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3 Easy Steps to Persuade a Quality Blogger to Link to You

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Linking Relationships

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The blogosphere is a web of connections made by links from blog to blog. The strongest relationships and the links that last longest are those that are made between bloggers.

If you want a link from a blogger you’ve not yet met, you’re really asking for a vote of trust. The link I give to your blog or your blog post means that I’ve tied my name to yours. Naturally any blogger would be more inclined to give your link a home, if you show it will be in the blogger’s best interest.

Who wouldn’t want to link to you if your link improved their readers’ experience in some meaningful way?

3 Easy Steps to Persuade a Quality Blogger to Link to You

Choose carefully when finding home for your links. Hopefully, you’re starting a long-term relationship. You want to be part of a network of quality people. Let’s imagine that the blogger you want to link to is me.

Here’s how you might persuade me in three easy steps.

  1. Do Your Homework

    2. Get to know me and my blog. Make a a project of finding out who I am and what I write about. Study my blog and my readers’ comments. In other words, do a little homework.

    So many people peddle their blog posts from blog to blog without even bothering to read the front page. You’ll stand out if when you say, “I’ve been reading your blog . . .” and what follows that shows that you really have. Chances are, if you show a real interest in my blog and your idea is off, I might suggest a new idea for you to try.

  2. Plan a Link that Adds Value

    3. No one needs a link on their blogroll. No one needs a random blog post that’s unrelated to a blog’s readership. Find a reason that your post that ties well to one I wrote. Show how your post expands on a topic that my readers have an interest in. Explain how the subject your content compliments mine or offers a point of view my readers might enjoy.

  3. Persuade an Individual (not sir or madam)

    4. When you send that email, be personal and gently persuasive. Don’t talk about yourself; talk about what you are offering.

    Please be simple and brief. Realize that I wasn’t waiting with nothing to do until your email came and that I probably still have plenty to get done. Doesn’t everyone these days? I want to see a compelling reason for your using your link. I can’t say “yes” to everyone, but it’s not fun to say “no” either. It’s real luck when a clear thinker comes along — someone who knew exactly what to offer that really does add value for my readers.

You lose nothing if I refuse. Make a good case, and a friendship could be starting. If you researched the blog you want to link, you’ve probably learned a few new things.

If your post goes up, you’ve made a connection to a quality blog. Hopefully that blog will grow into old age with yours, sharing many links along the way. We’ll all meet to discuss how the bloggers who come asking for links never seem to do their homework, don’t show how they’ll add value or personally offer a compelling reason why we might want to link.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

The Ageless Project: David Wilkinson

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A Problogger in His Teens

by Keith Dsouza

Did you think that age could deter you from blogging? Did you think that a 13 year old only can accomplish things in school?

Well lets break the myth today. Blogging is ageless.

David Wilkinson has shattered any idea that blogging is restricted by age. . . .

David Wilkinson, a 13-year-old blogger from Manchester, England, was born on February 15th, 1994. He has been actively blogging since the age of 12. In that short time, David has become a full-time Problogger and Internet Professional without affecting his studies. He is also the CEO and founder of Zi Media.

David also likes to play golf in his spare time or hooks on with his Xbox 360 or his gaming PC. He also has an interest in Photography but meekly says that he is not a expert at that yet.

Vital Stats

Name: David Wilkinson
URL: http://www.tech-zi.net
Birthdate: 15th February 1994
Birthplace: Manchester, England – UK
Current Location: Manchester, England – UK

What David Blogs About

David writes at Techzi.net and also owns Affiliate Defined. David writes about technology and has quite an engaging way of doing it. He mixes humor with his writings that many of regular readers have come to appreciate.

Reading through his blog, I was surprised at how easily a reader could digest the information he provides and laugh while doing it.

David’s categories include Internet, Gaming, Gadgets, Web2.0 and many more.

Getting Candid With David

Here are a few questions we asked David and what he had to say. .

Successful Blog (SB): How old were you when you came across blogging?
David Wilkinson (DW): I started blogging in July 2006 which would have made me 12. Admittedly, it was complete fluke that I ran across blogging at all and I have a spammy AdSense arbitrage website to thank, ironically enough.

SB: How did the interest generate within you, knowing that you are of such a tender age?
DW: I’ve always been an entrepreneur – trying to sell things to my friends and try out new methods of work. I’ve also always showed a natural interest and a burning curiositry for anything out-of-the-ordinary, or even slightly different. Blogging presented itself to me in a strange way (see above), but I don’t regret it for a second.

