It’s already time to add to the list of ways to make it big online that I posted last Friday, and, at the risk of overstating the obvious, here’s the latest suggestion:

Friends.

Keep many friends, or a posse of regular readers about you online, and the good times are sure to roll.

An example of how a ton of buddies, or at least subscribers to your RSS feed, can make a difference, I think, is very apparent at Airbag Industries, the blog of Californian web designer Greg Storey.

When you can distract yourself from the pleasing, yet minimal design, take a look at the posting frequency. It’s not always daily, sometimes it’s not even weekly. Sometimes there’s only a couple of posts a month.

Now take a look at the number of comments each post has. The most recent post Handkerchief, had, at the time I was writing this, 25 comments.

What’s so unusual about 25 comments though, as you may be asking yourself. The post has been online a couple of days, 25 comments would be par for the course, wouldn’t it?

What may not be immediately apparent though is that the majority of these comments were made within a few hours of the post going online. Overnight, while I was sleeping, in this case.

For while Airbag hadn’t been updated as of late Thursday evening Sydney time, it had by 9am Friday. I watch my RSS reader like a hawk these days, in case you haven’t guessed.

If just 1 per cent of readers leave comments on any given blog, then Airbag had over 2000 readers waiting, apparently with baited breath, for the next post to appear.

That’s pretty good. In fact it’s downright enviable. While I’m sure other blogs would collect the same number of comments, maybe more, how many blogs would do so from such an irregular posting schedule?

While having a large and regular readership is one thing, building it up is quite another matter.

Friendships take time to develop, and I doubt Airbag’s success came overnight, and having been in flight for some six years, there’d also be a little of the consistency factor, that I mentioned last Friday, in the mix as well.

All up though it’s still a reminder of the value of relationships online. And at a time when a certain search engine is becoming particularly heavy handed, and just a tad unpredictable, having friends we can depend on could prove very valuable.