Google began exporting its PageRank data recently and I noticed how one of my relatively new blogs had gone from being of ‘unknown’ PageRank to a rank of 2. On seeing this gratifying change, I reflected on the nature of the development of the blog and how I might duplicate its modest success on some of my other new blogs (not to mention this blog, which although the domain name is over a year old, the active blog is a lot younger.)
The new blog I mentioned is a political and news commentary blog. I agree that this is very much an active blogging niche (depending on how you choose your topics) so this fact may influence whether or not the success is reproducible.
The blog now has a total of 30100 words appearing in 71 posts. This amounts to an average post length of about 430 words per post. (You can get all these statistics by installing the Blog Metrics plugin.) Very close to half of these words have been added in the last 30 days as I vowed to make at least one post per day beginning March 1st. For me, this seems to be a steady and attainable rate at which to publish content. I plan to continue at a rate of at least 200 words per day, but will aim to raise the daily word rate to about a 500 words per day average.
Minimal promotional work has been done on the blog. I submitted it to about 20 low rank free web directories simply to get the blog indexed. The only other promotional work I did was to seek out about 10 active blogs in its niche (politics) and make good comments on the once per week. Numerous regular readers have trickled in via these commenting efforts and the blog now picks up several RSS subscribers per day. The blog was also noticed by a high profile political pundit and mentioned on his blog which led to a spike in traffic and some good organic inbound linkage.
Why do I tell you all this information and not reveal the blog? My reason for giving this detailed information is purely altruistic. I want to make tell the story, perhaps bit by bit and in several follow up posts, of what I hope will develop further to become a very successful blog. My reason for not exposing the URL of the blog is to retain a little privacy and also keep hold of the reins of the narrative.
I attribute this modest success to the blog commenting. It also reveals how contingent the nature of internet marketing really is. You have to plug away at known good practices and await your moment.
