Help for smaller bloggers like me

Vie Skippy The Bush Kangaroo, I found a great post on blogging from Welcome To Pottersville.

2) You ever heard of Buzzflash? Cursor.org? Send them your best stuff, see if they bite. It took me about a year before I started getting linked regularly on Buzzflash (although 8 times out of 10 it's to a NY Times op-ed piece that I drag from behind the firewall) but more and more they link to me for my stuff. God only knows who goes to Buzzflash but the sheer number is staggering and you never know who it is. They have a separate site called Buzzflash.net (near the top of the .com index page, on the right) for the express purpose of whoring your own posts and sometimes, without having to email the Buzzflash editors directly, they'll pick up on something on the .net site and link to it.

3) Email journalists, let them know what you think about a story they’ve written (and actually read it: Writers hate it when you pretend to read something they’d slaved over just to suck up to them when you betray that you really didn’t. I get that all the time, or, even worse, when I get flamed for something that Frank Rich wrote) and make sure your URL is in the tagline of your email. Max Blumenthal linked to me on The Nation last month on his own. So serendipity and sheer, dumb luck also plays a part.

4) Without sucking up the A listers, as I've patently refused to do since I set up Pottersville late last June, continue whoring your blog in the comments section. If the webmasters get pissed off at you, tough shit. Whales collect barnacles. If they ban you, they ban you and you’re really no worse off since they were never paying any attention to you, anyway (Interesting fact: The more blogs from which I get banned, the higher my readership gets. I cannot understand it, myself but it’s a fact. Every month without exception that Pottersville’s been up has been better than the last in terms of hits, sessions, page views, etc). However, I wouldn’t recommend this tactic if you’re just starting out. It sucks to be banned, especially if you’re not given a reason as to why.