The Writers Blog Alliance
05/08/2005

I am pleased to announce that the Writers Blog Alliance (WBA) is in existence in beta form. Those who have been following its development over the last few days can rush off now to have a look - just click on this link. I warn you, however; it's huge!

If you're wondering what I'm talking about, I'll try to explain briefly. WBA began as an idea for increasing the visibility of writer's blogs. It occurred to me that we are all in a race for traffic, the lifeblood of blogs, but we're losing that race because our market is smaller than that of the big guns, the blogs on the A-list. In the blogosphere, success is measured by links; the top sites count their incoming links in the thousands whereas we think we're doing pretty well if we get a hundred links. And quality of link counts too; if you can achieve a link from a blog on the A-list, your own blog's importance (and traffic) will increase dramatically.

The problem is that writers will never get links from A-list blogs; they deal in news and current affairs, oddities and gadgets, we provide good writing that does not depend upon the latest events (I know the journalist writers are an exception to that but they need to consider the toughness of their opposition - the A-list bloggers are entrenched). We're in a bind: without links to high traffic sites, our blogs can never rise above the cacophony of the millions of blogs, to be noticed by our potential market; but none of the top blogs are ever going to be interested in what we're offering. What we need is a few heavyweight blogs of our own to dish out links to us so that we can be noticed.

At that point, I realized that we would just have to start creating blogs like that. Worldwide, there are thousands of writers' blogs. If we were to get together in a central blog, all linking to it, the result would be a blog that packs some punch where the search engines are concerned. And, having achieved such prominence, the blog could give links to the participating blogs and their importance would increase, too.

The theory seems good but it needs to be tried. I spoke to Deborah Woehr of The Writer's Buzz about the idea and she ran with it, adding her own thoughts for a writers' community to the mix. The result is WBA, a mansion designed to cater for writers and readers. It has a directory, forums, a news section and a magazine. At the moment, we are using the news section as a blog, while I work on setting up a blog dedicated to the site.

And it's the blog where my idea will be put into practice. It will be very simple, a straightforward blog with regular posts and a blogroll. Note that: a blogroll. Everyone who registers with WBA will be included in the blogroll. Of course, we will expect that members will link to the WBA blog too; in fact, Deborah has already designed a button that members can place on their blogs. Without that, the blog will not achieve enough importance to benefit writers.

We should remember that a blog must be updated regularly and often, if it is to rise in the estimation of the search engines. Deborah and I cannot provide enough posts to keep the WBA blog updated as frequently as it will have to be (at least once a day, preferably more often). The intention is that members contribute posts to keep the blog ticking over. If many are involved in that, the burden will not be too great. So we are asking that you be prepared to write the occasional article for WBA. It is a small price to pay for the potential exposure we are aiming at. And, of course, each post writer gets another link to their blog in the signature to his or her article.

There is much more to think about in tackling this venture but I am saving that for a series of articles for the WBA blog. Let me just say here that the outline above is only Stage One of the plan. Stage Two arrives if and when the blog achieves the importance envisaged.

This venture will not succeed unless writers and readers join in. All depends upon membership and links becoming numerous enough to impact the search engines. So I would urge all who have an interest in writing to go now to the WBA, have a look around, press a few buttons and notice that you're not the only one there. Then register and become a part of tomorrow! It's free; what have you got to lose?

Clive

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