Increase Page Views on Associated Content with Linkback Articles

A few days ago, I wrote a linkback-rich article on Associated Content as an experiment. So you can see what I mean by a linkback-rich article, you can see it here. Why would I write an article consisting almost entirely of links to things I already wrote? Well, here's my reasoning - what's the alternative?

Up to this point, I've published about 40 articles on college-related topics, and continue to write more on a regular basis. Trying to market each of those articles individually would be extremely time-consuming. Even trying to share three or four of those articles with one person would be inconvenient because I would have to get the URL for each article, shorten it, paste it, and repeat the process two to three times.

If a person absolutely loves my writing on college-related topics and wants to read more of it, he or she would have to go to my source page and scroll through nearly 190 articles at this point trying to find articles on things that interest them. He or she would be looking for a maximum of 40 articles out of 190. That's about 21% of my articles. For every one interesting article, there are at least four articles that do not interest that person. Again, that's inconvenient and time-consuming for that person.

A linkback-rich article can minimize or eliminate some of these problems. Rather than linking to several individual articles, an Associated Content Contributor could link to a single article. The recipient of the link could decide what is of interest to him or her, and might end up looking at more than he or she would if he or she had been sent links to individual articles. Likewise, a person interested in only the college-related articles that I've written can find them all in one place.

Linkback-rich articles can draw more page views than an individual article would. For example, many Associated Content Contributors market their content by linking to it in comments on forums or blog posts. This is a good way to market content. Let's say that 2,000 people read such a blog regularly, and let's say that it's about success in college. Only 200 people (10%) read the comments. Linking to a specific article about different types of grading curves might net ten views (0.5%). However, saying something like, "Nice post, I completely agree with Point A, but in my experience, I've never encountered anything like Figure C. I've written a few articles on similar topics such as X, Y, and Z that can be found here," might net 20 views (1%). Follow the math here.

The grading curve article gets 10 views. Maybe one or two people go to the Contributor's page and look at other articles. Let's give this person (GC) 15 views. The linkback-rich article (LBR) gets 20 views right off the bat. Because this article links to the actual articles, we can assume that the actual number is at least doubled, going to 40 views. Half of the initial people look at two articles (50 page views) and half of those people look at three articles, bringing the total to 55 page views. Hopefully you've followed the math, but if you haven't, it's okay. It makes logical sense. It's helping a person find multiple things that interest him or her, as opposed to one thing that may or may not. Theoretically, you could get many more page views with a linkback-rich article than with an individual article, as well as more readers that could follow your writing in the future.

I would say that linkback-rich articles are not for everyone. For example, I don't think a linkback-rich article is worth writing unless a Contributor has between fifteen and twenty articles on a single topic. Remember that non-prose articles on Associated Content are required to be at least 400 words in length. If you post five or six links in an article and have to add a lot of "fluff" to get to 400 words, it's not going to help you very much.

On the other hand, if you've written several hundred articles about the same topic general topic, such as parenting, you probably don't want to link to all of those pieces of content in one article. You may wish to make several linkback-rich articles with a more specific focus, such as frugal parenting or green parenting. As another example, if your specialty is writing movie reviews, writing a linkback-rich article featuring a bunch of unrelated reviews won't do much. What you might prefer to do would be to write several linkback-rich articles arranged by movie genre, such as romance or horror.

It's still too early to tell if the theory behind a linkback-rich article is sound. In the meantime, I'm going to market it vigorously and hope for the best. If you decide to write a linkback-rich article remember to submit it as display-only so that you can edit it if you write more on the topic. Have you tried writing a linkback-rich article? Feel free to share your thoughts on the issue in the form of a comment. Thank you for reading!