How To Be an Omnipotent Blogger
Guest post by Michael Martin from Pro Blog Design, where he writes about creating profitable, usable and attractive blogs.
The omnipotent blogger is everywhere. He knows everything, and he knows everyone. He is the master of his topic, and he is a fraud.
To be an omnipotent blogger, you do not need to know everything. You need merely give off the impression that you do. How do you go about this?
Support The Underdog
The key is to research each and every topic you post about. If you blog about blogging, don’t settle for a simple link to ProBlogger. Search deeper. There are thousands of blogs about blogging, and the chances are good that someone else has written something similar to Darren.
The underdog’s blog post may not be of the same quality, or have the same wealth of knowledge in the comments, but it does have one pressing advantage. Your reader hasn’t read it before. Through simply linking to an article or blog that is new to them, you show that you know your topic. You know your niche, and you’ve done your homework.
What’s more is that the underdog will appreciate your link more. ProBlogger gets dozens of links a day. Darren simply doesn’t have the time go through each and everyone of them, but an underdog does. The underdog will appreciate your link, will follow through to your blog, and may well comment or link back to you on their own blog in future.
Give Your Blogroll A Purpose
ProBlogger, John Chow, Copyblogger. What do they all have in common?
Well, they’re all fantastic blogs, but aside from that, they all appear on virtually every blogging blogroll going. What purpose does the blogroll serve when all it is doing is list sites that your readers have already visited?
By all means, link out to such great sites. They do deserve it, but make sure you include links to much smaller sites as well. Is there a relatively unheard of gem in your niche? A promising looking start-up? A helpful blog for newbies?
Link to those blogs. Your readers will appreciate the links, and appreciate the diversity of your knowledge. Do you read every post written by every blog in your niche? Probably not, but it will appear that you do.
How To Find Underdogs
The very nature of being an underdog makes them a little harder to find, but there are plenty of tools to help you find good posts on any given topic. My personal favourite is Google Blog Search, and occasionally Google itself, though it’s usually better to link to other blogs, because of the very nature of blogging and the blogosphere.
You could use any number of other tools to help in your search. Even your feed reader is an invaluable resource, with dozens of links to click on each day.
Everyone links to the big wolf on campus. Be different from the normal blogs. Give your readers real value. No-one can be everywhere, but a clever blogger can appear to be.
