In my last blog, I talked about leaving comments on blogs in order to get the blog owners to notice you, and consequently link to you. Nowhere in that blog did I tell you to e-mail a bunch of sites and ask them to add you to their blogroll. (A blogroll is a list of blogs that a site will put into their sidebar, and that list of blogs usually corresponds very closely to the topic of that blog, meaning you likely won’t find a blog about politics in the blogroll of a cooking blog, and vice-versa.) E-mailing other blogs is something a lot of people do, and I’m not saying that you can’t. I have added blogs onto my blogroll from people who have e-mailed me.
It’s not my preferred method of doing it, however, and on some sites, this may backfire in your face because the owner may see you as spamming them. A lot of those requests go something like this, “Hi, I have a blog about XYZ and I want you to link to it on your site. Thanks!” and then the name of the blog owner. I look at those requests and just shake my head. Talk about bad manners. A good request would go something like this, “Hi, I came across your blog while I was searching for blogs that cover the XYZ topic. I couldn’t believe all of the information that I found on your site! You’ve done a great job in compiling all of these articles. I thought I knew a lot of the subject, but there was stuff on here I had never heard of. Thanks for doing such a great job, and when you have a moment, if you want to check out my blog and tell me what you think of it, I would love to have you visit! I have already added you to my blogroll because I can tell your site is a must see for people interested in XYZ, and if you like my site, I would love to be added to your blogroll. Thanks for your time – have a great day!”
Yes, my version is a lot longer, and yes, longer means more time spent writing it. BUT (and this is important!) nobody would consider it to be spam, and you’re much more likely to actually receive links this way, vs the first way where almost nobody would link to you.
The most important sentence in there was this one, “I have already added you to my blogroll.” Before ever asking for a link from another site, you must first link to that site from your site. Always. Anything else is considered in very poor taste, and most people will delete your e-mail without a response, and consider it spam. If you want to receive a link, you must first give a link. Always.
I think I stressed that point enough 😛 but if you have any questions, leave me a comment below and I’ll be sure to answer it.
Before you worry about links and blogrolls and all the rest, you MUST put together a quality blog that others will want to link to. If you don’t, all of your work will be for naught. High quality content first and foremost, every time.
But, how do you find out what the page ranking is for a site in the first place? There are a couple of different ways – check out my next blog where I discuss the options!
This was part of a series on blogging. If you haven’t read the other entries in this series, make sure to check out the summary page for a listing of all blogging articles. Comments and feedback are always welcome – feel free to leave them below or send me an e-mail at Hava L {at} Families dot com. Thanks for reading!