Linking out of your site

[Donace]

There is always good content on the web and it's always useful to bookmark such content for future reference.

A regular 'occurrence' is a weekly /monthly etc. post in which the author highlights 'good' posts that he found. the 'link love' post.

Now recently I have decided to do this also but ofc with my own spin to it.

what I would appreciate is if you can read through my latest version of this (http://thenexus.tk/update-links-love-2) and comment about its structure, flow ability and any general or not so general critique.

As before if you want I will be offering a free 125*125 on the site for a month ; so feel free to claim it if you do comment this time.

Cheers

Donace

[Rarst]

Idea of huge link love post is pretty interesting but I think it has to be more structured to be readable. I have two suggestions:

1. Use list format, maybe make custom list styling if default doesn't play well. It's hard to distinguish between blocks of info by paragraphs only in your post.

2. Use extensive anchors in links to highlight what paragraph is really about.

For example links in first paragraph are "The University Kid", "premium section", "this post". When I scan this paragraph this gives me no clue even if I heard about that blog.

I think it would be much more readable if you used anchors like "The University Kid blog (on [topic])", "auction was moved to premium section", "btw Univercity Kid looks for authors offering $x-y per z".

[Donace]

thanks for the input Rarst; The reason I went for the 'blocks' and paragraphs was I really didn't like the list formats and found adding links within 'a block of text' that 'points out' its value will work better, and a quick analytic look shows that of the 100 or so people who have read the post since Saturday morning there has been a > 90% CTR. (94.68% avg).

regarding the linking yes I agree that will need work and for better readability I am planning to use subheadings witch highlight the main 'area' and 'topic'.

lastly it wasn't meant to be a huge link love post it just ended up that way :p It was meant to highlight good posts and relating posts to maximise the use of the good posts.

[sarahG]

The post is pretty long, but I prefer the structure of flowing content rather than just links. If you only had a few then links are fine (Kevin's weekly links roundup is not usually too long and works well), but when you have a fair few, and want to add in your own content I think the way you've written it is far better.

Just try not to make them as long as you may find people stop reading after a while. If there's that much to write about maybe do them twice a month, or even once a week if you can get enough content.

[Donace]

Thanks for the response Sarah; Yes I have this plugged for a weekly thing at the moment and this one did stretch a bit more than the first one, there was just a lot of new posts this week that I wanted to weigh in on.

Yes I also prefer this 'structure' as I feel its more 'focused' and informative.

[Jeffro]

I'm a fan of link round up posts and generally, I like to do mine in a list style, not too many and provide a brief one or two sentence about the particular link. Has worked well in some cases but I know not everyone in the audience is a fan of these types of posts. Yours was well structured but a bit long for my tastes.