On Blogging Australia

The following was originally published on Polyblogging: Tips for Managing Multiple Blogs.

In Polyblogging: Basic principles I talked about sharing the link love with yourself.

Don’t be embarrassed, everybody does it. Despite what your mother told you, it will not make you blind

What do I mean by sharing the link love with yourself?
While some may feel that the analogy is apt, it isn’t really about comparisons between blogging and masturbation.

Basically, it is all in the crosslinking. While there will be a separate post in this series on how to reframe and crosslink, this post is on why you might bother pursuing this sometimes maligned and misunderstood activity - deliberately linking to your own posts wherever the link adds real value across multiple blogs.

It isn’t hard once you have a few posts on a few different blogs - for example in Polyblogging: Basic principles I linked to eight different posts across five different sites without “stretching the weave” too far (and I’ll explain this analogy in a later post in this series).

Why does it matter in blogging?
I wrote the following on faceted marketing through multiple blogs - talking about how multiple blogs can help one another grow:

Here’s a simple example: imagine that you are selling used books on eBay. You could draw purchasers in by the following:

• the eBay listing itself,
• your eBay store,
• customer new listing email newsletter,
• a book review website with an online store,
• genre-specific forums,
• author websites and fan sites, and
• for non-fiction: topic specific sites (gardening sites for gardening books, motor vehicle sites for car books, and so on).

Any of these have the capacity to increase sales.

In blogging, you can increase your ’sales’ (that is, the number of readers/amount of ad revenue/telling people about your stated cause) by increasing your exposure. Blogging on a variety of related topics within the bounds of your niche on a single blog helps that exposure a lot - and effective linking between posts helps readers to decide if they will subscribe to your blog’s feed by keeping them reading (if this is what they want to do). This is the cure for “social networking bounce syndrome”, where a Dugg or Stumbled post may bring thousands of readers who stay for 20 seconds then move on, never to read your blog again.

How does polyblogging make it easier to share links with yourself?
Multiple blogs present far more opportunities to share links than a single one.

• For a start, they are genuine inbound links - important in maintaining and increasing index service rankings (like Google PageRank and Technorati Authority).
• Secondly, you can dramatically increase the value of inbound links within the whole “self blog network” by linking between them - increasing one means that the link is worth more to another.

It makes sense if you are blogging on a variety of niche-bound topics to expand your reach (while staying within your niche) by crosslinking to other blogs that you own. If someone likes your writing style they will possibly like what you have to say within a variety of niches.
Can I just play with myself?
No. A word of caution here - being greedy with your link love is not sustainable for a couple of reasons:

• You can manually maintain crosslinks between a dozen of your own blogs by working hard at it - but you need tens of thousands of inbound links to make your blog the best it can be. In other words, if you want to be at the top of your niche, you need more than the self-provided links.
• Sharing the link love is good community spirit building stuff - not only will it benefit the people that you share with, it will benefit you as well. A little goodwill goes a long way. Enlightened self interest is a powerful force for good.

Is crosslinking enough?
No - it helps people find your blogs. It doesn’t help you much at all if they don’t like your content enough to keep reading.