The Politics of Blogrolling

The Blog Herald is running a series on promoting your blog, and Duncan asked for some feedback on the blogrolling aspect, so here goes.

About a month-6 weeks ago, I set aside a weekend (yes, that's how long it took!) and sent out somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 individual e-mails begging for a spot on some apparently like-minded blogrolls. Because this was my social activist blog I was begging for, I didn't link to them first because I recognized they may or may not be supportive of this particular effort.

Since then, only a handful have responded at all, but those who did had plenty of questions (which I was more than happy to answer) and not only gave us a link in their blogrolls, but blogged about the campaign itself. Just those few mentions within a few days resulted in what used to be about a month's traffic when that blog was just being visited by the established readership, with no promotion.

This got me to thinking: when it comes to Google juice and Technorati kinds of authority, a link is a link, after all, so is a blogroll link important enough to work that hard to try to get? I only get blogroll visits maybe a dozen times a month, and most of those come from my other blogs and websites. Your mileage may vary, of course; everybody's got different ideas and intentions for their blogs.

My point is here that it may be easier to get other blogs to mention you once or twice using trackback, or when trackback isn't available, simply mentioning blogs you've discovered as something your readers may find interesting. This way seems more productive, as it's beginning to look like the blogroll is evolving into something a bit different than it used to be.

Comments

[duncan riley]

Trudy
you hit it directly on the head, although not everyone will be
confortable with sending out 200 emails, but like all marketing it
comes down to a case of numbers, the more asked the higher the chance
of success, and in this case the time invested in insuring quality of
request also helped.

Trevor, on your comments your correct on not getting alot of traffic,
a couple of blogroll inclusions really don't make a lot of difference,
but multiplied into hundreds and thousands does. Even if you only get
a few click thrus a month, they are all potential new readers that can
become regular readers. Its the essence of viral marketing, that even
at the smallest of levels can and does work.

In terms of trackbacks etc absolutely, but be sure to make sure what
your linking is relevant to the topic.

[Trevor Cook]

I've got a big blogroll because it is my bloglines subscription - so its just what I read. I get very little traffic from other bloggers blog rolls. Some links in posts also generate very little traffic. But some like Scobleizer can be very productive. Amazingly though, one of the best traffic-generating activities along these lines is to put comments and trackbacks on other people's sites. Some generate little if anything but some like Seth Godin and Marginal Revolution can be amazing. So if I were you I wouldn't spend a weekend sending out emails. I'd hop onto a few like-minded sites and put up some considered comments and trackbacks so that people interested in that topic include you on their list of preferred sources (be it roll, bookmarks, aggregator subscription).
Everyone has blogrolls and I must admit I very rarely look at anyone's roll anymore though I used to look at them avidly and reciprocate with anyone I saw who had me on theirs. But as time goes on - who cares about all that mechanical stuff?