Fellow Dallas blogger, Jennifer Rice, has an interesting post on personal "Link Policy and Building Traffic". She makes a comment that really grabbed me:
"I believe that my blogroll is a reflection of my brand."
Here’s why it grabbed me. I started using blogs last year as e-newsletter and as an extension to my website. As far as websites go, I have a personal dislike for websites that have too much to click on. It is hard to guide your audience to the right message with so many links all over the place. But blogging is a different genre and more conversational, so I’ve reached some semblance of a comfort zone by adding some names (you may note that in my prior blog I never had any blogroll). In support of blogrolls, while they can detract from direct messages one is trying to deliver, they can strengthen the overall feel and brand to one’s blog. That said, I think in some ways they can also make people that you network with (whom are also bloggers) feel excluded.
At least for me, perhaps one day blogging platforms will advance such that corporate bloggers are not as canned in by the technology and can design their blog sites to fit the business needs better. Sometimes the tradeoffs one has to make with respect to blogging strikes me as more of a technology limitation. I have a growing list of features I would like to see for corporate blogging.
In any case, here’s my current link policy (which differs from Jennifer):
- The people I link to are not necessarily my friends. I may not even follow them that regularly or agree with what they blog about. Since I’ve never met some of these people, I may not even like them (just making a point here)! 😉
- That said, based on impression, they embody and represent an area that is important to me from a business perspective. There are three areas: 1) ventures, 2) technology, and 3) evangelism.
- I have also been thinking about adding a fourth category on management, but this category is broader, and it is not yet clear in my mind as to what flavor of management I would add.
- I may change my link policy (and hence, the bloggers in the list) from time to time. The purpose of the links (for me) is not to build traffic, but to expose my readership to other areas without overwhelming them.
Steve Shu
Managing Director, S4 Management Group
you’re right, it depends on the purpose of your blogroll. If you view the blogosphere is a brain (blogs = neurons, links = synapses) then the links to people who will link back allows you to plug into the conversation. I don’t mean reciprocal links per se, but I have blog dialogue (comments & trackbacks) with the folks on my blogroll, which solidifies the network effect. So my blogroll is a list of the ‘neurons’ with whom I’m connected. “neurons that fire together, wire together”… and bloggers that think together, link together. It’s all rather philosophical for me. 🙂 As you have one-way linkage, you probably won’t get as plugged into the blogosphere. But you may not want that, either.
Good Post(s) On Blog Visibility … Will Revisit My Link Policy
Ethan Johnson has a good set of posts on visibility in the blogosphere. Here’s the one the grabbed my attention (you can trackback to the others from his blog). Although I tend not to focus on visibility of new eyeballs