Month: February 2011

I was going to put “link” singular in the title, because people might think it referred to golf if I used the plural.  About 1/4 of a second later, I realized that I would be defeating the purpose of this post if I shied away.  So, here we are.

I’ve talked before about putting your business somewhere it will be tripped over.  One of the best ways to do this is with a links page on your site.  That is, a list of other sites, blogs, resources – whatever – that you like, are local to you, or are recommending to your clients/customers/patients.

Links perform a couple major functions.  The first is that done correctly they are the on-line equivalent of a personal recommendation.  If you’ve read almost anything I’ve written, you’ll know that word-of-mouth promotion is the be-all and end-all of marketing (how’s that for hyperbole!).  Well, at any rate, it’s damned important.  Most of our “decisions” are not decisions at all, but simply following the recommendations of those we know.

The second function of links, and the one we’re discussing here, is that they provide what I call search hooks.  Let’s say you put a link to a local Italian restaurant on your site – one you happen to like.  Your website deals with, let’s say. . . exotic fish.  I’m an af-fish-ianado (I couldn’t pass up the pun) of both exotic aquatics and Italian food, but today I’m searching for someplace to have lunch.  One of the links that pops up in my search happens to be from your fish site.  I visit, like what I see, and mark it for later before clicking the link to visit the restaurant’s page.  You can do that with shoe stores, your doctor, a doggie playcare facility. . . almost anything as long as you can show relevance.  A page full of random links?  Those went out in the dark ages of the ‘net – about 1999.

If you put up a dozen links, that’s a dozen more ways your site can be found during engine searches.

Minstrel might be a more accurate word, but from the 1850’s on, that word has gained a different and less desirable meaning in the U.S.

Long before there were written languages, history was passed orally from place to place, and generation to generation.  Stories and news were memorized, often set to rhyme or meter because the tales were so long.  Even after languages allowed histories to be written down, the cost of making copies or of transporting original works was so high that traveling tell-tales were still important.

If you read my books or articles – even my blog posts – you’ll note that I spend a lot of time telling stories.  Narratives allow the teller to work in facts and statistics, important words and phrases, in specific places and in order.  Tales allow the listener/reader to absorb salient points without having said points stick in their mental craw.  Or simply: stories help facts go down, like sugar helps medicine go down.

We are programmed to remember stories and rhymes – studies have shown this over and over again.  The Bible uses parables or illustrative stories to make moral lessons easier to remember.  Easy-to-remember stories are also easy-to-repeat stories.

Some of us, it’s true, are more at home with a roster of facts, figures and statistics.  Some of us (including myself) did very well in school because we remembered dates, names and other ephemera and could regurgitate it on command.  But narratives – stories with a beginning, middle and end, and having a moral or “point” to them – are easier for most members of our culture to remember.  (Oddly, this particular post doesn’t try to tell a story!  Hmm. . . )  If you can remember the story, you can apply it’s lessons.

Which is why I spend a lot of time educating via stories.