Business Blogrolls
That is the question from Des Walsh. He wants to know if businesses should be blogrolling?
could be detrimental to your business, in that people are in effect
being encouraged to leave your blog and visit elsewhere. On the other
hand, some would argue that a special feature of the blogosphere is
that there is a community, or – perhaps better – communities of
interest and that the blogroll is a way of strengthening community
links, which it is argued can be beneficial for business.
My approach till now has been that I am happy to have on my blog
some links to other blogs I like, or where there is some evident
synergy with the subject matter of my blog. I did however do a cull the
other day on this blog’s list, letting some links go where I observed
that there was no reciprocal link (not that I’d asked for them) and
that in some instances the other blogger did not apparently have any
links, let alone one to my blog.
I can’t think of a better way to endorse a blog or company and to reach out and network. Of course, you’ll want to decide, before you do this, these things:
How many blogs in my blogroll is my max?
If you aren’t careful, as you start adding friends and feeds, you’ll end up with an out of control blogroll. I currently have more than 200 feeds. If I were to put that many feeds in my blogroll in the sidebar my page would never load (and the huge quantity would distract from my content in a large way).
What are my quidelines for inclusion?
Does it have to be a business blog? Is it going to include only businesses related to yours?
Will it be dynamic or will you manually update it?
Using OPML and a few of the traditional blog aggregators you can output an easy to display blogroll that changes as you change your subscribed feeds. If you are a bloglines user, you can do this very easily. Just make the blogs that you want to display in your sidebar ‘public’ and mark the rest ‘private’. Only the public blogs will display and as you unsubscribe or add more public blogs your blogroll will reflect that change, dynamically.
Tags: bloglines, blogroll, business-blogging, business-blogroll, OPML