Let’s level up your blogging skills. Publishing articles as part of your community’s content marketing strategy is a great way to build your online community in numbers and in education.
The next topic in this series is internal links. If you missed the last post, we talked about outbound links.
What Are Internal Links?
From a strategic standpoint, internal links are part of healthy content marketing. From a hospitality standpoint, you’d like people who visit your website to be able to find things much like you’d want a house guest to have access to fresh towels and soap.
Internal linking among your published articles is digital hospitality. For example, our link above to our previous article about outbound links is an internal link.
“What internal linking does is gives context to the different pages. By linking to another page on your website, it says this page is also important.“
John Locke
As John Locke mentioned, internal linking helps your users go on a path to learn more about your community and your business. Maybe some of your products go together. Mention them in your articles and link to their product pages or previous articles.
Is It Self-Centered to Link Internally?
No. It is not self-centered to link internally. People who find your blog post or product page may not know about the book you published last year that’s completely relevant to a particular article. They might not know that you are selling a new toolset for their bicycles.
Content marketing means you are creating content on your website to help your community. This is through education either on a concept, tool, or product. Linking to relevant articles you’ve also published helps them further. That is seen as significant.
How Do I Use Internal Links?
No matter if you link to external sites or to products or pages on your own site, the link should be natural. It shouldn’t be like how your cousin Jerry awkwardly drops in the fact that he met John Wayne back in 1972 at every single Christmas party. It should be a natural segue.
“In order to create lots of internal links, you have to have lots of internal pages. The first step to a killer internal linking strategy is to have a killer content marketing strategy. You can’t have one without the other.”
Neil Patel
If your internal link sounds like a natural next step for your reader, they will stay on your site longer. That’s always a good thing.
Engage Your Community
Content marketing or blogging (see what I did there?) brings people to your site — which helps build your community. With PeepSo, you can host a growing and thriving community. How will you engage your community?
