Are you a link baiter?…and my Lonely Planet brief has arrived!

I’ve noticed an increasing trend in some of the smaller blogs I use recently which is beginning to be a real turn off…I head over to their post or read it via my feed reader (Google) and I’m faced with a whole load of links to other peoples’ posts or other posts on their blog.

I know that it’s good practice to reference out to things you mention but sometimes it feels a little bit like either…

(a) You really don’t want me to stay and read your post by providing all sorts of other things to read instead which might just lead me on a post trail and make me forget where it all started and to come back and read your post (and I’m sure that’s not really what you want)

or…

(b) You’re linking out to some of the external links in the hope that they’ll notice you and ideally link back to you.

Whatever the reason, before you go littering your posts with links to other posts, ask yourself this: Is this really and truly adding to the value and content a reader will get or is it just distracting?

On another note, I’ve just got my writing sample brief for the Lonely Planet…aaaaagh, now it means I actually have to do it! Perhaps it’s a good job we’ve been tripping the light fantastic, eating out and sampling the Dubai delights with my brother…it’s all in the name of “research”!!!