Our Blog Tracking and Interlinking System
How we made a blog index to help track and share published blogs.
Little Kidogo is currently focused on improving the articulation of our vision — we want you to be able to get what it is that we are saying, for realz this time.
Don’t stress though, the error lies on our side.
In order to get our mission across effectively we realised it is imperative we focus on bettering our communication channels, starting with our Little Kidogo Quick Bytes publication.
The first thing we noticed that needs some serious work is our interlinking system.
Why an interlinking system?
The Internet says that the best way to continue getting more views on your blog is to make sure you are sharing your internal links — i.e. adding links to other blog posts that relate to the one you are currently typing .
Interlinking gives people a chance to explore more of your content and thus be inhabit your brand world for longer.
Giving you the perfect chance to brainwash them all!
Mwaa Haaa Haa
😈
Just joking!
…
…
…
NOT!
🤨
Lol, aaaanyways —
So in essence, when you are creating and planning your content, it’s important to also be mindful of past content to share that might interest your readers.
In order to this however you need to be able to quickly glance at your previously published blogs so that you can effectively plan the affiliate links you’ll want to add to the blog you just wrote and are itching to publish.
And so we took up the challenge and made our first iteration of the Little Kidogo Quick Bytes Index.
Wait— you’re probably reading this because you want to figure out how to make your own blog tracking system.
And we hear the crowd say:
‘Bo!
‘Bo!
Pull up Selecta man!
⏪ ⏪
Alas, here’s the full guide to creating your own blog interlinking system, from start to finish —
Step 1: State an outcome for your interlinking system
“We want to be able to have a structured system to effectively speed up our blogging production. We also want to cash in on the effort we have spent thus far and use the blogs we’ve already published.” — The Little Kidogo Team
The first thing you need to do is choose your reason for creating this interlinking system.
- For us it was important to be able to quickly find links of previous blogs in order to add them to blogs we are currently writing for example —
If MountainGoat mentions something that he knows someone in the team has blogged about before he must be able to go to the Little Kidogo Quick Bytes Index and choose the links that he wants to add to his current blog.
- We also really needed the index to be easily accessible and simple enough to use for all team members.
- All team members need to be able to see what other published blog links they can possibly add to their own blogs.
- We needed the system to be scale-able and agile enough to improve and alter regularly
Step 2: Choose a hosting platform
There’s old skool (Spreadsheets) 📋
And there’s new skool (Trello) 📱
We chose new skool, because perhaps most importantly with Trello we can add pictures super fast.
“What’s so great about this?” you may wonder.
Well quite a lot, but it’s a quite long story which we will have to tell in another blog, however to make it short we’ll just say, pictures really helps relay lots of info very quickly.
Like they say — ‘at a glance’.
For us it’s really important to know what blogs have been published and what they are about in at a glance.
This was a very important factor for us, as one of our main reasons for needing the interlinking system was that it should be easy to traverse for all team members and it should be simple enough to choose which links to use, at a glance.
Saving time, saving money, saving everything.
Think about it, not having to read a blog before adding a link inside another blog is quite a BIG plus.
Okay so now that this seems sorted you can go ahead and choose whichever platform you prefer — remember, new skool isn’t always the best skool.
The platform you choose will be dependent on what types of blogs you write, and what your specific needs are for this system.
Step 3: Choose Type of Categories
Our first draft iteration of the index was an A-Z alphabetical list, where we ‘filed’ all published blogs by the letter of the alphabet it fits in.
However this was kinda confusing, as one couldn’t really see what the blogs were about, or where they fit in in the bigger picture you know.
So this problem made us realise we need to find a way of structuring the index better — perhaps using keywords or themes as list names might be better even than the alphabetical lists above.
So we thought and we pondered, and as always we came back to what our initial needs are for this system.
But we went even deeper.
Questions, always questions.
Ask yourself:
“When writing and adding links, what do you need to know about your already published blogs in order to decide on interlinking it?”
Our answers was as follows:
- We need keywords as per the theme of the blog.
- We need to know which project the blog fits in.
- Overall we need to know what the blog is about, at a glance.
- We need consistency across platforms.
And so our lists were born.
As you can see we decided that we will use our main project titles for the list titles.
This really helped solve the issue of consistency across platforms for us, and even though we aren’t 100 percent convinced this will be the best iteration in the long run, we feel that it’s a good start, because at least now things makes sense from a eagle’s eye perspective type thing.
And it also makes it easy to find relevant blogs as per the one we are currently writing — it’s as easy as knowing which project the blog you are writing falls under.
Now we can simply just go straight to the list that has the relevant Project Title, search for a blog and copy the link, et voilà, Bob’s your uncle and Sally is a 🦄.
“What about the specifics of the blog content, you can’t just choose any blog that goes with the same project you are writing about. Finding real relevance goes a bit deeper than that, no?” — you might specifically be wondering.
Such wise words young one.
The answer lies before you.
Step 4: Adding details about specific blogs
To accurately interlink, one needs to look at the real gist of the content you are sharing with these affiliate links.
Getting warmer 🔥
Let’s look at the way we add individual blogs into these Project lists of ours.
As we normally use keywords about the content of the blogs in the titles of our blogs, we thought it might be good enough to use the main title and subtitle of our blogs as the card names in Trello.
Individual Card Content:
- Use blog title as card title. This will help team members easily find blogs that are close to dealing with the same theme as the one they are currently writing.
- Add your blog link in the card description as you would want the link itself to be available quickly enough without having to go into the blogging platform.
- Add an image that explains the content as the card cover.
And that’s about it, for now.
Thanks for going all the way with us, as reward we bestow on you (For if you didn’t notice above) the legendary, the one and definitely not only, but pretty unique nonetheless,
(Pssst, drumroll plzzz…)
🥁🥁🥁
The Little Kidogo Quick Bytes Index
Blah blah blah.
Boring… right?
We had to try something.
However we actually wanna hear what system you use for interlinking blogs though? 💬
Also maybe there’s some things we are doing wrong, oh please let us know — spotted some bugs?
Anything look suspiciously odd?
Please let us know in the comments
Yours truly,
The Little Kidogo Team
Famous last words:
This was all our story, ultimately you can craft your own workflow by setting up the lists that matter to you.
Just remember —
- Make a point of telling your readers you are sharing affiliate links.
- Make sure to use affiliate links that compliment and ‘fit’ your content,
- If you throw ‘uncurated’ links at your readers they will lose trust in you and never want to click through to see more of you ever again.
- Get a strategy down for your affiliate links.
Next steps:
We will be improving and tracking our interlinking system and reporting back soon enough.
Now that we have the system down we also really need to work on our blog titles, as we are even more reliant on them now it’s definitely priority numero UNO.
😅
Lots of work ahead friends.
So stay tuned for more, and hey, if you can’t wait, here’s some more stuff we think you might like:
