Wired News and the NY Times both have concurrent articles out on how to make a blog more popular according to Don Dodge.

David L. Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati, keeps tabs on more than 45 million weblogs. Here’s his advice for cracking his site’s Top 100 list.

1) React quickly. Commentators like Andrew Sullivan and Michelle Malkin draw megatraffic with immediate rebuttals to A-list pundits at The New York Times and Fox News.

2) Make your posts easy to read. Italian comic Beppe Grillo broke into the Top 10 by setting his key points in boldface.

3) Link, link, link! It’s counter-intuitive, but the busiest blogs in Technorati’s index are those like Insta-Pundit.com that link prolifically to other sites. Linking works because most bloggers reciprocate by sending their readers your way.

4) Optimize for search engines. Put the name of your blog (even if it’s just your own name) in the main URL and the title tag of your site. On Technorati, identify your blog with search topics, like “politics” or “sewing.”

5) Post, post, post! Chinese actress and director Xu Jinglei has the most popular blog on the planet. At first we thought it was a glitch in our system, but it turns out she’s a real-world celebrity who makes time to post almost every day. What’s your excuse?

I do all 5 things plus a couple more.  I think posting a lot is a good idea (and I’m someone that has a lot to say so I usually can find a legit reason to post every time I want to post).

I notieced that Ana Marie Cox, in David Pogue’s artilce in the NYTimes, mentioned she had to post 12 times a day.

"AMC: Nick Denton discovered me at the corner grocery. I call it sort of my Veronica Lake moment. I had a blog of my own called The Antic Muse which I was doing while I was working full time at AOL, of all places. And Nick Denton is the publisher of Gawker Media, which has a whole wide array of blogs that are run on a very actually old-school publishing model, where he pays a blogger a salary and sells advertising.

DP: So, he hired you to do one about Washington stuff.

AMC: This is two years ago. That seemed like such an unheard of stroke of luck that I would get *paid* to just, you know, basically say almost anything I wanted, and just spout off about the news of the day and republish e-mails that people sent me from Senate staffers and whatnot. And that seemed like - it seemed so easy that the very pitiful amount that he paid me didn’t seem that bad. I doubt if I could get the same deal again.

Also it was much harder than it seemed. I’m making it sound easy, ‘cuz I was republishing stuff and joking about things. But when you have to put up 12 things a day, it starts getting hard pretty quickly.

DP: Twelve things a day!"

And here’s what Ana Marie Cox thinks are the ingredients of successful blogs today =

"AMC: I think it’s changing. Six months, a year ago, I would have talked about what I think made Wonkette successful and makes Gawker successful, to a certain extent, and other blogs: A strong, defined personality with a sense of humor about themselves. An ability to filter news quickly and to recognize, you know, what is interesting to other people as well as interesting to themselves, and finding the balance between those things.

What I think is changing is that people have now become addicted to the rapid update. You know, the not just 12 times a day; 18 times a day, 24 times a day. And it’s almost physically impossible for one person to do that.

And so I think that we’re probably going to see that the individual, strong-personality blog is not going to be at the forefront, because group blogs are going to be able to do what people expect of blogs better.

I post about 8 or 9 posts a day, max, to all 3 blogs I have access to - I can’t imagine do much more than that.