I know, that’s my sad attempt in creating my own word. Hmmm, makes me want to patent that. Wait, should it be blorganic or bloganic?

Anyway, how many of you have made a sad attempt in growing your blog or website? Judging by the questions I get from here, the posts made by many folks on various forums, and the insane amount of marketing about SEO shortcuts and alike, I’m guessing many of us have tried fast track our way to success.

There’s nothing to be ashamed of. Look, I’m guilty as well. Even though I firmly believe nothing will work in the long-term other than growing your blog organically, I’m still curious enough to see if someone has figured out some magic formula. My expectations are usually very low otherwise I would be disappointed every time.

In my opinion, if you’re an individual or small company, save your time and money and ignore those ads! Things like buying backlinks or link exchanges may work well for the big guys trying to move up on SERP but they won’t do much to sustain success for the small fry.

How to grow your blog organically

• Write quality articles consistently
• Comment on other like-niche sites
• Write guest articles on other like-niche sites
• Participate on dofollow forums

Really, that’s all there is to it. That said, doing all of those things will take a lot of time. But hey, if you can make it past the painful period of writing for an audience of one (usually at least three months), then it will pay off.

Notice I didn’t specifically state that you should seek out dofollow sites to comment and write guest articles for. Although I prefer dofollow, the real purpose of those activities are to spread the word about your expertise and build relationships with people. A dofollow backlink would simply be a bonus.

In other words, you are doing work to create a natural following. No gimmicks; just your own personal sweat equity. That’s what I call being blorganic.

So are you blorganic?

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As I mentioned in my last article about gift giving to bloggers, there are many ways to give this time of year.

Here’s what I’m offering to the visitors for Free Blog Help. I’m giving a free self-plug and accompanying backlink to anyone who wants one. Keep in mind that this site currently has a PR4 homepage and subpages that range from PR0 to PR4. I believe this particular page will earn a decent PR that will give you a lifetime of PR juice.

Just follow these simple steps:

1. Post a comment on this article.
2. Send me an email at gyoung@freebloghelp.com (or use the contact form). This message should contain an elevator pitch for your site. That means you get 20 words and one backlink with your choice of anchor text.
3. Do this by December 20, 2010.

I will post an article with all the responses on, Christmas Day, December 25, 2010. I’ll leave this article up for as long as this site exists so you’ll always have a qualified backlink.

The great news is that I don’t have too many rules around this either. Your promo can be on any clean topic (please no adult sites). That means you can market your site, a product, a specific article… just about anything! Unless it’s something in extreme poor taste, anything goes. I’m curious to see who redeems this freebie!

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1. This is your blog, you shall treat it with respect.

Run the blog like a business. That means whatever time and energy you decide to dedicate to it, find a way to keep that motivation up in the long haul. It’s a lot of work with very little results in the beginning but if you are persistent and are a good learner, it will pay off one day.

2. Do not take your blog’s name in vain.

Have a marketing plan. And if you’re not a trained marketer, then start learning online. There are plenty of articles out there on this stuff. Also, don’t discount the importance of simple things like commenting on other similar sites and getting a logo. Oh, learn what a brand is.

3. Remember your scheduled post dates and stick to them.

Create a realistic schedule of when you’re posting articles and stick to it. Early on, you may want to post every day or at least three times a week to gain some traction. Over time, you may adjust your priorities to suit your schedule and needs. Whatever you commit yourself to, stay with it for at least 90 days to track results.

4. Honor your hosting provider’s terms.

Pretty obvious stuff. Violate your hosting company’s TOS and you will get shut down. Good luck regaining any momentum you’ve built.

5. You shall not kill other blogs.

Mudslinging, or negative campaigning, is really pointless when it comes trying to outdo your competition. Of course, if you want to post an article about your terrible experience with a supplier, that’s fine by me.

6. You shall enjoy yourself.

OK, don’t commit “adultery” but definitely find a way to have some fun while you’re building your blog business. Take breaks regularly! BTW, does anyone even know what adultery even means today?

7. You shall not steal.

I’ve been blog scraped so many times it’s almost not annoying anymore. It’s not even worth my time to combat these thieves. That said, I would never do it to someone else. Scraping doesn’t pay off in the long run anyway, especially since it’s usually being done by people looking for shortcuts to success.

8. You shall support other blogs.

No one can build a blog empire along. You’ll find that often times, bloggers who have other blogger friends really can catapult themselves ahead. Look for another blogger in a similar niche and work ethic. That way you can motivate each other and grow together.

9. You shall link to other useful content.

Regardless of whether or not you get a link back, providing meaningful outbound links for your visitors should be seen as helpful. Stop worrying about giving PR juice away or sending your visitors off. A. You probably don’t even have any juice on most of your article pages and B. if your visitors like you, they’ll come back anyway.

10. You shall aspire to be a successful blogger.

There is no need to covet your neighbor’s possessions because if you work smart (and at times, work hard), you’ll arrive at your destination soon enough. Remember to set goals and objectives and create tactics to reach them.

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Are you working on your PageRank (PR)? I hope so. Several weeks back, I posted a few articles about Google PageRank, namely regarding increasing PageRank and PageRank benefits.

