Did You Know? Building Relationships through Linking.

I love my children’s orthodontist. So the other day when someone asked me if I knew of a good orthodontist, I didn’t hesitate to recommend him and his great staff. I knew he did a good job and that he and his staff understood teenagers. Besides that, their office is organized enough that I don’t have to wait for my appointment when I arrive. I felt confident in my recommendation.

The same type of recommendation exists in blogs. It is called linking.

When you link to something in your blog, you are giving the linked content a mini-letter of recommendation. So make sure you know what and who you are linking to, and that your readers will appreciate the reference.

These recommendations consist of blogrolls, comment links, and trackbacks. When you post a link, you are encouraging your readers to click it and visit the other site.

Your Blogroll is one way to link to others. On the right of my blog you will see two categories of links: Great Products/Services and Great Websites. The Products/Services are things that I personally use. They have enriched my life and I want to share them to help my readers. Some of them I have an affiliation with and others I don’t; but regardless of my monetary relationship with the services and products, I think they will help others.

The Great Websites are sites that I find interesting, ethical, and useful. That’s why I list them – to help my readers.

Comment links come from your readers. They are recommendations from them to sites and discussions that (hopefully) add to the discussion of your post.

The best letter of recommendation, however, is a trackback. A trackback is a linking of one post to another. This alerts the other blog that you linked to them with a discussion about a specific post. It continues the conversation. It’s also a great way to establish relationships between bloggers. When you link to a post on someone else’s site, they will probably click back to your site to see what you referenced. After all, you just gave them a “thumbs up” on something they wrote.

Everyone is curious; and most people have a “need to know” what’s going on mentality. Linking helps fill these needs. The more trackbacks and comments a post has, the greater its interest to your readers. Readers want to check things out and be part of the action.

So how can you increase your reader interest through linking?