Savvy Affiliate

Day 32 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

One essential part of running a successful blog is building strong relationships with other bloggers.  These relationships will be crucial to building traffic to your site, helping you get in on product launches and learn of things before the crowd, and for working together to create more value than any one blogger could do by themselves.

Building relationships isn’t necessarily easy

Unlike networking at a job or at school, most of the people you meet blogging you only know online.  It makes it harder to build a solid relationship with other bloggers when all you know of them is their name (or pseudonym) and what they write.  It is easier to network with people face to face.  The simple fact that blogging is virtual makes it more difficult.

But networking while blogging is just as important as at a job

In some jobs networking can be very important to your long term success.  A manager, salesman, politician, actor, can gain success as much by who they know as what they have done in their own right.  That isn’t to say that a person can’t break into any of those fields, but having connections does make it easier.

Blogging is no different.  Having friends with popular websites, or making friends with people who run popular websites, is one shortcut to success in your blog.  Speaking strictly in terms of traffic and search rankings, it is better to have one link from a really successful site (say PR 6-7) than a dozen links from relatively unknown sites (PR 3)

Blog networking can be similar to work networking

Although I would rather have a link from a highly trafficked site than a rarely visited one, you also need to think long term.  Just as at a workplace you try to meet everyone, and avoid offending anyone, because you never know who is going where, you never know what small Blog today will become tomorrow’s superstar.

It is not at all unusual for a blog to go from zero to huge in 18 months or less.  The lesson to be learned here is that it can oftentimes be more beneficial to focus your networking on less popular sites.  When the blossom, the rising tide will help lift all their outgoing links in value.  Additionally, it can often be much easier to get ahold of the proprietor of a smaller site.  And they will be more open to building a relationship.  Although someone like Problogger is very good at responding to e-mail, he must get dozens, if not hundreds, of e-mails every day.  People would like him to check out their site, people want a link, people are trying to build a relationship.  However someone like me gets very few blog related e-mails a day.  An e-mail to me asking for a site review, or offering a link exchange, or simply requesting that I check out your site and add it to my blogroll is much more likely to get attention than a similar one would to a John Chow.

Some Tips for Networking

1) Mind your manners - Being civil and courteous are just as important while blogging as in the real world.  If another blogger does you a favor, and links to you, or posts a guest blog, or gives you a review, make sure you take the time to thank them.  Although it isn’t always necessary to give them a return link (you can if you want to) a simple note saying you appreciated their effort is always appreciated

2) When pinging try to deep link - Deep links on your site are very important for ranking well in search engines and driving traffic.  Just as importantly, to you, deeplinking a blog is how you can get another bloggers attention.  I am currently getting 6 or 7 links a day to my blog, mostly due to Viralink.  But most of those links go to my Blog not a deep post.  As a result they don’t leave a trackback, and I don’t give them as much attention!    I always lookup my trackbacks, but most links to my main site I just assume to be a viralink and don’t necessarily follow.  I imagine other bloggers have similar experiences.  Do both them and you a favor and deeplink

3) Make use of new tools - Things like Mybloglog and Top commentator Plugin are great for finding out who is checking out your site.  Use these tools to find who frequents your site, these are your best bets in terms of networking.  It takes a lot less work to change someone from a visitor to acquaintance to friend, than to start with someone who doesn’t come to your site and has no idea who you are.