So I’m sitting here with a parrot screeching in my left ear and trying to think up ways of attracting more visitors to my blog. I’ve been learning about current blogging trends and my how things have changed since I last did this. Social bookmarking sites are all the rage, but in order to make friends I have to socialise with existing ones. The only problem is, I don’t actually have any yet. Which makes this a catch-22 situation.
The advice that seems to be given most often is to comment on other people’s blogs and generally get yourself known that way. However, I’m from the old-school that feels this is a bit spammy. I don’t like commenting just for the sake of having my URL displayed somewhere new so that googlebot thinks I’m really popular.
I’ve been checking out blog link sites and I’m not overly impressed. There are so many of them, it’s impossible to know where to start. A couple looked promising but appear to have been abandoned. One site has served up nearly 10,000 link impressions for my blog, but I’ve not had a single visit. To top it all off, they all ask you to fit your blog neatly into a category or assign keywords. That’s useless to me – I write about whatever comes to mind, anything from aardvarks to zebras. How am I supposed to categorise that?
I have added a little blogroll, but other than that I’m loath to cram the sidebar with links to exchanges and directories which I’m sure nobody will ever look at. I much prefer to keep a clean and concise list of links that won’t get drowned out. It may not be the fashionable thing to do, but that’s the way I like it.