NB: This is the 10th installment in The Inspired Solo’s Build a Better Business Blog in One Month series. Designed to help solo lawyers and other professionals boost their blog’s performance, the series consists of a daily lecture and task (or tasks) that focus on one “blog improvement project” at a time. Each post in the series is tagged with “[BBBB1]“. You can start the program at any time. Catch up with other BBBB1 posts here.

Build a Better Business Blog, One Block At a Time

Day 10 Lecture

Reach Out to a Fellow Blogger

Today, we’re going to be building on the work we began last week (see: Day 8: Expand Your Blog Community) and yesterday with our foray into blog-commenting as a traffic and relationship-building strategy by reaching out and building relationships with other bloggers.

It’s really this simple:

The secret to high SERPs (Search Engine Result Placement): backlinks — links from reputable, relevant blogs to your blog.

The secret to backlinks: relationships with other site owners and in particular other bloggers.

In some ways, this is an easy lesson to learn because it’s basically all the stuff we already learned in kindergarten:

• Express an interest. Learn what you can about your new blog-buddy. Read her blog, for starters — not just the front page. Really dive in and get to know this person’s story. Read the about page; read the very first blog post she ever wrote. Visit the other blogs she links to. Now you have a conversation starter.
• Be a good listener. By which we almost always mean “don’t just talk about yourself, and don’t use her time to talk as nothing more than preparation for your next turn.” Ask open-ended questions. Don’t assault her right out of the gate with a demand (or even a polite request) for a backlink or advice or a blog review. That stuff takes time and her time’s just as valuable as yours. Make your email short, compliment something about her blog sincerely, and … then what? You have a few options. Read on.
• Expect nothing in return, but hope for a relationship. Let’s get this out of the way right now: Builing a relationship is NOT exchanging Christmas presents at the office party, OK? It’s not a tit-for-tat quid pro quo exchange. Bloggers are pretty smart folks. They can tell when someone’s approaching them purely for what they can do to further the email-writer’s agenda. What you’re after is a relationship — a friendship, of sorts, one that’s going to mutually benefit the participants.
• Look for ways to be helpful. Here’s where your previous research comes in handy. From reading her blog, you’ll know a few things about your new blog-buddy — her interests, her current projects, the topics that fascinate her enough to write about them on her blog. That’s good info to have. Now you can look through your own wealth of digital info — your subscribed-to blogs, your email newsletters, your contacts — and find something that matches up with the blogger’s agenda. Find a way to help her, and offer it. Coming up blank? Offer to write a guest post. (But be careful here. Approaching very popular bloggers right off the bat with a “Can I write a guest post?” request is pretty much the same thing as asking for a backlink. Use this one cautiously, and make sure you’ve got a reasonable expectation of a positive response.)
• Share your toys. OK, this one’s not really applicable to blogging. I just think it’s nice. But then again, maybe it is applicable. If you have a pretty nifty solution to an expressed problem the blogger has been struggling with, share it, step by step. I’ve made more than a few friends by sharing my affinity for Levenger’s Circa notebooks.

What bloggers do you want to become friends with? Preferably ones that do not directly compete with you, but write about subjects that are related to yours. If you practice estate planning law in Houston, another estate planner in Houston is not the best target for this particular exercise. But an estate planner in Los Angeles may well be an excellent choice, as would a tax attorney in Houston, a financial planner in Houston, or a top-tier real estate agent in Houston.

Finding the best way to approach a blogger to strike up a relationship can be tricky. I advise a slow, steady approach. Read the other blogger’s site regularly for a few weeks. Comment on occasion — being careful to avoid self-serving links and offering up a substantive contribution to the discussion. Then, perhaps when you see an opening, or when you feel comfortable creating your own, email the blogger.

Introduce yourself in a few short words or sentences, and offer up something that might be of value — a link, a reference, a book suggestion, a contact, an opinion, a piece of information.

And what about your blog? You don’t even need to mention it, specifically (unless the “thing of value” is a post you’ve written). Simply put the link in your email signature (which you should always do, anyway).

Task: Connect With Another Blogger

Your task, which you may need to build up to, is to reach out to a blogger you don’t know. If it’s a blogger whose site you are unfamiliar with, take a few weeks first to build up to sending an email. Read through the blog, including its archives. Become familiar with the blogger’s story. Comment carefully on a few posts. Then, when the timing feels appropriate, drop the blogger a line. Continue to build on the relationship you’ve started in the future by keeping in touch, and continuing to participate on the other blogger’s site.

As with all relationships, if after you’ve given this one a fair bit of time and attention you still feel this is awfully one-sided, and the side is yours? Then you should consider cutting that blogger loose and moving on. Life’s too short to keep fishing in stale waters, and every relationship — be it the online, or the offline variety — ought to be fairly equal over time in its give-and-take for both parties. When they aren’t, my advice is to cut your losses and move on to friendlier pastures.