Broadcasting Brain

Conversation with self-links

Originally uploaded by Lilia Efimova

Although there’s no scientific evidence to correlate self-linking to self-pleasuring, you might be forgiven for making a connection.

Self-linking is seen by some people is being a selfish, taboo way of getting your blog noticed or keeping readers from wandering away from your blog.

Or is self-linking actually a smart thing to do and should it be seen as a valid blogging strategy?

What is self-linking?

Self-linking, as the term implies, is when you create a hyperlink to some of your own content. You do this when you want people to go read your content. You’ll place the link in a location where you think readers might want to click on it.

Ideally, the self-link should be relevant to the topic at hand. For example, if someone is looking for information about massage oil and you’re an accomplished masseuse, it could be very helpful to link to your blog post about massage oils.

Linking to your “make money online” blog in the same situation is not so helpful. Making it look like you’re linking to a massage oil post when you’re actually linking to an unrelated ad or website is downright deceptive.

Variations of self-linking

In my opinion, there are different kinds of self-linking:

• Self-linking when you are publishing on a different blog or website (as in a byline on a post)
• Self-linking when commenting on someone else’s blog
• Self-linking to your blog’s content within your blog

Some people do not approve of self-linking. Some blogs have been criticized for linking to their own internal content on companies or organizations instead of directly linking to the site in question (see this O’Reilly Radar post on self-linking for a description). Some would say that self-linking to an internal database, instead of linking directly to the site being talked about, would deprive a website from both direct referral traffic or increased traffic from Google searches.  EDIT: Louis Gray posted on this topic very recently as well.

Links have historically been regarded as a form of acknowledgment, recognition of achievement, and even celebration. Some bloggers compare links to a kind of currency or compensation. Other people don’t care.

Motivations for self-linking

As I see it, there are four main reasons for linking to your own material, using any of the above techniques:

1. To point someone towards helpful information or material
2. To demonstrate authority by showing that you’ve written significant, interesting, or cool content on a subject
3. To market yourself, regardless of whether or not you’re trying to establish authority
4. To boost your post’s results within Google searches or other search engines results (I first heard about this technique when reading a Problogger.net guest post about improving blog traffic)

This first two reasons are generally acceptable to most bloggers as long as everyone involved agrees with the practice. The third reason may be seen as being exploitive and individual bloggers may frown on the practice, particularly if it’s done with automated software for the sole purpose of improving search engine results. The fourth reason is permitted, although some people might question the need or justification of creating internal link clusters.

On the other hand, with regards to the fourth reason, there’s the famous cliche about building a better mousetrap… it’s worthless if no one can find it.

My limited research to date seems to indicate that most people frown upon reason 3, but they are OK with the other ideas. That’s the way I feel about it, too. Most of us who aren’t among the highly trafficked bloggers like to have opportunities for people to find out about us, so we’re sympathetic to other people who feel the same way.

What do you think?

Is self-linking good? Bad? Or does it depend on the situation? Is there a danger of going blind if you self-link too much, just like certain solitary activities are supposed to, um, cause health problems?

Why not share your thoughts? Leave a comment and let’s discuss!

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Blog posts from Aaron Brazell (Technosailor) and Scott Rosenberg’s Wordyard on the topics both touched upon the dilemma of finding an audience for your work and making your work easy to be found.

A lot of social media writing focuses on tools and techniques to accomplish the related tasks of audience building and marketing your work.

In keeping with the theme of efficiency and effectiveness from my last post, I have some comparisons of different methods to promote your work, as seen through lenses of efficiency and effectiveness, for you to consider:

Efficiency is blasting off 10,000 E-Mails to 10,000 strangers with a single keystroke.
Effectiveness is getting the right E-Mail to the right person who will appreciate and celebrate your work.

Efficiency is using Ping.fm, Twhirl, or some other tool to send quick updates and links to multiple Web 2.0 services at once.
Effectiveness is crafting the specific message for the right audience using the right medium.

Efficiency is using a bookmarking tool like Bookmarking Demon to create a horde of links back to your blog in order to boost your blog’s performance with search engines.
Effectiveness is building relationships with other bloggers and social media users in order to obtain genuine respect and admiration based on value, trust, and goodwill.

Efficiency is using a bulk article writing/mass submission tool to send your work out to multiple locations at once.
Effectiveness is writing the right article at the right time and getting it in front of the right eyeballs.

