Blogging and Philosophies on Link Exchange
A couple of days ago I asked a an unnamed person if he/she (not giving any clues about who it might be) wanted to do a simple link exchange between our blogs, as I find this person’s blog interesting to read, and I thought that my readers would possibly be interested in reading the mentioned blog. It’s a reasonably popular blog from what I’ve seen, but it’s been running for a good while, thus is more established than my own.
Today I got a response from said person, saying that a link exchange wasn’t interesting because the person only swapped links with other blogs that had more than x amount of visitors. This response amused me somewhat, in part because I don’t really know what grounds the person had judged my visitor numbers, but in reality the visitor numbers of my blog well exceeded “x per day”. I’m actually a tad bit surprised myself of how fast my numbers have established themselves at a reasonable low-to-mid xxx range per day. Why readers can’t be bothered to comment is a different thing, and I’ll try to investigate that further at a later point.
But back to the original point of the post. Part of why the response I got amused me was because it highlighted how different perspectives people have on personal blogging and link exchanges. For me this really isn’t about trying to reach a certain amount of visitors per day, and then celebrate once I reach that. More than anything else, it’s about writing, expressing myself, and share my thoughts with other people, and attract people who find my thoughts interested. I’m not really convinced that this is easier than trying to attract a certain amount of visitors, because there are hundreds of millions of people online, and trying make your voice stand out from the crowd can be hard enough.
And to me, this means that everything that I associate my blog with needs to be something that promotes and brings me closer to my goal of providing something that would hopefully interest those that read my blog. Obviously that includes the blogs that I link to as well. So yeah, just a sort of a funny look at how different looks people can have on certain aspects of personal blogging. I am definately not by any means claiming that one is better than the other. I do however believe that it can be beneficial for a blogger to treat a personal blog differently from any other website (topic specific blogs included), but I will get back to the whys and the hows of this at a later point.