When my personal posts link to my products — and when I refuse

The awkward honesty of linking your own stuff

Every few posts I face the same draft question: do I mention the products I build, or is that this essay trying to become a landing page?

I ship two paid products — App Store Localizer and EmptyRoom AI — and I keep this site as a personal trust hub. Soft outbound links are allowed. Soft outbound links that hijack the post’s job are not. This note is the rule set I actually use.

What a soft product link is for

On tomaserben.com a product URL earns a place when it answers a story question:

- What am I responsible for shipping?

- Which hostname does which job?

- Why did I refuse to park a commercial guide on my name?

It does not earn a place when the draft’s real job is “rank for the thing the product sells.” That work belongs on the product blogs. I already drew that boundary in why product SEO lives on product domains and how personal-domain trust links help my product sites. Today is the yes/no filter for a single paragraph.

When I link

I link when all of these are true:

1. The sentence is about me or the system, not the category. “I build X on its own domain” passes. “Here is how to win Y queries” fails on this hostname.

2. A curious reader would want the URL. Builder context, domain split, failed experiments, free tools beside paid work — readers who care about process deserve a door.

3. One or two mentions beat a tour. If I need a feature list, the post is on the wrong site.

4. The anchor stays human. Product name or plain URL — not a stuffed commercial phrase pretending to be prose.

5. The essay still works if both links 404. If removing the products guts the post, it was a brochure.

Under those rules, pointing to asolocalization.com or emptyroomai.com is attribution, not a campaign.

When I refuse

I refuse — and I mean cut the paragraph or move the draft — when:

- The outline is a how-to whose primary keyword is a paid job either product finishes

- I am about to paste a CTA that belongs under a product hero section

- The only reason the personal URL exists in the draft is to “borrow trust” for a thin commercial page

- I would be embarrassed if a stranger cited the post as a person thinking in public and then hit a hard sell

- I already published the useful guide on the product blog and this would be a near-duplicate with a personal intro taped on

Refusing is not modesty cosplay. It is hostname hygiene. The personal domain stays citeable; the product domains stay responsible for conversion content.

A quick draft test I reuse

Before publish I ask four questions:

1. Would I write this if I had no products? If no, move it.

2. Is either product URL load-bearing for SEO on this page? If yes, wrong host.

3. Could a reader link this essay without feeling used? If no, rewrite.

4. Am I teaching a commercial craft or narrating a builder choice? Craft → product blog. Choice → allowed here with soft links.

Most borderline drafts fail question one or four. That is fine — it means the product sites are doing their jobs.

How this looks in practice

Allowed on the personal site: why I keep two product hostnames, what broke when I mixed trust and conversion, why free browser tools can sit beside paid work, when I choose not to chase every mention onto my name.

Not allowed here: turning this URL into a third competing commercial cluster for either product’s money terms. If a draft starts teaching the craft at depth, it ships on asolocalization.com or emptyroomai.com instead — and this site can later link the decision, not rehost the tutorial.

What I want strangers to cite

I want people to cite calm process, not a disguised funnel. Soft links to the products I build are part of that honesty — they say where the work lives. Refusals are the other half — they keep the personal hostname from eating the products’ topical focus or embarrassing a future backlink.

That is the whole policy: link when the story needs the ship; refuse when the post needs a storefront.