Drawing Attention So People Will Read & Start Linking To Your Blog

When I logged into my Blog’s admin console this morning I found a bit of humor when I saw my Akismet Spam Protection had caught another 1,000 comment spam. If you don’t know, the art of comment spamming is when someone posts a comment on a Blog for the sol purpose of embedding a link which leads back to one of their sites. For a variety of reasons they hope to attract more visitors to their blog, attract the Search Engines and hope to artificially inflate their rankings.

I am sure compared to more popular sites that the amount of comment spam I receive is negligible but still ShandyKing.com receives a healthy few hundred a day. If it was not for having Akismet installed in my WordPress I would have to spend much wasted time manually filtering out the select few authentic comments I receive amongst the Spam.

At the rate I see comment spamming arrive to my Blog you would think Blog Spamming is still popular. Then again, I can not get over the number of people who send fake referral traffic to my Blog so they could get their Blogs URL stamped in my log files. But that’s a whole other story all together.

I remember when I first launched my Blog I was sort of thrilled when I got my first Spam. It sort of told me my URL as making its way around the web.

But this post is not how to spam your way to get links. When I first started this Blog I put quite a bit of effort into getting it noticed. With the number of new Blogs created each day, you have to do something to stand out!

Here are few things you can try that are not so evil yet deliver results:

1. Once you write a post, hit up one of your buddies on the Internet to submit your sites to Netscape, StumbleUpon and Digg. Nothing brings you up to speed on what people consider to be quality content and what is not when you see readers of those sites comment. If you keep at it and learn to write good solid quality content some of those posts might make it to their homepages where thousands of readers will find your site. With all those readers come Bloggers who might find your Blog interesting enough to write about and link back to you. Another thing to consider is websites that do nothing but spend all day scraping sites like Digg and Netscape with their own agendas. What ever their agendas are, if your Blog posts are accepted to stick around on Netscape and Digg you have a good chance of having many other sites automatically post links to your Blog on theirs sites.

2. Before you write a new post, take a moment and jump on over to Technorati or Google Blog Search and do some quick searches and see who has recently been Blogging about the same topic. You may want to select a few Blogs who not only talk about your topic but they also have received comments on their Blog about it. This way, you can then write a post about the topic and at the same time cite those other Blogs in your writing. By doing this you create a link to this persons Blog who in the near future will see and will most likely come back to your site to read what you have written about them. If they like what you had to say, you’ve just attracted a new loyal reader. But also, by linking to their Blog from inside your post you may get a free link on their Blog thanks to the TrackBack features of Blogging. And if these links appear on their Blogs and these Blogs have loyal followers their audience can soon become your audience.

3. Don’t be shy, Bookmark! This is time consuming but it works. When you post, go and bookmark it. These sites are all working hard to create their own user base and you never know who will find your blog.

Bringr IceRocket Daypop BlogPulse Blodex Blogsearch.com Blogs of the Day 180n Gada CodeCubed Newzingo Flickr KB Cafe Tag Search Bloghop Oishii Citeulike Common Times LookMarks Frassle GiveALink Memeorandum Ask Jeeves LinkFilter Hyperlinkomatic FeedMarker BackFlip Yummy.printfu Diigo Quimble Filangy Riffs Gibeo.net Linkroll OpenBM SearchFox Bloogz Findory Blog Top Sites Indiza Indiamarks.com Indiahappening.com

4. Get creative with how you link to other Blogs when you cite them. Linking to another persons Blog with one letter or character could be just as effective as writing a full long hyperlinked title.

5. Pay for traffic. Sites like StumbleUpon, Adbrite are great ways to direct immediate traffic to your Blog in the early days.

6. Directory Submission. Best of the Web & Yahoo Directory. BOTW offers a Blog Directory Express Submit service.

7. Be active, read and post comments on other Bloggers websites. Especially when you are new to Blogging the best thing you can do is engage yourself. When commenting on other peoples Blogs, do not write “Yea I agree” & “Me To” type comments. Give a little bit of your time back to that Blogger and provide a good solid comment. Agree or disagree with them, but that comment you write represents you and is a form of marketing your own Blog.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 4th, 2007 at 10:50 am and is filed under Shandy Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.