Better Than Fish Wrap

Most weblog archives are fish wrap -- rarely consulted, save for the odd Google query. That's bad.

• You spent a lot of time writing the old posts. Unless you're writing about news, those old posts might well be just as interesting to your readers as what you wrote today. But how are they going to find out?
• Google is going to rescue old posts from the A-List, because everyone links to the A-List. Unless you have tons of google juice, google won't rescue your archives.

As an experiment, in recent months I've added a few links to old posts at the bottom of most new posts. The links are mostly suggested by the Tinderbox Link Apprentice, so this only takes me a couple of seconds to add. I call these Fagerjordian because Anders Fagerjord made the argument for them in the first place.

Do links matter?

It appears that they do. Looking at some posts on my weblog from about 18 months back, I find that typical notes got about 30 readers/month. Having a Fagerjordian link boosts traffic about 20 readers/month per link. They're effective even if they're not in the current month, though recent links have more oomph than old ones.

At a rock-bottom five cents per click, that's earning a buck a month for each link.

Instead of gimmicks and pay-per-post and cajoling search engines, simply linking your archives to your new writing, and linking your archives together, can have real impact on your readership,