Your techniques worked.
I started this excercise after noticing a slow down in readership on my blog.

Background, and reason for the slow-down:

All of the Ektron employees have been using our eintranet product daily for our own internal use, and as part of an “agile” initiative, we began updating a “daily status blog” writing a brief summary of what we set out to do in the morning, and what we accomplished for the day. All of us, company-wide.

At first this was greeted by some with excitement at having a voice, and by others as big brother monitoring our productivity.
After the last three years of this, all in all this excercise has enabled Ektron to become much much much more productive in daily activity and effectiveness as a team.

As of late however, as more and more of us have increased our level of social activity on the intranet, I have seen that less and less people are reading each other’s “status blogs”.

Instead, the stuff with the most activity has been the whitepapers, news updates, and short profile statuses of our community.

After reading through your blog, the reasons for this loss of activity on individual blogs became clear.

The Titles.

Just about everyone had been using a naming convention on their blog titles.

Justin Status Blog – April 2
Jeremy Status – April 2
EOD TIM G – 4-2

Somehow everyone out of habbit had adopted this naming practice, and as a result:

Other’s content became un-enticing.

To test this theory out I began updating my blogs with more interesting titles on some days:

Status Blog – Feb 24
“A day in the life of a …”
“EOD – Feb
“Hippos and hijacking a friendly website”
“End of Day – Feb 18″
“Engaging Partners”
“End of Day Blog – Feb 12″
“Results from my integration with Sage CRM”
“Bill Roger’s new laptop and special thanks to Colin”
“End of Day Blog – Feb 9
“Buffalo, and integration between CMS400 and Sage CRM”

Using the user analytics features that are in our eintranet product, I found that on the days I posted an interesting title my views went up an average of 700%.

I just thought I would share my small success,
I will be reading your blog more often as a result!

Thanks for this piece which certainly helps to advance the essence of the idea, delivers some core steps in the process and provides some great reminders about the humanness of all those “link prospects” :) And, you’re right, it’s not ALL about relationships – I find that a dash of hyperbole helps too ;D

I enjoy your writing on link building, please make more.