HOW IMPORTANT ARE LINKS TO YOUR SUCCESS? Part One of Websites and Links

By Susan Reichert, Editor-in-Chief, Southern Writers Magazine

You’ve created your website. It’s online. You’ve put some content on there, included a picture of your book cover, book description and where they can buy it. Now what do you do?

For the most part, we go to Facebook and tell people about our website, our book, and give them the link to the website and ask them to go see it and link up.

But it’s not that easy is it? Just asking people to go to your site isn’t necessarily going to get them to do that. Asking them to link to you doesn’t mean they will.

If you ask someone to link to you, I wonder, did you link to their site first before asking them to link to you? The question I have is this. Why? Why would you ask them to link to you before you link to them?

Remember that saying we’ve all heard in the movies––”What’s in it for me?” For the most part, it is true; people want to know what’s in it for me. You see there are so many websites asking us to link up to them that we now have become immune to the curiosity of checking those sites out.  Because of that, we have probably missed some great sites that would have been beneficial to us linking to them and them to us.

If you are wondering how important it is to link to websites and for them to link to your website you might find this helpful: Companies know how important it is to link to someone else’s site. How do we know this? Because companies are willing to pay us to put their links on our websites. They know how important it is to link to as many places as possible. Why? Simple. You keep seeing that name long enough, and it becomes engrained and you will go check it out and odds are you will probably find something there to buy. That’s why you and I see advertising on TV. Even though most of us are sick of seeing some of those ads, they draw business into those companies.

So why can’t we do that for ourselves as authors? We can, if we will give them a reason to link to our webites. Most of us aren’t sure what that reason is. Mark Walters, SEO Consultant said, “Your website needs to be unique, interesting and engaging, etc.”

Your content has to be very good to garner repeat visitors. Check out some of the websites you know about. Look to see what their content is. Is it unique–one of a kind? Is it interesting? What is interesting about it? Just checking out some sites will give you tons of information that will help you with your website. It is time well worth spent.

For instance, do you have the link of sites that get a lot of traffic listed on your website or blog? If not, why not? Just make sure they pertain to writing.

Next post, we will talk more about getting those link-ups.