So far, we’ve been talking about linking things internally within a single Notion workspace. Now, let’s cover the different ways we can link external content within Notion.
Copy link to headingMentions and bookmarks
While we’ve already covered how to add a simple link to a URL anwywhere in a text block in Notion, there’s two cool ways we can display external URLs in a Notion page.
The first is mentions. This is slightly similar to @-mentions (covered in our previous lesson), but a little bit different. Basically, any time we paste an external URL in the Notion text editor, we can choose to paste it as a:
- Normal URL
- Mention
- Bookmark
- Embed
The first option is just a straightforward URL. Mentions are a cleaner way to display a link; instead of showing the entire URL, Notion will pull the title of the page the URL points to, and display that instead of the full URL. There isn’t much additional functionality here, but it’s become my default way of displaying external URLs in Notion.
Bookmarks are similar to Mentions, but if you chose to paste a URL in as a bookmark, you’ll notice that will generate a whole new block that will display both the title of your URL and the full address as well as a larger cover image. This is a great way to emphasize an important or often-clicked link.
Other than display prominence, there isn’t much more to Bookmarks. You can right click on any mention or bookmark and turn it into the other display type. So much cleaner than a regular URL!
Copy link to headingEmbeds
As you might have noticed, we’ve already talked about embeds, how they work, and what types of external sites you can generally embed. Now, I’d like to cover a few of my favorite embeds I use all the time.