Helio of Goteborg’s History wrote asking me how to get more links for his Swedish history page. I’ll admit I’m not an expert, but my last name sounds scandinavian, so I’m motivated to give a nice Swede the few tips I know. The first tips applies to non-English language bloggers, but read generally, the other five apply to everyone.

Here goes:

1. Provide content in English. Blogging in Swedish limits your readership and linkage; English is much more widely spoken and understood.

   A number of translation plugins exist for Wordpress. I haven’t tried them; maybe I should. You definitely should!

   Polyglot is a Wordpress plugin can help you provide content in a variety of languages, but you need to supply the content in both languages. Unfortunately, writing copy in both English and Swedish is work. Try robo-translation using Word Translation Plugin; it’s free. If free doesn’t work, you can pay for Angsumans’ Översättare Plugg Pro 4.0 Befriaren also known as “Angsuman’s Translator Plugin Pro 4.0 Released”.

2. Link or comment to niche blogs: True niche bloggers love getting links and they link back to interesting niche content. The challenge is to think of “niche” just broadly enough and to avoid becoming an obnoxious spammer.

   Helio, let’s take your blog as an example: you write about “The history of ‘X’ in Sweden”. So, you can link to a) history blogs, b) Swedish culture blogs and most importantly c) niche blogs about ‘X’.

   Your best bet is to find niche ‘X’ bloggers who seem interested in Sweden. These exist!

   Need proof? Do you see Lucy, the adorably cute cat to the left? Well, Wendy Johnson is attached to the hands holding Lucy. Wendy not only knits a lot; she sometimes knits Scandinavian styles.

   What good does this do you link-wise? There is a strong possibility Wendy might be interested in articles about the history of Scandinavian knitting. (Or she may not.)

   How might you, Helio, get a link from a blogger like Wendy? There is no sure way, but you could try this: post an interesting article about the history of Swedish knitting mentioning the Bohus Tradition; mention modern day knitters who still knit these things. Link Wendy’s Bohus sweater. (BTW: It’s a great sweater; she’s a famous American knitter and knitting book author. Your readers will probably be interested in the link!)

   If your article is interests Wendy, she might link back. (BTW: be sure to use WP-Cache if she does. Click to read why.)

   Now, don’t focus on Wendy; she’s an example. And let’s face it; she doesn’t want to be spammed.

   I want you to generalize the advice I gave you. Do you plan a post about The History of Luttefisk? Find A list (or B or C list) food bloggers who might be interested in Luttefisk. (Or better yet, blog about something edible.) Swedish Furniture? Find bloggers who discuss Swedish furniture or interior design.

   What can bloggers other than Helio do: Think about their niche broadly. Try to link to people in their tight niche, then try to find creative ways to link to people who overlap their niche.

3. Out link a lot. When first starting out, linking one person per post probably won’t do the trick. Make your goal to link to at least five bloggers who might be interested in your post.

   I’m bad. Finding five people is work. Looking at the links I’ve dropped so far, no one is likely to link back!

4. Identify your “link-niche”. How? Ask other people who visit your blog. You, Helio, may think your niche is History. It is, but are historians going to link you a lot?

   I think your “link-niche” is also Sweden! Swedish Americans; are dotty for Sweden. Find them; they will probably link more than historians. Or not– still, it’s worth aiming for links from both niches.

   I have no idea how you can attract historian bloggers. But, with a name like mine, I know loads of people who are dotty about Swedish culture.

   If you want to find niche bloggers are interested in Swedish culture, try Googling. Add Swedish term to the “niche” you are connecting too. When you eventually blog about the history of Swedish food, try “food scandinavian”. It won’t hurt to try “luttefisk blogger”, or “crafts Swedish”. To find Swedish groups, Google “Swedish Days” of “Swedish Museum”. (Heck, try Andersenville, Chicago.)

   This will take time, but if you find a blogger who is posting regularly, and mentions anything Swedish, finding a reasonable, non-spammy excuse to link them would be helpful.

   Your goal is to get these bloggers to notice your post. Their response is in their hands!

5. Always verify you pinged or tracked-back. If you mess up a link, linking won’t leave a trackback or pingback. If the blogger’s blog doesn’t post trackbacks, you won’t leave a trackback. If the blogger’s blog doesn’t let Wordpress autodiscover the trackback, you might not leave a trackback.