SB: Did something influence you to take up blogging?
DW: I’d always had a passion for writing and like to have my views known. I knew XHTML and a bit of CSS and with the help of Blogger managed to get a site running pretty quickly. I soon picked up on sites like Engadget and Gizmodo, along with the other “usual” technology blogs you’ll run across who dictated the direction my writing took. My style, being arguably different from the masses – aimed to please and not just inform and reading my blogs for the first time, alot of people won’t pick up on the underlying humor and jokes that long-term reads will. I guess my biggest influence however was the relationship I had with my readers, and for that – I thank them.

SB: What are your most memorable experiences when you started blogging?
DW: Ha! One stands out particularly strongly, as it happens and it was perhaps one of my first ever backlinks I was to receive. I’d reviewed NABAZTAG, a French Wi-Fi Rabbit-turn-evil-villain-turn-RSS-reader-turn-alarm-clock and the makers had picked up on the article and linked to it. Being new to the whole concept of blogging, I went off and wrote three or four posts ranting on my blog about how “famous the blog was”. Oh boy – I had a long way to go… 😉

SB: Do you think blogging is ageless? If not a ProBlogger, would you have still chosen to blog regularly at your age?DW: Ageless? Certainly. If not a ProBlogger would I have chosen to blog? Bear in mind, when I started to blog, I *wasn’t* a ProBlogger. I was just your average geeky kid (which I’m proud to say I still am). Today, I’m not sure I *would* class myself as a ProBlogger. Six months ago, maybe, but my focuses and earnings have shifted from one place to another and today my main focus is affiliate marketing. Despite this, I have to admit that the blogosphere is one of the safest and most fun environments online with such a community element to it that it’s hard not to grin broadly at the random adventures of Timmy the cat and Darren Rowse’s next big thing.

SB: Could you give us some quotes on how blogging can be an ageless experience.
DW: It’s nothing like a 9-5 job. There’s nothing stopping you from doing your schoolwork AND blogging. I guess it’s flexible “working” hours, to be honest. There’s nobody to tell me off (besides my blog readers) or whine at me for not writing (besides my blog readers) or dock my pay if I turn up for “work” late (besides my advertisers). 😉 Hehe… At the end of the day though, it’s one of them things that ANYBODY can do with a keyboard and a mouse. You don’t need to be 18. You don’t have to be younger than 60. You don’t have to have an IQ of ten-thousand and one. You don’t even have to write well so long as you have an interesting story to tell. A breath of fresh air in a controlled world.

Thanks, David. We couldn’t agree more.

Be ageless and let the world know. Great thoughts come from every age and all over the planet.
–ME “Liz” Strauss and Keith Dsouza
Work with Liz!!

Dear Google, I'm the Relationship Blogger

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Dear Google,
It’s Liz.

I’m a little confused about our relationship. After two years, you dumped me from Page Rank 6 to a Page Rank 3.

I would have thought it was text-links I had — they’re gone now. I’m sorry. The world knows I’m not an SEO whiz, if I was one, I wouldn’t have 40-some categories in my sidebar. At least, that’s what folks tell me.

But you dumped my LizStrauss blog too, and it doesn’t have any ads and never did.

It’s disheartening when I think of how I advocate NOT GAMING the system.

You might remember when I said

Links and relationships are intertwined and inseparable to me. It’s about people and connections that last.

Did you misunderstand the SOB program after all of this time? Not all of these folks have all of the links you might expect, but they will, because they show the key traits of a successful blogger. I know they will because they write good content and they make good relationships.

Is it that I write creative entertainment sometimes? Isn’t that better than just regurgitating someone else’s content?

Everyone knows that a link exchange on this blog is out of the question.

I’m the kind of blogger who wants a relationship not a one link stand.

And then there was my personal stance on link trains and other valueless link posts.

Dear Emperor: A Test for Your Next Link Post

If the recent birthday party invitation to 646 blogs threw you, please know that it lived up to the “Dear Emperor” standard. So will the link posts like this first one that celebrate the links the party guests brought to show their most successful and outstanding experiences — a birthday only happens once a year. You can believe I’m checking them. I do that for you, for me, and for my readers.

So Google, that’s our history. I know you know me better. I’m the person behind the numbers. I don’t link promiscuously.

I’m the relationship blogger. I want folks to respect me in the morning.

