Hot off the heels of yesterday’s post I came across another blogger who happened to be discussing linking strategies. It struck me as funny that she calls it relationship blogging and yet she seems to support the elitist model:
Define your brand values. Know what your blog is about and have values. Every established brand has values. That’s what draws us and keeps coming to a brands that we love. Figure out the key values of your blog and identify blogs that share the same values as yours. You’ll have a lot in common. as people.Have a standard of quality. Write down the traits you hold as a standard and look for them before you link. If you’re want a long-term relationship, go for quality and relevance before traffic. [Editors note: don’t quality, relevance and traffic go hand in hand] A quality blog that’s a friend for months or years has lasting value after a spike in traffic is long forgotten.
Look for bloggers who have differentiated their blogs. High-quality, one-of-kind blogs have huge growth potential and the bloggers who run them usually have plenty of marketing savvy to share.
An interesting comment coming from someone who’s copied the same format as a gazillion other blogs, but I digress…
Bloke’s simple Interpretation of the above: “So what can you do for me, huh babe?” And “welcome to my mutual admiration society.”
That’s some relationship. But wait! There’s more! Isn’t the following statement also a contradiction?
Keep current with relationships you already have. Visit and link to the blogs that have been your friends all along. Source.
Ok, so perhaps what she really meant to say was we should only keep relationships with blogs that fit into our “brand“, “standard of quality” or “values“? Just wondering. Or maybe she ought to have entitled the post more aptly: “Interviewing Your Future Blog Partners” don’t you think (rhetorical question).
It’s common knowledge that sharing links with blogs having a high relevancy and pagerank will help to increase our own rank (coming from an SEO perspective of course). So tell us something that we don’t already know.
But is that what blogging is really all about? Should we link only to blogs within our niche, or think like us, or like us, or who can help us get ahead and become a so-called successful blogger?
The last time that I checked the blogosphere was all about the conversation. So since when do all all roads (and conversations) converge to a single opinion? Only in totalitarian regimes like Little Kim’s.
Does success only mean a higher pagerank, how much traffic we sustain or money that we make? You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. But if your scratch doesn’t meet my expectations, forget it buddy.
Somehow I don’t think so (and hope not). Good grief, the blogosphere will become even more splintered, reactionary and elitist than it already is. I don’t know about you but my blogosphere is so much bigger than that.
Think about it. If we all became successful then wouldn’t that just lower the bar and we’d have to start all over again? Just think of the headaches it would cause for Technorati! They would go crazy. No more top 100 bloggers to list.
What would they call the a-listers if we were all to become successful? Reinvent the alphabet perhaps? Or how about this… we’ll call them Super Bloggers! Yeah, I like that. Then again, maybe it would be for the best so we could all blog on a level playing field again. Wouldn’t that be a hoot.
Is this the way we develop our relationships in the real world? (Well maybe some of us do). But speaking for the majority of us, we don’t subscribe to the notion of relationships like gold diggers who interview their potential partner’s resume before dating. You know the type I’m talking about. The brown nosers who have their schnoz so far up the ass of the rich and infamous they can’t see the forest from the pubic hair.
So let me see:
Does he make lots of money? Check!
Does he drive a nice car? Check!
Does he hob-nob in the highest of blog circles? Check!
Does his family lineage have any blue-blood? (Be sure to ask for a DNA sample). The jury is still out on that one!
Does his computer come with dual-core processors, 2 gigs of ram and a 24 inch high def monitor? Check!
Does he have a well known highly ranked blog? Check!
Well I guess five out of six ain’t bad.