   You really need that trackback. So, after you hit publish, always go back to “edit” your post. Scroll down and check whether or not a trackback was sent. If it was not, check your link is correct. If the link is correct, visit the page and search for “trackback”, find the url, add it to the trackback box at Wordpress. Save your post again.

   After that, trackbacks are in the hands of the blogger you pinged or tracked back.

6. Use StumbleUpon. This is for traffic– but you need traffic to get links. Besides, I suspect StumbleUpon friends are often bloggers: they are more likely to drop a link than non-stumblers.

   So, join StumbleUpon. Install the toolbar. Make a decent profile. Apply a few of my tips.

   Spend one or two hours a week stumbling content in your niches. Find friends in your niche, defined broadly: History is a niche. Sweden is another niche. Afterwards, find the correct niches for your individual posts. If necessary, self stumble– but it’s best to be patient and wait for someone else to stumble because you’ll get more traffic, get more friends and fans.

   Heck, write a good post about the history Bohus knitting, let me know and I’ll Stumble the English language version and tag it “knitting”.

Summary of How to Get Links

So, the short advice is: provide content in English, link to bloggers, link to a lot of bloggers, develop a method of identifying bloggers who are interested in your niche (who you can later link and who will link you), make sure you they know you linked them, use StumbleUpon to make friends with… uhmm… interested bloggers!

It was a bit odd, because, though I wrote a post on how to use Stumble Upon to get traffic, I didn’t actually expect to get over 1700 visits to that specific post over the course of the next two days. That’s quite a lot for this blog, which, while growing, still has a relatively small readership.

Did the StumbleUpon readers stay?

As you can see below, the visitors lingered a bit, averaging 1.71 pages, and having a bounce rate of 41%. That’s pretty good for visitors who have never heard of me or my blog. Oh, and guess what else? If you look at chart above, you’ll see that some of the Stumblers who visited Friday’s post went on to Stumble other older posts including Block Spammers From Your Trackbacks.

How does StumbleUpon compare to other traffic sources?

If you examine the figure to the right, you’ll see for sheer volume of traffic, StumbleUpon rocks. Once the initial Stumble began, and other people found and stumbled the post, my traffic zoomed.

In my case, the time spent on site and number of pages view beats Google search engine traffic.

However, I should point out two traffic sources that have longer times on site and lower bounce rates than Stumble: Sitemeter referals and Bumbzee referrals. Sitemeter referrals are visitors who I liked: Clearly, they want to read the post. Bumpzee referrals are very targeted, and I encourage you to join a community there.

(I also got some traffic from a long-winded comment I left at TechCrunch. At least some of people were clearly curious, and stayed for four minutes on average. That said, many just bounced out.)

Will using my five tips work for you?

It will, but probably not instantly.

My intention, (and my advice to others) was, and still is to apply the five steps regularly for a period of time.

Why did it happen immediately for me? Well, the truth is, it wasn’t immediate. I’d used two of the tips before posting my advice. It turned out that my audience already had two or three readers who do Stumble, and I got Stumbled — and by Sunday, that article had 17 Stumbles. Many from people I had never, ever heard of, but many from faces I recognize. (I’m reading everyone’s blogs blogs now– and many are great. I may soon write a post on reflecting on thought provoking things they said).

So was the Stumble Success really due to the tips?

Well… who knows? But I’ll make the case that it was!

Tip #4 was to thank people who have Stumbled you. When I checked who discovered the post, I found it was discovered by “Autorave”, aka Maki of DoshDosh. (I’m under the impression that Maki first became aware of my blog through Technorati, and have explained why I think this. )

Tip #1 was to Stumble people who link you. My reason wasn’t to get them to stumble you (at least not immediately). My reasoning was that some of the people Stumble sends to their blog will visit yours! (Which works!)

But, it turned out that Slevi, happened to like L’s Linky Love, the plugin, had mentioned it in an article about Top 15 wordpress plugins.

Well, it turned out Slevi also liked my article on getting Stumble traffic! I don’t know if he had “remembered” my blog because of my previous Stumble– but it couldn’t have hurt.

Some of the stumbles were from people I linked!
Mind you, I didn’t suggest you should link people hoping for a Stumble. But it stands to reason that if I come up with the idea to Stumble people who link me, they might do the same. So, this is sort of the correllary of tip 1.