Liz's Signature

10 Super Articles that Make Getting New Customers a Whole Lot Easier!

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Advice from 10 of the Best

insideout logo

Last week, I wrote about

How to Get Customers to Sell Themselves (on You).

For today, I’ve gathered 10 super articles on attracting new clients or customers. I’ve read them all and added a summary to each link so that you can target the ones you’ll find most helpful. So here’s the list.

  1. Why Do People Really Buy? by Mike Sigers at Simplenomics A coaching session about how to understand your business’s sales story from one of the best sales and marketing guys on the Internet.
  2. #5.19: The “Steal From The Best” Issue by Andy Sernovitz for Damn, I Wish I Thought of That! Advice on how to learn from the research and development already done by the big guys.
  3. Features And Benefits And Sales, Oh My! By Diane Helbig for Ezine Articles “Stop talking. Stop thinking. And please, stop selling. Your prospect doesn’t want to listen to you ramble on about things they don’t care about. . . .
    Ask a few questions, listen, and then address only what you hear. Let’s explore this process.” [via The Top 10 Sales Articles ]
  4. Romance Your Customers By Making The Easy Sale First by Evan Carmichael An explanation of the most basic step of permission marketing.
  5. Put Passion into Your Sales by Niche Marketing by Brad Shorr for Word Sell Inc. How to sell more naturally by limiting your market.
  6. Don’t Overlook The Easy Sales from business know how Shows how to tap into the relationships you have to get help with your quest to find new customers who love what you do
  7. Easy Sales: The Trend for Small Business by Jack Yoest at Small Business Trends Here are the questions to ask so that you don’t find yourself investing too much time and too much of yourself in a deal you can’t close.
  8. The Art of Prospecting For Customers by Biz Info Library for SalesMotivation.net How to warm up cold calls.
  9. The Role of Leadership in Selling by Daniel Sitter How to show clients that your motive is provide a solution to their problem.
  10. How to Seize the Phone Even If You Fear Cold Calling by Tammy Stanley for Salesopedia The psychology of getting energized to make cold calls. “You would be hard pressed to find a sales professional who isn’t familiar with those trouble thoughts that talk him out of making calls now and convince him to wait for a better time to make sales calls or cold calls.” [via The Top 10 Sales Articles ]
  11. BONUS! Ten Timeless Persuasive Writing Techniques by Brian Clark for Copyblogger To use Brian’s own words, “Persuasion is generally an exercise in creating a win-win situation. You present a case that others find beneficial to agree with. You make them an offer they can’t refuse, but not in the manipulative Godfather sense.”

Selling, like any other new skill, takes practice to become natural. So don’t quit. A friend and her husband made a game of who would get rejected most.

People do say “yes.” If you follow the advice of the experts, folks will say “yes” even faster and more often.

What’s your reason for not telling “your audience” of potential customers about what you have to offer?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!! page in the sidebar.

Related
To follow the entire series: Liz Strauss’ Inside-Out Thinking to Building a Solid Business, see the Successful Series Page.

121: How a Colossal Mistake Taught Me 3 Keys of Blogging and SEO

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Boy, Was that a Bad Idea!

Lately some folks have felt defeated, wondering whether their readers have left them. Dawud tackled that question in his post, What To Do When People Aren’t Paying Attention To Your Blog? Did you see it? His advice was right on the money.

When Dawud finished his counsel, he tossed the ball back here with this question.

What have you thought would work on your blog that bombed with your readers? And what did you learn from it?

Oh my! Many things have bombed, and I just let them go. But those don’t make for interesting stories. For me, only one stands out as the Bomb of the Century.

How a Colossal Mistake Taught Me 3 Keys of Blogging and SEO

It’s been long enough now that no aftershocks will come from speaking of it. At the time it was noisy and I owned no small part of it. It happened just a few short weeks after I started at Successful Blog and just a few short months after I wrote my very first blog post.

I tried to do a series on SEO when I couldn’t even spell it yet.
It wasn’t pretty, but in the end, it was beautiful.

The story goes something like this:

It was the wild, early days of the blogosphere, not even the trains had arrived yet. I think there were 15 million blogs about then. Picture me in Mankato, Minnesota, straight out of “Little House on the Prairie.”

I had done a popular series on Blog Promotion and maybe I was a tiny bit pleased with myself. I decided the next week would be on SEO. I had no clue what I was doing. I asked a friend to help — a young man from the UK, a programmer, not an SEO guy. He was as new to blogging as I was. Neither of us understood what we were taking on.