Efficiency involves using these tools plus a bunch of different advertising methods to drive income via CPM and CPC pay models.
Effectiveness… well, that’s a question that we’d all like to answer, especially the vast majority of us who’d like to be rich or at least financially independent. However, I think an important part of effectively reaching your content creation goals must focus on delivering and receiving lots of value.

I tend to think more in terms of being effective instead of being efficient. That’s one reason I tend not to fret about optimizing the use of every single second of time during my day. The down side to not optimizing is wasted time and potential. On the other hand, efficiency can be wasted without proper direction.

Efficiency does have its merits. Sometimes the shotgun approach to audience building and promotion can yield results when you can’t accurately target the people who are part of your target audience. Plus, of course, there’s always the X factor: you can’t always predict the results of every action because we have limited knowledge of the world and the people in it. Thus, maximum penetration with minimal effort can sometimes lead to good results.

On the other hand, high bounce rates from social news and social bookmarking do make you wonder about the wisdom of using a shotgun.

My gut tells me that effectiveness is the proper mindset for the twin goals of audience building and “findability” (as Aaron Brazell mentions) but efficiency has its place and shouldn’t be discounted either. Effectiveness, at its heart, includes creating valuable content. That’s what I strive to do. However, given the power of search engines, I’m starting to believe that ignoring the power of SEO (search engine optimization) isn’t the best idea either.

Just a few quick observations:

My Twitter follower experiment, which I made an update to a few days later, seems to be paying off.  I know that at one point I was following close to 1400 people.  I started trimming that number down where it seemed to make sense to do so.  Today I’m following 1044 other people. 

However, the number of people following me has increased.  Currently there are 633 people who follow me (and thank you!) on Twitter.

On Digg, I’m pleased to report that I hit my short term goal of getting into the listing of the top 1000 Digg users.  Or, at least I will when they refresh the list, unless things go wonky somewhere.  By the way, the composition of the top 1000 Digg users list is determined first by the number of Popular Digg submissions, and secondly by your % of popular submissions to overall Digg submissions.  You can see the current status of the Digg top 1000 list here.  Next stop:  top 500!

My Technorati ranking is slowly climbing toward 100, which is another 2008 goal.  I think I’m at 87 but I think the next recalculation will take me to 89.

Subscriber count:  my subscriber count is in triple digits.  Not quite where I wanted it to be yet, but overall it continues to grow, which is quite gratifying.

StumbleUpon:  I’ve actually hit the 200 friends limit a couple of times and had to rearrange some things.  StumbleUpon has been a wonderful resource for this blog!

On top of all that, I’ve been interacting with lots of cool people. 

It’s nice to see progress!

I think it’s far better to be genuine than remarkable; in fact, I think the former leads to the latter.

Seth Godin seems to have popularized the concept of being remarkable.  I discovered Seth’s books in 2007 and I’ve gotten a lot of useful information out of his E-Books to date (mainly the Ideavirus book). I haven’t read The Purple Cow or any of his other in-print books yet, but I’ve read a number of blogs or articles that talk about being remarkable. Michael Martine (here’s a guy who can give you advice on how to bring visitors to your blog) has renamed his blog Remarkablogger, influenced by Seth Godin’s ideas. I think Michael’s blog is already genuine and remarkable but I respect how he’s trying to further distinguish the blog and fine-tune his message.

Seth’s a recognized marketing expert (some would say genius) and he’s wealthier than I am to boot. I have a lot of respect for what he has to say, based more on the quality of his ideas and his words than the hairlessness of his head or the unusual images he conjures. These truths will give his words somewhat more credibility than mine. But hear me out.

First of all: remarkable. The word returns about 45,500,000 results during a Google search (sex turns up about 771,000,000; remarkable sex turns up 2,560, but I think most of it is non-erotic biology.  Sorry, I digress.)

Let’s try it again: remarkable. Here’s what Dictionary.com has to say:

1. notably or conspicuously unusual; extraordinary: a remarkable change.
2. worthy of notice or attention.

What’s interesting to me is that these two meanings of remarkable are a bit different:

Definition 1 seems to reference something that it’s impossible to ignore, mainly because it’s so different from its surroundings.

Definition 2 seems to speak to the worth or value of the remarkable object.
So, let’s try to think of some examples that fit both meanings:

Definition 1 - by this definition, Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, and many other celebrities are remarkable because they draw attention wherever they go. You can argue that some of this attention is manufactured through clever, hard-working public relations staff, but it’s still remarkable because it’s hard to ignore, much like the now-cliche saying about train wrecks.

