PhotoDude.com

Thu. Jun 19, 2003

The Power of Linking

The Power of Linking – Jeff Jarvis and Susan Mernit give further evidence to something that’s been growing for a while. First, from Jeff: “Today the NY Times wrote about how blogs try to get traffic. I tracked the traffic increase on a blog it mentions, one I know, versus my own traffic today, when I got generous links from Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds. Bottom line: Reynolds and Sullivan caused a ten-times-greater increase in traffic than the NY Times.”

And in Jeff’s comments, Susan adds, “Amazing, isn’t it—millions of Times readers, and perhaps 350 people went to my blog URL today. Think about the lousy conversion metric on that one. On the other hand, those are 310 people who probably would not have gone there without the article, so I have no personal complaints.”

The article actually has a clickable link to Susan’s site. And this article … in the New York Times ... drove a little over 300 visitors to click that link in a day.

On Tuesday, I got one link from Instapundit during the sea of mockery over Bill O’Reilly, and garnered 967 hits that day. From that one link (Glenn’s stats show he had about 85,000 visitors that day). Michele’s link to the same piece brought 334 visitors.

Traditional media still dominates in their traditional mediums. But it doesn’t always translate. My Olympics site was written up in USA Today a few days before the Games began, but the impact in my stats was statistically insignificant. When it comes to the web, and the simple ability to spread information (and thus, traffic), the playing field is rapidly approaching level.

You don’t have to be a professional writer or a journalist with the backing of a major newspaper … to write a link. And that’s where the power lies. The very fact the NY Times had a clickable link was, to me, somewhat unusual. Almost as unusual as finding a piece from Instapundit that doesn’t have a link.

And perhaps that’s the point.