If you are currently blogging, you should also be utilizing the TrackBack feature to drive targeted traffic back to your site.
There seems to be confusion among many bloggers about TrackBacks – how to do it, what it is, etc. Basically, the TrackBack is a system implemented by many blogging tools that allows a blogger to see who has seen one of their posts and written another entry concerning it.
The way it works is that a ‘ping’ is sent from one blog to the other, which generates a TrackBack.
The TrackBack usually appears below a blog entry and shows a brief summary of what has been written on the target blog, together with a URL and the name of the blog.
The way this can benefit your affiliate links is that you can search for blog postings on a particular subject as the various blog search engines, like Feedster, Technorati, and Daypop.
Or you could go to your favorite blogs on certain subjects and check what they are writing about today.
When you find a blog posting that is relevant to something you are trying to promote, you can write a commentary that touches on both the subject on the other blog and the product you are promoting.
For instance, say you are trying to push magazine subscriptions to the Weekly Standard as an affiliate of magazines.com. You might check out Power Line, the blog that broke the Dan Rather false document story.
Check their last few posts and find something there that you could write about wit your own fresh take. Then weave in a reference to the Power Line blog posting with a link to that posting. Plus, scroll to the bottom of that posting and click where it says TrackBack.
Then you will see something along the lines of “TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.powerlineblog.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/XXXX. You’ll add that TrackBack URL to the area of your blog where it says “URLs to Ping.”
And be sure to either reference your affiliate link in your posting, or run creative for it as an ad on your blog.
Warning – be sure you are writing a quality posting – if a site sees that you’re making a transparent attempt to get a link on their site, they can and will remove your TrackBack.