// Internet Duct Tape

North America’s Next Top Blogger? – Be a celebrity first

Posted in Marketing and Promotion, Technology by engtech on November 14, 2006

GoogleBlogoscoped interviewed top bloggers about their most popular posts. Deep Jive Interests breaks it down into three habits:

  1. Breaking real news (or rumours that become news)
  2. Providing unique analysis and commentary
  3. Posting on something topical and sympathetic

Good to note. What I think is also worth mentioning:

  1. Innovating and started blogging when it was new (IE: get into vlogging now)
  2. Playing to their strengths / staying in their niche
  3. Applying their strengths to a popular topic
  4. Already having celebrity status for another reason

This is something that shouldn’t be played down. Quite often top bloggers are where they are because of preexisting real world influence.

  • Joel Spolsky – former program manager for Microsoft Excel, author
  • Chris Pirillo – former host of TechTV’s Call for Help
  • Dave Winer – creator of RSS, XML-RPC and SOAP
  • Michael Arrington – tech corporate attorney who turned to startups
  • Om Malik – former senior writer for Business 2.0 magazine
  • Steve Rubel – public relations executive who advises clients to use blogs in their business.
  • Jeremy Zawodny – MySQL guru, Yahoo employee, author
  • Phillip Torrone – writer for Make, Popular Science and Engadget
  • Seth Godin – prolific author, former VP of Permissions Marketing at Yahoo

What got me thinking down these lines was the Washington Post’s article on Ted Leonsis’ (Vice chairman of AOL) quest to become the first link on Google for his name. This is perhaps the best reason to become a CEO blogger. He talks about having “an audience of 800 or 900 on a bad day, 12,000 to 15,000 on a good one.” It would be wrong to think he doesn’t get that traffic because of his celebrity from being involved with AOL.

It isn’t good or bad; it doesn’t mean they don’t deserve it. It is just something people should remember when wondering how these guys became top bloggers in the first place. You can’t underestimate how much easier it is to reach a wide audience when people already know who you are, how much easier it is to get high search ranking when you’re linked to by every blog on aol.com, or how much easier it is to break news when you already have the connections.

Of course, if it made things THAT much easier, we’d see a lot more of them.

4 comments

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  1. raincoaster said, on November 16, 2006 at 9:17 am

    But Denton’s celebrity isn’t pre-existing; it’s a result of his success with his stable of blogs. Also, he’s blogging at Valleywag all this week, using his celeb status to A) ramp up Valleywag’s sagging hits and B) get more directly in the sights of the VC’s, I’m thinking. Check it out.

    The silliest thing he ever did was let Jessica Coen go; bloggers like that do not come along very often.

  2. engtech said, on November 16, 2006 at 10:09 am

    Yeah, good point about Denton.

    He’s a celebrity from founding Gawker Media, one of the “most visible and successful blog-oriented media companies.”, and that’s why he’s a successful blogger.

    DUH.

  3. raincoaster said, on November 17, 2006 at 8:13 am

    I always try to be nice to Denton, since I generally send him a resume on average every sixty days. I’ll break that bugger yet!

  4. Digest for November 2006 « //engtech said, on November 29, 2006 at 8:26 pm

    […] North America’s Next Top Blogger? – Be a celebrity first […]


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