Why ethical blogging is good for your business

earlI’m a firm believer in karma and the philosophy of doing to others as you want done to you and in the blogging world I find this rings particularly true.

One of the things I always do when reporting on a story I found on another site is link to them as the source. Other than just being plain polite (they did find the story first after all) it also offers various benefits:

There is a good chance that the owner of the other site will see the link and check you out, I often do this and find myself linking back to different story on the other site.

You are linking to a page that is relevant to what you’ve written about (which it obviously will be), this can help improve your SERPS.

It helps your readers as if they are interested the story they have a link to follow for more info or opinions.

Other bloggers will see that you quote your sources so they’ll want you to check their sites out, now what’s a good way for them to do that :)

Another thing that I find really useful is to do the odd thank you post both to commentors and the other sites that link to you (examples here, here and here). As well as just being a courteous thing to do it also seems to encourage other sites to give you credit that might not of done previously (“hey, Al gives out thank you links if you quote him as a source lets link to him“).

One tip that I picked up from Juergen of Random Good Stuff fame is to send out a thank you email when a new site first quotes and links to you. This is a great way of making new human contacts with sites that are related to yours.

My next bit of ethical blogging karma is related to commentors (yes you guys), if a reader can be bothered to put pen to paper (so to speak) and leave a comment to a post it’s only polite if you do the same and respond. This helps build the blogs community and can also be really useful in finding out what your readers want to read about. On this blog we’ve only made 10 posts (well this will be 11) and so far we’ve had 91 comments so I reckon that speaks for itself.

Comments, links and suggestions always welcome.

About Al Carlton

Al quit the 9 to 5 rat race in January of 2007, before then he was a software engineer and systems architect of financial system. Nowadays Al spends the days running his various businesses and experimenting with different ideas and opportunities.
Al can be found on twitter at AlCarlton.

Comments

  1. Your spot on with this one, and of course how many links will you get to this site now?

    I’ll blog shortly 😉

  2. Thanks Ash, hopefully a few :) though links have been hard to come by here of late. My plan is to keep producing quality (I hope) content and they will come bnaturally in time.

  3. I think most bloggers follow this philosophy (or at least the ones I visit) and it is as Martha Stewart would say “A good thing”.

    I usually find my “next feed” (sounding like an addict now :P) this way since searching for new blogs is both a pain and can really be hit/miss on the quality. I figure if the current blog found another blog worth quoting then it’s probably worth checking out as well.

    One thing that you haven’t brought up yet and am looking forward to a post on is quality over quantity when it comes to blogging. Too often I see 20+ posts a day on some blogs (*cough gizmodo at 17 before noon today *cough) that really could have been condensed into 5-10 quality posts IMO. If your only reading one blog that’s fine but most are reading 5+ so it’s time consuming wading through all the less interesting posts.

  4. Ah cool … thank you for linking to RGS 😉 ..lol!

  5. Interesting and well put

  6. It’s all too easy for new bloggers to become ‘insular’ in the way they think. They become protective of their visitors and don’t like to link out to other bloggers in case they lose a set of eyeballs.

    But blogging is all about doing just that - reaching out to other bloggers, linking to other sites of interest, and helping your visitors discover new sources of information.

    Get it right, and people will keep coming back for more.

    (Great blog, by the way.)

  7. I know this post is a little old, but maybe you will still see this and have time to give a quick reply.

    One tip that I picked up from Juergen of Random Good Stuff fame is to send out a thank you email when a new site first quotes and links to you. This is a great way of making new human contacts with sites that are related to yours.

    Do you send out the email manually, or make an automatic reply?

    Ultra Lad 91’s last blog post..Welcome

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