I won’t say I “invented” this thing, but it’s a fact that I’ve never seen it mentioned anywhere, and I’ve been reading the feeds for several sites on blogging for months…
Maybe I’ll eventually expand this to a part in the Blogging Tips series. But, for now, here goes…
The tip is this: suppose you discover that some blog has linked to yours, or one of your posts. Always nice to know, isn’t it? To see that someone appreciates what you write, and finds it useful and/or interesting.
But… why not go a step further? Why not “give a hand” in promoting that other blog - especially if it’s less popular than yours, or newer, or owned by someone who doesn’t know (or care) about optimization, pings, SEO and all that?
I’m not suggesting you do a lot of stuff, but there are quick, small, easy things you can do. For instance, if that blog doesn’t ping anything, maybe do a quick ping for it in Ping-o-Matic or such, which will mark it as newly updated, and make several blogging services crawl it. Maybe you can check whether it’s listed in BlogShares, or whether Technorati, BlogPulse and others know about it. If not, why not add it to those yourself?
What for? Well, for a start, you’re, in a way, saying “thank you” for the link, and helping that other blog in return. But you’re also doing it for yourself:
- The more visitors that other blog gets, the greater the chances are of someone clicking on that link to your blog;
- The more popular, and well indexed, that blog is, the more “valuable” that link to your blog becomes - for PageRank reasons, and others. Remember, in terms of SEO, some links are worth much more than others, and a link from a popular site is always more valuable.
I’m not suggesting you do this all the time, for any link to your blog you discover. First, after a while, they will simply be too many. Second, this is worthless if the other blog or site already knows about blog promotion, pings, and all that stuff. Third, if the other site is more popular / older than yours, your actions won’t probably make any difference.
But if you have reasons to believe that that person has never done anything to promote his/her blog, then this certainly can help - both them, and yourself.
How to find out who links to you? If you’re a regular reader here, you’ve probably already read Who links to you?. 
Related posts:
RSS feed
Me, I have created a keyword in del.icio.us for people that have commented on my site and have blogs (http://del.icio.us/jopemoro/comentarios_oclcyc) . As I have the ‘daily blog post’ enabled in del.icio.us, I will create a link back to them automatically (assuming I have not linked to them already in a post or whatever…).
Also, it is an easy way to go back to view all these blogs later in time…