Today’s guest post is by online marketing coach, Dana Lynn Smith. BlogAid highly recommends her e-book Get Connected for all those serious about success with promoting online.

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Networking with bloggers that cater to your target audience or topic is a great way to expand your online presence. Use search tools to locate bloggers, then study their sites to get an understanding of what they do. Here are some good places to search:

• Google Blog Search
• Technorati
• My Blog Log
• Google (search for keyword + blog)

Prioritize your list of bloggers and contact them suggesting ways that you might work together. Don’t send a generic “would you like to trade links” email—make it personal. One good way to introduce yourself is to genuinely compliment the blogger on their site and ask them to provide a guest post for your blog. Once you’ve made contact, then you can suggest other ways you might work together to your mutual benefit, but don’t be pushy.

Here are some ways that you can cross-promote with other bloggers:

• Contribute content to each other’s blogs or ezines.
• Do joint teleseminars and promote through affiliate programs.
• Link to each other’s sites.
• Do reviews of product and services.
• Participate in virtual blog tours.
• Promote each other on Twitter or other networks.

Also, subscribe to the RSS feeds of relevant blogs and make comments on posts where you can add value to the conversation, but don’t be self-promotional in your comments. Each time you make a comment, you are building your expert status and creating a link back to your site.

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Dana Lynn Smith is a book marketing coach and author of several marketing guides, including The Savvy Book Marketer’s Guide to Blogging for Authors. For more book marketing tips, follow BookMarketer on Twitter and visit The Savvy Book Marketer Blog to get Dana’s free Top Book Marketing Tips ebook.