The Power of One Post

Back in January, my Technorati rank was somewhere in the 500,000 range. I set a goal to get into the top 100,000 blogs, and on Friday with the power of a single post my blog rank vaulted from 140,000 to 95,309. It didn't hurt that the single post was from marketing writer David Meerman Scott announcing his new book.

The book, The New Rules for Marketing and PR, explains about the power of using the online world to promote your business and products. In his blog announcement about the book, Meerman Scott (who is a fellow EContent Magazine Contributing Editor), mentioned by link, people he felt helped him as he wrote the book. David and I have had some email exchanges, and apparently he felt some of those contributed to his understanding in some way.

The power of his post was that other marketing writers mentioned by link picked up the entire list of links and my Technorati Authority Rank jumped to 49 on Friday on the power of that post. (Technorati defines Authority as " the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has.")

But I had done other things to help promote my blog. After I lost my Google ranking for a month or so, it gave me the impetus to talk to other bloggers about how to promote my blog beyond counting on Google search traffic. Based on the great advice I received I did the following:

• I increased my blog roll. I linked to others, and they in turn linked to me. More links equals more Technorati authority and that means a higher ranking.
• I began promoting my blog to other bloggers. If I wrote a post of interest to another blogger, I sent a link and requested the blogger link back. This helped immensely.
• I began promoting my posts on Digg and this too has increased traffic.
• I claimed my blog on Technorati and added Technorati tags to each post.

All of this work has helped me achieve my goal of getting inside the top 100,000, much faster than I ever imagined. You may wonder why I would be so excited about being in the top 100,000 blogs, but consider the quote attributed to someone named Matt (who turns out to be Matt Mullenweg of WordPress fame--Thanks to John Koetsier for that information) on the Technorati Home page: "70 million blogs. Some of them have to be good".

If I'm 95,309 out of 70M, I feel pretty good about that. It takes work, but it  can also take the power of a single post to move you forward faster than you ever thought possible.

5/16/07 Update: That one post it seems, is the gift that keeps on giving. As of this morning my Technorati Authority had rocketed to 67 and my rank sits at 67.799. That was indeed one powerful post. But it also occurred to me that Meerman Scott by mentioning all of these bloggers in his book announcement was using the techniques outlined in his book to promote the book. By listing bloggers big and small, he ensured that they would mention his book and in his own way start a viral marketing campaign. Pretty smart guy.

Comments

[David Meerman Scott]

Congrats on cracking the 100K mark, Ron. It's because you have a great blog.

David

[Anita Campbell]

Congratulations, Ron.

__
Thanks, Anita. I appreciate the comment.

Regards,
RM

[John Koetsier]

Hey Ron,

That 'someone named Matt' is Matt Wullenberg, who leads the Wordpress project, among other things.

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Thanks for the information. I appreciate the correct attribution.

Regards,
RM

[Fepe]

I know this is rather old, but, just so you know, the guy who leads the WordPress project is Matt Mullenweg, not Wullenberg as said above.

That said, I'm not quite sure if he was the one who said it, I've read that it's just as "Joe" or "John Doe".

Not sure though.

__

Thanks for catching that. I've fixed it in the post.

RM