How to Get Your Blog to 100,000 Visitors and Beyond, Step 7; Leave Comments and Trackbacks

Step 7 to getting to 100,000 visitors and beyond: Leave comments and trackbacks.

As we go through this series, there are probably a lot of you thinking one (or both) of these things (because I know I am thinking them):

1. Wow! This guy's a real rocket scientist. Tell us something we don't know, dunce-head!!

2. Some of these suggestions are so simple. Do they really make any difference?

Let me address these two issues before I continue with today's topic:

1. Yes, this stuff is very, very basic, especially at the beginning. I'm going in chronological order, so the first items you've already read may seem really simple to you. They seem simple to me now as well. But when I was at 20 visitors a day, they didn't seem so simple to me -- they seemed like ideas that would help me grow -- and they did. As such, as time goes on, the ideas will get more and more sophisticated and drive more and more traffic. Stay tuned.

2. I believe every one of these ideas has some merit. They have all worked together to get the results demonstrated on this blog. To me, these ideas are cumulative. I did them all and if you want to try and replicate my results, my suggestion is that you do them all as well. If you pick and choose, you might not get the same results. I think of it as a battle of inches and if I can gain one more inch every day, and have one more visitor, I'm making progress. Yes, some of the ideas will be bigger than others, but in many cases you have to do the little ones to earn the right to do big ones. If you're looking for the one great idea that moves you from 12 visitors per day to 1,000 the next day (consistently), I don't have an option for you. But these ideas, when added together, will get you there.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled program.

As I read all the other personal finance blogs I could find, I started leaving comments on their sites. Not "hey, visit my blog" sort of comments, but meaningful, intelligent (at least intelligent for me) comments that contributed to the content and spurred learning and discussion. This, in turn, drove traffic back to my site as people saw comments they liked and wanted to click through to see who was writing them.

I also discovered articles I really liked and I started mentioning these articles (with a link, of course) in my posts. When I did so, I would leave a trackback on the other site's post. Again, people interested in the topic/discussion would click through when they saw an interesting comment from my trackback and I would get traffic.

Again, these aren't rocket science. But they are the fundamentals, the blocking and tackling if you will, of good blogging. Use them and your traffic will grow.

Click here to read part 8 of this series.

Free Money Finance recommends Emigrant Direct.

Comments

[RS]

FMF,
This may be the dumbest question ever and believe it or not, this is coming from a Comp Sci major...so I appologize. Are trackbacks automatic? I thought that they were, yet I never see any of mine? For instance, I linked to all of these new blogging articles in one of my posts, yet I do not see a trackback at all? Thanks.
-RS

[FMF]

I can only speak for Typepad and how it's used -- and they are not automatic. You have to get the trackback URL (usually found at the bottom of a post) and place it in a section of Typepad, then publish, to send a trackback. I'm assuming most (if not all) other blogging platforms are the same.

Readers? Thoughts or comments?

[Flexo]

Movable Type and WordPress offer Trackback autodiscovery. When you post a blog entry, the sfotware scans your posts for URLs. When it finds one, the software visits the link and searches for a trackback link, encoded in XML. If it finds one, it will ping the site. But this process can make posting blog entries with lots of links (say, a Carnival post) very slow. I turn the feature off and trackback manually.

[RS]

Anyone know how to make trackbacks work in Blogger? Can it be used at all?

The better solution would be to move to my own host I guess, but I am still trying to figure that all out right now.

Thanks.
-RS

[Ring]

I don't think any can get so much traffic to blog. If only it Matt Cuts or someone else.

[Strick]

Not sure Sr Max Higgins read this post fully...