The last few weeks here I’ve been writing an end of week links post with a handful of links to other blog posts that I found especially useful and valuable that week.  The reason I started doing this is that I read this post by Rae Hoffman.

Tweeting links

One of the most common uses of Twitter is to Tweet about things you are reading or watching online.  Your followers see your Tweet and click on the link to check it out for themselves.  There are two problems with this:

1. Your Tweet passes no link juice to the linked website.  All links in your Twitter stream are “no follow”, so search engines like Google do not count them as a “vote” for the website you’re linking to.
2. Your link is not seen by as many people.  Though you may have a large number of followers it is quite likely that your Tweet will get missed in the stream.  On average I see an average of about 10% of my followers click through on the links that I Tweet. (Tip: you can use Tweetburner to track clicks on links in your Tweets)

Blogging links

So should you stop Tweeting interesting links?  Of course not.  In fact some links you might only want to Tweet, and aren’t too concerned about passing link juice or a lot of visitors to the linked website.  But for those links that are of high value you should consider blogging them as well.

3 Ways to blog links

There are a few ways you can go about blogging links to other websites.

1. Link dumps. As mentioned earlier I use link dumps about once per week for interesting or useful links that I want to share with my readers.
2. Expand on the original post. Sometimes you read a blog post and think “thats useful, but they didn’t cover XYZ”.  If you think you can expand on another person’s blog post, perhaps by writing a deeper “how to” for the topic they’ve covered, then you should definitely do it and link to their original post as the inspiration.
3. Take the opposite view.  Every now and then I read a blog post that is very well written but I just happen to disagree with it.  This is not to say the original is wrong, but I might think another way of achieving what they are writing about is better.  If you think something should be done a different way then you should publish it on your blog and link to the original post so your readers can see why you think your way is better.

Tagged as: Blogging, Links, Twitter