CornerScribe

Use trackbacks to build blog community

You’ve no doubt heard that building relationships is critical to building your blog readership. One often-neglected way to do that is to use trackbacks to others’ blogs and enable them on your own.

What is a trackback?

A trackback allows a link from your blog to be registered as a comment on another’s blog, and vice versa. For example, if one of your readers writes about one of your posts, she can also use a trackback to your post. In that case, your blog will show a comment with an excerpt from her post and a link to it. Of course, you have to have trackbacks enabled.

Why should you use trackbacks in addition to links?

Linking to others’ blogs is good for your readers and a nice thing to do for other bloggers. You already know that your readers appreciate the alternate perspectives, and I don’t know any bloggers who’ll turn down incoming links. However, trackbacks can add functionality to your blog that links can’t provide.

• It’s difficult for bloggers to know who’s linking to them. Trackbacks let a blogger know right away that you’ve linked to her blog, and what post you specifically linked to.

• Trackbacks allow the blogger to follow your comments and continue the conversation if desired.

• Trackbacks put a comment on the blog, and most bloggers appreciate commenters.

• Trackbacks allow the readers of the blog you’ve linked to to easily come to your site and read your take on the subject.

How to enable trackbacks on your blog?

If you’re using WordPress, then it’s simple. Log in to your administrator panel. Under Options > Discussion, you should see a check box labeled Allow link notifications from other Weblogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.) Make sure the box is checked.

How do you do a trackback to another’s blog?

In your Write Post window, you should have a block labeled trackbacks. To send a trackback to another blog, insert the post URL in that block. Don’t insert the blog’s home page URL; the address has to be one for a specific post so it will put it in the appropriate comments.

If you like, you can put in multiple URLs separated by spaces. This is especially handy if you’re linking to multiple sites (as in a list post). Each blog you list in the trackbacks will receive a comment with an excerpt of your post and a link back.

Final Tips

Whenever you put a link in to another site, immediately paste the URL into your trackback block beneath the post window. If you forget to include trackbacks, you can always go back and edit it the post to add them. For a few extra seconds of work, you can add value not only to your blog but to others’ as well.