blog marketing

Blog Traffic Building with Trackbacks

In my ongoing quest to attract more visitors by trying out new traffic generating ideas, I came across an informative post with a great video about using trackbacks. I’ve been playing around with WordPress for quite awhile now and I have to admit I never understood what trackbacks even were and why people bothered. The only times I ever got one it was spam, so it was certainly nothing to get excited about for me.

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After watching this video, it makes much more sense to me now. It has the backlink building power of comments with a much higher possibility of being clicked on if the visitor is looking for similar content on a particular topic.

This process is even easier today than when the video was made because all you have to do is link back to the blog and the author is notified. There’s no need to go hunting for a trackback url on the authors site. Although it is still important to find out if the site even accepts (posts) trackbacks at all.

This makes me realize how clueless I’ve been. I like to believe I give out a fairly decent amount of link love, but I’ve never considered choosing the site that allows trackbacks over one that does not. If I’m discussing an idea that I’ve researched and found referenced on multiple blogs, I need to be more selective with my links.

For the open source portion of this site, I will admit that most of the pages I link to are not blogs because it’s an open source community or commercial script site. Even when I find a popular blogger writing about open source software, I often can’t understand what the heck he’s talking about. I have created quite a hurdle for myself being a non-programmer who blogs about finding new software. 🙂

For the traffic building part of this site, it’s so much easier to find helpful blogs to link to because a lot of them take the instructional approach. The how-to type blog post is ideal for me because it really helps in implementing these unfamiliar blog marketing ideas. It also doesn’t hurt that there’s just a lot more of them to choose from too.

Blog Marketing with Press Releases

A press release is an announcement of something considered newsworthy by the submitter in hopes if it getting picked up by the media. If you’ve ever come across all those lists out there for best website traffic building ideas, I’m sure you’ve seen press releases mentioned in most of them. I was always under the impression press releases were for celebrities and fortune 500 companies, but I was so wrong.

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The key is to have such compelling news that people want to talk about it and share it. You’re probably wondering how a press release can help you if you’re not breaking big news or don’t have anything interesting enough to go viral. I was thinking the very same thing until I pulled up a half dozen articles in my Firefox tabs and began reading.

I think the most important part is to spend the time to write a very concise and persuasive release on the best information you have to offer over the course of a month or two. Not everything is worthy of a press release, but if you have interesting news in your niche or can take the finer points of many posts to create a strong release, you’ve got all the ingredients you’ll need to plant some website traffic seeds.

When you submit your press release to a free distribution site, you will naturally attract visitors who are interested in the topic of your release. The visitor numbers you generate from your press release will depend greatly on your headline and your copy. Let’s say that over the course of a couple weeks you only saw a trickle of about three or four visitors a day come in from your release. You might think of this as a complete failure, but you shouldn’t. Instead, think of it as a numbers game.

There’s a saying, and I forget where I heard it, who said it, or how it was said exactly, but it’s something along the lines of this: If you can find a way to earn a dollar, whether it’s from a product, service, system, or whatever, you already have the capability to become a millionaire. All you have to do is duplicate your efforts.

Same goes with traffic sources. Life would be so grand if I could simply generate a whole bunch of hits from my one press release, but the four a day you got in that hypothetical release still added up to over fifty hits in two weeks. Now all you have to do is find a whole bunch of free press release sites to submit to and you suddenly have a whole lot more visitor trickling going on.