Thought leadership effectively means  establishing credibility with an audience to produce extra brand equity for a blogger and by extension of the blogger’s company.

Thought leadership was found to be an important goal by many bloggers in the Backbone Media Corporate Blogging Survey 2005. Respondents to the survey stated that the top three priorities for bloggers starting a blog were 4 “another way to publish content and ideas,” “thought leadership,” and “build a community.” The same respondents were asked what issues continued to be important in their current blogging strategy. Thought leadership and idea sharing were the most important factors. When asked about the impact of their blog on their company, the following factors were identified as bearing the most impact from their blog: “another way to publish content and ideas,” “thought leadership,” and “RSS syndication.”

There are reputation benefits from establishing yourself as a leader in your community, but there are also some practical benefits for search engine rankings. If a blogger establishes himself or herself as a leader in the blogging community with a good following of readers, there is a good chance other bloggers will cite and link to the blogger’s posts and comment on those posts. Those links may help with boosting the ranking of a blog in a search engine for any keywords listed on the blog post. Those higher rankings may translate into more traffic to the blog. A blogger, and by implication, the company that employs him or her, will gain credibility and influence in their community by writing blog posts that establish the blogger as a leader in ideas in their blogging community.

What do you think is important for establishing credibility as a blogger? How did you gain your credibility and what tips would you give for budding bloggers to replicate your success?

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One of the best ways to increase blog readership is to have other bloggers notice and link back to you. In fact, you can’t have a truly successful blog without having that critical cross-pollination from other bloggers. Luckily, with a little time and effort, you can become a part of the conversation. You just need to take care not to do it in a ham-handed fashion.

If your goal is to get noticed by bloggers, you’re not alone. Corporate clients and PR professionals frequently ask me “how can we pitch the bloggers?” I’m happy that traditional marketers have recognized the influence of the blogosphere, but i cringe every time that question is posed. The quick answer is that you don’t. Pitching is not the proper word for what needs to be done. A far more appropriate question is “how can I engage with the selected bloggers that our market trusts?”

This inappropriate focus on the “pitch” is one of the reasons that bloggers generally distrust the messages PR firms deliver. In a 2006 study conducted by Technorati, 1021 bloggers were asked how much they trust messages sent from PR firms, on a scale of 1 to 10. The average response? A dismal 4.1.

I’ve watched many organizations reach out to the blogosphere in a myriad of ways, and have a pretty good feel for what works and what doesn’t. Whether you’re trying to get bloggers interested in your products, or in your blogging efforts, here are few no-no’s:

• Don’t be indiscriminate. Carefully decide with whom you want to converse. It’s far better to target the top 10 bloggers in your arena for engagement than annoy 1000 bloggers that were on somebody’s email press list.
• Don’t send messages that aren’t tailored specifically to the blogger you’re reaching out to. Do not send a generic email blast. Take the time to refer to a post they’ve made, or mention a common associate or other linkage.
• Don’t send press releases. Most bloggers feel that being sent any marketing-speak whatsoever is an indicator of significant “cluelessness” on the part of the sender.
• Email is okay, but there are better options. Commenting on their blogs and writing your own blog posts that then link back to them creates open dialog, and resonates with bloggers. To do this just Start The Blogging Conversation.

If you take the time to consistently read the blogs that relate to your editorial or market arena, you’ll probably find many opportunities to respond intelligently. Agreeing, disagreeing, and expanding upon what’s been said by those with some influence is a terrific way to get noticed and be a part of the dialog.

A great way to expand on the dialog is to interview a knowledgeable blogger who has said something relevant to your space. For example, assuming that the solar energy market presents an opportunity for Acme Widgets, Acme might want to interview an expert who has blogged about the growth potential of solar energy, and may even probe the blogger to comment on why widgets might be relevant to this emerging power source. Recording and podcasting the interview can be an easy way to get the content up quickly, and you are almost certain to get an inbound link from the interviewee.

Reading, commenting, and blogging are the best ways to get the relevant bloggers to notice and link to you. Being a participant in the conversation and contributing valuable insights can reap rewards that far outweigh those of any calculated “outreach” campaign that the PR pros come up with.

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There’s an old adage in the business world: If you want to improve something, you have to work at it some more. If you’re going to get serious about increasing your audience, you need to get from the how many read me” to the “what do they like” data, and that’s going to mean using some free tools and marketing methods.

Here’s a longer than usual list of small but useful things you can do to build your blog. We’ll start with some basic, cover-your-bases stuff and move on from there to more advanced techniques.

• Know your stats. At a bare minimum, you need to know where to find your stats in your blogging software and/or have a Site Meter badge. As RSS continues to ramp up, an absolute must, is a free or paid FeedBurner account!