What about the other three tips? Well, I don’t have data to show that stumbling people’s post after they stumble mine helps my stumble success. I also can’t prove stumbling my friends and commenter’s posts helps, and I can’t prove linking people who stumble me helps.

I probably never will be able to prove these things because the data will be indirect. But, what do I know? Josh Spaulding of Make Money Blog, Stumbled me, and also said he plans to remember to click the thumbs up button when he reads a good post anywhere.

Since he visits my blog, his decision to be active rather than inactive with Stumble will tend to help me and all blogs he visits.

Will I follow my own advice?

You bet! (Unless it works so well it becomes impossible.)

I did take the time to visit the 17 people who stumbled my Friday post (as of Sunday), looked a their blogs long enough to find a post I thought excellent and either stumbled one of their posts, or stumbled a post they had previously stumbled or discovered. I also made them friends and thanked them, when I could. (Some had setting adjusted to prevent that.)

Heck, in some cases, I even left comments at their blog. For example, I enjoyed Tinu’s article Social Media Traffic – Is It About Titans Reciprocating? Or Vote Whoring? Or… and left a comment. But, oddly enough, I forgot to stumble it Sunday. (But I just did. )

I plan to link some of the Stumblers, not only because they stumbled me, but because I find many of their posts interesting and thought provoking. With luck, when I link them, my posts will interest them. Since they know where the Stumble button is, I may get a Stumble.

All with no spamming!

Will I be stumbling my friends and commenters posts? You bet! I’ve been reading their posts– and enjoying them. But until now I didn’t Stumble. In future, I will be liberal with that Stumble button!

Does it sound like I’m claiming to be give-give-giving?

Well… sort of. Except you know what? I find I share common interests with people who Stumbled me. So, the reality is I and finding interesting blogs!

I’ll be linking and stumbling things I like. What could be better?

Still, I knew I got a few Stumble’s last evening. I just checked sitemeter and I’m amazed to see this:

I was planning to send out a few thank-yous for the Stumbles. I think I’ll manage to get a few out– but most of my thankyous will be sent on Monday when the weekend entertainment frenzy is over for me!

I’d planned to publish statistics after trying my own advice for a week– but I’ll be needing to take a look through Google Analytics on Monday. I’ll report more thorough stats then.

Pay Per Post is now set up to reward blogs with real traffic!

Of course, in some sense PPP always rewarded blogs with traffic. However, they used Alexa to measure traffic, and it’s so bad that this blog shows more traffic than my knitting blog — which gets 10 times the traffic I get here!

But Alexa will now provide real traffic monitoring.

How? On Sunday, PPP announced Argus, a monitoring system that will:

1. Make it easier for advertisers to find suitable bloggers to carry ads and
2. Provide actual traffic data to advertisers surrounding visits, pageviews, click throughs, traffic sources.

This tool uses the javascript installed in the footers at Postie blogs.

(Knowing you can track with Javascript, I’d been hoping they were planning this. Turns out they must have been!)

Evidently, PPP will still use Alexa as a traffic indicator to supplement their data. Still, presumably, if real traffic metrics exist for blogs, advertisers will quickly turn to the more suitable measurement — which is certain to be the PPP data.

In my opinion, Argus is a great advance all around. The advantage to advertisers is obvious. Though less obvious, Argus also has great advantages for serious bloggers who wish to monetize.

Advantage to bloggers

Bloggers will also benefit because a real traffic monitoring system will:

1. Permit high bloggers real traffic to attract the higher priced opps. Previously, it was the heavily gamed “Alexa” traffic that won the higher pay.
2. Allow posites to stop wasting time creating blog rolls that they auto visit armed with “Linky” and “Alexa” Firefox tool-bar extensions.
3. Encourage posties to devote themselves to building real traffic by writing great blogs!

Great work to the Pay Per Post team! Hopefully, other companies will follow your lead and start using real data too.

Evidently, Jason Calacanis and John Chow have also grown stupendously.

Hey, I want a 2290% boost in traffic too. I better ask the three of them for tips!

Or maybe not. After all, neither Andy nor Jason’s Alexa ranking has budged. John’s has gone up a bit lately– maybe because he overcame the ill-effects of the Google ban.

Real? Or Toolbar?

