Marketing Ninja

I apologize for not updating AjaxNinja in the past week. I’ve been on vacation and I neglected to write automated entries beforehand, so I suppose I failed to follow some of my own blogging advice. Oh well

I received the following question from an AjaxNinja reader this past weekend and I thought I’d share my insight as well as ask my readers for theirs.

Finding the related blogs. I already have a large list of related blogs in fields such as presentations, marketing, business, productivity, etc but who’s to say that the list is any good? I just surfed around on Technorati and Google trying to find these sites. Do you have any good methods for this? One of our problems is that we want to cover a broad area and this becomes a time consuming task.

Finding authoritative and reliable blogs in your domain can be tricky but the two best resources are Google Blog search and Technorati, as you mentioned. Commenting and pinging authoritative, relevant blogs is a good way to increase your authority as an up-and-coming blogger.

Stick with the most authoritative blogs

One thing I recommend doing is going through your blog list on Technorati and picking out the ones with the highest authority out of the large list of blogs you’ve discovered. Although there are some simple ways to game Technorati to boost authority, you’ll be able to tell by looking at the “reactions to this blog” page if the blog has any legitimate authority. Blogs with legitimate authority will have “reactions” from a number of diverse blogs, whereas ones with gamed authority will usually have only one additional blog feed that pings back to itself.

Use Blog Catalog or other blog directories
You can use blog directories like Blog Catalog, where blogs are already categorized by DOMAINS rather than by search engine keywords. Given that you’re looking to cover a broad area, this may be a better place to look than using Technorati and Google searches.

Put yourself in the reader’s seat; use Google to search for specific problems within a domain, rather than broad keywords that target the domain itself

Most of the blogs that I link back to from AjaxNinja are blogs that I’ve come across as a result of specific Google keyword searches when I’m looking for answers to technical questions, so I’ve accrued a number of resources to link to over time.

However, this is precisely how casual readers discover blogs. I’d suggest putting yourself in the driver’s seat of one of your potential customers/readers and rattle off a number of precise queries that target specific problems within your domain, rather than broad keywords that target the domain itself.

A blog that addresses an array of specific problems or issues within your domain is going to have a more authoritative writer (a stronger vertical/niche expert) than popular blogs that fail to cover domain-specific issues in any depth below the surface.

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