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Link To Your Sources - Or Not?

Remember this old mantra from 15 or 20 years ago:
“If you love something, let it go. If it loves you, it will come back to you.”

Some comedian then morphed that beautiful sentiment into:
“If you love something, let it go. If it doesn’t come back, hunt it down and kill it.”

A lot of today’s bloggers seem to believe more in the second version than the first.

I think the main reason bloggers don’t link to their sources is not a very good reason. They are afraid that if they give their visitors a way to escape, they’ll never come back.

I guess the main reason I like to see blogs that link to other blogs in their niche is … it shows confidence. This blogger obviously believes that no other blogger can offer the same viewpoint/resources/support/etc. This blogger is not worried in the slightest that a visitor will go away and never return. This blogger actually believes that if (s)he can give visitors really good and useful links, then the visitors will value the blogger even more.

That’s sure the way I think when I’m visiting blogs.

When you publish really good, useful info in your blog AND you link to hard news sources or other blogs that add even more valuable information, depth, background, etc., … then I’m pretty happy. I feel like you are giving me a fuller picture, and I appreciate that. You seem to think like I do, and I really like that.

Plus … if I’m researching, then I will ALWAYS want to give examples of whatever I’m writing about. When you link to other sources that are very relevant to the article you’ve written, chances are even if you don’t have the examples I need in your blog post, you are solving my problem by putting me onto pertinent examples in other places. Believe me, I won’t forget that. You have made my job easier, you’ve saved me time, and that’s really valuable to me.

So my advice is … link to sources. If you’re good, you won’t lose readers. And it can gain you a lot of credibility.

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Friday, May 23rd, 2008 at 12:31 pm and is filed under Writing Your Blog . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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