Web Marketing all-in-one for Dummies®

Chapter 5. Getting Involved on Other Blogs

In This Chapter

• Why connecting with other bloggers is important

• Seeing how to connect with other bloggers

• Minding your manners

• Blog carnivals: The good and the bad

Your blog will grow if more people find it and like it. But, for your blog to grow, more people will have to find it and like it. An Internet marketing Catch-22, if you will.

There is a pretty simple solution, though. Other bloggers have already gone through this process. They've attracted the readers and have a loyal audience. If you strike up a conversation with them and they like what you have to say, they'll pass you along to their audience. Instant publicity.

This approach might sound manipulative or cynical, but it's not. Established bloggers keep their audience by presenting great information. Some of that information is stuff they write on their own; some of it, though, is new stuff — quite possibly your stuff — they find in day-to-day research. (See Chapter 4 of this minibook to read about tracking other blogs.)

So, think of this progression as a kind of online social compact: You present content with great value. Other bloggers find it and pass it along to their audience by writing about it and linking to your post. They get some credit for finding what you wrote. In exchange, you get more visitors and more links.

Your job, then, when you first launch your blog, is to connect with some of those bloggers.

Connecting with Other Bloggers

Step 1: Find the bloggers with whom you want ...