Eric asks a question that caught my attention today – How Does A Niche Blogger Gain Credibility?
He suggest a number of possibilities including:
- The number of comments
- Technorati ranking
- Bloglines ranking
- Alexa ranking
- PageRank
- Quality of the posts
I’d agree that the most important of these is the quality of posts but think there might be a few more. I was going to write a post on it but somewhere in the back of my mind I wondered if I already had so I had a dig around my archives and found I’d actually written a whole series on the topic (and it was only six months ago – my memory is terrible these days).
Here’s the links to my series.
- Introduction
- Longevity
- Experience
- Expertise
- Blog Design
- 7 More factors in building blog credibility (writing skills, crital mass/readership, participation levels, others opinion, consistency, generosity and transparency).
What would you add? What bloggers do you see as having credibility? Why?
Hm, does your comment box work today, or is it still broken?
It seems to me that Eric’s post dealt with measuring the credibility of a blog, rather than gaining credibility.
There’s only one way to gain credibility: Top notch content.
My experience last week with an eight-month-old post suddenly getting passed all around the Internet might be an instructive case study.
The most important thing is to have a good memory.. :-)
But seriously, Michael is right: without valued content, nothing else matters.
I agree, there is no alternative to content.
I share the point that content is important, but it is not the only thing. I am sure there are thousands of undiscovered blogs with great content. What are they missing? Longevity, readership, design, etc. It is a mix of things that makes a blog credible.
I will say that credibilitty is not only related to the blog itselv…. it is related to the person.
it is a matter of social skills applied to a web environment… alexa technorati and others rankings are just parameters…
Common sense will say that someone with virtually no experience and or knowledge on the niche toppic he chose has no credibilitty; but if that person have a lot of friends who visit his page and so… the rankings will show he have a lot of visitors… I don’t know if I made my point; but that’s the idea.
Now… let’s see the other side of the coin… a phd guy or something.. usually they have virtually no social skills… and their knowledge is so deep and specialized that the average person will find it useless…
this phd guy may have huge credibility and rankings will show nothing.
I’ve only been at this blogging thing since June, and I’m ashamed to admit my frequency of posting is sometimes lacking. Interestingly enough, however, I’ve noticed that frequency of posting seems to be (at least for me) a huge factor.
For a while, I was simply posting, and relying on the “pings” that go to places like Pingomatic and Technorati to get people to the blog.
After seeing all the useful advice from Darren and others about commenting on relevant blogs, I gave it a go.
I am not sure how or when it happened, but without any major posting one week, my number of Feed readers (as measured by Feedburner) nearly doubled, (9 readers up to 17).
This just seemed to happen as if by magic. But I think it is probably more of a matter of getting my name and URL into enough relevant blogs, so that even if I only get 1 to 3 visits from each source a week, it starts to add up over time. I guess that could be considered the “long tail” of traffic sources, no?
As far as credibility, my site went from PR0 to PR4 with the last update, so I hope that means I’m doing ok with it.
Bill
What is top-notch content? That is a purely subjective measurement.
In order to gain credibility, you need to tell your readers:
1) What they want to hear;
2) What they already know; or
3) What they are willing to consider.
Neither “truth” nor “quality” make the top 3 list!
Perhaps “measure” instead of “gain” would have been a better title for the post…. certainly measuring credibility is very hard. The point I was trying to make, ultimately, was that yes, it’s the content that makes the blog, and it’s not something you can just create overnight….
Martial hit it spot on
You do have to define your intended audience though
You have to first of all target a niche
Then you have to target a subset of that niche.
You want people to love your content and come back day after day. It is possible to target a wider band, but in doing so you also face the risk of people just “liking” your content, and no “loving” it.
Having 100K readers isn’t necessary to make a living from blogging.
You can easily make a living with as little as a few hundred regular readers (as long as they are highly targetted). They will encourage more casual readers from within their own circle of readers.
The easiset way to do this is just to be yourself. Don’t try to please everyone. By doing this, for most people they are sure to gain empathy within a section of a niche.
If you get behind a cause, don’t do it for traffic. Do it because you think it is the right thing to do.
I’d have to say I agree with Martial and Jimmy Lee. Whilst Jimmy Lee touches on bloggers’ personal accomplishments and skills they have transferred to blogging I’ll add that you need to be accomplished by other bloggers.
For instance, a blogger which I see as being credible is that of Yaro Starak. Not because he has ~1500 feed subscribers and multiple blogs but for the fact that he has experience in the industry he writes about and other people have spoken highly of him.
Good post by the way, Darren.
As in all things, real world,or web logging, credibility is established by demonstration and observation.
When a blogger “demonstrates’ knowledge of the topic in an interesting, consistent and ever expanding way, the reader will ‘observe’ the blogger to be …yes that’s it … Credible.
That’s blogging. It takes the blogger and the reader to establish credibility.
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Even the people who disagree with me on occasion find me credible. :)
And I’m starting to get the occasional accolade from well known figures in my niche, so I must be doing something right. :)