Don't ask for link exchanges in any comments you leave. Just find other blogs/sites that you like and make your presence known there. Most places now allow you to link to your blog when you comment, so you will see some traffic from those sites. As you get more well known people that share your opinion will start trickling in through your comments. It is a slow process, but it does work. Any link exchanges you want to do simply email the contact for the site and ask if they would like to exchange links. If they don't know who you are they will probably look through your site and see if they like your content. If they do they will agree, and if they don't they won't. But most places are pretty friendly and happy to add you to their links. I think danzig makes some very good points, neophyte blog reader or not. Your site is going to stand on your opinions so you should make them stand out in any way you can. A very simple way at first to do that would be to italicize any of the content you are citing, that way your opinions are quite easy to find for even a novice reader of your blog. Aggregating the news items is a useful service, but your main competition is going to be from the local newspapers, so you need to find a way to differentiate yourself from them. Also, you don't really need to have a list of sources in your sidebar. You can just provide the link to the specific source in each post when you cite the sources there. That will help trim down your sidebar column, and should lessen your workload for updating.