One quality blog post is enough to make you famous

Friday, 5 Jan 2007 in Blog Marketing Tips 23 comments

Quality Blog PostAfter spending some time looking that A-Listers (top blogs in the blogosphere) today like ProBlogger, Micropersuasion and Lorelle on WordPress, I realised that the highest level and best form of blog marketing (or rather, the marketing of any website) is the good old quality content.

The way most people do it

There is no doubt that the best way to increase the profile of a website on the net, whether it is about enhancing search engine rankings, or about getting more targeted traffic – is to get more quality incoming links to your site, and with that in mind, the commonly used methods of getting backlinks are like article submissions, adding to directories, commenting on other blogs and basically leaving your URL wherever you go.

However, think about it. There are only 24 hours every single day. Let’s just say you work from the moment you turn out of bed until the time your mother or spouse starts to nag at you for being a computer addict… that will be about… 20 hours! And imagine each submission takes 3 minutes.

In total, you will get 400 backlinks in 1 day! That sounds pretty nice doesn’t it?

But look – this is a finite number, because your time is the scarce resource.

Consider the “quality content” strategy.

You may spend 6 full hours putting up one solid blog post of 400 words. (I’m sure you could do with 2 words per minute?) You could have spent most of this time doing research, reading other blogs, thinking through, and structuring your argument.

But that one post would be so addictive, so intriguing, and so viral! What happens now is that while you are asleep, people are reading this post and they will recommend it to others. Your content will automatically be Digged – readers online just cannot wait to share what they have found with their own readers and the world.

One post is enough to make 400 backlinks… and maybe even more. And the most magical part is – you don’t have to do any of those linking work! These people WANT to link to you, because being a reporter of a good post makes them credible as well! Moreover, you get linked in people’s blog post itself, not in the comments!

How powerful can that be?

Granted, not everybody is a born writer, and not everybody can entertain with words or have perfect grammar. However, I think what is more important than the words is the argument or the opinion – the thinking that goes behind the post. Both writing and thinking can be learnt, and they have to be learnt through constant practise. Liz from Successful-Blog.com posted her thoughts a while ago on the benefits of writing everyday, and the first in her list is “Writing every day makes us better thinkers.”

Drawbacks and Strategy

One drawback of this strategy is that you need a small readership to start with. Afterall, you need to have people to come in and read your post in order for them to share it with others.

So what I would recommend is that for the first phase in building your blog, you could do a 50-50 focus on writing and marketing.

But after the first three months, after you get a consistent readership of about 100 unique visitors a day, you can pay more emphasis on building quality content. At this time, one well thought post is more than worth 10 quick posts, because quality content is the best marketing tool, ever.

The rules of the world don’t change. Well, at least not so quickly. What goes on in the offline world will be duplicated in the online world, only quicker and more effectively. Academic professors in the top universities today spend years doing research on one single topic, and summarizing that into a 20 page journal paper. That paper will be the one cited by other researchers, and used as case studies in course syllabuses all around the world.

One quality paper is enough to make them world known. One quality blog post is enough to make you famous.

Comments

  1. Yeah what attract to stay on the blog is the quality of content. If you had a lot of traffic through all your other traffic generation strategy but had poor content, people will not come back for more. So you had “wasted” the traffic that you generated.

    So work hard on writing good quality content that enrich the reader.

    John Tan
    http://www.Johntanblog.com

  2. Thanks John. Actually come to think of it – the “poor content and too much marketing” strategy IS actually called “spamming” :mrgreen:

  3. 400 backlinks a day with 20 hours of hard work. That’s not a possible number.

    You will be lucky if you get 10% of that figure. Soliciting links is an extreme laborious task.

    Furthermore, Google will become suspicious of your aggressive link building campaign for a new site and all these solicited links may be “filtered”.

    So better publish good content and grow your links “naturally”.

  4. Hahaha. Okay, 400 links a “theoretical calculated figure”, not a “practical figure”… the point is that however large this number is, it doesn’t beat doing a good post and let people link in automatically. 😉

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  6. Me? On the A-list of bloggers? I wish. 😉 But it’s nice at least one person thinks so.

    Still, you are smack on right about content being the way to go. Without content worth linking to, or even reading, why bother? It’s about quality not quantity.

    Content matters. It always has and always will. Thanks for spreading the good content word.

  8. Heh… Lorelle, talk to anybody in the blogosphere about “Lorelle” and they will point to your blog! So, if you are not “A-List”, then who?

    Well, lets just put it this way – that A LOT of bloggers (myself included!) would be yearning for the kind of traffic and readership on your blog. 😉

    Thanks for dropping by. 🙂

  9. Great John, and we must also do our part as bloggers to spread the word about original content and ideas – its unfortunate but true that many who are brought into the Internet marketing arena are brought in by hype, and in the urgency to get their website profiled, they unknowingly (seriously unknowingly!) engage in spam.

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  14. Never assume about one’s traffic, my friend, as an indicator of fame or otherwise. In fact, never assume web traffic levels. People assume that I have some extraordinary traffic that makes my blog an A-lister, Z-lister, or whatever. I have no special traffic numbers. Besides, numbers lie. In one day I had over 20,000 visitors. Two days later I had 45. But my average was good. 😉

    I’m always stunned at the “fame” assigned to me and others like me. We just do our thing and do it to the best of our ability. I don’t go out chasing traffic or holding up signs that say “point to me”. We just do what we do and people point and say “famous”.

    Famous is relative. It’s nice for people to think so, but there are a lot of people who would be envious of my traffic (if they get less than 50 visits a day) and others who think my traffic is child’s play.

    I’m just glad that you like what I do. Trust me, my web traffic would make me a “P-Lister”. 😉

  15. Thanks Lorelle, for that inspiration.

    I certainly do enjoy your blog, and I believe many others would share the same thoughts.

    So I guess what you have built is really credibility in your specialization – you might not have “special traffic numbers”, but you are known for your excellent articles about WordPress.

    And I think that is what matters.

    Congrats again for being Wikipedia-ed! 🙂

  16. Thank you for the kind words. Those are the kind I appreciate.

    And keep on doing what you are doing, my friend. You are also turning the world on its ear with your passion.

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  18. Nice one . However,I dont agree with one of your points .

    “Your content will automatically be Digged – readers online just cannot wait to share what they have found with their own readers and the world.”

    This is not entirely true. Most of the top stories at digg are not worth reaching there.

  20. These are the things that are often disregarder though obvious. Thanks. Now I can encourage myself to write more quality posts.

    –Kyle

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