Web Business Marketing Blog

The lone blogger faces a continuous challenge to find new topics (see ‘the dip‘). Any self-respecting blogger will read regularly other blogs on his/her topic. And often, these related blogs will provide ideas for new posts. However by overusing linking or reacting to other posts, you run the risk of positioning your site too close to a social bookmarking forum. That cannot be your intention, since social bookmarking relies on a broad community to tap collective intelligence. As lone blogger, you will be hard pushed to compete with this.

Here are a few legitimate techniques you can use for using other blogger’s content:

Speedlinking

Some bloggers use speedlinking regularly - they make a quick post listing some recent noteworthy articles found on the web. This is a sure recipe for increasing posting frequency, but value-added to readers is rather limited.

Expanding the discussion

For posts by other bloggers providing thought leadership, you could expand on the issue, for example with issues relevant for your industry (while always referring to the original article). If you’re just commenting, you might as well do it on the blog of the original article (most blogs allow commenters to specify a single link to their blog). The best approach would be to put a specific twist on the article, or to use the original post as inspiration for a largely original article on the same subject.

Breaking news

Some blogs are more about bringing news than about thought leadership. Here, blogs can be very competitive with conventional media, or even among themselves - news more than a couple of hours old is no longer considered news in the blogosphere. Resist the temptation to link to other blogger’s news items that have already been broken, but you could consider for example a comment on trends, packaging a number of news stories relevant for your industry together.

A matter of balance

A blog reacting and commenting to other blogger’s posts without much primary content is little more than a link farm. There is a need to balance between developing own content and ‘acquiring’ content elsewhere. The blogosphere is a community - participation means contribution.