Skellie has excellent advice on being a more influential blogger. She writes:

Develop a consistent style. Leo Babauta is renowned for his lists, Seth Godin — to pluck an example from above — is known for pithy, thought-provoking posts, while Jason Kottke is famous for interesting links and insightful commentary. What kinds of posts do you do best? Developing a consistent approach, voice, and formatting style will help to develop a style of blogging with your trademark on it. When readers see a similar style, they will think of you. They’ll start to recognize your posts wherever they appear.

Just like a flashy signature, site design, or logo can catch people’s attention, a consistent writing style will help people recognize and remember you.

You should find a style that works for you and fits your personality. While it’s a good idea to change things up a bit and not be too predicatable, your blog should have a sense of style that’s consistent.

My favorite blogs are the ones where I know what to expect. I like visiting this health blog because I know I’ll get short, informative posts about basic health principles. I like reading this copywriting blog because the authors have interesting pictures and great copywriting tips. I visit this NBA basketball blog daily because I know it will have interesting commentary and links about the latest NBA news.

What is Style?

So, what do I mean by style? Here are a couple things to think about.

Post length and frequency - If one week, you post five 1000 word posts and then the next week, you post three 300 word posts, your style is not consistent. Try to keep things consistent so that your readership knows what to expect.

This doesn’t mean every post has to be the same length, but you should have a weekly pattern. For example, you could write a longer post (800 words) on Monday and then 300 word posts daily for the rest of the weekdays. And then a 200 word “link post” on the weekend.

Think of your blog as a magazine. Would you like it if your favorite magazine randomly varied their page counts? One month you get a 75 page issue, another month you get an issue with 150 pages, and then the next month you get an issue with only 25 pages. That would be annoying. By being consistent with your post length and frequency, you blog will be professional and your readers will begin to anticipate your posts.

Tone - Having a consistent tone is especially important in blogging. Blogging is a personal medium. Whether you have a more conversational tone or scholarly tone, be consistent. Also, be yourself. People are attracted to someone who’s comfortable in their own skin.

Formatting - Be consistent with your formatting. If you’re inserting pictures in your posts, continue doing so. But don’t have a month where you have pictures on every post and then the next month all your posts are picture-less. The same goes with subheadings, bullet points, bolded text, and italics. If you’re gonna use them, use them often or use them very sparingly. What confuses readers is using them for every other post. Also, some bloggers like Lyndoman do well without using much formatting.

Linking out - Some popular bloggers like Steve Pavlina don’t link out very often. Others like Michael Arrington link out all the time. Be consistent with your linking out. Your readers will appreciate it because they’ll know what to expect when they visit your blog.

What other factors do you think affect a blogger’s style?

About 2 weeks ago, I wrote about marketing without spamming. One of my points was that networking is an essential part of marketing. If you don’t have a relationship with the bloggers you’re marketing to, then you could be classified as a spammer. For example, if you promote your content to a blogger out of the blue, they might wonder, “Who are you?” and “Why are you spamming me?”

Blog commenting is a great way to presell yourself and your content while also building friendships with other bloggers. Here are a couple tips to consider.

Comment early. Try one of the first 5 to comment on a post because those commenters get noticed more than the later commenters. You’ll get more traffic to your blog. The blogger will notice you over the other commenters if he receives many comments per post.

Leave an insightful comment. Too many comments are short and don’t add much value. It’s okay to leave a comment like “Awesome post. Thanks for sharing.” However, most of your comments should add value to the post and directly engage the post in an insightful way. By leaving good comments, you will brand yourself as someone who knows what he’s talking about.

Pick a blog that you enjoy reading. It will a lot easier to leave good comments if you comment on a blog that you enjoy reading.

Comment on posts that are closely related to your blog. If you have a Ford Mustang blog and want to comment on a general car blog, leave comments especially on the Mustang related posts. Also, other Mustang car blogs like this one are great places to leave comments.

Watch your stats. If you’re not getting a lot of traffic from your comments, it may be time to target another blog. Don’t just look at unique visitors. Check out the bounce rate and pageviews, too. Blog A may send less visitors than blog B. However, blog A’s visitors may actually be visiting more pages than blog B’s visitors. More pageviews can translate into subscribers and a higher conversion rate.

After a couple insightful comments especially if the blogger responded to them, feel free to contact the blogger directly and promote your best content. Make sure your content actually relates to his blog. Also, link out a couple times to the blogger to increase your success rate of getting a link and a positive mention.

Which blogs should you comment on? Our blog directory can help you with this. We have a lot of blogs and they’re ranked by 3 metrics: overall, strength, and momentum. For more information about these three metrics, check out our about page.

I personally like using the momentum metric, because you can find blogs that don’t have a huge readership base yet they are growing quickly. The problem with networking with bloggers who have big audiences is they are often hard to befriend because of their fame. It’s hard to get noticed in midst of their many comments and emails. However, blogs with a high momentum metric are often times smaller blogs that are on the rise. What better time to network with a blogger than when they have a relatively small audience, but at the same time, are growing their readership very quickly?

For example, if you are a celebrity blogger, check out the top momentum celeb blogs. Then, pick one like Pop Crunch and begin leaving comments. If you are a tech blogger, check out the top momentum tech blogs. You can then scan the blogs on the list and pick a blog to target like The Techdirt Blog.

Also, don’t forget to submit your blog if you haven’t already. Other bloggers are browsing the directory for other blogs in their niche. If you haven’t submitted your blog, those bloggers won’t be able to find you.

Feedback

Feel free to share your favorite blog commenting tip.

