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Making Money Online - Tip #5: Trackbacks

There’s a feature available to most bloggers that not many people make good use of. I’m talking about trackbacks, the ability to share a bit of love with your fellow bloggers and get some valuable traffic in exchange.  This is part 5 of a series that highlights useful tips to attract traffic and monetize your blog (see list of articles).

So, what are trackbacks and why should I care?

Wikipedia defines a trackback (yes, it has it’s own page) as a “method for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents.” You’ve probably seen a section on most blog posts labeled ‘trackbacks’, usually stashed under the post itself or under the comments section. Within this trackbacks section is a list of links, each pointing to another blog post that links back to the current post you are reading. It is essentially a log of referrers for that particular blog post, notifying both the site owner and the readers of when someone mentions their post somewhere else.

So, to break it down, what basically happens is:

1. You post something on your blog
2. Someone wants to refer to your post, so they use your trackback link
3. A new link is automatically added to your post that points to their blog post

Almost all major blogging platforms support trackbacks, just make sure that your blog settings and theme are correctly setup to accomodate them. For your theme, make sure that you provide readers with a trackback URL (or for WordPress users, your permalink will suffice) and have a section of your post page dedicated to trackbacks.

By default, WordPress publishes trackbacks in the comments section if a separate trackbacks area does not exist. Personally, I prefer to keep my comments and trackbacks separated, as this prevents readers from seeing confusing comments that are in reality links to another post. In WordPress, you can separate comments by modifying your comment.php file by doing the following:

1. Add the following two lines:

   1 2	<?php $comment_type = get_comment_type(); ?> <?php if ($comment_type == 'comment') { ?>

   After this line:

   <?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : ?>

2. Add the following line:

   <? } ?>

   Right before this line:

   <?php endforeach; /* end for each comment */ ?>

3. Add the following section right after the </ol> that follows that line:

   1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

   <h3>Trackbacks</h3> <ol> <?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : $comment_type = get_comment_type(); if($comment_type != 'comment') { ?> <li><?php comment_author_link() ?></li> <?php } endforeach; ?> </ol>

It might look a little intimidating if you’re not familiar with programming, but trust me it’s really not that bad. Just be sure to add the strings in the correct locations.

Now, why would you want to use trackbacks?

Using trackbacks can get you extra traffic by leeching off of already popular sites. This is how the Blogger Profile posts I write work - they link heavily to already popular blogs, and in exchange for my writeup I get lots of traffic from these blogs. Sometimes blogs will also pick up that you’re writing about them. For example, my first profile on TimothySykes.com was picked up by Tim, and in return for my time he mentioned this site on his very popular blog.

Using trackbacks allows you to piggyback off of other sites and share some traffic - it’s a mutually beneficial way of building readership for your blog. With that said, try to remain respectful and courteous when dealing with other bloggers, as a link to your post with the post title will be displayed on their site. Give it a shot - try linking to this post or another one at your favorite blog and watch your traffic spike!

This post is part of a mini-series that features money-making tips and includes the following articles:

• Making Money Online - Tip #1: Content & Consistency
• Making Money Online - Tip #2: Schedule Posts
• Making Money Online - Tip #3: Commenting & Feedback
• Making Money Online - Tip #4: Time Posts Accordingly
• Making Money Online - Tip #5: Trackbacks

Be sure to check them out and subscribe to the feed for more great tips on how to make money online!