If you've read my blog for any period of time, you should be quite aware of my "blog drive-bys". This is where I drive my photonic car from blog to blog, stop long enough to comment on those blogs as I see fit, and then come back and publish links and comments about them on my own blog. This works well for getting my blog known out there as well as rewarding those who write interesting stuff.

A thought popped into my head last night (or this morning, depending on your perspective) about how I could do more to spread the link love. More link love means more traffic for both you and me. You see the link (usually via Technorati) and then visit my blog to see what I'm up to. People see your link on my blog and go see what you're up to. The search engines index all our blogs to see what the hell we're all up to. It's a win-win situation.

The secret to spreading productive link love versus link love that doesn't do a heck of a lot is to surround the links with text. Any text will work, as long as it doesn't look like a link farm to the search engines. Don't misunderstand me. Link farms work well for some websites, just not very well for blogs. My "Visited Links" category proved to me that it isn't very useful to us and that's why I stopped doing that particular task.

Here's the idea: Every time I publish an article (that isn't a blog drive-by article), I can add link love to the bottom of the post, directly below the article itself. Ten links at a time is sufficient. I would pick the latest article from each blog that I'm linking to and link to that article. Those blogs would receive the ping text and if the blog authors leave it there (or approve it depending on how their blog is set up) then I have a new link to my blog and they have a new link to theirs. Linking just to their blog index page beefs them up but doesn't do anything for me unless they do something manually.

I'm going to list the first ten from my blogroll as an example of how this works. It's also a test of how well it will be received. The response to it will determine if it's a good idea or not. Check it out:

Link Love:

I'm spreading a little link love to my friend at Can't Coach This and wishing him a very productive day.
I'm spreading a little link love to my friend at CruftBucket and wishing him a very productive day.
I'm spreading a little link love to my friend at goldcoaster and wishing him a very productive day.
I'm spreading a little link love to my friend at Mick's World and wishing him a very productive day.
I'm spreading a little link love to my friend at Another Opinion Among Many and wishing him a very productive day.
I'm spreading a little link love to my friend at John Chow dot Com and wishing him a very productive day.
I'm spreading a little link love to my friend at Lingo Slinger and wishing her a very productive day.
I'm spreading a little link love to my friend at MacBros' Place and wishing him a very productive day.
I'm spreading a little link love to my friend at Necessary Skills and wishing him a very productive day.
I'm spreading a little link love to my friend at SmartWealthyRich and wishing him a very productive day.