this is a pretty simple issue but just wanted to jot down this note in case anyone out there is trying to link to an image or pdf asset in their laravel blade file and its not working. The process to do this looks like:
a href="{{ asset('/assets/folder-name/filename') }}" target="_blank"> Link Name
so for example if you had a PDF that you wanted to link to it would look like:
a href="{{ asset('/assets/folder-name/file-name.pdf') }}" target="_blank"> File Name