It's rather pointless to write a business blog about marketing, public relations, customer service, personnel management, internet technology, finance, or search engine optimization, and have no one read it.
While maintainng a small circle of devoted followers, may be fine for an online diary or journal, it's of little value to to business blog. For any company blog to be a success, it needs to multiply its readership.
One way to get more traffic is by trading links with other blogs. Link trading is the process of placing your blog's link on another blog's site. They in turn link back to yours. It is a fair exchange.
There are a number of benefits to link swaps that are easily over looked.
One advantage of your link appearing on another blog is the implied endorsement you are receiving. A reader of that web site will feel, that if their favourite blogger reads your posts, then your blog might be worthwhile reading too. Often the blogger who hosts your link, will mention or review your blog within a daily post. That added exposure provides even more reason for the casual surfer to click over to your site.
The extra traffic resulting from a link exchange is fairly obvious. Less noticed is the high quality of the referred visitors. Since they surfed over from a blog, that features similar content to yours, they are very likely to bookmark your blog, and return in the future. After all, you are providing information that they already find interesting and helpful.
The search engines will rank your blog much higher if you have a large number of incoming links. If the links are from some sites that have content similar to yours, the search engines value the links even higher. The leading search engine Google considers an incoming link to be a "vote" in support of your web site. The more incoming links your blog has, the more important that Google will rate it.
Creating link exchanges with other bloggers often has the additional advantage of finding new friends. As you get to know the other blog writers, you may often be able to find other ways to cooperate. One very powerful way to work together is to guest blog on your new colleague's site. By writing a special guest column, or even a series of columns, you can reach an even wider audience.
The benefits of exchanging links with other bloggers are unlimited.
Now is the time to start making those link swaps.
You'll be very pleased with the results.
