Are You Doing Blogroll Link Exchanges?

We have talked about building backlinks a number of times. One way I have yet to address is doing blogroll link exchanges. I have not yet discussed them because until now I have never really used them. I get the occasional request to exchange links, but to tell you the truth I didn’t really trust them.

As part of building my niche websites I am trying to do blogroll link exchanges with at least 3 related sites per niche website. I have to say I really kind of dreaded going about it, the actual looking, and the asking and well ~ it turned out to be a lot more fun than I expected.

Before we get in to the “how tos” I want to discuss another piece of this puzzle that I have realized over the last couple of months.

I have discussed with friends and readers the importance of using keywords and just “doing what you love”. It’s been an ongoing internal battle with me in fact. I think most probably because I didn’t really know how to do keyword research.

When we started working together, Court gave me some pretty specific instructions. I was trying to “follow the rules” so I did exactly what he said. I have issues following the rules, so I just wanted to follow the process exactly so I would know it works the way it is taught. I began doing my keyword research, just looking for keywords that fit the specs, not necessarily anything I was interested in, just something that really fit.

I didn’t really know what the rest of the process was going to be and later realized it would have been much more fun if I had at least started my research in areas or topics I enjoyed talking/learning/knowing about.

This is my take on keywords vs. what you love. Find keywords that work ~ but look in areas you love.

With that said ~ I did go back and look for keywords in areas I like and found some great ones. This brings us back to the topic of blogroll link exchanges and the reason for my digression will soon become apparent.

How do I find Blogrolls to link with?

There may be easier ways, but the best way I have found is to go to our good friend google and input into the search box: inurl:blogspot your keywords here

Once you do that it is letting google know you are looking for blogger blogs with your keywords in the url. This will include each post’s url, so you should find some pretty related posts/blogs.

This is where it pays to be interested in the topic you are working with.

Now you are going to go through each one of those blogs that came up from your search and look for a couple things.

1. Is it really related to your keyword?

2. Do they have a way to contact them? Sometimes you will really have to look as they will write the email address like momtohann [at] gmail [dot] com which is kind of hard to find if you aren’t looking for it.

3. Do they have a blogroll.

It’s pretty simple, and don’t get too upset if they don’t have the last two. If there is no way to contact them you can always leave your message in a comment on a post.

If they don’t have a blogroll ~ they may start one due to your request. (This just happened to me yesterday)

How Do I Ask For an Exchange?

It can be a little intimidating the first time you send someone a request to do a blogroll link exchange, but really what’s the worst that can happen ~ they send you an email saying sure we charge a 250 dollar one time fee for blogroll links, let us know if you are interested. (You laugh but it happened to me yesterday!)

Just send them a quick note ~ tell them you found their blog and you have a related site, although not in direct competition and you think it might be mutually beneficial to swap blogroll links. Then let them know if they are interested to let you know, and send along the anchor text they would like used in the blogroll. Tell them you will put it up immediately and then let them know the text you would like used for your link.

It really is just that easy.

Remember how I said in the beginning I usually ignore the requests that come in for this site? A lot of people will. You need to expect to send out at least 25 requests to get your 3 or 4 links for each site. It can be a time consuming endeavor. You can always begin outsourcing this part when you are making a little more cash.

I will say, I found some really cool blogs while working on this yesterday, and even added a couple to my RSS feed. This is why I think it is a good idea to work in areas you like, because the more tedious pieces of the puzzle will be just a little more enjoyable.

Benefits of Blogroll Links

There are some huge benefits to having a blogroll link on someone elses blog. Think about it, the blogroll shows up in the sidebar on each and every page of a person’s blog. Depending on how many pages the blog has you immediately get that many new backlinks with appropriate anchor text.

Try to use a variation of your anchor text for each of the 3 or 4 blogroll exchanges you do. You might to Internet Marketing Strategy, How to do Internet Marketing, Internet Marketing for Moms you get it. Try to keep your main keywords together and add words at the beginning or the end. This will give you credit for your keyword, but you won’t get penalized for having too many links with the same anchor text.

There you have it, blogroll link exchanges in a nutshell. I would suggest you get to work on this, it can be a little time consuming ~ once you have your content in your site you can start sending out requests.

If you have any questions please feel free to use the comment section