Philipp Lenssen’s Tips For Crafting a Linkable Blog Post

1 comment October 8th, 2006

The prolific Phillip Lenssen has leveraged his Googleblogoscope experience to create an extremely useful diagnostic quiz for assessing how likely it is that other bloggers will link to your blog post. He advises that

Linkability shouldn’t be your main goal when blogging, but it’s a good indicator of how approachable and interesting your writing is.

Some of his key points that I find useful to remember are:

• Make sure you write something original, and not just a few sentences. Write about what you know.
• A small illustrative or explanatory image can go a long way to improve your post. This is great advice that I have yet to follow. I am continually impressed by Dave Pollard’s ability to express his business insights in graphics:
• The Blogging Process
• Puting Things in Context: Why I Blog
• Social Networking: Still Not Meeting its Critical Promise
• Blog daily. I still struggle with this, but I am discovering that forcing myself to write every day, even if I don’t get is finished enough to post, forces me to clarify my thinking on an issue, which is valuable in itself.
• Re-read and revise for clarity and offer a perspective for someone new to a topic. 

The best thing about the http://www.howlinkable.com/ quiz is that it prioritizes it’s advice to offer the top ten add suggestions for improvement; once you have addressed the basics you see more. Also, not everything you can check off will improve your score (something Fleming Funch overlooked); sometimes you need stop doing something to improve. My current linkability is 45% and I need to blog daily, use more illustrative examples and images, and add my photo to my about page to get it to 54%. 

One suggestion that Lenssen didn’t make directly that I think is a useful perspective comes from Useful Saheli S.R. Datta’s article “7 Habits of Highly Effective Blogger”

Think of your blog as database, not a newspaper-like collection of dispatches. your archived posts should be easy to find through Google and Technorati, so cite authors and publications by name, and use tags, categories, and keywords consistently.

Mr. Aridewa at the Moojik Times  also has a excellent summary and elaboration of Lenssen’s advice.