A fellow web designer has recently started a public battle with his wife on the Internet. It’s not what you think though — they’re battling to see who can have the most popular blog within the next twelve months.

Gerard McGarry and his wife Lisa run a popular reality TV blog in the UK. They decided to extend the site by adding new blogs about music and primetime television.

The interesting thing is that they’re going to build the sites using different techniques — Lisa’s primetime blog will focus mostly on rapid content building and organic SEO, while Gerard’s music blog will be built with more of a focus on promotion through social media, social bookmarking and community building. Throughout the year they’ll blog about their progress, which techniques are working and which aren’t.

Lisa’s approach is primarily about content-building. She’ll watch the latest TV news and blog about it rapid-fire. I’ve never seen someone compile content so efficiently. Better still, she’s now got contacts in TV publicity, so she gets a lot of the inside scoop on shows. I joked with her at the weekend that there’s no point reading the TV guide anymore, because she’s usually two days ahead.

My approach to writing is much more methodical. I’ll be writing about music, so I research the band in advance. I’m a slower writer by nature anyway. On the music blog, I’ll be working on a link building strategy and possibly trying to use social media to gain backlinks to the blog, which Lisa isn’t too worried about — she built Unreality TV up mostly on organic SEO!

Their battle is really just good search engine optimization and marketing research. I’ll be following this contest throughout the year and I look forward to learning about the techniques that were most effective for them.

Battle Sites

• Gerard’s: http://music.unrealitytv.co.uk
• Lisa’s: http://primetime.unrealitytv.co.uk