Not all of us can be whales. I’ll swim with the dolphins.

The fun thing for me though, is to have new bloggers contact me. I love to help out and offer tips because so many people in my niche were kind enough to help me out when I started. Giving back to new bloggers is the best way I can thank those who helped me early on.

‘Bout time. Love this post. First time commenting but I’ve been following your newsletter religiously.

I run virtual book tours and an integral part of our company is finding blogs for our clients to appear on. I will definitely blog about this later.

But, what you said (I haven’t gone to the other blog you mentioned but will after I send this off) makes a lot of sense from my perspective. Because high profile bloggers are VERY BUSY, it’s hard to get through to them. Just like publishers…you can’t get through to a big one, you choose a small press and sometimes they do more for you than the biggies…because…they have more time for you.

The blogs my clients appear on is a mixture – some low, some high – but I’m finding that the bloggers who aren’t as busy as the others are the ones who get back to me immediately and promote our stops just like a person who would get paid to do so would.

I am in full support of the new blogger who is trying to get his blog established. Just because you’re new and not hooked up with the search engines yet, the new blogger can drive people to his blog by other means such as making a post and announcing the post in several social networking sites or other blogs that they have. This is what I call the power of networking. In time, they will build it up but because the blogger isn’t a high profile blog, we won’t turn it down because we know through our promotions, people will come and that’s the only difference between high and low profile blogs (unless it’s the content and then we tend to not use this particular blogger).

But I’m really excited to read this post today and will be blogging about it tomorrow because there’s a very good point here.

Hafiz – yep, I think it’s probably best to work on networking with both big and small bloggers. A mix can work best.

DJ – by network I guess I mean interacting and seeing what happens. It probably includes all of the things you’ve mentioned – including what you’re doing now in commenting on this post (see above link for answer to your question).

Max – good idea

Simon – sorry to hear that :-)

pablopabia – yes, that’s another factor. Network with 20 smaller bloggers and the chances are that one day 1 or 2 of them will be big bloggers :-)

wordvixen – no standard level in my mind. You could look at their Alexa figures to see how they compare to yours (it’s not completely accurate but can be a starting point). In terms of length of time – depends how things go. I’ve worked with some bloggers after a single email when I felt connection – but with others it’s taken a lot longer.

netvalar – yes, don’t stop interacting with big blogs. You might have less success but when you do get some response it can be well worthwhile. And like you say – if it’s genuine it works best.

LarryG – see the link above that I left for Lex G. I find email tends to work best.

Scott – totally agree – I think it’s not a matter of one or the other – but one AND the other.

Matthew – we can be friends :-)

Steve Mills – yep, I think diversity is a great approach.

Dr.Mani – oooh, you have me intruiged :-) And yes, you did get on my radar – and most of my readers :-). Actually, offering to guest post can be a great strategy.

jd – great analogy. Why networking is like fooseball….hmmm – might be a post in that one.

Blogging Mix – like I said in your post – don’t give up on us – we’re just being pulled in all directions and sometimes we just take a little longer than others :-) Great post.

CatheringL – yes, I think when you’re networking a good starting question is what can I ‘give’ in this relationship. Giving gets attention – whether the other person is big or small :-)

I think too many new bloggers fail to understand the basic business rule of giving first.

Your latest post presented a better perspective of the issue. Cheers :)

Separate, but related, another mistake I made was focusing on “the site” vs. “the people”. We tried to bootstrap a site by building a great user experience. What we failed to do was build the people network to support the site. The “ah ha” came while doing workshops for the site. I had the benefit of two successful community folks, Ward Cunningham (father of the Wiki) and Mark Curphey (one of the founders of OWAsP) The insight was that “the site” was nothing more than a reflection of the people behind the site and a mechanism for the interaction. The people connection we were building from the workshops, mattered more than the site itself. In fact, w/out the people connection, it failed initially. Luckily the learnings carried forward into other community efforts.

I think that’s why it’s very important to figure out your goals up front … is your site a “knowledge base” … is it an interactive forum? … are you a shepherd for others? … etc.

Darren, what you said just sparked off a great idea – will try and get a programmer to create a prototype quickly :)

Oh, and it surely is possible to get on an A-lister’s radar – like I just did :) Just harder!

All success
Dr.Mani

You should aim to have diversity in your online relationships, you never know which newbie blogger may become the next darren rowse or yaro starak.

haha

However, when you approach a smaller blogger, you are then looking to trade traffic with much fewer hits. Small blogger to small blogger doesn’t grow very fast, especially if you consider the conversion ratio of each hit.

I personally approach both big and small bloggers with very different angles. For example, I add as much value as possible when approaching a big blogger, and by value I don’t mean money. I approach small bloggers with less value because I know they’re usually hungry to talk to anyone that found them through their blog.

It all comes down to appealing to adding value to the potential relationship and feeding egos when they’re hungry. That may sound manipulative, but it works…most of the time.

Anybody?

Networking with smaller blogs in your niche is great for building partnerships, and working together to build up the niche you are blogging about. This doesn’t mean don’t attempt to network with bigger bloggers. You might not get any replies to E-Mails, but the comments you leave (so long as they are useful or communicative) will give you good traffic increases.

What I actually do myself is from time to time browse new blogs in my niche to see if anything came up to add to my RSS subscriptions. Then as articles come up that I feel I can add to or comfortable jumping into the discussion then I head on over and comment. While writing my own articles I sometimes realize that one of the blogs I subscribe to has a writer who could be worth asking a question or 2 to and then I will actually send an E-Mail I try to stay on the point.

Though I went off on several tangents when I contacted David Jennings author of Net, Blogs, & Rock ‘n’ Roll. I was pleasantly surprised when he not only responded but also told me he reads my blog. So you never know that problogger might just be reading what you write and will respond when he sees your E-Mail just as pleasantly surprised that you deighned to think of asking him/her your question.

Dorothy from grammology
remember to call gram
http://grammology.com

And do you have any recommendations on length of time or amount of content to have before beginning to promote and network? I’m thinking you wouldn’t want to start with only one or two posts, and yet you wouldn’t want to miss good opportunities.

Who knows? The “small” blogger whom you network and befriend today might become a star blogger in the next couple of months!

As usual, great information. We feel we are in a developing niche which means great potential, but most blogs are relatively small. This is compounded by the fact our niche is adult in nature which means keywords saturated with worthelss content.

Thanks,
Mr. Gentlenibbles