Linking

One of the most well known and most proven traffic building strategies for bloggers trying to make money from a blog is "linking" or "links" as they are called. Links happen when another blogger likes what you have written, or what your blog is about, and links to it on their blog. Or even better, mentions you in a post in their blog as well as linking to you.

Inbound links will bring traffic from the other blogs to you which of course is important, especially if the blogs linking to you are about a similar topic and therefore the visitors are looking for the type of information you are writing. These are almost like pre-qualified buyers, or at least pre-qualified visitors, meaning they probably are visiting your blog because the title or the mention of your blog in someone else's makes them want to read yours.

Of course this works two ways, especially when you are just starting out. Inbound links are what you need, but you also have to have outbound links, or at least you should. It is blogger courtesy that if someone links to you, you should reciprocate and link back....well...you should, but only if it makes sense, and sometimes, the other blogger is not really concerned about your link back, they are linking to you for genuine reasons, like something in your blog is something they want to quote or mention in theirs.

Although it will certainly get you more links, reciprocal linking is not always a good thing. For one thing, it can result in traffic leaving your blog for another without reading yours. For another, too many outbound links will end up using up a lot of your sidebar space, space that you could be making you money from your blog.

There are the purists in the blog world who will tell you that linking is what it is all about. They are correct but only to a point. Certainly in the beginning days of blogging, linking was a big, big deal, as bloggers started talking about each other and linking to each other's stories. Don't get me wrong, it's still important today, just not as important, especially the links list in the sidebar type of links. As I mentioned earlier, for my money, I prefer a link in someone's post that mentions something I said, and links to where I said it. I believe these are far more valuable links.

I do have links in my sidebar, many of them are to my own blogs, others are to blogs that I really like, and think might be useful to you, but for the most part, I avoid them. My real estate is valuable, filling it up with links to other blogs that mean nothing to me or my readers seems kind of pointless to me. I would rather mention a blog in one of my posts and post a link to it within the text of the blog, instead of putting it in my sidebar forever.

One other point, it's a good idea to regularly check the validity of your sidebar links to make sure they are still working. Often a blog will be removed, or the blogger will stop writing, and the posts become stale, making the link virtually worthless and using up space on your blog that could be put to better use, like a link unit, or an ad, or a link to one of your other blogs.

In my early days as a blogger I also got involved in some link exchange programs. These are OK I guess, but you need to be careful. Some of them come fairly close to stepping over the line on the Adsense rules. Personally, I didn't find them to be very useful after awhile and dropped out of the programs. Yes, they got me links, but typically they were reciprocal links, and I ended up with links to a lot of blogs I didn't care about, and in fact some of them I really didn't like. So I quit the program and removed the links from my blogs.

Yes, you should link, but only when it makes sense. Link to articles and blogs that will be of use to your readers, or perhaps you. For example, if you have other blogs, post a link to them on all your blogs, think of it as free advertising.

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