What are the biggest blogs in your topic area? Not sure? Here’s how to find out:

1. Go to Technorati.com and enter your main keyword phrase. You’ll get a list of blog posts about your topic.
2. Then go to Google.com and enter your phrase with +blog attached.

You’ll start to get a feel for what blogs are the important ones in your area of expertise.

Then what?

• Add them to your reader so you can follow their posts.
• If they are really good, you may want to add them to your blogroll.
• You can always trackback to their posts.
• For the really advanced bloggers like you, you can find more even more blogs that link to them and expand your empire in the same way.

Let me give you an example. I want to find some of the best blogs about blogging so I went to Technorati and got 1,299,219 blog posts and 23,539 blogs.  Yikes!  Now the tricky part is trying to determine which of these are the most relevant and important.  There are two numbers you can look at on Technorati:  the number of fans and the authority.  Several of the top blogs are listed in my blogroll.

Another thing you can look at is the Technorati list of top blogs and commenting when their posts are relevant to your topic. This is an easy way to get traffic to your blog since Technorati is such a good blog search engine!

P.S.  Make the blogosphere even better by adding your favorite blogs and posts to Technorati (we use the green button on the right hand sidebar that says, Add this Blog to My Technorati Favorites-thanks)!

De.licio.us is one of a suite of social bookmarking sites.  It has three main purposes:

1. an online site to store your bookmarks,
2. a place to share your bookmarks with friends, and
3. a site to check out what other people are bookmarking.

An added benefit is you can assign tags (keywords) to the bookmarks.

You can use number 3 to get traffic to your blog.  By bookmarking your posts with your targeted keywords, you can get a relevant link to your blog.  You may also get visitors to your blog who stumble across your bookmark.

Another useful feature of de.licio.us is you can find other popular blogs in your topic area.  Search de.licio.us for your topic and see what kinds of items are popular and bookmarked frequently.

Be sure to be a responsible bookmarker by not only bookmarking your site, but other sites with outstanding content.

One last thought…. to get to the de.licio.us site just type in http://de.licio.us  (no www or .com).

Blog Rush is a brand new way to get traffic to your blog…. and I’ll use this post to review it for you and let you know how it works to generate targeted users to the site.

What is it? Blog Rush is a small box you add to the sidebar of your blog. Inside the box, relevant blog posts from other blogs are listed (and your blog posts show up on other related sites in there Blog Rush box). Your users can click on a post and it opens a new window to a different blog. You can see a video that explains exactly how it works at BlogRush.com video.

So far here are my initial impressions about Blog Rush….

• It couldn’t be easier to sign up. A little bit of info and you get code to insert into your template and the Blog Rush box appears.
• The software has been created by John Reese, Traffic Secrets guru. He was the first Internet marketer to have a million dollar product launch day so I always keep an eye on what he’s doing!
• You can also block certain types of posts from appearing in your Blog Rush box.
• You get credits if another blog signs up to BlogRush from your link, too.

I’ll follow up this post with more details on how much traffic it generates for me. Stay tuned and in the meantime, sign up for your BlogRush account right away.

Congratulations to WellnessCoach.com (and it’s talented author, Erica Ross-Krieger) for ranking #12 in Google for her main search phrase in just a week!  Her blog just went live last week, and I was so excited to see her on page 2 already.  Be sure to check out her suggestions for Wellness for Entrepreneurs including my favorite post so far, “52 Ways for Entrepreneurs to Thrive.”  I’ll keep you posted on her status.

You can learn how to add audio and video to your Wordpress blog from Mike Stewart, the Internet Video Guy, when he is interviewed by Tom Antion. It’s Thursday, August 30, 2007 at 9 p.m. EST and you can register here. “Point, Click, Talk and Profit!”

Make sure you “Claim Your Blog” at Technorati. Just sign up for a Technorati account and then click “Claim my Blog” to start the process. You’ll need to put a specific code that Technorati gives you in a post on your site so it can verify that it’s your blog.

FutureNow shares a wonderful discussion of The Drudge Report and how it went from blogging unknown to expert guru.  The lessons are particularly useful to new bloggers who are trying to learn how to blog and make it successful.  I especially like the message to Be Persistent.  It can take awhile for your blog to take off, and if you quit too soon, you’ll never know just how successful you could be.

See that orange box over on the right hand side of the screen under the heading “Add Us to Your RSS Reader”? If you click the orange box you can “Subscribe to my Feed.” But just what exactly is it for?

First, let’s explain a feed. A feed is a list of all the postings on your blog… and it is automatically updated when you make a post.

Feeds are used by feed readers. A feed reader is a special kind of software that lists all the different feeds you have subscribed to and the individual blog posts. A feed reader saves you a lot of time because you don’t have to visit every blog to see if it has been updated… it automatically looks for and lists new content for you in your own “personal newspaper” format.

My favorite feed reader is the Google Reader because you can get to your feeds from any computer on the Internet. Just log in to your Google account to get to your specific feeds. It also lets you sort your feeds into folders and makes it really easy to read through a lot of feeds quickly (you can watch how one top blogger, Robert Scoble, reads 622 feeds every morning). It’s also easy to add feeds to the reader… most blogs that have the orange box will also have a button that says “Subscribe with Google.” Click it and the feed is automatically added to your Google reader.

By the way RSS (which stands for “Really Simple Syndication”) is the technical part of the feed that makes it all work in the background for you.

I also love an RSS reader because it’s so much easier than having to delete email! Rather than getting email updates and having to delete each new message, you can just see the post in your reader.

So go visit Google, set up your reader, and make sure you put Your Blog Team at the top of your feeds!

You know how when we want to start a new project or tackle a new “thing,” we always ask our friends for advice? Well sometimes that advice can get you into trouble….

See what happened to Technorati Top 100 blogger, Gala Darling as part of her guest post at ProBlogger

7. Before you start blogging, give serious thought to what your likely future plans may be.

When I started, the blogging platform I installed was chosen because it was something my friend was using. Now that I want to do grand things, I’ve realised that Textpattern (which has served me very well) is really not powerful enough. Thus, my geeky genius (*coughbeloved boyfriend *cough*) & I are faced with the daunting task of converting everything to Drupal — something it appears no one has ever done before, & to say we’re dreading it is the understatement of the century.

Yikes! Let’s all get started on a robust blogging software so you don’t have to do any of these conversions, OK?

blogroll (noun). A blogroll is a list of links to other blogs often placed on the side of a blog.

Different bloggers use them for different things. Some bloggers create a list of relevant blogs for their topic area; others use it as a place to link to all their friends.

We call our blogroll “Favorites,” and it lists some of my favorite blogs that you might also be interested in (so they are bloggers who talk about blogging.)

You want every link on your blog to be relevant for your visitor so use this list of links to provide good resources in your blogroll.