• Who are you? Don’t be coy about your About page and profile if you want to garner readers. Even if you are blogging anonymously, give your readers something. Checkout Darren’s post, on How to Write Your “About Me” Page.

• Master basic social skills. Whether you love or hate social bookmarking sites like Digg and del.icio.us, at least some of your readers love them, so make it easy to vote for your posts. There’s a multitude of ways of doing this, but the easiest and the one i recommend is the ShareThis plugin which creates a popup menu when clicked, with links to all of the major social bookmarking sites to submit your content. You can see an example of this plugin at the bottom of this post. Try it out.

• RSS above the fold. For blogs, “above the fold” means before you need to scroll, and that’s where you want your RSS stuff. For example, this is the location you will want your standard, FeedBurner, or specific RSS reader badges to reside. Making it as easy as possible for readers to subscribe to your blog and save clicks pays off.

• Get listed. Multitudes of blog directories are out there. Three you should make the effort to check out and get listed in are MyBlogLog, Globe of Blogs, and Blogarama. Looking for more blog directories? See Kevin’s post, 75 Websites You Can Submit Your Blog To for an excellent list.

• Get listed, part 2. Don’t forget website directories that accept blogs, such as the Yahoo Directory (paid), the Open Directory Project, and specialty directories in your industry or geographic location.

• Respond to comments. At the risk of boring you, let me say it again: Blogs are a conversation, and that means you absolutely should respond to comments. Doing so will turn first-time visitors into loyal readers. For more information on getting more comments, see Start The Blogging Conversation.

• Post on weekends. Conventional blogging wisdom is you shouldn’t post on weekends because fewer people read blogs then. By the same token, there are fewer posts competing for attention.

• Show your back stock. One way or another, get a list of your best/most popular posts onto the front page of your blog. There’s no better way of turning a chance meeting into the start of a lasting relationship with your blog. A good wordpress plugin for this is MostWanted.

• Give credit and links where they are due. Simply put, the more links out of your blog, the more people will link to your blog. So even when you can’t pin to a specific post, link to that blog or website and give credit where it’s due.

• Post when your readers expect you to post. When you post creates expectations. If you post twice a day for months then not at all for two weeks, your readership will drift away. Know what your posting goal is and keep to it, and don’t be shy sharing that with your readers.

• Make use of trackbacks. When you’re blogging about some major blogger’s post, either positively or negatively, use your blogging software’s ability to send a trackback to that blogger. You will be surprised how often the trackback recipient will comment on your posts. This technique works only if you’re blogging in earnest, not fishing for links. For more on Trackbacks see Darren’s post, Introduction to Trackbacks.

All done? Here are more ways to get more readers that take more effort:

• Make friends with fellow bloggers. That means follow their blogs, be helpful, get to know them, and comment intelligently. Don’t ask for links up front. Don’t expect instant acceptance. Don’t be irrelevant. And don’t nag!

• Use photos. The right photo triples the impact of a good post. Take them yourself, find them at Flickr already permissioned at  (2.7 million and counting), or spend a dollar each at iStockPhoto.

• Post your photos at Flickr. People are interested in seeing themselves and other people. If you take digital photos, post them to Flickr and include a Flickr gallery on your blog.

• Participate in newsgroups. While newsgroups have faded in recent years, you’ll find at least one very active newsgroups covering just about every topic imaginable. Dive right in. And don’t forget to include your blog’s URL in your signature line.

• Use Squidoo. Build one or more lenses to showcase your best blogs about a given topic, or which together form a great tutorial, or just to establish your reputation as someone who knows a thing or two. Checkout Pigboom’s post on Improving SEO with Squidoo.

• Convert old posts into new ezine articles. What’s the difference between a great post you did on a subject six months ago and a free ezine article that drives traffic to your blog? About ten minutes’ effort on your part at ezine sites like iSnare, Ezine Articles, and especially the SiteProNews directory of article directories.

• Guest post. This technique has worked wonders for me over the last few months. Offer another (more influential) blogger guest posts to keep the content rolling while that blogger is on vacation, overextended, and so on. This technique presupposes you have some sort of relationship going, that the other blogger has either asked for guest posts or seems ready for the idea, and that you have at least a few posts that would fit the bill.

• Provide answers. In just about every area, there are current questions that need answers. Think about the subjects you blog on. What questions could a little non-blog research or data-gathering answer? A good tool for finding subjects that people are currently in need of answers for is Yahoo! Answers.

So there are my 20 top tips for building the reader base of your blog. Of course, there are many more methods available to bloggers to aid them in building their blog, whats your methods do you use? How did you generate the amount of subscribers you have at your blog, and how long did it take?

If you liked this article, please share it on del.icio.us or StumbleUpon. I’d appreciate it.

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