Here are few of my favorite marketing articles I have read in the last few weeks. Remember that the easiest way to stay on top of your niche is to use Google Alerts, I use it daily and love it.

Would we miss you? by Seth Godin

This touches on a very important subject, would your readers or constituents miss you or your blog if it was gone tomorrow? When I start asking myself questions like that, I really start to focus on providing great, timeless content, if timeless is achievable. Dig deep and make every word, post and comment worth fighting for. Is your signature worth more when you are dead or alive?

The secret behind making a video go viral

Believe it or not everyone, all of those viral videos you see every day did not make it there on their own. What you will find is the method to the madness of making a video go viral. You could of course just hire out a private group to make it happen for you.

If you want your customers to be happy, tell them less.

I am not sure how this concept would work in the blogging world, but when it comes to dishing out the goods to your customers, the less they know, the happier they are. According to Guy Kawasaki, a happy customer is a good customer, and a good customer doesn’t know everything about the things they buy. While I feel that this works with traditional products and services, blogging is the exact opposite. The bloggers who dish out the most detailed advice and content will flourish more than those who just regurgitate information.

A strategy for building niche focused blog networks

I recently subscribed to Darren Rowse’s Problogger.net and find most of the information valuable and very well laid out. When building up a blogging network or taking your single family blog to a new level, this article will give you the best visual representation for accomplishing your goals. I am a visual person from time to time and need to see things laid out in a way that makes sense, this does just that. When is doubt, draw it out!

As all bloggers know, having a good Technorati ranking is key for establishing your credibility. But when you are starting out as a blogger, what is the easiest way to increase your rank?

Your Technorati authority is the number of blogs that have linked to your site within the last six months. For more information about Technorati and Technorati ranking, go here. Your number one goal is to increase this number of links pointing to your blog. Unfortunately, if one site links to your blog more than once, only one is counted. So the key question to ask yourself is how to get your link on as many different blogs as possible in the shortest amount of time. The answer: Contests.

People love winning things for very little effort. In the last month, I can count about 6 contests I would deem legitimate and worth more than $2,000. Some of you may have heard about the Sense to Save contest or the Winning the Web contest. Contests like these are a great way to drive traffic to your blog and are a lot of fun to talk about. The downsides are the effort involved in executing them and not everyone is willing to put forth the time and energy to properly run one.

To increase your Technorati authority by using contests, find upcoming contests through forums, Google Alerts, search engines or word of mouth (right now Ty over as Tysblog.com is collecting contributors). When you find a contest you can participate in, try offering something to be donated for the prize. The idea is to offer the contest either a service or products. For example, I found a contest and donated Entrecard credits to it. Entrecredits are cheap and work great for this. Because of my donation, my link was visible under the list of contest prizes, which everyone involved saw. In most cases, the hosting blog is willing to take on most prizes in order to sweeten the pot and make more buzz for his or her site.

The best part about donating to Internet contests is the publicity they can offer you. This is because one way to be chosen as a contest winner is to promote it and give some “link love” back to the hosting site. If you have donated to this contest, this will help drive a little traffic to your site, boost your Technorati authority and establish your presence in the blogging community.

I donated to one contest and gained over 14 backlinks to my blog from it. The cost of those 14 backlinks was the 1,000 Entrecredits I originally donated to the contest prize. Everyone would agree that 1,000 Entrecard credits go for about $4-5 dollars or about an hour of time. That is a great trade-off for gaining links. Imagine if you hunted down 5-10 different contests and donated just Entrecard credits. That could be enough to double your Technorati rank in most cases. Plus, all those contests you decide to donate to will enjoy the boost in prizes to give away. This is a classic win-win situation.

This is a screen shot of my Technorati authority. In one month, www.joshwhitford.com went from 0-54 authority.

The truth is, you will probably never run out of contests that are worth donating a prize to, along with gaining some traffic and Technorati authority for your blog. The number one way to grow your site and market yourself is to participate in the blogging community. Growing your network and community is the foundation to your blog. Trust, traffic and authority aren’t given to a blog, they are earned. Your mission is to establish yourself in your niche community.