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.

In less than 30 days I’ve moved my Alexa ranking from over 4 million to a little over 600,000. In this article, I’ll tell you how I did it.

First off, a quick reminder as to what an Alexa rank is, and why you should care. Alexa ranks are calculated via the Alexa toolbar. For everyone who has the toolbar installed, Alexa tracks her web surfing and calculates the popularity of web sites based on that.

Alexa ranks are used by many companies to sell advertising on your blog. One I use, text link ads, uses Alexa ranks as part of how they price and sell ad space on your site. If you’re interested, click the link above, and you’ll be directed to their site, and I’ll get a bonus for referring you.

If you think about it, there’s an obvious problem with Alexa rankings. Alexa counts only traffic for those people with the toolbar installed. You may have hundreds, even thousands, of visitors who don’t have it installed.

So, step one is to ask your readers to install the toolbar. You should install it yourself if you haven’t already. Once again, the link is Alexa toolbar download. It’s available for IE and Firefox.

Step two is to promote your blog. I’ve been participating in blog carnivals for a while, so that’s a good step to take if you haven’t already. If you aren’t familiar with carnivals, then read my post about it.

Another great way to promote is to participate in writing projects and contests on others’ blogs. I participated in two this month, Daily Blog Tips and EMoms at Home. You can read my entries here.

Daily Blog Tips: Three Essential Steps to Great Blog Posts

EMoms at Home: Write Outstanding Titles and Openings for your Blog

The one at Daily Blog Tips got an honorable mention, which wasn’t bad out of 115 entries. Both have generated quite a lot of extra traffic.

I recently spent a lot of time putting together character creation worksheets for those readers who write fiction. I’ve been a little disappointed in the amount of traffic it’s drawing, so I’m continuing to promote it. As a part of that, I leave notes on forums mentioning that it’s available. I’m also emailing other bloggers who I think might find it useful.

Step three, link to your own posts. Link to your own relevant posts, as I have in this post. Also, post an occasional list of your most popular posts. These interior links will often give even older posts new life.

I realize that an Alexa rank of 600,000 + doesn’t exactly make me an A-list blogger, but it’s a huge improvement, especially considering it took me less than 30 days to pull it off. The lesson I’ve learned? Spend more time promoting! No matter how much great content you’re writing, you still need to help people find it, and that’s where good promotion comes in.

Before you read what I have to say, check out this article, over at Blue Hat SEO.

How it works 

Okay, if you didn’t go read it, here’s the gist. You can find good content for your site by “scraping” old sites. The URLs are no longer active, but you can find the cached content stored online, like the Wayback Machine.

So, you find some good content that you think is abandoned. You copy and paste it into your own site, and reap the benefits of more unique content (which search engines love) with no more work than it took to find it.

One commenter even admitted to saving wikipedia articles for a few months and then posting them to his blog. Since the actual wikipedia article has no doubt changed, he’s now posting unique content.

Of course, it’s unique content that he didn’t create.

Ethical?

Not even close. This is stealing someone else’s content, plain and simple. Some of these people may be attributing the work to its original source, but I really doubt it. Even if they do, it only slightly elevates the activity, in my opinion.

I have a couple old sites that I’ve let fall by the wayside, and there’s some abandoned content out there as well. Does that give anyone else to use that content without my permission? No, it doesn’t.  Never mind the fact that I may want to use it again some day. The fact remains, it still belongs to me, whether I’m making use of it or not.

This technique depends on the original owner of the content not noticing that his work has been resurrected…on someone else’s site. That’s probably a decent assumption. I doubt that most people routinely check to see if their content has been swiped. However, all you need is one person to step up and say that you’ve taken their work, and you have some serious credibility issues.

Why do it? 

I think most people who do this type of thing are shooting for the quick money from blogging, if there is such a thing. They load their sites with lots of content and hope that some AdSense clicks will bring in a monthly check. That’s fine, but if you’re working on creating a blog that readers will come back to time and again, this is a really bad idea. Months of work can be undone in one posting if your readers find out that you’ve been swiping material and passing it off as your own.

A better way 

Write your own content.

Ask guest bloggers to write content for you. Many bloggers will do this for links back to their sites.

Get content from legitimate sites that offer free content. Tell where the content came from.

Ask site owners (if you can find them) to use their content.

Buy content.

If you’re going to the trouble of building a blog, don’t sabotage yourself by doing something you’d be ashamed for your readers to find out.

First off, wikipedia gives a good explanation of a blog carnival. You can search for carnivals online and submit your blog articles to them. Then, if your article is accepted, you’ll get a link in the carnival back to your blog.

Why should you write for blog carnivals? First off, traffic. Blog carnivals, since they provide a link back to your blog, can generate traffic for you in the short term.

In the long term, people who like reading the article you submitted may also like your blog in general. A handful of people will stick around and become regular readers. Presumably you’re blogging to be read, so more readers is a good thing, right?

Finally, if you’re blogging, you’re probably interested in contributing something to the online discussion in general, and to your topic(s) in particular. You want to be read, and you want to put something useful out there for your readers. Blog carnivals can help you do that.

You can also host a carnival on your site, where you’ll post links to relevant articles on others blogs. This will give you a chance to get to know some other bloggers in your field and perhaps exchange links with them as well.

See this site, for a list of carnivals and their submission guidelines.

Even though I don’t always follow this advice, it is good advice. If you’re trying to boost traffic to your blog, then you’ll want to use titles that help readers find your topic. So, while catchy titles are fun, they’re not always a good choice if you’re hoping to attract traffic.