T h e Barter B l o g

Reading some of the posts at Pro b l o g g e r.net always gives me ideas. A recent post on Social Bookmarking and my subsequent experience got me thinking how barter could be useful to Pro-B l o g g e r s (apologies to Darren for stealing and corrupting his b l o g name). Of course b l o g g e r s already barter implicitly with reciprocal links and traffic building systems that trade “clicks”. I was specifically thinking of two tracks here - bartering to help improve our b l o g s and their exposure and bartering our own goods and services to reduce cash out of pocket. I’d like to open this up to a discussion in the comments or by contacting me directly. Here are some basic ideas with more information on each following.

• Link barter (not reciprocal links)
• Promotion barter
• Hosting barter
• Barter goods and services

Link barter - not reciprocal linking:

My thought was to get a group of 10 to 20 quality, established, business oriented b l o g g e r s to cross promote each others existing sites or newer b l o g s. Each site would link to half of the others on the list with no “reciprocal” linking. For those with a newer b l o g to promote and an established b l o g, they could link out from their established b l o g and recieve links to their newer b l o g. For example, The Barter B l o g is well ranked and my newer b l o g, Safe and Secure, isn’t. I might provide links to 5 other b l o g s from here and in return get 5 comparable links to Safe and Secure. Here are a few principles:

• Only quality sites - this should be about generating deserved recognition.
• Established b l o g g e r s. Even the newer sites to be linked to should have enough content to judge that they are quality sites.
• No “bad neighborhoods”, blackhat, “b l o g and ping”, etc.
• Links should be assigned some value, so a more established b l o g might be worth more return links.
• Business oriented. No personal b l o g s, gambling, mature themed, etc. Nothing against those, just not appropriate here.

Promotion Barter:
My short experiment with Social Bookmarking produced good traffic results and a few decent comments, but I also offended at least a couple of people by “Digging” or “Linkfiltering” my own b l o g s. My thought was to get a network of 5 to 10 b l o g g e r s who agree to read each others b l o g s, join several Social Bookmarking sites and link/dig/furl/etc. when they see a good post. Nothing shady here. Similar principles to the link barter apply.

• Quality, business oriented b l o g s
• Link quality posts that you expect will bring return visitors to the linked b l o g.
• Be a good netizen at the Social Bookmarking sites you use.

Hosting Barter:

I’m still wanting to setup a feeds page that will output the summaries of all my b l o g s R S S feeds. Because I don’t want to get into a situation of having it labeled as a “link farm” and my b l o g s are already so thoroughly interlinked that that is a concern, I’d like to put it on a server that’s in a different IP range from any of my b l o g s. That rules out using B l o g g e r, B l o g s o m e or my own host. If several b l o g g e r s wanted to do something similar, we could trade the space for a single page and the bandwidth it would use on one server for the same thing on another server. A fairly simple swap and I’d even throw in setting up the PHP files to output and format the feeds.

Barter Goods and Services:

Many Pro-B l o g g e r s are pros who b l o g about their profession. If you’re a b l o g g e r with a good or service you’d like to barter with other b l o g g e r s, let me know and I can feature you here. We might also put together a b l o g g e r s barter group here, on Yahoo or Google Groups, or somewhere.

Comments are open and anyone who is interested is also invited to contact me with this form. (Please provide enough comments that I know you are commenting on this post.)