I’m in love with a site and that site is Plinky.
I came across Plinky accidentally, like one comes about a good story or a true love. In fact, in the pursuit of ruining the Internet (which I do daily to place food on my table), I found the one thing that might convince me that the web is worth saving. It’s a strange amalgamation of democracy and communism: everyone answers their own opinions to a daily question. Then they build on each other’s works. It’s the most beautiful of all the Internet microcosms: one that could convince me that there is yet a reason to spare this bright blue ball we call earth.
Here are the top three things I love about Plinky:
1) It Is The Swift Hammer Of Thor To Writer’s Block.
The thing that I think I have the hardest time with as a blogger is coming up with the will to write. WordPress is a damn commitment when you really get down to it. I have to write the whole post, edit it, rewrite it, find photos, edit them, upload them and schedule it. That’s not including the time I spend cursing God or hating myself. It honestly takes a few days to fashion a good post (and you’ve seen what I consider a good post around here). In fact, I have a dozen “drafts” that are pretty much done minus photos, formating and the occasional affiliate link (a boy has to eat, right?)
Where Plinky succeeds is that they make everything easy. The idea is to be brief, but they don’t limit you to a certain word count. They give you a daily prompt and you answer it in as few or as many characters as you’d like. My post today was quite lengthy, but I’ve had others that were only one sentence. It’s just free form fast pace prose creation.
I started a Tumblr blog almost 2 years ago to help me do that very same thing. However, in the 20 some-odd months I’ve been part of Tumblr, I’ve only posted 8 times. In a month of being on Plinky, I’ve made seven answers and made friends. Prompts, I’ve found, help me to fire up my creativity. Plinky is like a light jog before a tremendous workout. It get’s the ideas moving and the blood flowing to the fingertips.
2) It’s A Great SEO Tool
Google’s recent Farmer algorithm change vastly affected the way a lot of people are doing their link building. I’m personally not a huge link building fan (though there is obvious value in it) I prefer to build links organically by having my readers link to it. What readers you ask? I’ve got some- I think.
However, adding links to a Plinky post is easy enough and every post I’ve put up has been indexed by google within a day of the post. My most recent answer was indexed in less than an hour. That means that not only do you get the anchor text you want, but it will also be indexed very quickly. Now it’s not a great link, but it is still a link. And if that’s what you need to feel better about your site at the end of the day, then it’s a perfect way to do it.
I’m not a huge believe in this, and I imagine that by saying it’s an “SEO tool,” people will take that to mean it’s a place that they can vandalize with useless text and get anchor text out of. I’m going to ask you to be gentle with Plinky, for the next reason I’m going to list.
3) It’s An Unadulterated Realm Of The Internet
Here’s what I mean by that. Facebook used to be this place where only college students could hang out, post photos and stalk cute girls. Now my 85 year old grandfather has a profile. Twitter used to be a free forum for conversation. Now you’ll get spammed any time you mention apple. LinkedIn always sucked.
There are very few places left on the internet that are free of the spam and wasted space of most modern social networks. Remember when everyone had a MySpace page? Then what happened- The only people who wanted add you were amateur porn stars and people with terrible bands. But that place exists again, and it’s called Plinky.
I haven’t been bugged by anyone offering me a free iPad 2. People are actually just reading my answers and leaving responses. It’s like being heard again. It’s nice. I know that I just listed it as an untapped SEO resource, but hear me out on this. It shouldn’t be ransacked and brutalized by SEOs desperate to get a link. They only ask for a short answer to a prompt, and there’s no reason you can provide a quality answer to the question and get a link in the process.
The Bottom Line
Plinky is a new favorite site, and this week’s winner of the Magnetic Oreo Award. I encourage anyone who fancies themselves a writer to use it often to do some metaphorical stretching before writing.
