You know it : Making money blogging and reaching online success aren’t easy things. There’s many things that you can do in order to maximize your chances of success. One of these things is reciprocal help, a technique that I’m using since years and which always providing great results.
In this article, I’m going to show what you can do to help other bloggers while they help you.
Link exchange
Since the early days of the internet, link exchange have always been popular between websites owners. The benefits of links exchanges are a few visibility and a backlink, which is seen by Google as a proof of quality.Personally, I’m not a fan of link exchange, mostly because it takes a big amount of space on your blog. Also, a great blog will naturally get backlinks by other sites. Though, my site Cats Who Code has been in Smashing Magazine’s blogroll for a while and it provided me more than 100 unique visitors on a daily basis.
Another problem with reciprocal links is that Google have told that they will not have the same “seo weight” than non-reciprocal links. Why? Because they thinks that a non reciprocal link have more value because it is not an agreement between bloggers.
ReTweeting each other
Twitter is an excellent way for bloggers to promote their content. On almost all my sites, Twitter is in the top five traffic providers. Depending on your number of followers and the time of the day, a single tweet could lead to 200+ unique visitors to your blog post.
Retweeting tweets from your friends is definitely a great way to help them. Of course, the best you can do is to set up alliances with your friends: You’ll retweet them, they’ll retweet you.
Even better than retweeting…Using Tweeterfeed
What about automating reciprocal help? If you’re used to retweet your friend’s tweets while they retweet yours, a great solution is to use Twitterfeed. What is Twitterfeed? It is a tool that allow you to automatically tweet an item from a RSS feed. Just sign in using your Twitter account, define which feeds have to be tweeted, and that’s all.
I’m personally using this technique along with several friends and it is a very good solution to help each other.
Voting at social bookmarking sites
As a blogger, a great way to get quality backlinks and traffic is social bookmarking sites, such as Digg, Delicious and DesignBump. Reciprocal help is definitely the shortest way to achieve social bookmarking success.
I have experienced it personally with lots of friends, asking them to vote for my posts on bookmarkings sites while I vote for them. Some people might say it’s unfair, but at least, it works. Though, be aware that some sites are using complex algorithms in order to limit reciprocal help and make sure that people hitting the frontpage are “legitimate” users, not bloggers team who are voting for their friends.
Digg and DesignBump are using that kind of algorithms, but most sites aren’t.
Good communication
At last but not least, a good communication is a very important thing in order to maintain solid relationships with your blogging friends. It can sounds not so important but believe me, if you want to have a team of bloggers helping each others it is very important to stay in touch regulary, on twitter or via email.
And you, have you already experienced reciprocal help in order to get more online success?
24 Comments
Good article, intriguing and interesting in the fact that we are helping each other to more success. It’s an interesting dynamic when you consider that each blog is vying for loyal readers and so are your ‘competitors (friends).’ Very good article indeed.
It’s good to get some help when you have a new blog. In the 2 weeks mine has been live I’ve had a few retweets and those have been really great for bringing new visitors. It also no trouble at all to retweet someone else’s post if you think it is good and worth the read.
Good post JBJ!
After about a year of being active on Twitter and Facebook for the sake of my blog (personally been active for a long time), I’m starting to see 20-25% of traffic comes from these two sources alone. There’s nothing like helping friends out and retweeting their links and ideas. Good karma goes a long way.
Great and helpful article Jean.
I have great communication from other bloggers, and we help each other for a few months. That improve traffic on my site significant.
Thanks for the comments! Glad to see that this post is useful to you
Very useful article!
On my way to sign up to twitterfeed
Great work! Another thing that I would like to add is guest posting on each others’ blogs. You help each other out, you both get more content, and you both get more exposure. Everyone’s a winner!
Nice post!
I believe that @Eric is correct. Guest posting is on more way to help each other.
Also, i’m trying to help bloggers like Jean-Baptiste not only because i will give them 5-10 more visitors but also because their content is excellent!
