How to Become Successful at Blogging

[Kire]

I'm Not Going To Blogroll You
by Chris Bowers - MyDD

This is a form letter response on how to build blog traffic and influence.

Dear anonymous blogger,

Around 25-30 times a week, at least, I receive emails from bloggers such as you asking me to put them on the MyDD blogroll. Overall, in less than a year and a half of blogging, I have easily received more than 1,000 such requests. By now, if "blogroll" or "link" is in the title of an email sent to me from someone I don't know, I simply delete that email without even reading it.

I am not angry that people send me these emails. In fact, it has happened so often that by now even annoyance has worn away. There are many benefits of blogging "fame," and they have dramatically changed my life for the better. I simply accept requests to be blogrolled as a fact of life now, and I don't imagine that this letter will cause them to stop (much as I didn't imagine that my Diary Purge post would cause inappropriate diaries to cease).

I can imagine that many "smaller" bloggers have a significant amount of justifiable frustration toward the "mid-major" and "A-list" blogs. After all, such blogs do engage in a number of annoying activities, such as:

More: http://www.mydd.com/story/2005/9/22/164528/907

[displacedtexan]

1. I read that article.

Most bloggers still think that links will bring them fame and fortune.

Each week, I get a dozen or more requests from bloggers to showcase them in the DU Blog Box column. Unfortunately, almost all of them either haven't updated their blogs in months or they do that two sentence intro to a NYTimes article thing.

What's really sad (IMHO) is that most bloggers don't inject their own personality into their blogs.