How to Build a Popular Blog
Earlier, Jonathan from http://www.gazotto.com emailed me about having his blog added to the Gadget Blogs List over at Gadgetizer.com. No problem, it’s a decent blog with a lot of potential so I’ll add it tomorrow, but he also asked about how Gadgetizer seems to be getting so popular in the highly competitive gadget blogs arena.
I’m posting my reply to him below, but first I’d like to say that Gadgetizer could be a lot more popular than it is right now if I had done things differently with the site. Anyway, here goes:
Here are a few tips:
1. Post multiple times per day. If you look at Engadget, Gizmodo, Lifehacker, Treehugger, Slashdot, or any of the top gadget/tech blogs you’ll see they post relentlessly. There’s always something new popping up in their rss feeds and on their sites. It’s a ‘dynamic’ thing.
2. Post about what’s hot like the other gadget blogs but also find stuff that they’re not posting about. Those things set your blog apart from the crowd and others will link up to those posts.
3. Send tips to the editors of the bigger sites, or any gadget/tech site for that matter. Even if they don’t post or link to you, they will be aware of you and subscribe to your feed and watch it for new and interesting stuff.
4. Link out to and trackback/pingback a lot of the smaller blogs as well. Not only will this get you some long term inbound links, it’ll build awareness of your blog with their readers.
5. Post and comment on other forums or blogs, etc. and follow up. Also, watch who’s linking in to your site and email them or comment on their site thanking them for the link. Relationship buliding, building awareness and visibility is huge when marketing any blog.
Darren over at http://www.problogger.net does some great posting on professional blogging and I’d highly recommend reading his blog daily for traffic tips and strategies.
I’ll add a few other points here:
1. Unique, quality content is huge.
2. Linking out and crediting sources is huge.
3. And one other major thing I’ve noticed since Tiago started out as the editor at Gadgetizer: Hiring someone who can read, write and speak multiple languages to write for your blog is a major bonus.
Since Tiago started writing over there, Gadgetizer has been the first to post several stories that originated on European foriegn language sites and forums. This has gotten us links from a lot of major blogs and news sites whose editors simply don’t read or can’t read and report on because of the language barriers.
I’ll stop here for now, but this is the type of post that has spawned ideas for a few others. Look for more in the days to come 
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