It’s Okay to Use Links In Your Stories

And One Other Thing That All Your Readers Will Appreciate.

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It amazes me how many Medium authors consistently overlook one thing: the reader. If writers frequently lose sight of the reason they write, how do they make money? If you don’t know who your audience is, you don’t need to be a writer.

There are loads of articles that say negative things about other authors, on how to increase your readership and make money on Medium, and there are now stories that don’t show links if yours involves particular websites.

Case in point: Articles about the latest writing job opportunities outside of Medium. This is true for contests as well. Some writers do not include links in their blogs.

A few months ago, I saw a post on Medium that was about the latest job opportunities for writers. In a comment, I questioned the author as to why there weren’t any links in theirs. I told them that I had to search for these on Google. The websites of some businesses don’t all provide career pages.

They said that they didn’t want certain businesses to get spam. It’s not wise to say that. Don’t mention any new job vacancies or contests if you’re not using links to those businesses since you’re concerned about spam.

First things first, spam happens to everyone. That is an undeniable fact, and your only option is to remove those.

Think about it this way…

Readers don’t want to put in a lot of effort when reading an article.

When you see an article with a list of The 10 Best Novel Writing Software, for example, do you a) read it all the way through, or b) skim through the article to find the links and click on them? I would choose b).

I realize that this seems paradoxical because we all want readers to give our work a thorough read. However, it is not the case in reality. The reader’s attention span is one of the causes.

Everyone is lazy, let’s face it, and they don’t want to do the work, even if it means reading on a screen all day. The reader doesn’t want to scan an article about, say, The 10 Best Photo Editing Software, not find any links, and then copy and paste those names onto Google.

To save the reader from having to perform all that work, it is far simpler for you as the writer to add a link.

What About the Fear of Spamming Other Sites?

That is not your concern as a writer. I bet the businesses you’re linking to are happy to get traffic from your blog. That’s free publicity for them. If you’re still worried about it, shoot the company a message before you mention them in your story. I’m pretty sure that they would appreciate you linking to them.

This includes researching your topic, not just contests and job posts.

Remember when you were young? You had to cite your sources when writing a report in school so that the teacher would know you weren’t copying anything. It is another‌ method of double-checking your information. The same applies when creating an online article or blog.

Readership

Your readership will be low if you produce a blog post about The Top 10 Websites That Are Great without including any links. Remind yourself that readers do skim your work. You have no control over that; that’s just how the internet works.

Another Idea:

Whether you don’t want to put a link to the employer’s website in your articles on job openings, see if they’re listed on employment sites like Glassdoor, LinkedIn, Indeed, Problogger, and others. You could connect to those instead.

The best course of action is to offer links to your content. That will be appreciated by your readers.

One More Thing…

I should mention that I’m from Canada — another English-speaking country. Why you might ask? Because some American writers don’t realize that not everyone who reads their contest or job postings is a resident of the United States. There are countries where people do speak English and people in non-English-speaking countries who can read and write in it as well.

Case in point: writing jobs AND contests, once again. This is problematic since not all U.S. competitions and jobs welcome applications from international candidates. Taxes are the cause, after all.

Although I don’t know much about legalese, you should state in your article whether the company allows applicants who are not U.S. citizens. I have clicked on a few of those just to discover that when they ask for where you live and only include State, not State/Province (which is what we call it here in Canada), in the middle of the application process.

In order to prevent your readers from being annoyed while trying to find your content, I ask that all writers take this to heart and add links to your articles. And if a job or contest is open to foreigners or not, please include that as well. Thank you.

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