A Unique Way to Use Trackbacks to Get Traffic

af Mikael · 6 Kommentarer · September 8, 2008

I recently wrote a post about the new design at TechCrunch and how we can learn from what the major sites are doing. One most assume that they have some of the best people and definitely the most funds to optimize their site for optimal performance.

You might have noticed that in that post I tried a little new trick that I learnt from Jack Humphrey. He is an expert in Web 2.0 marketing and especially in using blogs to get the top rankings in Google. One of his free ebooks is called Authority Black Book and contains a lot of valuable information on how to leverage the powers of Web 2.0 marketing to increase search engine rankings as well as get tons of new visitors to your site.

Use Trackbacks

The book holds lots of information and I won’t go into all the details (mostly because I can’t remember it all). One thing that I did want to try was to use trackbacks as a way to get backlinks to your site as well as new readers.

When you link to another blog in one of your blog posts then almost every single time the blog you’re linking to will have a trackback created in its comments section. Unfortunately those links are often using nofollow tags but some blogs are not and you can use that to your advantage.

I’m not saying that you should link to them to get the backlink but if they have valuable content that you want to share with your readers then why not get the benefits of a link.

Nofollow Backlinks

So what about the blogs that are using nofollow tags? One of these blogs is the TechCrunch blog that I mentioned. One major difference between the TechCrunch blog and most other blogs are that they have put their trackbacks section on top of the comments section. This means that the trackbacks section has a more prominent placement than the comments which means that a lot more people will see them.

Do you think that people will be more likely to link to TechCrunch when they know that the readers of the blog will see their link and (if you give it the right title) will probably go check it out? There is no doubt about it.

Rewarding the people that link to your posts by sending them traffic back is a great idea. And that is why I believe that we can learn so much from these major players. I would never have thought of that on my own.

Getting visitors from the trackbacks you create on other blogs are not the only way to get attention. Unless you’re linking out to a REALLY huge and popular blog you will find that the site’s blogger will check who is linking to them and come visit your site.

If you don’t believe me then check out the post I wrote. You can see that I linked to 4 other sites that had posted about the redesign and instantly one of the authors came to my blog to say thank you for the link. If I hadn’t posted that link he might never have known that my site existed.

No matter what topic you’re writing about you will always be able to find other blogs that have talked about the same of similar topics. If the posts they have written are valuable then why not link to them to:

• Give your readers more information on that same topics and
• Get the attention of the other blogger and potentially his/her readers?

One of the ways to find blogs covering the same topics is to do a search on Google Blog Search. That will also give you a wide variety of blogs that you can link to.

It is IMPORTANT that you only link out to valuable content. It will hurt your reputation amongst your readers if you link out to poor articles just to get a link and some attention. So don’t go that route.

Now I would like to ask you whether you have ever used trackbacks as a way to get additional traffic to your blog?

Other people have posted articles on trackback traffic:
10 Blog Traffic Tips
3 Overlooked Ways to Get Hundreds of Links and Prospects to Your Blog
Pingback and Trackback – Blogging Tools to Generate Traffic
Wordpress Trackback Video

Video on using trackbacks

Tags: trackback links trackback traffic