While various ‘yays’ and ‘nays’ for blogging etiquette are doing the rounds, I have one for those who run their own Business blogs.
If you post on a competitors web site, do you have the courtesy not to add your own link? Does it matter and should you care?
Personally, I do care and therefore when posting on other designers web blogs I tend not to link back to my site. At least I shouldn’t have and won’t be any more. Just professional courtesy…
If you are posting on my blog feel free to post links. It makes it look like i have friends!
Personally i like to know who is posting a comment to know how much weight to add to their reply. Anyway surly that is messing with the very nature of blogs. If you have a business blog you are looking for an open conversation and must accept all that entails.
So i have no problem with competitors posting links (not spam of course) on other sites as i believe it is mutually beneficial to all.
Absolutely Alan. I mean whats the point in having a blog if you’re going to complain when your contemporaries post on it. Frankly, I am flattered that anyone would read my blog. Blogging is all about 2 way conversation, and opening up those channels etc… But my 2 cents was not about posts or comments which are more than welcome (otherwise I’d just turn that feature off). It was more about the link back to the commentators own web sites and my choice when posting on design blogs not to link back to my site. It wasn’t that I was going to stop commenting or comments.
Robert Scoble had an interesting point in one of his early posts about blogging etiquette. He said something along the lines of ‘Don’t hide your competitors links from us. We’ll find them anyway’. And so right. All you have to do is Google ‘Web Designer’ and you’ll find thousands of other Web Design companies (285,000 in 0.15 seconds to be precise). This is not about pretending you’re the only fish in the pond. It’s more about these are my standards and my house rules. When in Rome and all that.
Look at it this way. Restaurateurs often eat in each others establishments. You can learn a lot by dropping in and see whats going on and seeing whats on the menu. Dropping in and handing out business cards would not be as courteous.
Hi Peter. I don’t think I get your point. How can you hold a 2-way conversation if you don’t know who 1 of the parties is? If you posted on my blog without a link, I’d wonder why. The blogosphere is a wonderfully connected beast because of it’s links. It might be a problem if you said something like: “Eoghan can’t design for sh*t; try EdenWeb”. But if you’re adding to the discussion in any way, you deserve a link!
Good point Eoghan and thanks for stopping by. Not sure why your post there was eaten by my spam filter!
Re your email. I can’t come to BarCamp this weekend unfortunately but hopefully I can make a future event and finally get to meet some heads :O)