How to boost your blog traffic using trackbacks

HowToMakeMyBlog reader Daan had the following comment to my recent post about how I built my blog traffic.

50 visitors from a trackback is a great number, in most cases it is higher than what you would get from blog commenting, so I asked Daan if he could write a guest post about his experience with building traffic via trackbacks. If you want to guest post on HowToMakeMyBlog, please check out more info here.

How to boost your blog traffic using trackbacks

By Daan

A blog without readers (and comments) is a dead blog. One (quite easy, but lucrative) way to promote your blog is using trackbacks. Trackback is WordPress-lingo meaning:

Trackback: helps you notify another author that you wrote something related to what he had written on his blog, even if you don’t have an explicit link to his article.

Before you begin

• Make sure the blog (and your new audience) you’re writing for is related to your niche.

• Make sure the article is recent, otherwise nobody will notice your link. Besides that, tracking back to a recent post raises the chance of your article being listed first below the ‘Trackbacks’-heading.

• Make sure the blog you’re tracking back to shows trackbacks in their articles.

How it works

1. Notice your “Yeah, but…”-moment: the best follow up articles – trackbacks – are written when the reader has a what I call “Yeah! But…”-moment: you agree with what you just read, but you’re missing something. That is your signal. Now write your article.
2. Make sure you give your article a catchy headline. Because the title of your trackback link can’t be changed later, you’ll only have one shot here.
3. Insert a link to the original article in your post, if the other blog runs on WordPress. Your trackback will then automatically be placed. If you don’t have a place for a link to the other article, then here is an alternate way to send trackbacks.
4. After you have written your article and come up with a brilliant headline: Retweet, Digg!, Stumble, etc. the article that inspired you to write your post. Not only for saying ‘thank you!’, but to indirectly draw lots of traffic to your blog. ‘Help me help you’, get it?

Writing a catchy headline

The headline is the only tool you have, in order to make the readers of the trackback, want to read your article. So it has to be catchy, it should be inviting and it should make the reader understand that when they click this link, they’ll gain more insight to the article they’ve just been reading.

The first trackbacks I ever made were in an article full of linklove called: ’7 Helpful Articles for Beginning Bloggers’. Two very successful trackbacks were those directing to articles at HowToMakeMyBlog.com and Copyblogger.com.

Because the readers of these blogs are mostly beginning bloggers or eager to learn, the headline immediately caught their eye. As you can see in the statistics the results are astounding – for a blog that’s barely a month old, that is.

Get your readers to stick around

Don’t forget that if you want your new audience to stick around, besides the headline, the content of your article should be of quality too. What we can learn from the statistics of the HowToMakeMyBlog-trackback is that these readers appreciated reading the article and went on reading up to an average of three pages per visit.

For the referred readers of CopyBlogger counts the same. Although they didn’t stay as long as the other readers, they still managed to read a little less than three pages per visit.

Both referred visitors have one thing in common; they are very valuable readers. They both stayed longer and visited more pages than the average reader that visits my blog. This illustrates that even though i.e. Digg and Twitter are great promotional tools, the visitors you attract through trackbacks (and comments) are much more valuable.

Keep your value

Although writing ‘linklove’-articles is widely appreciated by most bloggers, flooding your blogposts with trackbacks probably isn’t the greatest idea. You should keep it in proportions. Nobody likes a spammer, and nobody likes to read articles that are spoiled with links. Keep your articles valuable and only use a trackback when you really have something to add or want to say “thank you!”.