Has it ever happened to you that you came across a site that you liked and bookmark it, read it routinely for sometime and then ‘lost contact’ with it for some reason or another? Then after quite a gap of months or even years you found it again? This happened to me recently when I started blogging again. I say again because I would start a blog in the past but for some reason or another would just not continue. It was easy to discontinue my blogs with minimal content without feeling the real loss because I was not actively interacting with the blogging community. When there is no interaction with anyone, no exchange of ideas with anyone, it becomes easier to stop blogging quietly because no one will notice. So two things are essential for staying in the game of blogging..
1) When you come across someone’s site or blog that you really enjoy reading, you should make every effort to not lose them. This means subscribing to their site with your favorite reader or bookmarking them with any of the online bookmarking site.
2) Make an effort to provide some feedback on their material that you like. After all you want to provide them encouragement by letting them know you like what they write, don’t you? This can easily be done by commenting to the post you like. Commenting is beneficial to writers as well as readers because not only it gives writers an opportunity to interact with their readers directly, but they may stop by your site one day, increasing your readership.
There are times though when you may have a lot to say that cannot be said in just one comment. In such situations, it is perfectly okay to write your opinions in a post on your own blog, by providing a link to the article that prompted your thought process. By doing this, you are not only giving credit to the original article’s writer, you are also benefiting from their blog’s readers when they follow the trackback links to your site to read what you have to say about the subject. This linking back and forth to articles eventually results in more people getting involved in richer exchange of ideas giving rise to more traffic, which in turn results of course in more money. This referring back to the articles via links is called pingbacks or trackbacks.
Today when I read Leroy’s post on Greenllama talking about the importance of pingbacks and how they are a powerful means of bringing traffic to your site, I felt I had to write about this phenomenon. I also needed to write this because of two blogs that I recently re-discovered after having ‘lost’ them for a long time: Freshblogger.com and Greenllama.com. I had recently written a post about one of the topics that was being discussed on Freshblogger which brought Ray – Freshblogger’s author on my site. He in return contributed further to the idea by making another post on his site linking back to my post, hence driving a lot of traffic to my site. (His site has more than thousand subscribers so in this scenario, I was the one reaping most of the benefit).
Leroy mentions Kevin of bloggintips.com who explains the importance of linkbacks in more detail here.
So, if you want to increase your readership, get in the habit of linking back to the article that you want to write more about, creating a network of blogs talking about the same subjects, and finally leaving comments on other people’s blogs.
pearl
Hi Nigel – thanks for stopping by! yes I feel there isn’t much space for everything in one sidebar! I am using rounders2 and instructions are the same for all rounders! will try it some day :)