If you want to have long-term success in the blogging game, you need to have attention. I just found this very relevant post. It’s entitled Links or Content? Nope, the Issue is Attention. In this post, Aaron Wall tackles the question that webmasters often debate: Which is more important, links or content? However, he argues that attention trumps both of those things. Here’s what he says:

The debate is flawed. Links or content alone are just one type of asset. You might be able to profit from either for a while, but ultimately the real measure of relevancy and staying power is attention.

I think he’s right. The internet is getting more crowded. More people are trying to make money online. More bloggers are learning internet marketing skills. Here is a list of over 100 make money online bloggers. I think most of these blogs were started less than a year ago. Information is easy to produce. Big offline publishers with massive amounts of quality content are starting to publish their content online. Therefore, attention is the most valuable resource right now.

You can have the best content but if no one knows about it, how will you make money or gain readership? You can be a marketing genius, but if your content doesn’t capture people’s attention, your marketing will be inefficient and ineffective. You can be the best link builder, but a blogger who has more attention than you will steal your rankings in the long-term because their attention will get them links faster than you can build them.

So, think of ways to get noticed. Write content that causes people to pay attention to you. Promote your blog in such a way that people don’t forget you. Don’t stop building links but also get attention because that is the best link building strategy.

Also, here are two principles that can help.

• Be bold.
• Focus. Don’t multi-task so much. Instead, “single task”. Much of the content and marketing that gets attention is well-planned and took much concentration and focused effort.

When we talk about judging the importance of a blog, there’s usually a clash of semantics. Some people look at the ‘value’ of a blog (how much a blog is worth), others look at how popular / influential the blog is in its niche and overall in the blogosphere (authority).

If you’re looking to place a dollar value on your blog, read this blog valuation article on Performancing. However, for SEO purposes (or if you want to rank blogs in a blog directory, as we’ve done here at EatonWeb) you’d be better off finding the authority of a blog.

There are many different scales that people use to measure a blog’s importance - Traffic, RSS Subscribers, Search Rankings, etc. Unfortunately for a blog directory, we don’t always have access to this hard data and as a result we have to rely on third-party metrics to do the job.

So which 3rd party metrics can we use? PageRank is widely discredited, and Alexa stats are wildly skewed in favor of tech-related sites. It’s not that hard to fake RSS numbers (although you’d have to be particularly desperate to do so), and Technorati, while being again skewed towards the linkerati as opposed to a more representative sample of web users, also has its share of glitches.

The approach many people have used is to combine a host of metrics and use them to arrive at an aggregated score. For example, SEOMoz’s Page Strength tool factors in linkage data from Yahoo Site Explorer with directory listings in Dmoz and mentions in Wikipedia, amongst other things, in order to arrive at a score out of 10 (like PageRank). This is ‘good enough’ but if you want to compare two blogs with similar scores, it’s a poor measure. Using a larger scale (out of 100) allows you to compare site differences better but the question still remains:

Which metrics are the most important?

More →

Hello, my name is Dee. I work as a full time in-house SEO for Sea Waves. Also, I blog part time at Net Business Blog. I’ll be blogging once a week here. More specifically, I’ll be giving tips that will help you market your blog. Subscribe to our feed and you won’t miss out.

Today let’s talk about marketing without spamming. What’s the difference? How can you keep your marketing from becoming spammy?

Here are some equations that might help you understand the difference between spam and marketing.

Promoting low quality/irrelevant content = spam

Promoting with no prior relationship = spam

Promoting with good content and networking = good marketing

Good blog marketing is not just about letting people know about your content. You also need networking and good content.

Why Good Content?

People will share high quality content. But bad content, they’ll make fun of or ignore. For example, you promote one of your posts to popular bloggers. Popular bloggers are known for having quality content. For those bloggers to link to you, you must have quality content that their readers will enjoy. So, promote your best stuff and aim to increase the quality of your content.

Tips for Producing Good Content

Think about what people in your niche like to talk about. Would they share your content with their friends? Ask yourself if other bloggers would freely link to your posts. The key here is creating content that stands out from the crowd. There are many ways to do this. Here are 3 of those ways.

1. Cover the areas in your niche that no one else is covering.
Example: Follow the popular blogs in your niche and write about an important subject they’re not covering at the present time.

2. Write about your niche in a unique angle.
Example: Whenever you post a news item, add your opinions and views.

3. Format your blogs in a creative way.
Examples: Take quality content from your blog and other blogs and aggregate them in a organized list post. Also, make sure to have usable, clean, up-to-date blog design.

Finally, your content needs to be relevant to your audience. Therefore, know your audience well in order to give them what they consider useful/important/entertaining.

Why Networking?

Think about some blogs where you’d like to have a link. For example, if you have a basketball blog, you’d definitely want a link from TrueHoop? If you have a copywriting blog, you can get a lot of traffic from a link on Copyblogger. How would you go about pursuing these juicy links?

You could email them your best content. However, popular bloggers are used to getting promotional emails. Some of these promotional emails come from their friends. Hmmm. Are the popular bloggers more likely to link to their friends or you, a stranger? We are social creatures by nature. We like to support our friends more than random strangers. So, you have a much better chance of getting links on popular blogs by being friendly and networking.

Networking Tips

Here are some practical networking tips.

Think of networking like building offline friendships. Small talk first.

• Think of networking like building offline friendships. Small talk first.
• Introduce yourself to other bloggers by emailing them. Don’t promote any of your posts. Give them your blog URL and tell them a little bit about yourself. Ask them a small, relevant question.
• Leave insightful comments.
• Link out to quality content. Bloggers like trackbacks.
• Do interviews.
• Offer to guest post.
• Target bloggers who like to link out rather than the more “isolated” bloggers.

Conclusion

There is a lot more to say about quality content and networking so stick around. I’ll give more practical examples in later posts. Until then, reevaluate your networking efforts and the quality of your content. If you do this, you’ll be on your way to increasing the effectiveness of your marketing.