Blog circle?

[Emroy]

I know a few of us on these forums have blogs ... So I thought it might be a good idea if perhaps we promoted each others blogs?

Does everyone have an RSS feed? How about we sign up to eachothers blogs and then when a new post in made, we can all Digg, Stumble, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit ... etc eachothers posts?

What are you thoughts?

If your interested, post your blog link here.

www.emroy.com.au/blog

[bradzo]

Jake - great idea.

That is what is taught in the 30DC - to get a team together and do exactly what you've described - Digg, Stumble, Facebook etc each other - it gets the links happening.

My main site is my blog - its in my signature.

Come on everyone - jump onboard - who knows where it'll lead! (pun intended)

[Emroy]

Bradley,

Nice blog ... You don't have any social networking icons so I can RT or share the posts?

Perhaps we'll make a link circle, add it to our blogs and then add each other to our links. Good for SEO I'd imagine.

What are your thoughts?

[Aidan]

Hi Guys,

That sort of arrangement can work well if:

There is some form of control on ensuring the work gets shared out and actually completed, not leaving all the work to Emroy and Bradzo.

and the links to and from your site are not reciprocal and are to/from topically related websites.

Random links from your site can be potentially damaging to your seo efforts so do be careful if linking from your own. Bookmarking each others posts from the social sites won't do any harm

[bradzo]

Hi Jake

I put the Stumbleupon, Twitter, Facebook and Delicious links in the top right.
Did they not appear?

And right at the top, it says Subscribe to Feed - does that not show either?
Grrr.

I'll add a plugin so the social networking sharing shows up for each post.

Thanks for the feedback, and the follow on Twitter.

I think a link circle would be worthwhile - and I'd imagine it'd be good for SEO.
But as always, (and I'm as guilty of it as anyone for NOT doing so) checking your stats and seeing where people come from etc is important.

Cheers!

[Emroy]

@Bradzo ...Theres simple plugins that you can get (Click on one of my posts, then go down tot he bottom of the post and see the bookmarking icons ... Click for instance twitter) It will automatically bring up a page in twitter with the title of the blog and a link in your twitter window.

Just a suggestion, might make it easier for us advertising your work.

@Aidan... Ahh, thats a good point. Thanks for pointing that one out. Perhaps we can break the blogs up into different categories? Say different categories for business / health / etc? will that work?

[bradzo]

Jake - yep, just trying to find my Share and Enjoy plugin and noticed 260 spam comments on my other blog! argh. Better go setup Akismet.

@Aidan - good point about the reciprocal links - better for all of us to only link to "like" sites.

Thanks for the great ideas guys.

[Aidan]

You could organise the co-op (if I may call it that for now) so that links from a health site were only to other health sites etc as long as all the health sites did not end up with a similar list of links in their blogroll or links sections.

That would likely flag the arrangement to Google as a link swopping scheme or a purchased links scheme - same thing really and bad news.

A better approach would be for links from the content of posts to link to posts on other sites or even to the other's homepage in that case.

Ideally though the links should appear non reciprocal but more random (3 way is easily spotted too!)

In-content links are great links to give and get, particularly from related sites but can also be used for un-related links. That way a health site commenting on where they found great tax advice could legitimately link to the non related site from an in-content link.

Hope that helps