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Make Your Link Lists Matter

Make Your Link Lists Matter

Have you checked out this week’s link recommendations from Liz Strauss’ SOB Business Cafe, Engtech’s Best of Feeds, or Darren Rowse of Problogger.net’s Speedlinking? Why not?

Personally, I’m not a fan of link lists, especially when the link lists are just lists of links. But when it comes to good link lists, these bloggers know how to link.

When I find a link list. I don’t want just a list of links. I can get more information from a search engine. What I want to know is why these links matter? And why should they matter to me? Why are they important for me to visit? There has to be more to link lists than just a blogger’s say-so. I want to know why I should leave a blog to visit another, don’t you?

The three link lists just mentioned are excellent as they present the reasons why you should visit these recommended links in clear English. They don’t say “do it because I said so” or “you’re going to love this one!” They say, “The reason you need to visit this site is because…”

They sell the link.

Good bloggers understand that a link is a letter of recommendation for their readers to click away from their blog to visit another that they know will be so good, it will make the reader want to come back to their blog for more.

See Also
The Importance of Being Kind to Yourself; And How To Do It

Who are your favorite link list providers? How do they link?

Do you offer your readers frequent link lists? How do you format them? Do you just link, or do you explain your links?


Lorelle VanFossen blogs about blogging and WordPress on .

View Comments (8)
  • Excellent point Lorelle, I have done link lists around 4 to 5 times so far in the past months. And certainly, Liz and Darren always do a good job in creating them for their readers.

    1. It should be in the order of, hmm, what did I read today or this week, and I think my readers would also be interested in this.

    2. Gather them up as you go along through the day or week

    3. Write about them and give a reason.

    Simple enough, hard to do, but well worth the sanity for your readers.

    By the way, I call them inspirational linking on my blog. Not important, but just another FYI.

  • I like to do a weekly roundup of links I found interesting but didn’t have time to write about fully or didn’t feel were deserving of a full post. I do a little blurb below the story explaining why I think it is significant.

    I call this feature ‘The Tap’, here’s the latest as an example.

  • I’m going to be develop my auto-linking software a bit more and maybe distributing it (like everything I do… I’m always amazed at how getting something to work for me is only 15% of the time effort of building something other people can use).

    Some friends brought up some good points the other day that my output is cluttered so I plan on fixing that up for this saturday’s post!

  • oh, and this also stresses the importance of GOOD POST TITLES.

    I usually leave the original post title as is and write two sentences describing it.

  • I have only recently discovered the fun of linking to posts that I have found useful, interesting, inspirational and what-nots, and have resorted to presenting it to my blogger-friends on a “Read It Now – (date)” installments (see an example).

    My friends may not find what I interesting, interesting, but heck, I always have so much fun and satisfaction in knowing that I have done my best to share with my blogger-friends what I’ve found in the blogosphere! :)

    One thing I’ve noticed though, is that people tend to leave a comment if I shared, say, 3 links in a blog post, than, say 10. So yea, short and simple always does the trick (perhaps I should run a little test to test this out).

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