Review What You’ve Written Regularly

Linking to your own content can be the best way to involve your readers in everything else you’ve done. But you can’t link to other posts that you’ve written unless you know what else you’ve written.

I would suggest browsing your own archives on at least a monthly basis. It may sound tedious, but if anyone should know your content best, it should be you. If you know your own content, you will be able to know when your new content crosses paths with past writings.

The very idea of a link is to provide solid and interesting content, so just be sure that you’re linking back to worthwhile content and not just linking for the sake of linking.

Probably the best way to link to other posts of yours it to do it discretely, and not draw too much attention to the fact that you wrote it. They will (hopefully) find out soon enough.

Some practical ways to apply these ideas on your blog, today:

• Keep strong categories. The first front for keeping your posts organized is to start with strong categories. For more on this topic read “Organize your Categories: 5 Practical Tips.”
• Make your own lists. There are bound to be lists of posts that will be pertinent to you and not to your readers. I’m talking about lists like “posts that never took off”, “posts that belong in a series”, or “posts that received a lot of comments”.
• Add links later. This may sound like an odd idea, but especially if you consider removing the timestamp on your posts, think about going back later and adding in relevant inline links. Just be sure that your edits are minor, and that your links truly do make sense where they’re placed.

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