Mention Bloggers’ Names, Get Traffic

friends_frontThat title sounds too much like a get-rich-quick scheme. But let’s face it, as bloggers, number of readers and traffic is important to us. Regardless of whether it’s to get money or just allow you a voice to share knowledge (the reason this blog was created), traffic plays a big part in that.

Here’s a simple trick to get you at least some traffic. I do admit it’s a little selfish, but it’s win-win so I don’t see the harm. I’m going to give away a little secret (and I hope Louis doesn’t mind me sharing). Louis Gray and myself both bookmark each link back to our blogs on Delicious. Louis taught this to me as a neat trick to keep track of the coverage a blog gets around the web. You’ll notice you can click “Coverage” on LouisGray.com right now and see all the mentions of his blog. Mine can be found here. I also do the same for SocialToo.

Here’s the benefit to you: Those links get populated on FriendFeed, more people see them, comment on them, their friends see them, comment, and the process goes on. I see mentions on these shares by Louis (and myself) all the time thanking him for sharing, but in reality, they made that share inevitable. It’s simple, mention our blogs and we share them with our friends whether we or you like it or not. 🙂

I thought this technique used to track our blogs’ coverage could benefit you as well. In addition, just mentioning a blogger’s name or linking to their blog at least gets their attention because they get notifications through trackbacks, even if they don’t re-share it or post to delicious. Bloggers, regardless of who they are, all have a little bit of ego in them. The most successful ones like to know who is talking about them, and track that regularly. Want a blogger’s attention? Link to them.

Regarding tracking coverage through Delicious, do you do this for your blog? Do you know any other bloggers that use this technique?

10 thoughts on “Mention Bloggers’ Names, Get Traffic”

  7. Hah, that's actually a great idea. Learn something new everyday…
    Also on a side note, this is my first time on this blog but I love the design of the page with social stuff you got going on the sidebar. I plugged your site on a recent Linkedin.com Question by someone regarding “why they should use WordPress over Blogger”. I gave em your link and told them your site is an example why they should use WordPress. Good job with it all Jesse!

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  10. I do bookmark blog posts that mention my software and save a copy of the page in Surfulater, too..

    There is a project in the planning stage at DonationCoder.com, to build a group based bookmarking and archiving tool to use for collecting all blog posts mentioning software made by any developers that are members of the site, for the purpose of displaying custom pages with a screenshot thumbnail of the blog pages, a brief excerpt from the blog post, a link to the page, a comment from the site admin about the blog post, tagging, and ability to replace the link to the blogger's site with one to our own cached version of the page, in case the blog it's on ever disappears.

    We had been using magnolia to do this, but lost everything in their disaster. So rather than trust another 3rd party with this data, the site admin felt it was best that we try to set up something to run on our server instead. That way we know for sure that it's securely protected and sufficiently backed up.

    As software developers, this data is important to us, because these blog posts, articles, and reviews are testimonials from our users. And for a lot of freeware authors, it's the only payment they get for the code they write.

    When someone comes across a site of a small unknown developer offering some sort of software that they feel a little unsure about, an honest collection of links like this can help to put their mind at ease. Include all the negative ones in it too, and you are being very honest and transparent, showing that you have nothing to hide.

    But for me, I am not just a software developer. I am also a blogger…one that actively promotes good, lesser known blogs that I find. And I often find them because they have written about my software or mentioned my blog in one of their posts (or even advertised on one of my sites through Project Wonderful)

    Anything you do that catches my attention will cause me to take a closer look at your work. And if I like what you are doing, I am going to tell others about it and send you some traffic.

    Yup, I am an active willing participant in free word-of-mouth advertising, with a strong preference towards the little guys that could use it the most.

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