Scott’s December 5th training was based upon his article How I Made the Blog A-List (And You Can Too).  (Scott’s article is a MUST READ for community members who are serious about promoting their blogs.)

For those of you who were unable to attend Scott Allen’s training, please refer to the above article and notes below provided by Sandra Boyer.

Traditionally, making the A-list was measured through citations; in other words, who got cited the most.  Technorati uses this idea to measure blog authority in a time box for a period looking at the past 6 months.  They look for links to other blogs and keep track of all of them to know how many links are made to various blog posts for those past months. 
Google is slow on updating their database of links.  Technorati updates instantly the rankings of the top 100 and posts the updated list either daily or every couple of days. 
Authority is a count of number of inbound links as measured by Technorati.  Based upon this ranking, they can break blogs down into several groups.  A cut off point of 500 links in the last 6 months equals a very high authority.  The next cut off is between 150-500, which equals a high authority.  A medium authority is measured from 10-150, and a low authority is less than 10.  These authorities can be considered the A-list, B-list, etc.
Kinedia uses tools for URLs that lets you know your ranking.  Source URL is on that site where you can see your ranking. A link in a bloggers group can help find people who share your common interests. 

A great strategy is to build links—you build links, you build readers!!  Beside the search engine benefits, it also drives direct traffic from people who follow the link.
What builds links?

1. Basics.  Write well and write often.  Link to other bloggers!  Spend 50% of your time off your blog.  Read others blogs, get ideas, write posts in their discussion forums, and then turn it into a blog post for yourself.  Comment on others’ blogs.

2. Frequency of post is important.   It’s good if you do it, but it won’t break you if you don’t.  Don’t pan your blog if you go a couple of weeks without a post.  It’s better to keep up a fairly sustained effort for 6 months.  Every post is an opportunity for someone to link to.  A blog network (like Connecting with Women) helps.  It is tremendously powerful.  Your Sidebar links get counted.  An active community writing posts is great.  Write large comments on your blog and link back to the network blog.

3. Link list posts are link bait.  People love lists!!!  Lists are resources to people for people that are not easily searchable on search engines.  Some like big long lists such as Bootstraps and Mashables (high authority blog) have 100 elements broken down in categories, but ultimately it is a mini directory.  Go for shorter list, 10-20 that are carefully selected with commentary added to it to help people know about whether to click to it or not. Make sure you search around to see if it’s already out there.  You want to be original. 

4. Unique content.  There are original ideas.  Use your own unique perspective.  Tell your own story of how you accomplished something!  This is guaranteed to be unique content.

5. Blog carnivals–#1 strategy to get inbound links to your site.  (Originally they were considered  a traveling road show.)  Don’t participate in ones that have single host, use those that move hosts from week to week. At blogcarnival.com you can find them by category and find which ones that are active. You can find 5-10 carnivals to submit to.  If you can find 5/week, that’s 125 inbound links.  Consider hosting a carnival because those who submit will link to your blog, other regular readers will link to it.  You can get 20-50 inbound links for hosting and can get 200-250 links from hosting alone.  Highly proactive carnival strategy can get you to the A-list.

6. Make your blog page your home page.  When anyone links to anything on your site, it counts as a link.  Your blog page is pretty much your whole website anyway! One trick is Technorati doesn’t care.  They look at everything under the blog domain.  Any links to your blog get counted.  They just look to see if there’s a link to that page.  Let your homepage be your blog.

Tell the story of how you established a successful blog is link bait.

Blogs are a distributed conversation.  It’s all over the place.  It can be a conversation, not just a publishing mechanism.

SEE what’s out there and engage in what’s there!  Interaction is what makes it effective. 

Leave comments on other blogs.  Whenever you do it, you put in your name and link to your blog.

P.S. Mark your calendar: Scott’s teleconference trainings are every other Wednesday evening. Scott provides the kind of help and training that most people trying to market online only dream of having access to on a bi-weekly basis.

If you did not receive an email with the information for Scott’s trainings, please contact your Connecting With Women mentor.