A few days back I was talking with a friend of mine who is starting his own photography blog, and he asked a very good question that I think most new art bloggers probably wonder about, too.
Everyone seems to know by now that to get more visitors to your website or art blog you need to start getting other websites linking to you.
This is because the more links you get, the more “value” the search engines assign to your site—and the more value you’re assigned, the higher your website will appear in the search engine rankings.
And my friend correctly realized that it wasn’t just any website linking to him that made the difference. Since his blog is about photography, he needs other photography websites and blogs to link to him. He also wanted to be able to find other photography blogs that he could comment on and link to from his own blog, as a way of integrating himself into the right network.
So his question was, “How can I find enough of the right kind of blogs to make a difference?” Or in other words, where do you go to find good blogs in your niche?
And really, whether you’re trying to network with other bloggers for SEO purposes or just to make friends, the same problem applies. . . with so many blogs and websites out there, it can be very hard to find the right niche—the right group—to fit into.
But there IS one pretty easy way to find the “right” kind of blogs that you’d want to network with, and I’d bet that most folks just don’t realize it’s available.
Here’s how to do it:
I told my friend to type the phrase “photography site:blogspot.com” into Google. This told Google to search for “photography” under only one domain—Blogspot.com.
Since the Blogspot domain consists entirely of blogs, all the sites that came back were a perfect fit—they were all blogs, and they were all about photography.
(And by the way, you can do the same thing with other large blogging services, like wordpress.com and livejournal.com.)
What’s even nicer is that Google ranks those results according to how much “value” it perceives those blogs to have. So if you’re looking to connect with the best, or most effective, or most popular photography bloggers, you only have to look as far as the first few pages of Google.
And then the last step is to start networking your way into that elite group of first page bloggers by commenting on posts, participating in polls, and writing blog posts of your own which reference theirs.
In time, by integrating yourself into that network, your blog should begin to appear in the first few pages too.
This technique can work for any art blogger looking for any type of blog. Oil painters, watercolorists, crafters, folk artists, you name it. It doesn’t matter what kind of blog you have, you can always find others that are similar. Just pick your search term and add “site:blogspot” after it (without the quotes).
Good luck, and happy searching!
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