I announced the series. It got some attention.

One post in the series delivered information on metatags that was totally, entirely, and unabashedly out-of-date. The musicians, the sales folks, and the kindly tech guys began gently correcting the errors via their comments. They were both gracious and gentle with their replies.

Despite their grace, it was not fun nor particularly pretty.

I apologized.

Then, I caught up with my friend, Yaro Starak, and borrowed some of his knowledge to correct the misinformation we had supplied. He was most generous.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end.

A prominent SEO guy used us as the reason bloggers shouldn’t talk about SEO, leaving out the part where he had been invited to help.

A couple of posts went up from bloggers I still know and respect, who said, “Yep, she was wrong, but you didn’t need to shout her down like that.”

They just stood up like that.

It was about honor and community.

The prominent SEO guy and I talked offline and made peace with each other. He bought me a copy of Aaron Wall’s famous book so that I’d never find myself there again. What a beautiful resolution to the conflict!

The rest of the story is myth and legend of the wild, early blogosphere.

Sure I wish I would have been smarter, more circumspect, but I’m at the same time I’m grateful for the event. I learned these things from that colossal mistake.

  • No one will ever know enough about SEO to go it alone.
  • Conflicts are best handled without an audience.
  • If you build relationships, folks are there when you need them.

I guess, you might call the learning part a success.

Which leads me to the very next question.

What do you do when a commenter seems to misinterpret what you’re saying no matter how hard you try to explain what you mean?

If you’re reading this, I’m not just asking Dawud the question, I’d love to hear your answer too, in the comment box below.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

One2One is a cross-blog conversation. Find the answer at dawud miracle on Monday. You can see the entire One-2-One Conversation series on the Successful Series page.
In Case You Missed It: Writing 06-13-07

121: How Do You Write Compelling Conversational Copy?

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one2one blog post logo

Please Talk to Me!

Dawud, I listen to you talk about your friendship with Adam and I hear the respect you have for him and the work he does. So I know that when you say you helped him, you did more than just give him pointers. You showed up with all you are. I hear it in how you tell the story.

Then you ask me (and the folks reading)

What tips can you offer for writing quality, conversational blog posts and website copy?

Did you know that writing conversationally gets brains to tune in more closely than writing formally? It’s true. Our brains know that in conversation sooner or later they are expected to have a response or an answer. So even if what we’re reading isn’t something that is our favorite subject, we pay more attention when the writer writes in a style that is more like conversation.

The most conversational word form is a contraction. If I did not use contractions, my writing would begin to sound stilted and jerky. People do not avoid contractions when we talk. I will not be avoiding them after I finish this sentence.

Great grammar and good spelling are, of course, important too. Yet, they only make for technical quality. For truly compelling, you have to put yourself into what you’re writing. Here’s how to do that.

  1. Write a clear message first. Let the words come from your mind through your fingers, don’t stop them in your brain on the way out. You can edit them later. Get the message out first.

  2. Write with authenticity. Use your real voice. Use the voice that you think with, not the voice that you talk with. The voice that you think with is closer to your heart.

  3. Tell your own truth, exactly as you know it. Do second guess what other folks might think of it. Trying to read the minds of your readers will only dilute and unravel the power of what you’re saying. Readers who come in good faith will be able to find the place where your experience meets with their own. People are more alike than different. The genuine truth of any story resonates with humanity.

  4. Write for one reader who is a lot like you, but who hasn’t heard your story. Talk to that reader the way you would talk to a person you respect and value. Share your information with sincerity and transparency.

  5. Read aloud what you write. Listen to how it sounds. Change out any words that don’t sound like you. You know your voice and the words that you use. Keep reading it aloud until it sounds exactly like you might have said it — only better.

It’s not the most important thing to have every comma and period perfect. What makes compelling conversation is a truly interested writer who’s engaged and curious. Show up every thought and every word as important to you because someone you care about is going to read it. Your readers will know that you did.

It shows. No one can hide how much you cared or didn’t. Caring is compelling.

I leave you with this question for next week.

When you go around the Internet, what mistake do you see most often?

If you’re reading this, I’d love to hear your answer in the comment box below.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

One2One is a cross-blog conversation. Find the answer at dawud miracle on Monday. You can see the entire One-2-One Conversation series on the Successful Series page.
In Case You Missed It: Writing 06-13-07