Well, it’s remotely possible both traffic ranking companies are right. After all, Compete measures the number of unique montly visitors and and Alexa measures daily visitors. And Compete estimates US traffic while Alexa estimates worldwide traffic.

But why do I think the difference is due to differential adoption of the toolbars both services use to measure traffic? (Maybe Andy can shed some light on this?)

I’m sure LordMatt is right the same thing affected all these blogs Compete ranks. Toolbar? Fix in Competes algorithm? Whatever it was, it affected Niche Marketing,, Feverish Thought, Dosh Dosh, David Airey and, possibly, Lord Matt

The Alexa Gaming Method

A well known method to trick Alexa into believing you have high traffic relies on four things:

1. A group of friends who agree to work together. This group might call themselves the “Alexa Project”.
2. All friends installing both Alexa and “Linky” extensions to their browsers. (The Alexa toolbars are available FireFox and Internet Explorer. Linky is available for Firefox.)
3. At least one friend sets up a web page to act as a “hub”. This web page includes links to every blog in the Alexa Project.
4. Using their Alexa browser, all friends in the Alexa Project agree to visit the hub regularly and automatically open every link on the page, either manually, or automatically using their Linky Tool bar.

The behavior of an individual participate is illustrate to the right. Basically, the visit the “hub page”, and click open every link. In principle, they have visited their friends site, and so, in some sense, their friend deserves to have Alexa give credit for the visit.

So… it’s not really an unfair right?

Yes, the method is, in fact, unfair. After all, what everyone who joins the project knows is that somewhere between 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 100 people have Alexa toolbars installed. (I tend to think the value is roughly 1 in 500, and I’ll use that number from now on.)

So, if a blogger can get 10 friends a day to visit using Alexa toolbars, Alexa credits the blog with equivalent of 5,000 visits by “random” people. By banding together, a group of 10 people who visit each other blogs every day can seriously drive down their Alexa ranks. (With Alexa, #1 is the best rank. )

Does this really work?

Yes. This drives down your Alexa rank.

In fact, this method relies on Alexa measuring traffic exactly the way Alexa tells people it measures traffic. If someone visits using an Alexa browser, Alexa counts it. Otherwise, Alexa doesn’t count that traffic.

In case you are wondering why you can’t just reload your blog over and over and over. Well, Alexa only counts any individual IP once. You can give yourself one “Alexa hit” a day. After that, you need real visitors with their own Alexa bars installed.

What Goes Wrong?

Frailty, thy name is “Alexa Project Participant”. Over time, each participant begins to neglect their job. (And it is a job — unless you would have visited the blog itself to read that blog anyway. But you wouldn’t; otherwise, no one would need “The Alexa Project”. )

Anyway, maybe the unreliable participant visits on Sunday, but forgets to visit on Monday. Then, they forget again. A few more forget to visit. Eventually, everyone begins to see their Alexa ranks degrade.

At that point, the more reliable members get discouraged: They know they are giving their friends a boost, but their friends aren’t returning the favor!

Soon, everyone stops. And everyone’s Alexa rank starts to rise up again.

Sometimes people start to regroup and try to convince others to hold up their end of the bargain. That can work for a while, then the whole cycle begins again.

How could the Alexa juicing be made to last forever?

Why, by writing plugin!

What would the plugin need to do:

1. Permit users to enter their friends blogs into a database.
2. Create a button that lets users auto-visit their blogs from their own blogs. The p
3. Include a script that detects their friends visits. (This can be done by reading referrers and logging the ones that match their friends blogs.
4. Once underway, the blogger using “You Visit, I Visit” would click a button and only visit people who actually visited them! (And if the other bloggers has installed the plugin, well, they know they’ll get a return visit. )
5. And everything should be fairly invisible to outside observers, because, well… There are people who claim this is “just visiting their friends blogs” and “just getting credit for traffic”, but there are others who bet to differ.

Watch for opportunities to have your posts highlighted by an A list blogger in your niche.

I watched: this involves reading the A-list of bloggers I admire.

I saw that Pro-blogger, Darren Rowse was requesting posts for his current series: 31 Days to Building a Better Blog.

He is posting links with full titles. So, this is an opportunity for you to get a link on Darren’s site and get some readers. Who wouldn’t jump?

