Comment on other people’s blogs. Comment at their blog and reference their post using trackbacks on your own blog. (What’s a trackback? Well, according to Wikipedia a track back is a…)
I couldn’t figure out where a recent (enormous) spike in my site’s traffic came from until I looked at my Referrers log. There it was, a ton of referrals from a site I’d made casual mention of in another post. In fact this site wasn’t even the subject of the post but was referenced in support of my main point.
As it happens, the site picked up the trackback and listed my post by title under their “Links to this Post” section. The fact that this site gets many times the traffic of mine coupled with a relatively compelling subject line continues to have a positive residual effect on my site’s traffic.
In other words, not only did I get a spike that day but I continue to get smaller, ‘echo’ spikes, as a result of my original post. And guess what, some of that traffic is sticking…
So look around and see who’s relevant in your space and start exploring how you might expand the dialogue in a way that benefits them as well as you. That’s the spirit of blogging after all.
Guidelines for Effective Blog Commenting
- Be sincere and have something relevant to say. Don’t just comment to create traffic. Comment to further the dialogue. Otherwise you’re just so much comment spam.
- Be specific. If you’re commenting on a fellow bloggers post at their site then write to the topic of the original post don’t just use it as a springboard to launch into your own stuff. If you’re using a trackback to reference their post in yours, make sure that their post is relevant and appropriate to yours. Don’t just throw it in there in the hopes of generating traffic back to your site. This is akin to the keyword stuffing that made keyword tags irrelevant in web development.
- Be polite. Don’t be a jerk – you can disagree with people without resorting to rudeness or invective and your chances of getting noted and responded to increase exponentially as well.
Quick Tutorial on Using Trackbacks
Remember, I’m not an expert, I just play one on the internet so the real gurus may have a better explanation but what I do to create a trackback is simple, I…
…click on the post’s title to make sure that its URL (the permanent link to that specific post) is the one listed in my browser’s address bar (otherwise you may create a link not to a specific post but to the main index page of the blog). Then I…
…copy and paste the URL from the address bar into my blog. Voilà, instant trackback created. Then generally…
…this sends a ‘ping’ (notification) back to the originating blog notifying them that I’ve referenced their post on my site. And some sites, like the one I trackedback, publish these links and the posts they originated in … it’s a big, beautiful circle of blogging life!
