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Limits for self-promotion in answers

I understand that one should not excessively promote a product or a website via SO.

Yet, I maintain a technical blog with my own personal notes (and proper disclaimers when refering to external website content). This blog has advertising enabled. Sometimes, I put links in my answers here, to a relevant post in my blog (i.e., for example when my post contains a lenghty more detailed or complete explanation than would fit in a typical SO answer).

My posts often cover more than what is initially asked in the SO question. So, it probably would be considered off-topic or spamming to dump the whole content in SO answers here. I usually copy a relevant extract.

Is this practice of putting relevant links to some of my blog posts for more details OK with SO etiquette and policies?

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Three important things:

1) Make sure the post you link to is actually related to the question. I've seen many people do this and link to posts that are about a related or very broad topic, with only the barest mention of what the question is actually about.

2) Include the important parts of the answer in your answer. Essentially, make it so no one needs to go to the link to understand your aanswer in the first place.

3) Don't only answer things that can result in links to your website. Don't even do it for most of your posts. The more you do it, even following the guidelines above, the more spammy it will feel.

Remember: this site is not here to promote your website. It's here to help people with specific problems. Use the site 'naturally', and you'll be fine!

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    We've definitely had people who clearly were just trying to drive Stack Overflow traffic to their blog to rack up advertising dollars. They almost always violated two or three of the above rules, so if you can stay within these guidelines we'll probably be okay with the links in your answers.
    – Brad Larson
    Jul 30, 2012 at 15:13

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