Clickable Links in Comments

It's important for bloggers to visit other blogs, and leave the occasional comment, especially if they like the blog and see it as a potential host for a blog tour. It's also a good idea to leave a nice little clickable link back to your blog at the bottom of your comment post. You've seen those, right? How did the commenter do that, you may have wondered?

First type this:

But replace http://blogbooktours.blogspot.com with your blog URL.

Then replace Blog Book Tours with your name or your blog's name.

My link will look like this when I publish the comment:

Blog Book Tours

Even though I pasted in the entire string in the red box above. And it's clickable, isn't it?

Now copy and save this tip for future use. Paste the entire string as your signature in a comment window and you should get a live clickable link when it publishes.

Go try it in the comment section of your own blog to make sure it works for you! It may sound a bit confusing, but it's really not.

Blog Critiques

Before you choose blog hosts for your tour, you need a good blog of your own. Do you have one?

Here's the list of criteria that we consider in judging a good blog:

Basic Design Attractiveness?
Title and url cohesive?
Consistency and clarity?
Loading speed?
Blogrolls?
Sitemeter?
Bookmarking in place?
Linking effective?
Quality of overall posts?
Comments section working?
Too many/too few gadgets?
What's great?
What can be improved?
Is it ready for a blog tour?

Look at your own blog with those aspects in mind. Is there anything on your blog that could use improvement?

Time to collapse

No, not from the efforts of daily blogging. What I mean is collapse your archive. Look at that long mess in your blog sidebar. Is anyone really going to click on your daily posts from this month? Not likely when they can just scroll down the page.

First go to Layout in Blogger, and click on edit in the archive gadget. Then choose either Flat List or Drop-down Menu. Immediately, you will see a nice short list or a nice little box. That frees up column space for much more important information that your reader might actually use and enjoy.

Do it. Right now. Collapse your archive.