A major part of branding is developing a good relationship with your fellow bloggers. They are some of the people that will support you the most when you are trying to make it in the blogosphere. Here are some tips you can use to help you develop a good reputation online:

• Leaving Quality Comments
• Use a friendly, inviting tone on your blog
• Don’t steal other people’s content
• Write quality content on your blog
• Be appreciative towards those who help you

Now some of you may not care about what kind of reputation you have. After all, any publicity, even bad publicity is publicity, right? Well, I’m going to examine a case that I think might change your mind.

This case involves the site The Geek Boys (I won’t link to it because I don’t think what he did was right). As some of you may know, Alexander Batista, the man running The Geek Boys, developed a sort of notoriety for stealing the theme of Darin.cc. Alexander received a lot of backlash, and a lot of pageviews from this little scheme. In the end, he claimed that he only did it to prove a point, that you don’t need to pay a huge amount of money to a company like Unique Blog Designs in order to get a good looking theme. He did prove a point, and that is that developing a bad reputation can hurt you big time when it comes to blogging.

Alex has since attempted to redo his theme, and his approach towards making money online. Now he is using a different theme, and is aimed towards “buying his way” to the top. While it is an interesting concept, it appears that he is having trouble gaining advertisers who want to show his ads. His first attempt was with Carl Ocab. Carl decided to back up Darin and asked Alexander to clear things up with Darin first. Carl and Alex did appear to make up, as Alexander now considers them “best friends” but I haven’t seen anything on Carl’s blog, or seen an update on Alex’s blog in quite some time.

He developed a nice spike from the bad rep that he got, but it appears to have gone away just as quickly.

So what do you think? You can take a visit over to www.thegeekboys.com to check out Alex’s blog. I personally think that what he did hurt him a lot in the end and damaged his brand. Do you attempt to develop a good relationship and reputation with other bloggers? Or do you not care?

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