A Case Study in Mass Blogger Collaboration

This is a guest post by The Investor.

More than plaudits, more than authority, and more than generating an income if they’ve got any sense, any blogger first wants to be read.

The challenge of finding readers has changed over the years. In the early days of blogging, Internet users were unfamiliar with blogs, and there weren’t many ways for bloggers to network beyond using their own blogs and commenting on others blogs in their niche. Early bloggers got to know each other quickly, and there was a pioneering spirit.

Today the landscape is different. Social networks like Twitter and Facebook have created whole new off-blog communication channels, and fresh ways for bloggers to get the word out.

Yet at the same time, newer bloggers face a different challenge to the pioneers of five years ago – established competition.

The best of the struggling blogs of yesteryear are today’s giants of their fields, attracting links, Tweets, and ever more readers like a black hole swallows sunlight.

Don’t get me wrong – most successful bloggers I’ve encountered are generous with their time and their insights. They’ve invariably worked hard to get where they are. They deserve their success.

But the challenge for mid-tier bloggers and those just starting out is clear.

How do you get word to readers who might be interested in your blog, through this crowded or even saturated landscape?

Money bloggers pooling their resources

I’d like to reveal how a bunch of personal finance bloggers are tackling this challenge. We’re doing it in a grassroots way, which could work in your niche too.

Like all good ideas in blogging, it started with a blog post.

It was written by ‘Sam’, the anonymous author of one of the most successful new personal finance blogs, Financial Samurai.

In his post Creating Powerful Friends: Samurai’s Alexa Ranking Challenge, Sam threw down the gauntlet to other PF bloggers:

His challenge:

• If you are outside of the top 200,000 sites inside Alexa, get in the top 200,000 within 6 months.

• If you were already in the top 200,000, get in the top 100,000.

• If you’re already in the top 100,000, get into the top 50,000.

To join, you initially just had to comment on Sam’s blog post with your current Alexa ranking. That was it.

The group was named The Yakezie, and Sam gave the challenge a deadline of July 4th.

(Oh yeah, and if you failed you’d lose your little finger!)

Up, up and away on Alexa

Sam wrote his post on January 20th. The challenge has now been running for two months, and the results have been pretty remarkable.

There are far too many participants to list everyone, but to give you a flavour of the impact on Alexa rankings:

• Money Reasons: Up from 1,432,262 to 215,606
• Planting Dollars: Up from 865,928 to 86,986
• Money Funk: Up from 425,121 to 177,035
• Fiscal Fizzle: Up from 349,079 to 144,975
• Financial Samurai: Up from 74,081 to 49,360

Not a single one of the 43 blogs who originally signed up to take part in the challenge has seen their Alexa ranking drop so far! And besides the traffic boost, bloggers taken part have made new friends and discovered some other great blogs like their own.

5 tips on collaborating in your niche

We all know Alexa isn’t perfect, especially for smaller sites, and that all kinds of holes could be picked apart in this method of evaluating progress.

But to my mind the proof is in the pudding – more links, more retweets, more contact with other bloggers, and most importantly more readers.

If you’d like to try something similar in your niche, here’s a few thoughts on what’s working for us and how it might work for you.

1. Start today

As far as I know, Sam didn’t discuss his post with anyone before he kicked off the Alexa Challenge. His blog has a very vocal community that includes many personal finance bloggers, but they might have all shrugged.

Sam went for it anyway!

As the poet Goethe wrote:

“Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.”

2. Track something. Anything!

Alexa isn’t perfect, but it provides a universal way for all the Challenge participants – dubbed ‘the Yakezie’ – to both independently and collectively track their progress.

You might track Tweets or links in Google or pagerank or even Technorati authority. Just track something!

3. Have a concrete and desirable goal

The Alexa rankings are one part of our focus. Another aim is to move up Wisebread’s Top 100 league table of personal finance blogs.

The Wisebread Top 100 actually has 464 blogs in it, which gives you a measure of how crowded the personal finance blog scene is. Getting higher up the rankings – ideally onto the front page – is a very motivating goal for all the bloggers.

4. Let magic happen

One of the nicest things is seeing how stuff has emerged unplanned from different members of the group:

• Sweating the Big Stuff created a nifty page that tracks everyone’s progress via an automated Google spreadsheet. With 100 or so comments on the page, it’s become a popular hangout for participants.

• Eliminate the Muda and MBA Briefs created a badge for fellow Yakezie members to display. Nobody has to, but most of those who like badges have grabbed it and put it up.

• Early on and on a whim I featured every blog in the challenge in a special section of my weekly links roundup. Other Yakezie members took up the baton – again with no coordination or bartering – and My Journey To Millions has even built an automated Yakezie post reader into his site. Now there’s a Yakezie blog carnival underway.

Can you imagine the torture of getting 43 people all pulling together like this in your day job?

Don’t plan, I say. Keep it informal and let stuff happen.

5. Promote other bloggers

While it’s a challenge in name, this is a collaboration in nature. That’s the whole reason those taking part are seeing success. All those posts retweeted or the readers or Google juice passed along adds up.

• If I promote A, she may promote B instead, but if B promotes C and C likes me then we all win!

What are you waiting for?

With so many ways for bloggers to communicate and so many blogs out there, it’s hard to focus your promotion efforts – and easy to disappear in the noise.

So why not try something similar to what we’re doing in your own niche? It can’t hurt – and it may help a lot.

If nothing else it makes blogging even more fun!

The Investor is the personable yet mysterious author of Monevator, a blog that’s all about making money, saving it, and investing it for financial freedom – or at least a good holiday!