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.

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Photo by Hamed Saber

I found myself thinking about an article I read a month ago on Zen Habits today, called “Wake Up: Are You Living Consciously?” The memory was prompted by a feeling of regret I had about pouring many hours of my time into a role at my university’s magazine — something I ended up getting very little out of in return.

About half-way through my commitment to the magazine I’d decided that I didn’t like the kind of writing I was doing, and that I no longer wanted to be a journalist. Yet I stayed on, wasting more time and energy on the project. It wouldn’t have been hard to find someone else to fill the role. My mistake was running on autopilot. I never took the time to evaluate what I was doing, so I continued to pour my time down the drain on something that contributed little to my life and what I want to do with it.

Living consciously is about analyzing and evaluating your actions, habits and behaviors, rather than simply doing. In other words, asking why rather than doing without really thinking.

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Photo from the Four-Hour Work Week Blog.

Everything you’ll learn about blogging or running a successful website, you’ll learn from someone else: either by reading how-to articles, observing the mistakes and successes of others, or by observing your readers and how they react to your blog.

The second element — learning by example — has the potential to impart more knowledge and important lessons than (potentially) any other source. In this post, I want to share seven lessons I’ve learned from best-selling author Tim Ferriss (author of The Four-Hour Work Week) and his blog, and how you can use them to your own benefit.

Whether you’re a fan of the blog’s author or not doesn’t really matter. What matters is that it’s a blog which has grown entirely through a strategy of content that’s value-packed for its target audience. It’s also a good opportunity to see The Matrix model in practice.

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Lines of code from The Matrix (1999).

One question I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is: what sets the top blogs and websites apart, from a visitor’s perspective?

The question has an astonishing answer. It’s not traffic, it’s often not subscriber numbers and it’s not advertising revenue. These are the things visitors don’t see, or don’t have to see.

If what visitors do see makes your blog or website look popular and successful, to visitors, it becomes popular and successful. Once that happens, it’s only a matter of time before the numbers begin to fall into line with the way people see you.

I call this The Matrix model because, as we saw in the film, we accept what we see and experience as reality (even if that’s not the case beneath the surface). If you can influence the way visitors perceive your site, a blog or website with modest traffic and little advertising revenue can start to look like a niche authority.

In this post, I want to explain how you can apply The Matrix model to your own site.

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Photo by josef.stuefer.

By beginning this post with the above figure, I don’t do so to boast. I know there are thousands of blogs that have received more subscribers than this — and in less time.

I highlight this figure (1,050 subscribers in 3 months) to show that you don’t need to have big money, the perfect niche or a staff of writers to quickly develop a 1,000+ network of loyal readers. This blog exists within a mature and crowded niche, I’m its sole author and I’ve spent nothing on marketing and promotion.

I’ve learned enough from this experience to share how you can get 1,000 more subscribers in 3 months.

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