PageRank is actually more valuable than you think. Most folks believe obtaining a high PR is just for building credibility and selling sites. You know what else it does? It saves me over an hour a day.

Think about it: What would you do with an extra hour a day?

Early self-promotion is a lot of work!

I would say, if you’re already a month or two into your site (sometimes even sooner), you probably realize that you have to promote your site. Otherwise, you could potentially be writing to a very small audience forever. Here are some common things folks do:

• Commenting on other sites to showcase your knowledge on a topic
• Adding your articles on social bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, etc…
• Tweeting your articles

Doing all of these activities can easily take over an hour a day to do!

Look, I’ve been there. I’ve done all of those things but now, I only comment on a very select group of partner sites. These are people who have been regular visitors at my site and have contributed in many ways without solicitation from me. I occasionally see an article that I like on CommentLuv and might pop over to a new site I haven’t seen before.

That said, I never feel obligated to promote on a daily basis anymore. One could argue that if I did, I could be at PR5 or higher instead of PR4 and have an Alexa ranking of sub-50,000 instead of hovering around 65,000. To me, it’s well worth the trade off. I save myself 7-10 hours a week by not religiously promoting my site and still gain enough traction to get a satisfactory number of daily visitors and comments on my articles.

A good PageRank reduces your time promoting

Having a respectable PR (my home page is PR4 as of Sept 2010) motivates people to come to my site to read and comment. Since my site is DoFollow and I also have CommentLuv enabled, visitors feel that reading and commenting on my articles is worthwhile.

So rather than having to push myself out there, there’s enough incentive for folks to come back. Being able to get just a bit of that PR juice is plenty of motivation for many people!

You can increase your PageRank “naturally”

Organic link building is the preferred method. You know, you can actively try to increase your PageRank without the use of gimmicks.

One way is in the form of partnering with other dedicated people like yourself. You could work together by writing guest articles for each other’s sites, adding each other to your blogrolls, and mentioning each other’s articles when relevant. Just be smart about it. You’re not trying to fake some backlinks, rather you’re teaming up with another passionate soul in order to grow together.

At the end of the day, there’s really no need to buy links (which is often a scam anyway) nor is there a need to beg big shots to add you to their blogroll (which is like banging your head against a wall).

What other tactics have you tried to increase your PageRank?

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First, if you don’t have a gravatar already, please go to gravatar.com and get one. It takes all of five minutes.

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A backlink is a search engine optimization (SEO) term used for links that point to your site. You may have also seen them called inbound links or incoming links. Regardless of how often a search engine’s algorithm changes, backlinks are almost always an important ingredient.

Why? Because backlinks are a good indicator of how popular or relevant your site is. Although outbound links have no impact on SEO, backlinks actually do. Always have, always will.

For example, if you create a sports car niche blog site and place links to the top sites in the world (i.e. Top 3 as of this post are www.google.com, www.facebook.com, www.yahoo.com), it would be pointless for SEO purposes. Otherwise, everyone would do it what I just did (by listing outbound links) on their blogs, even if they have absolutely nothing to do with the content.

On the other hand, let’s say your sports car niche blog site, actually had quality posts. Now imagine if one of the top sports car sites, say www.motortrend.com, posts links your blog on a regular basis. Essentially, you have a power player (under 5k Alexa, PR6) in your niche community vouching for the content on your blog site. Shouldn’t that represent that your blog site has valuable content for that audience?

Remember, this is just part of the top secret search engine formula that the public will never fully know. However, since we know that it’s important and it’s somewhat easy to do, doesn’t it make sense to ensure we get some backlinks on our site? And I didn’t even get into the PR juice!

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If you take a look at a lot of my articles, especially those that I published late 2009, you’ll find a bunch with close to the 100 comment stratosphere. However, it wasn’t until this week that the barrier was broken. My 10 FREE killer themes of 2009 is actually at 102 comments as of this writing.

And I’m talking legit comments, regardless of whether they’re from visitors you’ve never met before, your friends, or yourself. For the most part, cut out the spam and you’re good. For me, I typically respond to 30%-40% of comments. So when I broke the 100 comment mark on this article, I recounted those from yours truly. Out of the 102 comments for that post, 25 were mine and 77 were from others, which means I responded to just under a third of them.

The point is, exceeding the 100 comment milestone legitimately takes a lot more than elbow grease and dumb luck. Here are my takeaways:

What I learned from a 100 comment article

• Partnering with others helps. (That post was part of a writing project from another site.)
• Give people what they want. That means writing an article that actually provides value.
• The title should compel people to read on.
• Lists posts kick butt.
• Making the site DoFollow will bring more comments even though you might get a bit more spam to clean up.
• Hit hard, hit fast. Keeping articles short allows visitors to stay focused and not be bored before they reach the comment area.
• Asking a question at the end of an article steers people to the type of comment you’re looking for.
• When people take the time to write a comment that is useful and relevant, taking the time to respond makes total sense.

Obviously, I’ve already known most of these. However, seeing the results of the successful, aforementioned article certainly reinforces my thinking.

What’s your highest commented article to date?

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