Comments on: What Sifry Isn’t Telling Us About A-Listers and Boosting Your Ranking

By: Tony

Tony — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 16:12:59 +0000

Thanks Joel — very kind words indeed ;)
Let us know how your girlfriend-blogger-project works out!

Cheers
t @ dji

By: joel

joel — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 15:48:28 +0000

great post tony. absolutely great summary. I’ve been serving as a technical “advisor” for an aspiring blogger, my girlfriend. She’s picked a really great vertical that she’s SUPER-passionate about and is just starting to get an idea as to how real blogs work and how they can draw, and keep, visitors. So this is the perfect wrap-up to get her thinking ouutside the realm of her expertise, and into thinking about the medium she’s chosen to have her voice heard.

kudos!

By: Tony

Tony — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 04:41:16 +0000

I guess the caveat should be “post as often as you can as long as you can keep up a certain threshold of quality, with data suggesting at least once a day” — you’re right Chris, if you publish crap, well, no one will be interested in that.

Quite frankly, I brush up against that threshold all the time — and sometimes dance over it.

But that’s just my style!

As for popular != (effective || good), I suppose that’s a true assumption; however, I was talking strictly in terms of the # of inbound links people were or weren’t getting.

And, I agree, not all “popular” or “A-list” are good; some have a high popularity because of their own intrinsic off-line notoriety, or even, have the case of history on their side.

Thanks for popping by!
t

By: Chris P.

Chris P. — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 03:08:54 +0000

I, for one, think posting frequency is an awful thing to be planting in the heads of would-be A-listers.

Earlier this year, I tried to go the “one post a day” route with my personal blog, and I found that I produced about 90% crap. I received few comments, and I was becoming less and less involved from a mental standpoint.

In late June, I decided to eschew the frequency philosophy, and this decision has basically sent my site — from metrics to comments to subscribers — to an entirely new level.

Now, I focus solely on quality, and I have stopped worrying about the fact that I might only produce 3 or 4 good entries a month. Lately, this has resulted in over 75 trackbacks in October alone.

So, I guess the point of my comment is that David Sifry is looking at a snapshot of popularity, but not necessarily what’s good or effective.

As far as single-author sites go, looking at the Technorati top 100 and deciding on a trend is just ridiculous to me. Let’s face it — most of us run single author sites, and most of us aren’t ever going to see the Technorati top 100.

In my mind, Sifry is speaking to the privileged few and not to the largest portion of the audience (that matters the most).