Andy Coates Blog

Earlier his week I asked myself a question, "Does the age for a blog directly relate to its popularity"? After pondering this question for a longtime I decided to do a quick Google search for the average lifespan of a blog, after looking though many sites and published study's the average lifespan of a blog equated to about 3 month. Whilst looking for this information I came across an interesting post by Darren Rowse at Pro Blogger which states that the average age of the top 100 blogs is 34 months (as of October 2006) . So going off these figures, if the average lifespan of a blog is 3 month and the average age of the top 100 blogs is 34 months then we can safely say that the longer you are around in blog-land the more chance you have of success though this is not guaranteed.

Being relatively new to blogging (I've been at this for nearly 2 month now!) I can vouch how easy it is to see examples of successful blogs, decide you want to do that to and then find out actually how much work you need to put in to get just a few readers. When I started I was naive enough to believe this was going to be an easy ride and the advertising revenue on my site would come flooding in, Ha ha! It only took about 3 days to realize this was going to take ALOT more work and find out how blogging really works and make the decision to jump in the big blogging pool and stick it out for the long run! So here are my reasons why the longer you "Stick It" at blogging the more chance you will have of success.

Why not to give up too early and strive to get better!

Practice Makes Perfect
Like everything in life you need to practice at it to be any good at it and you need to keep practicing at it to be really good at it! (unless you are one of these gifted individuals who is naturally good at everything!) The same goes for blogging the more you do it the better you will become some progress faster than others but ultimately if you put the hours in you will see results. Each time you write a post you will be using the same neuron connections in your brain and each time they get used they will become stronger and stronger and more efficient. As time goes by you will find writing will become easier and as long as you keep up your enthusiasm and want to get better at blogging you will.

More pages = more potential niches!
As blogs get older inevitable the archive gets bigger, we must not forget about this archive as these pages will still get hits from relevant google searches and could turn a one time visitor into a regular reader. If you begin to view every page of your blog as a potential landing page you can begin to see that if you have 300 posts in your archive there is more chance of getting a search engine hit.

Internal links
When beginning a blog this is an important thing to take into consideration when writing posts though at the very start you will have limited posts to link to! Once you get a few posts under you may reference an older post in a more recent one creating a one-way link to this post. This is good for two reasons, first of all this will help the Googlebot when it is calculating page-rank, as every little link counts. Secondly this is good for readers to find out a little more about the subject and spend more time on your site. So as a site grows older the more the internal linking structure grows which will help channel visitors to the subject niche they were looking for, and if a visitor finds exactly what they were looking for they will come back for more.

Incomming Links
If a blog has been around for a while there is more chance that articles from it will have been linked to from other blogs, this helps again with Google page rank but also acts as a channel for visitors to get to your site. Once again, the more (quality) posts there are the more chances there is to getting linked and the more potential visitors you will get!

Pagerank Updates
Google is calculating page rank all of the time but it only updates the actual rank every few months this is good because it gives newer blogs time to build content and hopefully get some quality incoming links. Upon the first page rank update you should have hopefully managed to get a few incoming links and build you internal linking structure so the Googlebot can follow the links (think of them as votes from different authorities!) and rate your pages depending on the "votes". One vote from a higher authority (high PR page) is worth more than one vote from a lesser authority (low PR page). The second time round when Google calculates the page rank, you will have an even larger archive and an even bigger internal linking structure. This time, providing your pages and others who have linked to your pages have gained some PR you will be awarded a little more PR as the incoming links will have a little higher authority than last time, though this is not an exact science it gives a general idea. This is another reason older blogs are more successful, because they have been around long enough they will reap the rewards of the second PR update and so on (although t gets much harder to progress as you go on).

Summary

These are just a few pointer's but quickly outline why older blogs are successful. If you want to be successful at bogging, grow a larger reader-base, get 10,000's of hits per day and eventually make a little money then persistence is the way froward. Don't view you blog as a get rich quick blog think of it as a learning experience and if you strive to get better with each post then you will. Reflect on your blog, if something isn't working then change it, if something is working then replicate it and make it better! This has proved a great motivation to me since changing my outlook and gives me confidence in the future!

If you enjoyed this post please feel free to buy me a gingerbread late! mmmm!