I found a great post on “How To Build A Better Blog” today that helps marketers understand the reason for linking to other sites, even your competition.
Totally backwards from what we marketers from the mid to late 90’s learned about linking to or even mentioning competition on our sales pages.
But therein lies the difference. All we had back then were sales pages. No content. No free information. Nothing but pitch.
Nowadays it is quite a different story. Web 2.0 demands we flip everything we know about linking upside down and do the exact opposite of what we learned starting out.
The most profound lesson in all of this, from Build a Better Blog’s post title, is “Link Love Is Not For Sissies.”
How true. To this day it is weird for me to link to competitors or people I overlap with considerably. But I do willingly and with 99% glee because it brings 37% of my first time visitors back to my site according to my stats.
You will find out here why it works, despite the counter intuitive-ness of linking to anything that doesn’t put money directly into your account!