A Guide to Breaking Into the Technorati Top 100

Photo by *Solar Ikon*

For a few minutes, I want to you to suspend your natural balance of optimism and cynicism. This article lists exactly what’s required to break into the Technorati Top 100 most linked-to blogs in the world.

It might seem like an insurmountable goal, but remember, many others have done it — and most of those blogs started small. The journey towards a big goal is just a collection of many little steps in one direction. My aim is to set out all the little steps here.

I asked you to turn off your inner-cynic for a moment because you may be having one of the following reactions:

“My blog’s target audience is too small to ever make the Technorati Pop 100.”

or

“I don’t even want to make the Technorati Pop 100. It’s a bogus list.”

In both cases, I don’t want to persuade you that you’re wrong. Instead, I’d counter that many of the strategies here can be used to powerfully increase the number of inbound links to your blog, regardless of what you want to do with them. For bloggers, more inbound links generally means more good stuff (traffic, subscribers, revenue, etc.)

The Numbers

The Technorati Pop 100 is a ranked list of blogs with a high ‘Authority’ rating. The #1 spot is taken by the blog with the highest authority of all Technorati tracked blogs. The rest of the list proceeds in descending order. A blog’s ‘Authority’ is the number of unique blogs that have linked to it in the last 6 months. Multiple links from the same blog will still count as +1 to your ‘Authority’.

As I write this, your blog would require an ‘Authority’ score of 3,043 to break into the list.

Unless your blog is very popular, this number will probably seem outrageous. One thing I’ve noticed, however, is that in-bound links have a tendency to snowball over time if your blog is growing steadily.

These strategies could help you double your monthly in-bound links from 20 to 40, for example. But what if you receive 80 the month after that? And 160 after? And so on. Once you put strategies in place, you can start a snowball rolling, even if you don’t have many links to begin with.

1. The wisdom of writing for del.icio.us

Writing ‘for’ a social bookmarking service sounds cheap, but all it really means is writing value-packed content your readers will want to bookmark.

In my experience, writing an article which becomes popular on del.icio.us results in a lot of inbound links, because many del.icio.us users have a daily or weekly link-dump they publish to their blogs. The post contains recent items they’ve bookmarked (which will hopefully include a link to you). This is an under-reported strategy and one I’m going to talk about in more detail sometime.

2. Unearth cool stuff

A lot of blogs are in the business of pointing to things other people have found. If this is done fairly, the blogger will include a link to the person who ‘found’ the item. If you find something a lot of people want to link to, that person could be you. I suspect most of the links to Gawker Media blogs (Lifehacker, Kotaku, Valleywag et al.) are accrued through this method.

A tip: don’t point to items another blogger has already ‘found’. You will miss out on the ‘via’ link entirely.

Photo by .supernova.

3. Be prolific

While frequent readers will know that this isn’t a strategy I subscribe to, it’s one that seems to be employed by many in the Technorati Pop 100. An article on ProBlogger today includes a quote from a blogger who swears by this strategy:

… his theory was that if he posted 20 posts a day that even if only 20% of his audience actually read those posts that he’d end up with more readers on that day if he wrote 1 post a day and 100% read it.

The result is that he writes a very successful blog with a lot (and I mean ALOT) of short sharp posts per day).

4. Create value-packed content

As a counter-balance to the last point, many blogs on the list deliberately pursue a strategy of not posting more than once or twice a day. Seth’s Blog, Dosh Dosh, Copyblogger, A List Apart, Zen Habits, Coding Horror, The Dilbert Blog and several others are all examples of this strategy. Value-packed content has the potential to attract more links than a dozen easily-discarded posts.

5. Give meaning to news

While it’s difficult for bloggers like us to break news without the vast resources of blogs like Engadget and The Huffington Post, our news coverage can still collect in-bound links if we give people something to link to (other than the news itself). Analyzing the implications of news, how it will affect certain groups/individuals and what it means in the greater context of things are strategies you can use to make your news-coverage worth linking to.

6. Coin a phrase

Seth Godin has proven himself the master of this. Every time the terms “ideavirus”, “Purple Cow” and (lately) “remarkable” are mentioned, Seth Godin seems to get a link. I suspect this is one of the main reasons he occupies such a high spot on the Technorati Pop 100 list (though the position is really well-deserved). In my own small way, I’ve noticed a number of incoming links to Skelliewag adding to the discussion about “value-packed content”.

7. Create passionate readers

To steal and modify a catch-phrase from Kathy Sierra, building an inbound link snowball requires a passionate readership more than it requires a very large readership. Having 100,000 readers will not get you into the Technorati Pop 100 if only 1% ever link to you.

Readers will become passionate about your blog because of its content, but it’s also important to give them a reason to support you, the blogger behind the blog. A link is an act of support and endorsement.

My suggestion would be to avoid neglecting individual readers in favor of the collective. Answer emails, respond to comments and get to know your readers in other places (StumbleUpon, Twitter, etc.) Remember that while your collective readership is important, it’s the individuals who create the benefits of the collective.