Now that you are a blogger, it would be very wise of you to start reading as many other blogs as you can fit into your day and still be productive. The amount of information and ideas you will gain from building up a blogroll will more than make up for the time you spend, just be careful you don’t start spending all of your time reading other blogs because you still have your own blog to worry about, not to mention a business to run.

Some well-known bloggers disagree with having a blogroll at all, and see them only as a glorified form of link exchange. In a sense, that is all it is. But for your readers, it is a way to dig deeper into your psyche by delving deeper into your lifestream and what makes it up. It will also help them learn as much about your subject as possible. I suspect some bloggers don’t like blogrolls because it leads readers away from their blogs, and if they don’t feel secure in the quality of their blog, this could be disconcerting.

Why should you use a blogroll?

• Blogrolls help educate your readers further, building trust in your brand
• It’s a good way to get quality inbound links to your blog
• It helps build a perception that you are part of a niche

Why would you not want to use a blogroll?

• You aren’t interested in having outbound links or links to potential competitors on your blog
• You don’t want to have to deal with other blog’s emailing you to exchange links
• You don’t think educating your prospects beyond your blog would make good business sense

How much emphasis should you give your blogroll?

• As long as the links are on both blogs, you get credit for them regardless of their placement
• If cultivating an active blogroll is a tactic in your marketing plan, give it higher page placement
• Length of your blogroll is an issue, as well.  It may get very long over time and take up a large portion of screen length

Educating readers may seem counterintuitive, but as many productivity experts like Steven Covey and Zig Ziglar point out, helping others out as much as possible and creating Win/Win experiences is the only way to long-term growth in our new economic environment.  Blogging is about sharing, whether you are a small business or a hobbyist.  Link abundantly.For those of us that have put the time into learning about marketing and blogging, it’s apparent that our services will always be cheaper than the amount of time needed for newcomers to go through the same trial and error process it took for us to get this far. But there’s something to be said about helping anyone willing to put the time in or who is looking for a specific answer. You can’t look at it as losing a prospect, look at it as gaining respect, or as Covey would say, as “making a deposit”. Check out some of the incredible blogs in our blog roll and tell them we said “Hi”.

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