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Okay, I know I’ve only been at this wedding blogging thing for about 7 months and there are a lot of popular wedding blogs out there.  But, today I’d like to share some of the things I learned about building my blog.  There are lots of techniques out there having to do with search engine optimization, use of social networks like digg, myspace, facebook, sites like StumbleUpon, etc.  But I’m going to focus on getting links! 

For those of you who don’t know, links are like money, the more you get the better off you are.  They not only drive traffic your way directly by people clicking on them, they also are used by search engines, like google to determine how important and relevant your site is so they can properly rank you in search results.

 

So how do you build links?  Sure you can just ask another blogger for a link exchange.  But, I think it’s much better to build friendships with other bloggers.  This takes time, but it can be fun too! 

So here are my top five ways to build your blog.

1. Contribute on other blogs in your niche.  There’s lots of wedding blogs out there, take the time to find them.  You can do this by clicking off of blog rolls on other blogs or using Technorati or another blog search tool to find them.  If you find an interesting post that you can provide a relevant / helpful comment to then post a comment.  Remember, don’t just spam other blogs with non relevant responses just to get your link out there, you need to actually provide some useful information.   This might make some of their readers come over and check out your blog and you might just get some new followers.  The other benefit is you will become known amongst other bloggers.  This probably won’t have immediate payoff but it is planting seeds that may grow someday.
2. Help a blogger out.  It is the plight of every blogger to come up with good, interesting content day after day.  I believe most bloggers go through phases of low inspiration and other times when they would just like to take a break.  So, don’t be shy about asking to guest blog on other blogs.  I was lucky enough to guest blog on the famous “Style Me Pretty” when I first started blogging and that probably was the most valuable thing I’ve done in terms of building traffic.  Weddingbee also accepts guest blog posts and you know how valuable that would be for traffic.  It not only gets you an all important link it also helps your reputation.
3. Ask others to guest blog on your blog.  This is something I tried to do a lot of last summer.   This gets fresh content for your readers and it also helps build relationships with other bloggers and wedding professionals. 
4. Link Love:  Weddings are all about love so why shouldn’t wedding blogs show love too?  Link love that is.  I found there’s no better way to get incoming links than to link to others.  Not only are my Top-5 Wedding Blog posts of the week interesting reading, since they make it easy for my readers to soak in the best posts of the week from around the wedding blogosphere, they are also great for getting other blogger’s attention and in many cases links!
5. Hold a blog carnival!  This is something I haven’t done yet but it seems like it might be a good idea.  A blog carnival is when a bunch of bloggers get together and write blog posts about a certain topic.  One of the bloggers volunteers to host the carnival and posts a compilation post (similar to my Top-5 format) with a short summary of each post and a link to the actual post.  As you can imagine there will be links generated all over the place during a blog carnival.  I think it would be pretty cool to have all my favorite bloggers writing about a topic from their perspective.  It would keep things interesting and it will also generate links!

So those are my humble tips on how to build your blog! 

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