You may have seen in our Saturday Summary series that we have been trying out a few different ways for you to provide links to blog posts that you’ve enjoyed. These sort of linking tools are a great way to encourage readers to share their posts on a certain theme – perhaps you have a popular post meme that you’d like to collect all the different links in one place? You could even use these tools to allow readers to submit their links on a specific page so others can find a new blog to read!
Whatever you’re doing with the tool, we’re here to help you find the one that’s best for your blog.
First up, Linky Tools. This one is pretty good, but after your free trial of 30 days has ended, you have to pay to use this tool. We’ve been trying this one out, and while it works as well as any of the others, the amount of emails from the owner of the site declaring they weren’t spam emails were a little ridiculous. (If you have to deny that your newsletter is spam, it probably is spam)
Next up is InLinkz. The first link up that you do allows you to have thumbnails for each link, but after that, it’s just a text based list for free users. Still works fine though! InLinkz allows you to save your settings for a regular feature like our Saturday Summary – very useful!
One of the sites that we found while looking for these sort of link up tools was Mister Linky’s Magical Widgets. Unfortunately we can’t give you any information about this because the site was so slow to load, we couldn’t even get to generating a new link up. Magical, it is not! (You wouldn’t want to put something as slow as this on your blog as it will slow your whole site down.)
Finally, the site that we have been using most is Simply Linked. It’s super simple to install, easy to use and allows you to save your settings as a theme – each week, we just click over to start a new link up, choose the Saturday Summary settings and it’s all ready to go! There aren’t any thumbnails on any of the links (at least with the free option) but the tool still works well.
Have you used any other link up tools? (We’d love to know about any others – especially if they’re a WordPress plugin!)
