Blogging 101

[Boogie]

Link Exchanges

Now that you've created some articifial link exchanges, have done some trackbacks, and have written some other blogs lookin for link swaps your traffic should be fairly reasonable.

500 hits a day? 700? 1000?

Once you've seen a reasonable influx of daily hits from various sources you should now begin to recieve emails from other folks who are looking for link swaps... presuming you're using a pretty obvious way to conact yourself.

One of the hardest decisions is to pick which blogs you'll want to swap with. The link list/TGP mentality says 'anyone with traffic' but that's not always the case with blogging.

First off you'll want to get an diea about their traffic. Check their alexa.com rating.

Secondly you'll want to get an idea of their PR and google backlinks (as well as yahoo backlinks). Use the google toolbar for this, or, use some smart googling techniques. See how many pages they've got indexed in google. check how recent their cache is. Check how many backlinks are pointing towards their site.

All of these should be important factors in who you decide to swap with.

Most importantly, however, is that your link outs to blogs should be valuable content as well as hard link exchanges.

Lets say for example I'm running a blog on gay sex. Should I link to straight sites? Should I link to a Gonzo blog?

Generally its best to exchange with blogs that either are the same theme or are directly connected to your theme. For example if you're doing a 'babe blog', it would be natural to link to any 'solo girl' blogs, or even an amateur girls blog. Perhaps its not so far fetched of an idea to link to a hardcore blog either. But know where to draw the line.

This way you're swapped surfers are generally always going to be into the topic of both your blog and theirs. No reason to send lesbian hits over to a hardcore site most days, they're just going to hit the back button. You want the folks who are going to stick around, add you to their RSS reader, and click all of your links. That's where the real fun is