So you just started a new job in the "Insert Category Here" industry and are instantly expected to get up to speed so you can begin helping your team with billable work. You've heard that blogs are a
great resource to begin your education, however you discover that there are literally a million blogs you could read, so where do you start??
This situation is one that probably many individuals face and I can understand where they are coming from especially since it's quite difficult to believe which bloggers are actually telling the truth or which bloggers' strategies actually work. Below I have listed some ideas to help shortlist the number of blogs in your feed reader:
- Do some research on the author of the blog by checking out their LinkedIn profile, MySpace Page, FaceBook Group, or other Social Networking profile.
- Find out how long the Blogger has been in the industry and how long they have been blogging for.
- Has the blogger spoken at any industry related conferences?
- Run a site:www.blog.com command to find out how many pages the blog has indexed
- Use Yahoo Site Explorer to find how many back links the blog has.
- From the back links above you should be able to determine the authority of the blogger by figuring it out networks/resources the blogger writes for.
- A couple of simple measurements are looking up the blog's Google PageRank as well its Technorati rank.
- Feed Subscribers are an excellent way to determine how many other people think of the blog as a useful resource.
- Use Blog Influence and Text Link Ads' Blog Juice.
- How many other industry related blogs reference this blog as well as include this blog in their blog roll?
- Create a quality score of your own by adding a blog to your reader and monitoring number of posts, number of strategic posts, number of breaking news posts and number of re-posts of industry news.
- Do a keyword search in Google Blog Search and try reading blogs that Google suggests in its "related blogs" section.
- Find out how many members the blog has in its community at MyBlogLog.
- Is the blogger providing valuable advice that you can apply to your business or is it just old news and outdated tactics?
Original Post:
Which Blogs Should I Read?
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