Let Me Ask You a Question?

Do you know who is linking to your blog?

If the answer to the question above is yes then you do not need to read any further ... However, if the answer is no you might want to read on.

Actually I have already described much of this in a previous (and lenghty) article, but for the sake of argument I am going to repeat myself and try to visualie my argument as well. Let me begin with a simple point; if you are a serious blogger who cares about what you are writing you also care about who is reading you and most importantly reffering to you from their own blogs or sites. On that note, the only thing we need is an easy way to keep track of our incoming links and in this post I will show you how to do this. First off though let me visualize my point ...

Below is a screenshot from my RSS-feedreader (Bloglines) showing a list of 'Technorati Watchlists'. Natrually, I am keeping taps on my own blog (Alpha.Sources) and also my affiliate Demography.Matters. However, for the sake of argument I have also (for some time) been keeping taps on a randomly chosen list of blogs from my blogroll just to see how many incoming links they in fact have and as you can there is a lot. 

All the bold links signify the that there is a new incoming link to the given blog/site in question and the small bracket indicates how many. In fact this screen is not very telling of the general tendency here as many of these blogs have between 40-50 incoming links a day. Not all of them are unique or 'interesting'  (Technorati  recycles alot of links and also includes 'junk') but I would say that about 35 % of the links would be of interest to the writer of the blog in question. An example could a reply and/or comment from another to an entry made by you at your blog.

So what do we need to set this up ...?

1. You need to use a feedreader which enables to read syndicated RSS feeds. I use Bloglines but there are many RSS/feed readers out there. 

2. Secondly you need to set a watchlist. Technorati can do this for you (if you have an account) but also PubSub is an opportunity. The method is simple; when you set up a watchlist for a sitelink in your Technorati account it will track that link on the internet and show you where that link appears on other sites. This is good of course but not good enough. The real genious point here is that every one of these watchlist subsriptions have a RSS feed which have the potential to gives you instant updating on  the particular site and/or topic. As such, you can also set up a watchlist for your name or for a topic such as 'mircrosoft.' 

3. Consequently, the real benefits here are obtained through the synergies between setting up a watchlist for a given topic/sitelink etc and then embedding this watchlist into your feedreader through RSS.