Since 2004, our annual study has unearthed and analyzed the trends and themes of blogging, but for the 2008 study, we resolved to go beyond the numbers of the Technorati Index to deliver even deeper insights into the blogging mind. For the first time, we surveyed bloggers directly about the role of blogging in their lives, the tools, time, and resources used to produce their blogs, and how blogging has impacted them personally, professionally, and financially.

We can learn some really interesting things from that report and I strongly suggest you take a quick look. The report shows that two-third of bloggers are male, 50% are between 18-34 years old and they are more affluent and educated than the general population. If you’ve been in the blogging world for more than three months, you’ve probably noticed that in a way or another.

Your tiny blog in the blogosphere

One thing I want to stress on is how many blogs are considered to be active by Technorati and why blogging is a long term investment. First, let’s take a look at this chart from Technorati:

Chart Technorati authority

It shows the number of blogs per technorati authority segments. The Technorati authority is the number of blogs linking to your blog in the past 6 months. As we can see, most blogs are very isolated from the blogosphere and never receive love from other bloggers. The situation changes when it gets to 20+ authority, but we can see that the number of blogs achieving some sort of success is really small. Only 75,000 out of 5 million bloggers have an authority of 50 or more!

The lesson is that so many people will abandon blogging within the first months or year. If you can keep a good posting rate for more than a year, there’s no reason for your blog not to reach at least the 50 authority mark. With that mark, you can at least claim you are in the top 50,000 bloggers in America. Sounds good heh?

Next part tomorrow

Technorati will release the second part of this report tomorrow so stay tuned. For today, I really just wanted to show how most people don’t succeed blogging and will stop very fast. Take this as an opportunity and see blogging as a long term investment.

1. Technorati introduction

First of all, to understand how to increase your Technorati authority, you have to understand how the Technorati authority is calculated, right?

Technorati Authority is the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has.

It is important to note that we measure the number of blogs, rather than the number of links. So, if a blog links to your blog many times, it still only count as +1 toward your authority. Of course, new links mean the +1 will last another 180 days.

All right, so it’s all about getting backlinks again. Damn backlinks. The good news is that it’s easier to get real backlinks with Technorati than with Google. The reason is that technorati don’t care about a link being ‘no follow’ or ‘do follow’: a link is a link! The problem though is that Technorati only takes in consideration backlinks coming from blogs registered with Technorati, but most blogs are so it’s usually not a problem.

2. Comment

Commenting is the easiest way to get backlinks from Technorati, but not by commenting the usual way. A regular comment on a blog won’t give you a backlink from Technorati because when the owner of the blog actually “ping” Technorati to say “Hey, here’s my new post”, there are no comments on the article. So it doesn’t matter if you comment because Technorati won’t go back and check for new links. The question is, how can you get an increase in authority by commenting?

That is fairly simple and it’s called “Top commentator” or “Recent commentator” plugins. You will find these plugins on a lot of blogs and they simply are plugins showing the top commentators for the blog and also the 5-10 most recent comments. I use them on my blog and you can see the “Top commentators” in the footer. How to exploit these plugins? Well, by becoming a top commentator on a blog, you will appear on every single page of the blog. What does that mean? It means that everytime Technorati will visit a blog you are a top commentator on, it will see your link on the blog and that makes a +1 blog reaction for you!

3. Real life examples

Here are some real life examples:

We see that what was picked up by Technorati is the top commentators part of the blog and I was actually a top commentator at the time!

Now, we see that what Technorati picked up was the Recent Comments part of the blog and luckily, my comment was a recent comment at the time!

These two examples actually gave me an increase in authority just by commenting, which is something I do anyway!

Being a top commentator is dead easy

I know you are thinking you don’t have 15 hours a day to become a top commentator on all these blogs! The thing you have to know is that the top commentator plugin usually resets every month. That means everything starts fresh on the first of every month and you can be a top commentator with a single comment! On the first of each month, visit a couple of new blogs and comment as you would normally do. On the next blog post, if you are still a top commentator it means a +1 authority for you!

That’s it, it’s as simple as that. You guys might have other strategies to increase your Technorati authority and feel free to share that with us!