A few months ago, I activated Google Analytics on the blog so I could get some idea of my traffic numbers, what search terms land people here, which posts are most popular, and who is sending traffic my way. This tool has been a bit of an eye-opener in multiple ways, but one of the most glaring things I noticed was some incoming links from other blogrolls that I hadn’t seen before. I like to reciprocate these links whenever possible, so I’ve been working on updating my own blogroll when I catch some previously unnoticed traffic coming in on Analytics. I believe it’s important for us ham bloggers (especially in the tiny subculture of homebrewing) to network with each other as much as possible.

To those ends, I’m going to post more often regarding cool content that I’ve found on other blogs (much like the SolderSmoke blog). Analytics has shown me how important this crosslinking is for traffic generation and for building awareness of other blogs. Hopefully it won’t distract much from the original content. Let me know if you think it gets out of balance.

Update

Somebody does read these posts! I’m pleased to see that some other folks agree with me. One nice side effect of this post was that I was able to smoke out a few new blogs to link to. Thanks everyone!