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This is part of the the book BLOGTASTIC! Growing and Making a Difference Through Blogging. You can read the table of contents and follow the book on this page:
See the table of contents for the book here: BLOGTASTIC project
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BLOGTASTIC!: Earn links to your blog
Simply speaking, a link is a gift. You have to treat it that way. You wouldn’t ask a friend or colleague to give you gifts. You shouldn’t ask your blogging friends for links.
Imagine a stranger comes to you at a networking event. Before you can even say hello, the stranger says “give me a gift.” What would your first reaction be? You might be shocked, angry, or upset by this rude behavior. Now, imagine you have dozens or hundreds of people asking you for a gift each day. You’d probably get jaded and eventually just ignore these requests.
Successful bloggers get frequent requests for links or link exchanges. Some of these requests are even automated. If you add your request to this queue, you will probably wind up annoying these people. They may even put you on their blacklists, and so they may not listen to you even when you have something good to say.
There are three simple ways to get links:
1. Consistently write compelling content.
2. Provide a high “return on investment for an interaction”(ROII).
3. Create content that is link-worthy.
One more thing to observe here is that when you ask for links, you’re openly announcing that you have little influence in the blogosphere.
Blogging Tip: Focus on earning links rather than asking for them
If you are really, really good at something, then it is hard for people to ignore you. If you maintain an excellent blog, then it is hard to imagine nobody will link to you.
You will definitely need to put in more work to earn links than to ask for links. Earning links is fool-proof strategy, and asking for links is a crap-shoot strategy.
Rajesh Setty is an entrepreneur, author and speaker based in Silicon Valley. He maintains another blog called Life Beyond Code and tweets as @UpbeatNow
