The biggest problem most sites run in to is trying to gain the respect of readers and other blogs in their niche.  Knowing that in order to build up traffic, PR, and links you need to reach out to similar sites, but how do you go about getting them to care about you?  This is tricky because if you hit up sites while you are in your infancy most will just ignore you because you don’t offer any real benefit in return, but how to you get to a point where you can offer something if you can’t get any traffic from them?  I must have e-mail TMZ 20 times before they added me to their blogroll so you have to be willing to handle rejection.

1. Message Boards

Starting out you should look to message boards to find similar sites willing to do some link exchanges.  You will find a lot of the users have new sites that they are trying to build up.  This is usually an easy way to gain some simple link exchanges.Make sure you review the sites you are linking to for original content, how often it is updated, and to see how it fits your site.  Remember that links on your site should provide your users a benefit in some way.

Some sites worth checking out are:

• Site Point
• Name Pros
• Digital Point

2. Social Bookmarking Sites

Sometimes getting traffic is as easy as putting your stuff out there to find.  I am a big believer in obtaining traffic from search since organic traffic is usually more stable, but that doesn’t happen overnight. So until it does make sure you hard work is recognized by using social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit, Fark, MyBlogLog, and many other out on the web to drive some visits to your site.  This should help drive some traffic and get you some stats you can show when building link exchanges.

3. Show Link Love

Even before a site decides to add your link to their site don’t be afraid to show some love by linking to some of their content.  A lot of web site owners will look at the logs to see who is referring them traffic and if you show up a few times it might gain you some props.  Links of the Day posts or referencing them in a post is always a nice way to show another site that you respect what they are doing and in return you will get some respect back.

4. Content is Critical

All the linking, begging, pleading, bookmarking, and whatever else you can think of won’t matter if your content is garbage.  You have to make your site something that people will want to link up with.  Focus on making your content solid from beginning to end.  Make it something that other site owners want their readers to see.  Once you get linked with one solid site it gets much easier to get the blog roll rolling.

Filed under: Blogging strategies, Blogging tips