Secret Blog Strategy Revealed: What Reader's Digest Teaches Us About Blogging

We can learn a lot about successful blogging for the past. History is great for recycling, especially old publishing approaches. To that end, one strategy from the history of publishing can be an uber-successful, present day blogging  strategy.

Most magazines print original material commissioned to freelancers or proposed by the same. I write such articles from time to time.  But the Reader’s Digest did something whole different. Instead of publishing original works, the founder De Witt Wallace visited The New York Public Library, “and copied out by hand from other magazines his own abridged, adapted versions of articles he thought would interest readers,” wrote Daniel Borstin in his book, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Event in America. Apparently the editors of the original had no problem with that and considered it free advertising. The Digest considered this “a co-operative means of rendering a timesaving service, Borstin writes.

Magazine articles could be written to please the reader, to give him the nub of that matter in the new fast-moving world of the 1920′s, instead of being written at length and with literary embellishments to please the author or the editor.

The strategy was largely successful. The Digest built circulation numbers far exceeding the readers of magazines from which it abridged articles and grew its reach globally. At its zenith the Digest’s employed 100 editors and 2,500 clerical working in its New York office, while managing bureaus in London, Paris, Copenhagen, Havana, Helsinki, Quebec, Madrid, Milan, Oslo, Rio de Janerio, Stockholm, Stuttgart, Syndney, Toronto and Tokyo.

With modern blogging and news aggregating technology, the strategy used by the Digest has been amplified. Such is so with Google Reader or Bloglines, a blog (duh!), and keeping abreast of news in an industry. If Wallace thought the 1920s were fast-paced, our time is lightening fast. Given the exponential explosion of content, the Digest strategy remains apropos. Here’s how.

There are several rules anyone serious about blogging should be following:

• Develop valuable content your readers can use.
• Optimize content for search.
• Promote content in social networks and using other tools.

With that in mind, let’s flesh out the tools you’ll need:

• News Aggregator: helps you pull news from all over the Internet into one centralized location. This helps with work flow because you’re not spending hours a day combing the Internet for material. It comes to you. With Google Reader you can create folders to mirror “departments” or “topics” or “categories” tied to your blog. This keeps you organized and helps with building out an editorial calendar.
• Blog (preferably WordPress and hosted on a private server): You want to host your blog on a server that’s well maintained, where the owner knows your neighbors and is strict about who’s in and who’s out. This helps with optimizing your blog for search. Without getting into the technical side, think of it this way. You want to keep good neighbors. A well maintained community bespeaks well of its members and Google likes that. Just like the mayor of a town likes his dominion to be well-suited for good people. And, you want to use WordPress because it’s, quite simply, the best CMS and blogging platform on the planet. Besides, it’s free!

Next you want to choose a industry or body of knowledge that interests you. If it interests you and you can find content on it, chances are it interests others too. There’s your audience. Your choices are nearly endless.

After you have an industry and body of knowledge picked, find all of the top-notch web resources and populate your news aggregator. Besides the top-notch stuff, you want to include commentary on the commentary from your contemporaries doing the same. This is how you begin building relationships with other bloggers.

That’s not it! There’s more.

When you identify those bloggers writing about the same stuff you’re writing about, begin developing relationships with them. This is where the Digest strategy gets amplified. As you begin developing relationships you’ll want to start talking about link-sharing strategies with these people. (We’ll share more later on that.)

Interestingly, however, don’t think of these bloggers as your primary audience. They are not. They are a secondary group of people, like a cheer group heralding you content. You readers are those who need your content and don’t have the time to read it from far away places on the Internet. There just isn’t time for them to cover everything. They need you — that’s your audience. But to find them, or rather, for them to find you, optimizing your content for search becomes important. (We’ll talk more about that later too.)

How do you promote your content?

• Build links strategies with other bloggers.
• Submit to RSS directories
• Submit to blog directories
• Join MyBlogLog communities
• Join Blog Catelog
• Start an email list and send out notices.

These are only a few ways to promote your content. But with these pointers, you should see results from using the Reader’s Digest story as your own personal blogging secret weapon to success.