Expanding your blog’s readership circle can be quite frustrating at times, especially when the success of your blog hinges on how many people you can effectively reach. There are a million different ways you can reach out to people, but the effectiveness of each tactic varies. One way you can help to effectively get your blog noticed is through trackbacks.

So What Are Trackbacks?

According to WordPress.com:
“Trackbacks are a way to notify legacy blog systems that you’ve linked to them. If you link other WordPress blogs they’ll be notified automatically using pingbacks, no other action necessary.
Think of trackbacks as the equivalent of acknowledgements and references at the end of an academic paper or chapter in a text book.
To send a trackback, add the trackback URI from the other blog post to the Send Trackbacks module in your blog post before you publish it. A trackback URI from a WordPress blog will end with /trackback/.”

Why Should You Use Trackbacks?

If someone has a particularly thought-provoking or well-written blog post that you want to further write on or just expose your readers to, you can link up to that post via trackbacks. This will also notify the author of the post that you have linked to them, allowing them to find your blog with a little more ease than if you just commented in the comments section (especially if it’s a very successful blog).
Linking to other bloggers will not only encourage them to read your blog, but (assuming you have good content on your blog) also to link over to your blog in their posts thereby increasing your level of exposure.

You can also allow trackbacks on your own website to help let others know they are welcome to share your posts. WordPress also allows you to decide on every post whether you want to allow trackbacks or not, so if there is something you don’t necessarily want to share you can opt out of trackbacks for that particular post.
Be sure to use your trackbacks wisely though and don’t just link to people for the sake of linking, you don’t want other bloggers to consider your trackbacks to them spam. Using trackbacks is pretty simple and an easy technique to reach out to other bloggers and allow them to reach out to you. The blogging world is such a tight knit community that you’re sure to gain a few new blogging ‘friends’ in the process.