This December will mark 15 years since I started blogging. I started with the now defunct site Themestream, and shortly after it went down, I moved to Blogger. Actually, in a sense, I’ve been blogging longer than that. For 3 years prior, I was writing articles for a weekly ezine.
Anyhow, over the years, I’ve learned a few tricks for driving traffic to blogs. One key to building a community around your blog is linking to other blogs.
Find out who the thought leaders are in your industry. Search for your industry and see which blogs show up in the results. Search on Twitter for hashtags in your industry and see whose tweets get the most engagement. Check out popular Facebook pages and see which pages they, in turn, like.
Once you find these leaders, link to their blog posts. One way to do this is to see if any of them have written on the same topic. Once you find a few related blog posts, write your own blog post on the topic, quoting them to support your position (or to oppose your position). When you do quote them, link to that post of theirs.
These bloggers will notice your link in their trackbacks and in their analytics. When they do, they’ll visit your site to see what you have to say. Once there, they may even comment to say thanks or to give you feedback on your own thoughts. As a bonus, you might even get a link back from them to you in a future post if what you have to say is compelling.
Linking to other bloggers is one of the best ways to build a community and drive traffic.