Most likely you have a blog or have thought about creating a blog for your business. There is minimal financial cost involved in starting a blog if you don’t have access to a lot of capital, but the time and thought investment can be equally as “expensive” as other marketing objectives if not more so. Either way, you might learn a thing or two from the top audience acquiring and retaining blogs in the blogosphere if you are trying to create a profitable business blog.

Technorati, the leading blog search engine, recently completed their 2008 State of the Blogosphere report which has been released annually since 2004 reporting on their analysis on the trends of blogging.

 The 2008 report consists of the who, the what, and the how of blogging; blogging for profit; and the brands entering the blogosphere.

In The How of Blogging section of their 2008 State of the Blogosphere they nicely break down what the top bloggers are doing compared to their blogging counterparts based on Technorati indexing data.

Audience Building Strategies – listing, commenting, linking, and tagging.

“Top audience-building strategies include: listing their blog on Technorati and Google, commenting or linking to other blogs, and tagging blog posts so that they are more easily searchable. Active bloggers have learned a variety of techniques for attracting visitors to their blog, conducting an average of five different activities to attract visitors. 28% do at least seven activities.

Posting -The top blogs post daily and post multiple times per day.

“Technorati Top 100 bloggers are twice as likely to post ten or more time daily compared to the next 500, and 14 times as likely than the next 5000. Looking again at Technorati’s tracking data shows how often the Top 100 bloggers post each day compared to the next 500 and the next 5000. The Technorati Top 100 are prolific, with 43% posting ten times per day or more often. Only 8% post once a day or less frequently, compared to 13% of the next 500 bloggers, and 22% of the next 5000 bloggers.”

Linking Strategy – The top blogs consistently link from their website to other blogs.

“Bloggers are also adept at linking to and from other sites – they have a median of 29 links from their blog to other web sites (with a mean of 3400), and a median of 30 links from other web sites to their blog (with a mean of 4800).”

Reader Loyalty – The top blogs actively pursue ways to create reader loyalty.

“To build loyalty with readers, bloggers create events for their readership. In order to retain visitors to their blogs, sophisticated bloggers are creating readership events.”

In Conclusion – Should you adopt ALL of these blogging strategies?

Although these may sound like good ideas or no-brainers, are these strategies the right choice for your blog? Technorati has an obviously large user base, but at the same time they are also a “technically advanced” audience.  The average consumer, be it B2B or B2C doesn’t visit their site or possibly even know who they are.

Does your audience need 5 posts per day, or will it annoy them enough that they delete you from their RSS feed or stop reading your blog. Is your blog’s goal to convert visitors to purchase your products, think of you as a thought leader, or to increase page views so that you can sell more ads or increase your advertising rates? These are three totally different strategies that require strategic planning that comes from different angles. As with anything in internet marketing optimization, no one strategy is right for every website or blog so you will definitely need to test to uncover what works best for your readers and your blogs goals with the least amount of compromise.

For the business bloggers out there reading this, check out LinkedIn’s corporate blog editor Mario Sundar’s post on 7 Habits of Highly Effective Business Bloggers that are takeaways and a slideshow from a presentation he did with Lionel Menchaca from Dell, Nicki Dugan from Yahoo!, Carolyn Abram from Facebook and Thomas Hoehn from Kodak. This will help get your mind on the right track.