Be honest with yourself, how many times have you skipped reading a link love post by your favourite blogger? You’re not alone; many others, including myself, do the same thing. Why? Because we read blogs looking for content that will engage us not lead us to a bunch of links. I understand bloggers create link love posts to show their commenters they appreciate their interaction but do we really have to show our appreciation with a list of links? No, we don’t! And with the following creative link building ideas, we can show commenters our appreciation without disappointing our readers, while still keeping our content appealing.
Creative Link Building Ideas for Link Love
Show link love with a resource link. Write your posts as usual, but somewhere in that post provide a resource link. You’ll link to a post on the commenter’s blog that’s related to your post. For example, if you’re blogging about writing engaging content and your commenter wrote a past post about how to find blog post ideas, then you could link a related phrase in your post to that commenters past post about finding blog ideas. The phrase in your content could be discovering blog post ideas or something similar that doesn’t take you off topic. This keeps your content the way it should be — interesting and informative — while still showing your appreciation to those who interact with you by leaving comments on your posts. In addition, it could bring your commenter more traffic than just placing their link in a list with other links. I’m sure your commenters will appreciate this link building idea more than the usual way of creating a link love post.
Show your appreciation with an Attribution. Choose a post written by your top commenters from their blog, and then add to their post (mention ideas or advice they may have left out) or write your take on it as a post on your own blog. Be sure you give each of them proper attribution. After all, the attribution is where the link love comes into play. 
Write a profile on your top commenter. On a monthly or weekly basis, choose your top commenter and offer to write a profile on him or her. In your profile, link to his or her blog, and make sure their blog is related to yours so you don’t veer off topic.
Interview your top commenter. This is basically the same as writing a short profile on your top commenter, which can also be done on a weekly or monthly basis. Furthermore, you can let the top commenter know you’ll publicize the interview through social bookmarking, press releases, and etc. Also encourage your readers to share the interview post through social bookmarking. Not only will you be helping your commenters by promoting the interview post you did with them, but you’ll also bring traffic to your blog, and odds are the interviewee will publicize it as well, which will send even more traffic to the both of you.
Review their blog. Offer to write reviews of your commenters’ blogs. Again, make sure their blog is related to yours.
All the aforementioned link building ideas is much more interesting than a link love list, wouldn’t you agree?
To get started, create a blog post letting your readers know how you’ll show your appreciation to all of them who are top commenters each week and/or month. To keep this notice at the top of your blog, make it a header instead of a blog post. However, once you begin utilizing your creative link love building ideas on a consistent basis, you’re readers will catch on, and they just may begin commenting more, so they can earn themselves a link on your blog. After all, they’ll soon discover that your creative link love brings more traffic than making it onto a link love list.
If you have some of your own creative link building ideas for showing link love, please share them in the comments area below.
