created every day; while existing blogs are updated 18 times every second, or 1.6 million new posts written every 24 hours.



This is a phenomenal amount of blogging and if you have started your own site you may well wonder how you will find an audience amongst so much other output.

The truth is, you've got a hard job on your hands to find a readership. There is absolutely no doubt that everybody in the blogosphere will advise you that you need quality content because no matter what tricks you pull to attract new visitors they will not come back again unless you offer great articles and commentary for your niche.

It is fine now and again to write short items promoting other people's work or a video you have found on YouTube, but the meat of your blog must be interesting, well-researched and well-thought through articles. If you love the niche you are part of then this will come naturally.

Don't start off with massive amounts of enthusiasm and then a few months later sag because you have burnt yourself out. It's best not to publish more than one post per week or you'll quickly run out of ideas – quality takes time, and quality beats quantity every time.

Don't expect more than 10 visitors to you blog on any one day during the first six months of its life. For starters, it takes at least six to nine months before Google and Yahoo seriously begins to index the pages of you blog for inclusion in their rankings.

There are many, many ways of publicising your blog. You could add it to MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog and then start interacting with other bloggers in your niche, you could also post up the URL in the forums that you are a part of. Don't forget to submit it to some free directories.

Another way is to join the “dofollow” community.

In January 2005 Google introduced the nofollow attribute. This adds the following code to a HTML link: rel=”nofollow”. Simplified, this puts a stop sign on the door by telling the search engine bot not to count the webpage in its ranking calculations, and as every person involved in SEO will tell you: build lots of inbound quality links in order to do well in the search engines.

Over night in 2005 the Google game changed as blogging platforms like Wordpress slapped nofollow all over blog comments. Millions and millions of links were now discounted.

Some bloggers though were not happy about this change. They knew that this wouldn't stop spam and so continued to leave off the nofollow attribute. This became known as “dofollow”, although in actual fact there is no snippet of code which reads as such.

"Dofollow" simply means the absence of the nofollow attribute.

These refuseniks wanted to reward their regular commentators with a little link love. Why shouldn't they receive a little boost for the time they take to engage with my blog, they theorised.

“Dofollow” is an incentive for your readers to comment often and come back regularly.

So, if you are a blog owner then how do you make a switch to “dofollow”?

Well, that depends on what software you use. The best idea is to visit DoFollow 001 and read the article "Dofollow" Guidelines for Webmasters and Bloggers.

This will give you advice and ideas on how to join the "dofollow" community.

Once you have flipped your website over, sign-up with DoFollow 001 and submit your website to its directory.