Since I started blogging in 2006, I’ve often heard that BUILDING COMMUNITY is an important part of the online experience.
Heck, building a Twitter following, adding Facebook Fans and linking with other business professionals on LinkedIn is a crucial part of building an audience, right? Anyone who has sent out a newsletter knows that the list is the most important part of the 3 components (not that awesome creative that you worry so much about!!)
But I’ve found that having a five-year-old blog means a lot of broken links. Links break when websites are rebuilt into a newer better format, blogs are moved from a “free service” into a self hosted platform, or a subscriber just decides to delete their account because they can’t keep up.
If your marketing blog suffers from broken link itis, and you use WordPress, you may want to try the plug-in I’ve been using to identify the broken links. It has become one of my favorite WordPress Plug-in’s: Broken Link Checker. The only thing it is missing is the ability to see the broken link from inside the dashboard of the WordPress blog.
For those readers who are still confronted with a broken link here and there — I’m working on fixing them. Thank you for emailing me to let me know they are there!
Oh, by the way. My favorite broken link URL? http://www.sagerock.com/404.shtml Sage is just too cool!
Meanwhile, I’m still going to continue to build community… I’m just going to keep using my broken link checker and remove the links to blogs when someone abandons them or reformats their domain.
