The Wardman Wire

There’s been something of an undignified scrummage going on over at Iain Dale’s blog.

Iain culled his blogroll, and there have been a whole “monstrous regiment of bloggers” scrabbling for the spare places on the blogroll – like schoolboys after a copy of a soft-porn magazine.

The poor guy will have to wear a raincoat to dodge the dribble.

I’m quite happy to say that I do NOT want a link until I have built up good enough content to turn one-off visitors into returning readers.

From a blogging strategy point of view, pleading for blogroll links is often a bad idea for several reasons:

1 – You are spending time on this when you could be creating content.

2 – Gaining traffic by gaining publicity is only a good idea after you have a website that will justify that content.

3 – The slow food approach to blogging is likely to be more successful long term.

There are better ways to build content, such as responding to an article with a post on your blog.

Anyone care to put me on their blogroll ;-?

[Edit: 12/4/2007]

There is one comment there that impressed me, from Cameron Rose:

Iain, Thanks for what you do. Mine is a local newsblog for the ward area for which I am standing. A local service for the good folk of Southside and Newington in Edinburgh.

This seems to me to be a good thing – that the more popular blogs can help encourage engagement in local politics.

Cameron, I’ll give you a couple of links in this blog to encourage your excellent project in local politics in Edinburgh. Of course, a link from a 2-bit nonentity blog like this one does nothing for your GoogleRank, but may help with technorati.

But, please – get off Blogger before you are locked in by Googlerank – unless the blog is a temporary one that you will dump imminently.

Oh – and you misprinted your url in the comment.]

Tags: monstrous regiment, blogroll, iain dale

[tags]iain dale, monstrous regiment, blogroll[/tags]