How To Add Links To Your Blog

Yesterday I received an email from Harry. Seems someone told him he should create a blog for his business and he had 3 very good questions:

1. What do I need to know to create this Blog?
2. How much does it cost?
3. Do I need to have a hosting site?

Because the answers to these questions were contained in a tip I wrote last year I posted another old tip to our article archive and sent Harry the link.

And while all of Harry's questions were answered in that tip, there's a lot more to blogging than just creating the blog. (Remember last month when I wrote about getting traffic to your blog?)

Now if you have a blog you're using in place of a website or as a method to drive traffic to your website, you also need to know how to add links to your blog. I don't mean the links contained in your articles or signature but the links you want displayed in the right sidebar.

To show you what I mean please look at the following 2 blogs.

Example 1:

Example 2:




Notice how the blog in Example 1 contains only 1 link in the right sidebar and it's for "Google News." That's the link provided by the blogger template.

Now look at the links contained in the second example. There are links pointing to other sites and products but no "Google News."

There are 2 good reasons to put your website, affiliate and product links in the right sidebar:

1. The link can help your Google page rank.
2. Blog readers now have the opportunity to visit another site of your choice.

Because I use Blogger.com I am going to tell you how to change the links for their templates but changing the links for other blogging services like WordPress is allowed and should be very similar.

To put your links on your Blogger templage:

1. Login to your blogger account and click "Change Settings."
2. Click on the "Template" tab.
3. Copy all the code that is displayed in the box holding the template code and save it in a text file. (This is your backup in case you mess up and need to start over so don't change anything in this file until you have everything you change working.)
4. In the box that displays the code for the template, scroll down until you find the following code. There won't be colored code in what your searching so you'll have to scan the code to locate it.
   
   <h2 class="sidebar-title">Links</h2>
   <ul>
   <li><a href="http://news.google.com/">Google News></a</li>
   <li><a href="http://EDITME">Edit-Me></a></li>
   <li><a href="http://EDITME">Edit-Me></a></li>
   </ul>
   
   
5. "This is the HTML code for the sidebar links. The purple code is the URL for the link. The green code is what the person sees when visiting your blog." (Taken from "The Complete Blog and Ping Turorial.")
6. Each of the lines that starts with <li> and ends with </li> displays a different link. Change the purple code to the link you want your visitor to visit and change the green code to words you want your blog visitors to see. (You can also make the same changes to the line for Google News.)
7. After you've made your changes, save your changes and republish your blog.
8. View your blog to see your new links to make sure everything looks and works OK.

The Blogger template gives you 3 links however you may not need them all or you may want more.

If you don't need all 3 links you can remove the lines
<li><a href="http://EDITME">Edit-Me></a></li>
that you're not going to change. Just be sure not to remove the </ul>
at the end.

If you need more links that the 3 provided, add more by inserting more
<li><a href="<<li><a href="http://EDITME">Edit-Me></a></li>
lines before the </ul>.

Once your finished you will have added value to your blog for both your readers and yourself.

To Your Success,
Susan

PS Read the Blog and Ping Tutorial to discover how to set up a free blog on Blogger.com, how to design it for marketing and how to get it spidered by Google and Yahoo quickly. Available at: http://www.friendswhocare.us/blogs