Nice article,
I definitely agree, you should also add leaving comments on each-others blogs to good communication!
I love this post. Everything you mentioned is pretty easy and doesn’t take a lot of time. Scratching each others back benefits everyone.
I’ve found that exchanging expert guest posts on a mutual subject works quite well. Blogroll (sitewide) links just don’t seem to do much to help though.
Featuring each other’s blog or post is also a good way. List posts are good for that.
Tweeterfeed seems a great useful tool — i will check it whether can fulfill my needs for re-tweet back.
Can’t believe I wasn’t already using Twitterfeed! Thank you for sharing your insight.
Nice article!! I have a habit of blogging for a few years then getting bored and not blogging for a few years. This is a great way for my current restart.
Nice ways. I haven’t tried twitterfeed yet. Will give it a try.
I absolutely think that we bloggers shall help each other more than we allready do. One method I think is pretty good is by promoting other blogs you like in your our own blog. Maybe you could write a post about a blogger you like (and why) and leave a link to one of his or her post.
I´m sure that if you do so, the blogger you link to will do the same thing for you.
I see what you’re saying, Jean. I think there is a huge opportunity for bloggers to benefit from one another. If you just setup a Twitter and start adding links to it or just adding your blog post links, no one is going to want to follow you or keep following you. Retweeting seems rather pointless to me. I follow tweeps because of what they have to say and share. Not for how they copy other tweep’s stuff and re-post it. Remember, your reputation is always on the line.
I enjoyed the article.
I think I should be made clear that we should not simply support each other just to support each other. Whenever I ask for help in bookmarking, tweeting, etc. I always let my fellow bloggers and friends know that they should feel no obligation to share. I ask them to share the content only if they enjoy it and find it valuable.
I think we shouldn’t get carried away in helping for helping’s sake. We should share valuable and interesting content.
I totally agreed that in order to make others to support you, we must first take the first step in supporting them. But having say this, we should also be mindful on the quality and usefulness of the contents we are promoting.
Thanks.
Great post! I have received incredible reciprocal help! I recently joined a group called “Worthy of Attention” and it has helped me tremendously. My goal with this group (as with everything) is to be a bigger giver than receiver!
Jean,
I agree, bloggers should help each other out and work together. I appreciate everything you give back to the community. Another good way to get exposure is by setting up a Facebook fan page for your blog and importing your blog rss feed to your fan page. This gives you more exposure and often times links on Facebook end up very high in the search rankings.
I never heard of Twitterfeeder. I am always looking for new ways to automate my twitter accounts and drive more website traffic. Thanks for that. I guess us internet marketers and bloggers should help each other out.
Thanks for a great article! As a fairly new blogger myself I am very happy every time my posts get retweeted. Im having a little slow start atm, but I do retweet everything I find to be good readings myself and hope that someday ill get more RTs myself aswell!
Awesome article indeed
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What bloggers can do to help each other reciprocally…
You know it : Making money blogging and reaching online success aren’t easy things. There’s many things that you can do in order to maximize your chances of success. One of these things is reciprocal help, a technique that I’m using since years and whi…
What bloggers can do to help each other reciprocally…
You know it : Making money blogging and reaching online success aren’t easy things. There’s many things that you can do in order to maximize your chances of success. One of these things is reciprocal help, a technique that I’m using since years and whi…
[...] Some of my Cats Who Code posts are retweeted up to 700 times. How it is possible? First, I use a Tweetmeme button which allow my readers to share my posts quickly and easily. The easier retweeting is for your visitors, the more they will retweet. Secondly, I often ask my followers to RT my posts. Some people may not agree on that one, but personally, I have no problem when someone ask for RTs because I’m still free to do it or not. The two remaining “techniques” I use are to get as many followers as possible (assuming they’re interested in my tweets, otherwise they scrictly don’t have any value) and to have lots of friends like I explained in this previous post. [...]
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[...] and especially, create a network of bloggers where you can help each other reciprocally. I wrote a full post about this some times ago, you should read it if you haven’t [...]