We all want to know how to get more traffic to our site, make more eyeballs stick, and make more money, but if you keep using the same techniques that have grown out-dated, your bound to stay at the bottom of the heap. Therefore, here's a brief tip on how to use a lesser known feature of blogs called "trackbacks" and "pingbacks" to get more clicks rolling your way.

First, what is a trackback? A trackback is a link displayed in the comments area of a blog, which points to another blog that referenced it. For instance, suppose you just posted a blog article. Someone comes along and likes your post, so they link to you from their own blog. If your blog supports trackbacks, you'll automatically return the favor by linking to them as well. Think of it as an ego boost saying, "Check out all the people talking about my post!". Naturally, it didn't take long for people to start abusing trackbacks, which is when pingbacks arrived.

A pingback is basically the same as a trackback, but it uses a different protocol. In addition, it usually enforces a check on both ends to make sure both blogs link to each other. Thus, it better guarantees sharing of the readers.

Why would anyone want to use trackbacks and pingbacks anyway? Because the blogosphere is all about linking together and finding related content. Two-way links in blogs are perfect for this purpose and trackbacks make it easy to do.

Since we all know that traffic is money, how do you use this to get more traffic to your blog? Put simply, you link to other blogs. Think about it this way; On popular blogs, it's common for people to race to be the first posted comment, since they'll also get the most views (and clicks) by the blog's readers. But with trackbacks and pingbacks, it gets easier.

Here are the steps:

1. Start by picking a topic and writing a blog post.

2. Use your favorite blog search engine and locate other blog posts with the same topic. The more relevant the better.

3. Link to those posts from your blog. That's right, link to them! If your blog supports trackbacks, it will automatically submit them to the target blogs, getting you listed in their post. If your blog doesn't support trackbacks, you can use various tools such as TrackbackSpeed to submit trackbacks/pingbacks and automate it for you.

4. If all goes well, you should see a link to your blog from all the target blogs you submitted trackbacks and pingbacks to. Some links will happen instantly. Others will take a bit while the moderators check to make sure you've actually linked to them.

Now, if you're quick, you can locate a new post on a popular blog, within minutes of it being posted, and be one of the first to submit your trackback or pingback. You'll be rightly seated at the top of the comments and share in the king's bounty of clicks. Otherwise, well, it's still an inbound link! As with any SEO tactic, you don't want to over-do it and spam, so please use responsibly and only with relevant blogs.

Now that you've got the traffic, it's up to you to turn it into money. We'll save that for another post.