Let’s have blog connections…but who and where are you?
As I’m still in the early stages of this blog (I’ve had a couple others previously) I’ve got to thinking about how to bring more people to my site. I’m sure it’s an issue that’s come up for many of you out there who’ve wanted to enjoy the great benefits that blogging communication/relationships can bring, but are finding it hard to get noticed. I mean, it’s great knowing theoretically what a blogging community is all about, but I think a few of us need some cold, hard facts about how to get our identity noticed out there in the blogosphere. It’s a giant place; and we really only want to connect with those of similar interests, so how do we do it?
The first step of the process brought me to where? Why, other bloggers of course. At ‘Randomly Amused’s bog post ‘ Tips on getting traffic to your blog‘ I was doing some research about trackbacks and pingbacks (I’ll write more about these soon) when I found this short post, and a link to this other blog site at ‘The Blog Herald: ‘Building blog traffic for newbies’.
The first blog has a few basic principles that you might like to keep in mind if you want to attract more visitors to your online presence. ‘Regarding links, you can link to any and every site on the web, but you will score higher if the links are to sites related to your content, and – more importantly – if the site links back to you. It’s like an Internet handshake. Another important factor is linking to larger, high-profile, big-traffic sites.’
There are some good ideas here, but we do have to question them thoroughly. First of all, after further inspection I have discovered that this blog has been virtually inactive since this post which was written back in January! How much integrity does this blogger hold if they themselves haven’t stuck it out in the blogging trenches? I like the idea of an ‘Internet handshake’, but I would have to say that we should only link to those who relate to our specific content.
The question of whether or not to link to bigger sites needs asking as well. You may simply be seen as a ‘gold digger’ who wants to get free attention without working for it. Or, the so-called ‘A-list’ bloggers may be too busy with their workload and already huge link list to even bother connecting back to you. I guess there’s no hurt in trying, but I would again reiterate that taking the time and effort to search out blogs that relate to your field of interest will most probably produce more ‘real’ connections with people.
The second link to the Blog Herald has a more comprehensive list of ideas to work with. This seems to be a blog that has stuck around for awhile, and which is written in a collaborative effort by multiple authors. This point in their list of how to improve blog traffic backs up what I said earlier about linking to popular bloggers:
‘Link to other small sites without exchange, either through side bar or post: linking to big sites is great in showing what you’re reading, but does nothing to build up your readership because they nearly always never return the favour, indeed a number of them will steal your stories or ideas without any attribution at all. Smaller sites on the other hand are often stoked that you’ve linked to them and will return the favour without asking, even if they don’t, you’ve still done a good deed.’
Read through the posts. Both writers push the point that the most important factor of all is to ‘write, write, and write.’ The Blog Herald pushes the point, ‘Post regularly and post often. It not only brings readers back regularly but it means the spiders from the search engines will return more frequently indexing your entire site, and you’ll start getting hits from the search engines.’
This is another of their important points: ‘Submit your blog to ALL the search engines.’ The more you write, the more your key words will get picked up by Google and the other information-gatherers.
Jesse Somer is a blogger who wants to connect with other bloggers of similar thinking. Come on, let’s make it happen! Give me some advice ‘blogmasters’!
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