Jun
28
2006
Something cool you can do with your name in a Comments link
Posted in the Category of Blogging
I betcha never thought of this. Typically, when you leave a Comment on a blog post, you link your name back to your blog or Web site.
When Brand Autopsy's John Moore left a comment here recently (thanks John!), he linked his name to a PDF with information about his Brand Autopsy marketing practice.
Clever, huh?!
P.S. It's easy to do this. You just gotta know the complete Web address for the location of the PDF on your site or blog. In John's case, it looks like this: http://brandautopsy.typepad.com/BrandAutopsyBackgrounder.pdf
He entered the above in the "URL field" when leaving his comment.
Comments
Trey Reeme said on June 28, 2006 at 10:52 AM
Debbie,
Instead of a PDF (which causes immense frustration when clicking on a PDF link that you don’t realize is a PDF and having your browser go into a fit trying to open it), why not encourage linking to a custom landing page of your website. I’ll roughly demonstrate in my comment.
Cheers!
Debbie Weil said on June 28, 2006 at 11:07 AM
Generally I agree that it’s better to lead people to an “interim” page rather than directly to a PDF file. But John’s approach (which he says above was a goof - !) didn’t bother me as it’s just a one-pager and was quick to download.
Holch said on June 28, 2006 at 12:06 PM
I wouldn’t link to a PDF either. First: believe it or not - not everyone has the Adobe Reader installed.
Second: on some computers it takes very long to open the Adobe Reader or the browser crashes.
I can’t see a real advantage of linking to a PDF over linking to a website. What information can be displayed on a PDF which can not be displayed on a webpage?
Sorry, I can’t see what is so clever about this approach and it was a mistake anyway.
OK, there is one point to it: the approach is different. But hey, different does not necessarily mean better (see the disadvantages mentioned above.
Don’t get me wrong: I like PDFs because in some occations there they are really handy, but I would prefer to be informed that the information is a PDF document.
Regards,
Holger
Mike said on June 28, 2006 at 11:01 PM
I wouldn’t recommend linking to a PDF for several reasons, many of which have already been brought up.
If I click on your name, to see if you’ve got anything else good to read, besides the comment I obviousy read and it takes me to a PDF and I haven’t chosen to go this far on our first date, I’m gonna dump you for being a little too forward.
Debbie Weil said on June 29, 2006 at 10:55 AM
Don’t you love it when an off-the-cuff blog entry spawns lots of comments? Eegads, guys. You all make good points.
There’s something else at work here. Because John Moore’s Brand Autopsy blog is pretty well known, I wasn’t irritated by his PDF link. Instead I was intrigued to see what the PDF would be.
If it had been from someone unknown—and if the PDF were an annoyingly large file, or were annoyingly salesy—I would have been put off.
-----
johnmoore (from Brand Autopsy) said on June 28, 2006 at 10:35 AM
A clever mistake! I meant to link to my blog not to a PDF link stashed deep in the bowels of my blog. But as we know, mistakes can lead to discoveries.