Definition 2 - anyone who does good work or good deeds would fall into this category. Why? Simple: because we need more good role models in this world. We need inspiring examples to help spur us all to do better. We need to recognize the people who make a positive difference in this world.

My argument is that people who fulfill the second definition of remarkable will experience more long-term success than the first.

Here are a few things to consider:

1) Our average attention span is declining to milliseconds. Sometimes it takes a purple cow to get our attention.
2) Some ideas, services, or products have a limited shelf-life or life span. They don’t have much time to gradually build their worth; they have to be inherently remarkable to be effective.
3) There’s a huge amount of competition for staking your claim to all of the good, popular, fun, important, and valuable messages. There are probably hundreds of other bloggers who are saying (or have said) what I’m writing in this post.

Clearly, speed and reaction time are very important when you’re selling something. Sometimes that purple cow, irresponsible celebrity, or Richard Branson marketing stunt gives you a crucial edge when spreading your message. Sometimes it takes the sound of a gunshot to get everyone’s attention in a crowded room (yelling fire apparently works as well, but I don’t recommend either tactic.)

Consider something else for a moment, though.

What are you trying to achieve? What is your timeline?

Are you trying to get a quick burst of sales?

Do you want to establish instant brand-recognition or notoriety?

In other words, are you in a hurry? Today’s common business wisdom would suggest that if you aren’t in a hurry, you’ll get stampeded and trampled by those who are willing to run fast and hard to meet their objectives. If so, maybe you really do need to strive for that first definition of being remarkable.

However, maybe your goals are different and should be different:

• Are you trying to make a noteworthy, sensational wine (here’s a hint: aged wines of good quality are far more expensive than newer ones due to the value of the fermentation process, which can take years to work)
• Are you trying to make a healthy baby? Remember the old chestnut: nine women being pregnant for one month won’t yield one healthy child, nine months is needed for the least risky childbirth, giving the fetus enough time to develop prior to leaving the womb.
• Are you aiming for enduring value delivery that’s not tied to the moment or specific situation?
• Are you trying to build a long-lived, credible reputation based on value and integrity?

Definition 2 can take months, years, or even decades to achieve. You must be genuine to fulfill this definition of remarkable. You must show your worth, repeatedly, and be willing to learn and improve over time. Being genuine means that you are capable of providing valuable knowledge, insights, and work on a regular basis.

A purple cow is good is attracting your attention, but I wouldn’t want to drink its milk. I doubt it would make good hamburger.

Cows aren’t purple by nature. I might notice a purple cow before I’ll notice a brown cow, but unless it’s a brown cow in disguise, I don’t think that I’d want or need a purple cow. A well bred, well fed cow is just as remarkable as a purple cow and it’s probably better for you, too.

Yes, I’m presenting a simplistic view of the purple cow message and I haven’t read Seth’s book, so I’m probably missing the point. However, I see a lot of garish, trashy, and tacky stuff on the Web that might grab my attention for a moment, but it doesn’t have enough substance to keep me coming back. That’s all I’m trying to say.

Yes, that’s a lie. I don’t own a dog.

However, I did spend some ECs (Entrecard credits) for some new ads today. I think the main reason that I did that was I saw a jump in my RSS subscribers…

Coincidence? I don’t know.

But it will take me a few days to earn back ECs, so I’ll have to postpone the contest.

I’d seen the odd mention about Entrecard, but I didn’t pay much attention to it.

Somehow I found Sam Freedom’s Internet Marketing Controversy Blog, where he had two posts (this one, then this one) about Entrecard.? I guess he’s written yet another post about Entrecard today - I haven’t read it yet.

Bascially, Entrecard is a combination of business card and advertising system. You can earn points by giving your business card to people or by receiving their business card - this transaction is accomplished by clicking the Entrecard link on their website. These points are used to buy advertising on other people’s sites - this means that they can pay points in order to advertise on your site as well.

The whole point of Entrecard is to create incentives for people to visit each other’s sites and promote their own site at the same time.

I must admit that I’ve found a few interesting sites using Entrecard and I’ve gotten a little bit of traffic, which is fine for a free service.

In fact, I think I’m going to run a couple of contests here at The Uncanny Broadcasting Brain Blog where YOU can win Entrecard points. Stay tuned for more details!