in mind.

Not everyone should use the exact title of her blog.

Not everyone should blogroll her blog. Some should be links to individual posts.

Some should be comment links.

Not everyone should link today, tomorrow, or the next day.

Choose one of the options below to pick your link day.

1. Choose the last letter in your last name. Count its place in the alphabet. Count out that many days from today and link to Janice’s blog on that day.

2. When you get your next link to your own blog. Link to Janice’s blog.

3. If a friend or family member has a birthday, anniversary or other occasions between now and April 1st, link to Janice’s blog on that day.

4. When you get the third, or fourth, or fifth, “Sorry Technorati is . . .” message, link to Janice’s blog.

Janice’s URL is http://janicetechnorati.blogspot.com/

This will get real attention, if enough of us do it. We have the power to make a difference.

I’d trade the bells and whistles for a smooth-working engine that tracks my links accurately.

Wouldn’t you? Link to Janice.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Related articles:
Dear Niall Kennedy and David Sifry at Technorati
Janice Myint at Technorati Is in Customer Support
Explore the Magic Middle with Authority
Want Technorati Fixed? Link to Janice. Give Janice AUTHORITY.

Explore the Magic Middle with Authority

February 14, 2006 by Liz Leave a Comment

David Sifry posted The State of the Blogosphere–Part 2 at the Technorati Weblog today. Part 2 focuses on how information is handled both in the mainstream media and in the blogosphere.

Once again Sifry provides information and analysis that will serve you in your online business and in your personal life. Everyone who wants an understanding of the state of the national media should read this. Businesses should be keeping an eye on the data Mr. Sifry has to offer, particularly businesses that spend advertising dollars. Bloggers should pay attention because opportunities are replete. But bloggers be prepared. It will require creative bloggers that can recraft this information into persuasive messages to help businesses understand that the world is becoming an economy of knowledge and that the base of that knowledge is moving as we speak.

MSM, the Long Tail, and the Top 100

David Sifry discusses the Mainstream Media stalwarts in relation to the Long Tail Blogs telling the story with his usual graphic detail. He also speaks to the Top 100, and the network effect that seems to hold the same blogs in those 100 positions. He points out, that despite the network effect, new blogs have moved in and out.

The Magic Middle

Sifry also spends time defining a group he calls the Magic Middle–bloggers who are in niche publishing with 20-100 other sites linking to them–as sometimes radically changing the economics of trade publishing with their interesting, topical, and influential blogs. These are the blogs that people like you and I read and write. We might well know them better than Mr. Sifry does.

Technorati Explore

The first new feature David Sifry describes is Technorati Explore. I have to say, I’m not clear on how it works. I’ll let him explain it.

The idea is to use the bloggers that know the most about an area or topic to help spot the interesting trends that may never hit the “A-list”. We call this new section Explore, and we’ve seeded it with some of the most interesting topics that we could find. But one of the nice things about Explore is that there are no gatekeepers, and that anyone who writes interesting topical blog posts can get included simply by tagging his blog and tagging his posts.

Sounds great doesn’t it? The post says much more about it. I tried it out tonight . . . I’m still not sure how it works.

What’s Authority?

The second new feature Sifry introduced is Authority Filtering. A new green slide allows you to tune your searches to adjust your results to only those with a lot of authority. Authority is calculated on number of links.

Why You Should Read This Post?

I hardly told you half of what’s in it. Here’s just a few notes–a taste–from the summary.

Blogging and Mainstream Media continue to share attention in blogger’s and reader’s minds, but bloggers are climbing higher on the “big head” of the attention curve, with some bloggers getting more attention than sites including Forbes, PBS, MTV, and the CBC.

Bloggers are changing the economics of the trade magazine space, with strong entries covering WiFi, Gadgets, Internet, Photography, Music, and other nice topic areas, making it easier to thrive, even on less aggregate traffic.

The Magic Middle is the 155,000 or so weblogs that have garnered between 20 and 1,000 inbound links. It is a realm of topical authority and significant posting and conversation within the blogosphere.

I sit in the Magic Middle. Tagged with Authority–if the sliding scale works the way it’s supposed to. The MSMedia is losing ground and hardly has a clue. The blogosphere is growing faster than most folks can contemplate how to make something of it. The information is here. The future is around the corner.

What will you do?

–ME “Liz” Strauss