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Tech Talk Tuesday: Linkbait And Trackbacks

Linkbait is when you post to your site, link to someone else, and hope and pray that you get their attention (and even better, their traffic).

Bloggers (and many webmasters) try and keep track of their statistics. In the year and a half that I’ve had this blog, I’ve gotten comfortable with my statistics and I can sort of feel the trends. My traffic comes from search and returning readers. A tiny piece of my traffic (less than 3%) comes from links from other sites. Now, you can interpret that in a few ways. One way might be to say that this site is not really part of the community, and that my readership suffers for it. Another way to interpret this would be to assume that my readers are sending more readers, and the search results are helpful. I know the answer to this, and it falls somewhere in the middle, perhaps about an 80/20 split.

I want to point you to a perfect piece of linkbait. The opening sentence of this article makes it so I must respond.

A long time internet player, eBay power seller, Jessica Gottlieb burst into the ‘Mommy Blogging’ world as the woman behind (or was it in front) of the Motrin Moms debacle.

To be clear, I don’t have to leave a comment, but I do have to keep reading. I want to know what it is Debbie is about to say. How did I know that Debbie was talking about me? I had a google alert set up, and I can see it my blog’s statistics. I highly recommend using Statcounter, the code is easy to install and the information it provides can be very helpful.

If you’re going to really use linkbait, may I suggest linking to a specific post? Debbie, of course, is bright enough to do just that. See this paragraph?

By creating a link to a single blog post, my site automatically issues a trackback, sometimes referred to as a pingback.

this is a trackback or a pingback

Again, when you linkbait someone, you can be critical. I wouldn’t say Debbie was trying to be my BFF, but it was honest, kind and effective. I’ve had a rash of not-so-kind things written lately. You know what? I’m not into helping them out, so the pingbacks? They get deleted. Everyone else does the same thing, they just haven’t told you yet.

Be critical, that’s fine, be mean and it won’t work.

Just you wait and see. I’ll talk about my friend Nina, her fabulous dog and super sweet husband. I betcha one of the three of them will show up here and ask you to donate to WFMU.

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