Blog Marketers Missing The Boat With Blogroll?

Last year when I jumped on the blog bandwagon I was part of pay membership site that was run by Haden McCabe, the membership site was called “Revenue Insider” and I found the marketing ideas and tactics taught by Haden to be very similar to my own style. The difference however was that Haden was using wordpress blog software to drive his sites for several reasons that I have been over before (ease of posting new content, style layout, css, ect).

At the time I realized that I was really missing the boats with “blogs” as they were then (and are even more so today) very popular online. With this popularity I thought it was time to explore what this movement to blogs was all about. Haden began to share the steps in which he launches his blogs with the group and also release several simple and elegant looking wordpress themes that allowed for simple well blended integration of the adsense code.

I started my first blog and did everything Haden mentioned, over the next month I started to see traffic build to the site as it began to rank well in MSN. For my next blog I decided I need my own custom blog theme, a theme that was not being used by other bloggers which would give my site a unique look.

The second blog site I launched was a sporting site, I hired a coder to put together the theme for me and was quite happy with the result. I also noticed that the theme contained a section called “blogroll” where the admin of the blog can easily add links to relevant sites within the blogs theme. I also noticed during this time that Haden had removed this feature, as did many other bloggers that were “marketing” online. The thought was that any outbound links from your site give your site visitors a chance to leave your site without you getting paid. Not to mention the loss of pagerank.

While it is true that a blogroll section can lead visitors off your blog to another site which can result in a loss of revenue it is also important to understand how a blogroll section can also help a site to gain incoming links from other established sites within the same market. Further I think it is important to understand that blogs were started as a means for webmasters to share their favorite sites online with their visitors. Understanding that many bloggers within the blogsphere link heavily to other sites can be very beneficial to those that understand how to make use of this “blogging tool”.

Now when I launch a blog I always link to quality sites within the blogroll section after I have say 25 posts to my blog (I don’t want people finding my blog in the first days as their is not enough content to pull in links). The next step then is to begin to visit these sites every now and then, you will want to click the link from your own blogroll. This way the webmaster of the site your visiting will see your site in their referral logs.

The last step in this process is to simply comment now and then on a recent post, often times when a blogger see’s that you have added their site to your blogroll they will add yours as well! I usually do this for several weeks to several months. About every three to six months I evaluate the sites within my blogroll, some are their in hopes of my site receiving a links which some might be their simply because I feel the site is a great resource for myself and my readers. Generally speaking I think a lot of webmasters are not linking out enough, I know for several years I hardly linked out to sites at all. Now however I find it helpful for myself and helpful to my target visitor.

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Posted in Inbound Juice, Free Blog Scripts, Web Marketing Strategy