Recently my friend Grant Griffiths wrote a blog post at Blog For Profit about using “blog rolls” to promote your own blog. In his post, Grant addresses the effectiveness of blog rolls or blog lists.

I have to agree with him that these lists, usually born out of some kind of friendly recripocal agreement to exchange links between bloggers, are not the most effective way to create links back to your blog. When he posed the question on Twitter, I responded that I no longer use blog lists on any of my blogs. And here’s why:

Real Estate

No, I’m not referring to houses and condos. I’m talking about the available space on your blog, usually in the sidebars. Rather than waste valuable “real estate” on my blog, why not generate some passive income with that space instead? I belong to several affiliate programs, a lot of which provide graphics to promote their products or services. On my personal blogs, I have a few spaces available for advertising. Other bloggers can pay just a few dollars to have their own badge or button displayed on my blog.

A small fish in a big pond

Another problem I have with blog lists is that my own link will probably end up buried amongst several other links. With nothing more than the name of my blog, its unlikely that someone will go through and click on each link or choose mine out of several others. I know this from experiences with my personal blog. Out of the thousands of page views I’ve had, the number of visits that have come from someone else’s blog roll is barely in the double digits.

A better option

So if you don’t participate in link exchanges and blog rolls, how can you build links back to your blog? One word: interaction. I leave comments on other blogs that are relevant to my own and I include my link in the comment form. In fact, which blog I link to depends on the topic of the blog post upon which I’m commenting. If I’m leaving a comment on a post about parenting, I leave my “Mommy blog” link. If I’m commenting on a VA blog post, I leave the link to this blog.

I also incorporate links to other blogs in my own posts like I did earlier here when I linked to the Blog for Profit post. Now I can’t speak for Grant but I can tell you that I greatly appreciate it when someone else links to my blog in an actual post rather than on a sidebar. For example, last week my friend and NAVLA colleague, Laurie Mapp of Halo Secretarial Services, posted a collection of blog articles she found interesting, one of which was a link to an article I’d written on my freelance blog about feeling overwhelmed with projects and regaining some focus.

This type of link exchange is going to be much more effective than just a mile long list of links and including the links in a discussion about a specific topic is more likely to catch a reader’s attention and make them want to click on that link.

Again, this is just my personal preference and I have seen some blogs out there who have managed to effectively utilize a blog list. So if you do choose to include a blog roll in your sidebar, exercise some caution in the type and the number of links you’re including in it.