By Lou Dolinar
Second in a series
Updated Feb. 14, 2006

The good news about blogging, as we showed you last week, is that you can set up a free account at Google's blogger.com and in about four minutes create a megaphone that can reach 300million Internet users worldwide.

The bad news is there are 3million bloggers ahead of you on the path to fame and maybe even fortune. Most are delighted to get a couple of hundred daily visitors, and few reach the rarefied realms of The Daily Kos (upwards of 500,000 visits per day) or Glenn Reynolds' www.Instapundit.com, (200,000). According to NZ Bear's The Truth Laid Bear traffic analysis site (www.truthlaidbear.com/TrafficRanking.php), only about 300 sites garner as many as 1,000 visitors a day.

So how do you get readers? Most blogs cover some combination of politics and the war on terror. Back in the old days (maybe two years ago), top bloggers like Reynolds scouted the Net themselves for the snappy observation or clever essay to link and discuss. A few good write-ups like that and you might make their blog roll, the list of permanent links that most sites incorporate. You were a star.

"It was easier years ago when I started," said Michele Catalano of Long Island, whose intensely personal essays on everything from motherhood to the war on terror have won her a wide and loyal audience (No. 105 on NZ Bear's traffic rankings, with around 5,000 visitors a day). Now, she says, new blogs just get "swallowed up" if they don't actively promote themselves, and some have even taken out ads on better-known blogs.

Uber-leftie blogger Duncan Black, aka Atrios, agrees: "If you're doing political and media blogging, you have to do a little PR. People know who's linking to whom, so one way to get other bloggers to link to you is to link to them. You can also e-mail bloggers, saying you have something interesting for them."

This kind of promotion has to be subtle - bloggers often joke about "cyber-stalking" the bigger guys by bombarding them with personal mail and excerpts of blog posts - a definite turnoff. In a classic post, "Confessions of a Link Whore" (www.indcjournal.com/archives/000348.php) Bill Ardolino writes a hilarious parody of what it takes to get an "instalanche," the much-coveted Instapundit link that crashes file servers and drives a previously unknown blog's traffic through the roof.

Ardolino has had a couple of these recently for his reporting (now there's a concept!) on the Dan Rather memo flap, which quickly drove his traffic from about 3,000 visits a day to upward of 50,000 before it settled back to a steady 15,000. He's getting something like 500 e-mails a day, and now he's the one being stalked: "It's really annoying," he says with a laugh. "Ever since I became much more popular, it's become overwhelming when people are e-mailing you their work all the time." Imagine what the bigger bloggers, with 10 to 20 times more traffic, have to deal with.

He says the environment for getting noticed is a lot tougher today, and it's not enough to write well or have a unique perspective. "If you have something new to say, something that adds to the debate, you're more likely to be picked up by other blogs. Don't bombard the big guys with everything you write - pick only your best quality."

Mildly sneaky ruses are acceptable, he says. For example, if you're trying to get the attention of a bigger blogger, become an active commentator in the reply section of the blog. If you pop up regularly, the odds are pretty good your target will eventually check out your blog. He also suggests that if you're serious, bite the bullet and pay for a site at www.TypePad.com, rather than use the free www.blogger.com service. That's because TypePad better supports "trackback," a feature that automatically createsa link on your post to posts on other sites that have linked to you. Your readers not only see what you have to say, but they also see what others are saying about you.

If you're trying to figure out how to get your blog noticed, there are - surprise - a fair number of resources on the Web. Bear's site, as noted before, will give you a pretty good idea of the overall shape of the blogosphere and who the popular writers are. In terms of subject matter, some bloggers follow www.Technorati.com and MIT's www.blogdex.net to see what stories are being most closely followed by bloggers. A good primer on blogging that Ardolino recommends is at www.acepilots.com/mt/archives/cat_blogging_howto.html

Choire Sicha, editorial director for Nick Denton's Gawker Media blog empire, agrees with the other experts but adds a final tip: "Outrageousness gets traffic. Naked pictures get traffic. But remember, anything that goes on the Internet is forever."

Next week, we'll show you how to join the most elite bloggers of all - the ones who make money.