Last week we had a get-together with money coach Nancy Zimmermann and musician Craig Addy, to talk a bit about generating blog traffic. Here we are, at Waves on Hastings and Richards in downtown Vancouver.
Craig, Nancy, Isabella
A number of questions came up, one of them being, “how do you get other blogs to notice you?” Sometimes it seems that you link and link and link to other blogs and they don’t even acknowledge your existence.

Of course it’s like anything else in life. You can’t make people notice you. But you can help them, you can make it easy for them. Here are a few things you can do:

Trackbacks
In theory, there are various ways in which any web site owner can easily see whether someone has linked to his or her web site. But in practice, that doesn’t always work – so don’t assume that because you’ve linked to someone, they will actually find out. A good way to ensure a higher chance that someone will notice you is to use trackback, a way of notifying the owner of the blog you’re linking to.

  • Go to the blog post you are linking to and see whether they have trackback enabled. Let’s try this on Nancy’s blog.
  • Go to the blog itself, here.
  • Then click on the individual post by clicking on an article header, here for example.
  • At the end the end of the article you want to link to you find something called “trackback URI”. Right click on it and click on “copy link location”. For Nancy’s article it looks like this: http://nancyzimmerman.com/2007/11/20/econ-101-warren-buffet-on-the-us-dollar/trackback/.
  • Now go back to the “create a post area”, where you’re writing the article from which you want to link.
  • In Wordpress you will find a location underneath the article body called “Trackbacks”.
  • Open it by clicking on the plus sign. Now paste the copied trackback URI into it.

Email
It also doesn’t hurt to send an email to the person you’re linking to. Just so you don’t come across as overeager, you might want to write something like this:

“Hi Blogger XYZ – just a short heads-up that I linked to your blog in this post [include the URL of your post]. I liked you’re article because …. Not sure whether trackback is working, so I thought I’d email you, too”.

You can also use an “email to your friend” plugin for this. (Go here for an explanation of what a plugin is.)

(This post was listed in the Carnival of Struggling Bumbling Newbies)