I wrote one. I can now report that Darren’s readers are clicking and reading. Darren’s readers are devoted to good information — it’s not just “the cult of Darren”. Plus, Darren filters the posts somewhat to make sure they are decent, so if you visit the list of links, you will find good posts you will want to read.

But most importantly to you: I got more than 60 visits the day his list came out. The number dropped, but I got a few a day for some time. I’m still getting a few a day (though I haven’t checked today.)

No, I’m not going to tally them. It’s a bunch. And I did nothing more than write what I consider to be a good article in my niche and submitted it to Darren’s series.

Because Darren is a true quality blogger, I’ll probably get some a few referrals a month from Darren forever.

So, the final word: submit something to Darren’s project.

The short story is that, having given it some thought, I realized that I had to sever any relationship with paid-to-post programs if I wish to run the tests to gaming strategies. By my own request, I ceased to be a postie on Monday. But, that’s actually the small story, as it happens to have to do with me, personally.

The larger story has to do with Pay Per Post reaction: When they became aware of the experiment, Karen, of Customer Love, announced that Posties would not be permitted to participate in even short term tests to see if Alexa can be gamed. Later, “froogle” announced that PPP will be auto-detecting attempts to game Alexa using these redirects.

Karen and Froogle at Pay Per post are correct to announce this policy and check for compliance. (Checking is easy. I set this up so that participants cannot conceal participation.)

One reason given for PPP’s action appears to be this: PPP currently uses Alexa for segmentation. Therefor PPP cannot be permitting Posties to be gaming Alexa to improve the price they charge advertisers.

As it happens, though I didn’t really think of this before launching the experiment, I recognize PPP’s policy as manifestly correct.

I suspect people will wonder why I didn’t think of this in the first place. Part of the reason is that, initially, I was focused only on testing the rumored gaming method. I’m afraid, like the famous cat, I will someday be killed by my own curiosity.

Also, as it happens, I hadn’t taken a PPP opp in over 6 weeks or so and didn’t intend to take any if I actually managed to game my Alexa. So the thought “Oh, I’ll be able to take better opps” didn’t really hit me. (If it had, I would either have done the test secretly or resigned from PPP immediately. )

I also believe Alexa is inherently deficient due to the self-selection bias introduced by the toolbar and I believe it is already heavily gamed. So, I sincerely don’t believe a few blogs plublicly testing method makes much of a difference in overall accuracy or fairness of Alexa ranks.

Of course, the other reason I might have not thought of it is simply, ordinary stupidity and thoughtlessness.

Nevertheless, the fact is, PPP is correct: regardless of Alexa’s faults, because PPP uses Alexa for segmentation, Posties cannot be conducting of Alexa gaming on their blogs! (At minimum, the tests must be designed in ways that do not affect a PPP blogs’ Alexa rank in even the slightest. But that is difficult to know in advance.)

But I want to conduct tests and do so publicly. So here’s what I did.

Recognizing Pay Per Posts position is correct, I did two things rather quickly:
1) I yanked the redirect images from blog footers. Because of the experiments design, this immediately ended the first experiment which persisted only a few hours and so can have very little effect on anyone’s rank.¹

2) I voluntarily resigned from Pay Per Post.² I had to ask what the process was, and did a bit of fiddling at the PPP interface, but unfortunately, the process isn’t obvious. I sent pm’s to four PPP staff asking the procedure and also filled out a ticket. Within two hours of filling out the ticket, I was out of the system. I thanked Karen of Customer Love. (For those wondering about any financial consequences to me: there are none. I hadn’t taken a PPP opp in at least 6 weeks. )

3) I redesigned the experiment in a way that will actually give clearer results without the need of many blogs.¹

So, now I am free to conduct the current experiments and, what’s more important to me, I am free to conduct future experiments without violating PPP policies or exposing PPP or posties to any unfavorable publicity.

I also think Posties taking opps from Pay Per Post should applaud PPP for their quick response on this.

1. In fact, for those wondering, preliminary results suggest the short term test had absolutely zero effect. Because I was in the process of resigning, I kept images on my own blogs. The preliminary data suggest that this method does not work. LordMatt’s sudden increase in Alexa when he asked a few people to include images at his blog was probably due to a real increase in blog visitors with Alexa toolbars. Still, I need to continue 3-4 days to get incontrovertible evidence which I think is useful because rumored methods are constantly popping up.

