CT Biz Blogs

In a recent post about outbound links on the Naked Conversations blog, Shel Israel called links the “wampum” of blogs. (He and co-author Robert Scoble wrote a new book about blogs called Naked Conversations. They blogged the entire process, from finding a publisher, to drafts of the chapters, to notes about the research that went into the book, and much more. I’m saving my pennies for this book.)

I’ve written before about linking to others and why that’s important (part 1, part 2). The flip side of that is that bloggers who are linked to will investigate the reference, check you out, and perhaps link to you if they feel their readers might be interested. But that’s a maybe — it’s not something a blogger is obligated to do.

So the question is, how do bloggers find out that someone has linked to them? There are many ways:

1. email from the linker to the “linkee”
2. trackbacks
3. blog watches/search engines
4. referrer logs or stats

1. Email
The simplest way is for the linker to email the blog that’s been linked to. This has the virtue of being direct, but should be done carefully, if at all. You don’t want to spam the “linkee,” or beg for a link back. That’s just tacky and won’t win you any friends. Networking involves more than just pushing your URL at people and expecting them to do something with it — you need to add value to the conversation. I would only email in very rare occasions, because if the blogger linked to is at all serious about his or her blog, chances are he or she has other ways of finding out. If you get an email asking for a link exchange, don’t feel obligated — do it only if it makes sense for your readers.

2. Trackbacks
Trackbacks are automated notifications that actually appear on the blog linked to — usually in the comments section or a special trackback area. In this case, the link back to you might happen right away. Some blogs do this automatically, or semi-automatically. For example, my WordPress blog will automatically send a trackback to any other WordPress blog I cite. You can see what this looks like on Heather’s Soap Blog for Eie Flud. That’s how Heather found out I mentioned her, and how she found me and left a comment on that post.

Sometimes blogs have special trackback URLs. Here’s an example on a Micro Persuasion post about “splogs,” or spam blogs (read the article while you’re there). If you scroll down, you’ll see the trackback URL. If I wanted to send a trackback, I would copy that into the appropriate field as I wrote my post, and, once I click the “publish” button, Steve Rubel would get the notification. The rest is up to him.

Not all blogs support trackbacks — Blogger, for example, is useless for that.
However, there are manual work-arounds, and I think they’re worth doing if you’re using Blogger and you’re serious about joining the conversation. Here’s a free trackback tool you can use. And here’s another trackback tool. And here’s a post I wrote about using trackbacks on a blogger blog, for the first time.

There are issues with Trackback “spam.” A good anti-spam application, such as Spam Karma, can help you there. (I use it and love it and worship the ground SK’s creator, Dave duVerle, walks on. I’ve even sent him money, although you can get it for free.) Also, you can hold all trackbacks for moderation, so that you can manually expunge any offending trackbacks.

In my next post I’ll talk about the other ways of finding out who’s talking about whom.