Dark Ninja Move 1 - Blog Circles

I guess that this isn’t so much of a Dark move, but it is frowned upon by Google.

Nobody underestimates the power of a Blog Circle. Everyone knows that a Blog Circle can help their traffic greatly. You can think of Entrecard as a BIG Blog Circle with “nofollow”.

Thing is, the type of Blog Circle I’m proposing has no “nofollow”. Its pure and simple linking between blogs, creating linkbacks, helping each other and boosting your reputation. It will carry on going, as long as you reach a certain point where ypu will be more than a blip on the radar. By this time you will have enough momentum to keep going.

I want to take the time to go through the process of creating a Blog Circle, so get comfortable and concentrate!

Let’s imagine that you have just started your blog. You love your theme, your future looks bright in terms of content and you have nothing to worry about. Except visitors. The right people never seem to know about your blog. So, somehow, you have to tell people about it. This isn’t easy and it takes time. A lot of time. I know, because my previous blog, Steve’s Blog of the Web, was just managing to gather momentum when I put a brick wall in front of it; I moved my blog to a different address. That’s this blog by the way. That blog was around for 2 full months and had a Technorati Authority of 26 and 9 RSS subscribers. That’s pretty good going I think. Then again, this blog has been running for 1 week and has 7 RSS subscribers as of writing. That’s really good going and I thank the people who subscribed.

The thing is, I referred the old readers to this new blog and I think that 5 of them were my original readers. Although I have discontinued my old blog, if that’s the power of two blogs working together, what do you think the power of 10, or even 20 is? A lot. So, this is a good reason to create a Blog Circle. I also think that you should keep the Circle closed to anyone relatively bigger than you. For example, if you have 30 RSS subscribers, don’t invite someone with 700. Why? Well, they may help you, but you won’t help them much and then its not fair; also, they probably won’t join in the first place. Get it? Good.

So, if I were creating a Blog Circle (which I am), this is the process I would follow -

Tell people about it - Send emails, write posts and so on. Let people in the same boat know about your circle.
Make it easy to sign up - Let them sign up via a contact form, not just giving them an email address and saying, “Email Me.” Tell them to just include in the message that they want to join your Circle.
Take all the addresses and put them into a mailing list in Outlook. Then notify them weekly or bi-weekly on updates to the Circle.
Give people goals - Tell them who the other sites in the Circle are and they can then link to them.

There are actually a lot of Blog Circles that are disguised as Media companies. Take a look at Darren Rowse’s B5 Media company. There are links to all the other sites on each blog. Very networky.

So, take the above information and go and start your own Blog Circle.

PS: I am starting my own Blog Circle. It’ll be called Black Dojo. If you want join my Circle (network), sign up here. The Black Dojo’s main aim is to reach the top of the SERP’s. Hope to see you join the Dojo!

Technorati Tags: Google, Blog Circle, nofollow, blogs, linkbacks, RSS subscribers, B5 Media company, Black Dojo