Why This Post Is Not About 45n5’s Top 100 List
By Matt Jones on Sep 14, 2007 in Creative Blogging
While I am pleased to be position 79 on 45n5’s fantastic top 100 list, this post is not about what 45n5 did to market it, but what I did to exploit it.
Note: I was ranked much higher and would still be higher if the ****** ******* PageRank updated but a great many blogs have been added. I’m glad to see the rankings are fairer now and I recommend you check your rank position again if you haven’t done so recently after reading this post and subscribing too the feed.
Thinking Outside The Mentality Of “I Should Give This Guy Some Credit And It Will All Be Over Soon”
A Canadian I link to far too often jovially hinted that the Top 100 list was a great “mailing list to send your spam news to”. I am glad to see I think on much the same level as JC and it wasn’t long before I was formulating ideas for my Top 5 Blogging Success stories post which is still pulling in links and traffic. I used the list to decide which bloggers to email and acquire quotes from.
On the same day 45n5 published his first video about the top 100 list, while reading my RSS feeds I found myself reading the same thing again and again and again and again and again and again.
I must give credit to each of those bloggers because they all managed to make their posts original and I actually really enjoyed seeing how they responded to the list. However, they only managed to squeeze out 1 good post using the top 100 list, while I have created 2, the Success Stories post, which is now a lifetime pillar post and this one.
Please forgive my temporary ego trip good mood.
How I Treat Topical Issues
A piece of advice I read some time ago (I’m afraid I can’t remember where) was, “if everyone else is writing about it, don’t write about it”. Sure, it’s obvious that standing out is very very important but I do not agree with that strategy. If everyone is writing about it that means it’s topical and should be taken advantage of by using it or writing something different about it and then bragging about it later.
Unusual Conclusion
Call me a fisherman, but I’m starting to enjoy the linkbait of other bloggers more and more. I like the way it connects everyone together and creates a nice warm sense of community, providing it is not the ‘controversial’ or poisonous types of linkbait.
Are your views on linkbaiting (writing content that attracts links) changing?
Technorati Tags: 45n5, links, traffic, bloggers
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I’ve always been a fan of linkbaiting. My attempted linkbait last week though resulted in a server crash. :S
True! I agree 100% with that.
Linkbait seems is becoming more and more of a legitimate marketing strategy… shame.
Yeah I read about that Rhys… it’s bizzaire how it crashed so quickly!
First off, thanks for the link.
Secondly, I only posted about it in passing to hopefully help it gain in popularity, so that I could gain more traffic from it. I have already received over three dozen unique visitors from being on the list, and I was down a fair bit. (I am not even in the top 100 anymore).
Lastly, it is always good to have an ego trip, just so long as it is temporary.
“Are your views on linkbaiting (writing content that attracts links) changing?”
I’m not sure where linbaiting gets a negative connotation, i always though writing content that people want to talk about and link to is the name of the game?
And yes I agree that list is useful for many things beyond just finding a new blog or two
thanks for the mention.
[…] from Blogging Fingers always provides an individualistic and original twist in his content. In Why This Post Is Not About 45n5’s Top 100 List, he suggests how to think out of the box when blogging about topical issues in the […]