Secret To Success In Blogging? Begin When You Are A President

During my years in blogging I have learned some secrets of blogging same as everyone who commits at least to a certain extent to this fascinating activity. In the vast majority of cases successful bloggers prefer to keep their secrets to themselves (only sharing some small parts that will demonstrate the general direction but will keep the tips and tricks to themselves) but it looks like Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has discovered a universal secret to success in blogging - blogging when you are already a president. Unfortunately this secret is hardly realistic for the vast majority of bloggers to use so we’ll have to watch his progress from afar.

Our president is probably one of the politicians who are well-known for their affection towards the world wide web. Dmitry Medvedev is pretty young (he is only 44 which means he is 3 years younger than Barack Obama) and he behaves accordingly trying to look cool to the younger generations and probably also hoping to turn some of us into his supporters from people who generally don’t trust the authorities at all.

And while this is nothing but my personal guess, I believe this approach is a pretty clever one and all Medvedev’s actions related to his internet presence draw huge attention from the younger population.

Online presence of Kremlin seems to be a pretty strong one already: Mr. Medvedev has an official video blog and now this blog is also transmitted to LiveJournal (which is traditionally the most popular blogging platform in Russia and is also affiliated with the Russian authorities via one of its major owners). And while he is criticized pretty often for lack of actual conversation with readers in comments, I think that it is really hard to expect that a president of a large (and difficult to manage) country like Russia will have time to not only post to his blogs but to also read comments and reply to at least some of such comments.

So whatever the critics say about it, I think it is not bad to have a president who is a vlogger anyway - even if he keeps silence in comments. What’s more, these online presences seem to be growing more and more important for the President and his team as they are working hard to make such presences a success and report on the progress of adventures.

The latest news is that the Russian president is now officially one of the most popular bloggers in the country as yesterday his official video blog passed the 20 thousand registered users mark. Visitors to the official blog are supposed to register when they want to leave a comment to one of the posts published by the president (or his moderators, of course) and while the number of actual commentators is lower (just above 5 thousand), more visitors were willing to register and now we have the results already.

I know that for many English-language bloggers 20 thousand subscribers will sound like a ridiculous amount as in some topics you can easily surpass the mark without using the advantage of being a president. Yet in Russia the situation is very different: the vast majority of blogs are still maintained as a personal diary and so the readers are usually the close friends and family of the blogger. And professional bloggers are so rare that having a one thousand subscribers is already considered to be very honorable - so someone with 20 thousand subscribers obviously enjoys huge popularity.

The irony is that Russian bloggers are already discussing an interesting conspiracy theory as they have discovered that Yandex, the leading Russian search engine, seems to want to help the official Kremlin blog with some extra traffic (converting into registered users, of course).

For 16 hours Yandex blog search (a service similar to Google blog search but obviously focusing on Russian-language blogs) for any queries like I, you, me, she, he, him, her, etc. displayed the Kremlin blog comments among the very top link - and sent more to the blog from the most unexpected queries.

This has turned out to be a temporary glitch on Yandex but it would have been intriguing to know that when you blog as a president of the country, you will receive some preferences from local search engines. Unfortunately becoming a president to eventually become a successful blogger seems like more difficult to do than becoming a popular blogger without even being a president.

Via (in Russian)