You
came back! Glad you're not sick of me, yet ;-)
First
of all, I'm not here to “sell” you on the idea of
having a link-back signature. I'm not here to convince
you that you need to change. The real beauty of Blogland for me is
that we all get to be who we are. Or who we want to invent ourselves
to be – we're all in one big boat, there's infinite room, and we
get to hang out in any class we want, behave anyway we want (provided
it's legal - my lawyer made me say that.)
In
addition, the opinions expressed here are MY opinions. The
opinions of Tina Downey do not necessarily represent the opinions of
the ENTIRE A-Z TEAM. I do know that they are shared by some
of the A-Z Team members. You can identify them by their, um, link
back signatures at the end of their comments :-)
I
think we'd better start with the definition, since 25% of our
responders didn't know what the question meant. A link back
signature is a hyperlink, just like any clickable piece of text on
any website you visit, and by clicking it, you land on that person's
blog. Sometimes it's their front page, sometimes it's on a
particular post they'd like you to read. It's a wormhole, for you
sci-fi fans, instantly transporting you past what I'm about to
reveal, and lands you safely on the commenter’s blog.
Many
of you pointed out that it's not necessary to have one, people can
find you anyway. Yes. Patient, technically savvy, experienced
bloggers can. They know that they can click on your name or your
picture, pull up your profile, see the list of six blogs you own,
guess which one is most active, click on that blog, find out you
haven't written anything there for two years, stay patient, click on
another blog, find that one more active, but still not the A-Z
blog...and that's where I give up. Maybe it's different when you're
a host and have to visit 300 blogs in the first three days. You're
not quite as patient.
Another
example. My friend Jeremy Hawkins (I could make his name clickable
and you'd be right there, but he's in the sidebar, so you can easily
click there) has MY blog listed in his list. That's because he's my
admin. He built my beautiful sunflower and flamingo blog from
scratch. I have him listed as a blog owner. I don't have to – but
why wouldn't I want to advertise for someone who did such a nice
thing for me, just out of friendship? He's freelance, word of mouth.
I've got a button for him too. BUT, if you were trying to find HIS
blog, you'd see Life is Good listed, might click there, and wouldn't
be at his house at all. You'd be at Rydell IV, not the international
space station. Am I making sense?
As a
team, before the challenge started, we had a guest poster who wrote a
FANTASTIC tutorial about how to make a hyperlink signature. You'll
find it here. Check it out! Then you can choose how you'd like to
operate, fully (fuller?) informed about this option of easily getting
people to your blog. You are blogging to get people to read your
work, right?
Thanks for listening.