Influence on the Web is all about connectivity

It's been months since I revisited the value of linking out, so it was great to stumble across this post by Publishing 2.0 (via Martin Stabe), which contained too many eloquent lines on the power of the hyperlink to include them all on del.icio.us. My favourite parts:

The reason Google’s search results often contain more blogs than traditional media content is that blogs were the first to harness the power of the link. Blogs linked to other blogs, while traditional media brands remained disconnected silos. Savvy web users — many college age or early 20s — pooled their links on Digg and developed the power to drive server-crashing volumes of traffic, forcing traditional media sites, who still lack such influence, to plaster themselves with Digg This buttons...

...Journalists and PR professionals, the influence brokers of traditional media, have lost a huge degree of influence on the web in large part because they don’t link to anything. While traditional media brands are still powerful channels on the web, they are losing influence everyday to the link-driven web network — journalists and PR professionals can no longer depend on controlling these former monopoly channels to exert influence online.

Whenever I give talks to traditional publishers who have been afraid to link to other sites because it will “send people away” instead of keeping them trapped in the publisher’s own content, my now standard response is to say that there’s a site that does nothing but link to other sites — all it does is send people away. And yet remarkably, people keep coming back. So much so, that this strategy has translated into $10 billion+ in advertising revenue. (Yes, Google of course).........

Comments

[Matt W]

Kristine

Let me suggest that strategic or deliberate linking is important. A couple of times I have done perhaps a dozen or more links as "there are several bloggers who may be interested in this article", with a link on each word.

It can work very well, perhaps to engage a niche not previsouly targeted provided:

a) It is a good (preferably seminal) article.
b) You choose your blogs carefully and know your target niche.

Get it wrong and you get shot. One example that has brought in 15 or so totally new links to the blog from a new niche.

http://www.mattwardman.com/blog/2008/02/13/archbishop-rowan-firestorm-was-started-by-the-bbc/

Powerful, but with a downside.

Matt W