Effective Web Relations with Other Bloggers

Never underestimate what other people will do for you. It can be the making of a blog and community, but may rely totally on someone else.

Since my first blog I have always tried to keep good relations with other bloggers and website owners in my niche. I try and do this because I had great success using these methods with my first ever blog. Although I didn’t know it at the time, me emailing every site which was like mine and exchanging a link was doing me a great deal of good. I wish I had the statistics to show you. Unfortunately though I only realised the other week what my contacts were doing for me.

Communication Is the Key

When I started my first blog I was desperate to build a good following and get some traffic, as I was very inexperienced within the market of ‘making a blog’ and ‘marketing a blog’ I chose to go down a route which you would take in real life… making friends. It’s a fundamental part of starting any kind of business, get the right contacts and you will be able to achieve anything…

Businesses from all around the world will tell you that setting up a good relationship with their suppliers and other parts of the ‘food chain’ were as important as having the right idea and finance to start that idea. Why? Because with a good relationship with the people around you, you can help increase peoples awareness of your website and therefore increase the likelihood of making some money from those people.

The Impact of Good Relationships

We can see it all over the web these days, good relationships will help you increase your traffic, there’s no denying it. Websites from Digg to Twitter all allow people to submit content from website, and this means you will get a massive increase in traffic from them. Although people primarily submit content they think is good, they will also submit content which has been written by a credible source, or by one of their friends.

This means that creating a good image for your website and getting involved with the people who read your website will likely increase the number of people coming to your website and because of that you are likely to make more money. As well as this it will increase the number of people which will be part of your community, consequently improving on how much people will publicise your website again.

As well as this a good relationship with your readers/visitors will help you sell products and services, as people will trust you more, meaning they will be much more confident in handing over their hard-earned cash, resulting in more money in your pocket.

My Story of a Community Member

When I had my first blog, I advertised my blog wherever I could and as it was to do with PC gaming news, there were a lot of forums, blogs and communities to do this in. A couple of weeks after contacting a website owner I started receiving a lot more traffic to my blog. At first I couldn’t point the finger at one location because the traffic was coming from many different websites. At this point I also started talking to the website owner I had contacted quite a lot and found out that he had been going around the web and promoting my website! This included telling his friends, posting links on website and even using his own website to promote my blog.

Now I’m not saying this will happen to everyone, as it is a extreme case, but if you can get your name out there with a good image, then you are likely to get some people helping you out, for nothing in return.

How to Improve Relations

The part you’ve been waiting for, how to actually improve your relationship with fellow bloggers to start reaping the rewards.

Join In With Your Community – It’s great to have people posting comments on your blog and feeling like you have a community, but if you really want this community to come along and help you out, you need to join in yourself. So instead of just accepting all the comments and not really reading them, read them all and respond to some of them, it doesn’t have to be all of them, jut a small number so that people notice you are making an effort to respond to questions and generally just join in.

Join Forums Location in Your Niche – Another important way to get people to like you online is by making an impression. This can be done on community forums which cover your niche, but aren’t run by you. Joining in and helping people out will improve your image dramatically. As well as this, if you give good advice and answer questions well, people will feel a lot more confident in your abilities and therefore may visit your website.

Help Out Others – If you want people to help you, help them. It’s not hard, just take a few moments every day to help promote some other peoples blog. Don’t make it too obvious you’re doing this for your own reward though, do it because you want to and you actually like the blogs/websites content. Hopefully the owner may return the favour.

Guest Post – If you feel you can get guest post on another website, and then do it. Not only will it increase your traffic whilst that post is new, but it will make you look a lot better within the community, as you aren’t just posting on your website to make money. When posting on other people’s websites you are helping them out, which will not only make them friendlier with you, but will improve your image with readers of the guest post too.

Image: Danilo Rizzuti / FreeDigitalPhotos.net