2. I also yanked my blogs from ReviewMe and Sponsored Reviews. It is suprisignly difficult to automatically delete a blog from many of these services!

Details. The searcher’s ISP resolves to NY city; they visited 2 pages and then flitted off to Lord Matt’s blog.

What will come of this visit? Beats me!

But maybe I should see if I can get that New Yorker to visit by mentioning that I totally agree with Allen Stern’s review of Texty: I don’t care what the sophisticated technologically advanced Michael Arrington at TechCrunch says, the product sounds useless! And if 48 year old stay at home knit blogger thinks it’s useless, just who is going to think it’s any good?

Oh well, I’ve been wrong before. Maybe the IT guys needs this because they haven’t figured out the more recent versions of Wordpress already have this!

Lord Matt wrote an very informative article explaining how you can gain a good rank on Technorati. Strangely enough, most of us will have moderate ranks, and so will need to do slightly different things to maximize traffic from Technorati!

Now, I won’t say I get loads of traffic from Technorati. However, I do get consistent traffic; moreover it tends to be valuable traffic and sometimes wins me editorial links.

The key to getting the traffic is understanding how Technorati is used by those who like Technorati.

How is Technorati Used?

Technorati is used at least four ways.

1. Performing ego searches & stalking by fans and detractors.
2. Researching blogosphere reactions and controversies:
3. Researching more generally.
4. Following a discussions in niches.

In all cases, people visit Technorati to find recent reactions, stories or news because Technorati is set up to deliver this.

What to do to get Technorati Traffic?

First, bear in mind, when getting Technorati Traffic, your goal is to get the traffic from searches done today. Not weeks from now– today.

So, how can you convert each type of use to traffic.

1. Mention people with ’stalkers’ by name.
   To get traffic at Technorati, focus on the stalkers, not the egos! To do this, whenever it’s relevant, mention ‘A’ list people by full name and product. Example: Jason Calacanis of Mahalo.

   After doing this, watch your referrer logs.

   For a day or two after you post, check your referrer logs for Technorati searches on that name or person. If mentioning that person brought traffic, hey, drop that name again!

   (If you want to eventually nofollow the link, use my NoOldSpamLinks plugin to auto-nofollow after 10 days. I do this for John Chow.)

2. When there is a big controversy or breaking news items in your niche, post your opinion!
   If you blog about blogging, then when blogs were posting fast and furious about the ethics of PayPerPost, you should have posted an opinion. Don’t refer to people involved in the dispute by unsearchable short hand like: “the A-list bloggers”. Give full names and blog titles.

   Write like this: “A list bloggers like Allen Stern (of centerworks), Allen Stern (of CeterNetworks) and Andy Beard (of Niche Marketing) and ValleyWag have blah blah blah…”

   And here’s an extra tips: When possible, link to specific articles and preferably recent ones. People do click visit Technorati to find out who commented on articles: those people are often the ones who are writing their own blog post: They may end up dropping your link.

   How do you find the recent articles discussing recent controversies? Do a Technorati search!

3. Post the results of your ‘research’ in your niche.
   Did you have a problem? Did you spend several hours or days using your best Google-fu to find the solution? Did you have to consult people?

   Post results of your research! If you are experienced a new problem yesterday and solved it, the chances that others are looking right now is pretty high. Of course, you’ll get more Technorati traffic if the problem is fresh, but you’d be surprised. When I had problems believing aLinks was a memory hog, I saw a Technorati search for aLinks in my referrer log! (In future, I’ll Google traffic for that because someone else will have the problem and want the solution.)

4. Use Technorati tags:
   Tags attract visitors in your niche. Always has, always will. Need I say more?

Summary:

I gave you four tips to get Technorati traffic, 1) Drop full names, titles of blogs and give links, 2) Drop full names, titles of blogs and give links 3) Post solutions to problems that required you go do research and 4) Use tags.

Oh, you say the first tw tips the same? Why, yes they are!

Dropping full names, titles of blogs and links results in “stalker traffic” and “controversy junky traffic”. The key is: you need to actually drop the search terms these people use into your post.

Did you know attending to proper search terms when writing is “on page SEO?” That’s also known as “White hat SEO.” It works at Technorati and it works later on with Google. You should do it.