Linking out to other blogs can increase your traffic. Sounds backwards to you? Here´s how sending out visitors to other blogs helps you increase your own traffic.

A link to an article on another blog provides your readers with additional, valuable information about your topic. This increases the value of your post tremendously. People get more value from your post and will notice, maybe bookmark you or even subscribe to your blog with hope of more value to come.

The other blogger, who you have linked to, will definitely notice the link. Bloggers are statistic addicts and will probably check for new links to their blogs on a regular basis. Most of them will try to give back the link live you gave them in some way. Maybe tomorrow, in a week or at another point in future. Depending on the quality of your posts, you may also gain a new regular reader of your blog, especially if you share similar topics.

Plus, by linking to another blog post, you´ll create a trackback on it, which appears within the comment section of the linked post. I am receiving a good share of my traffic via these trackback links.

This article is part of my series:
The 25 best ways to increase traffic to your blog. Please read the other 24 articles and you will definitely increase your blog traffic.

Thank you for visiting my blog. There are new posts here every day. Staying updated is easy: Just subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe to FREE eMail updates. Thanks for visiting!

For blogs, there is one tool almost every blogger does come to use at one point of time to make the most out of his or her blog. It´s FeedBurner and there are good reasons to use it, whatever blogging platform you use.

FeedBurner is republishing your blogs RSS-Feed and adds some feature to it making it even more useful and user-friendlier.

Reasons to use FeedBurner
The most interesting reason to use FeedBurner is, that thy enable you to know how many people are subscribed to your RSS-Feed. As these readers are the ones who keep coming back to your blog, you should be interested in their number and how it has developed over time.

Your readers can easily subscribe to your Feed if it is handled by FeedBurner. They are offering a wide variety of services to use for reading your content. Starting with email or Newsgator, people can also use Bloglines or MyYahoo and many other services to keep up with your blog.

Best of all: Many bloggers do start their blogs on hosted platforms like Blogger, WordPress.com or whatever. They´d lose all of their subscribers when they decide to move the blog to its own domain as the URL of their RSS-Feed will change. No problem with FeedBurner here as this URL can stay the same as it is a FeedBurner URL like mine:

I could use this URL even if I´d move this blog to a domain totally different. Even though, I won´t do this.

Showing your subscriber count
Just yesterday, I put a litte chicklet to my sidebar, showing how many people are subscribing to my feed. At this moments there are:

There were discussions round the blogosphere whether bloggers should display subscriber count. I have chosen to display it now as the count is getting to a stable basis.

Do you think there is an effect on this? Are people more likely to subscribe when they see that many others have before?

FeedBurner FeedFlare
The FeedFlare feature adds some information to the end of each entry what can look like this:

This can make readers of your RSS-Feed click through to your site to leave a comment or something. Again, more visitors for your blog.
You can easily change these infos or add more of them to your feed. Just go to your FeedBurner-Account and click on Optimize and then FeedFlare. Select the items you want to show and that´s it.
There is even an API which lets you create your very own FeedFlares, I´m planning to write an own article about APIs in the future.

Subscription by E-Mail
FeedBurner also provides the possibiliy to let your readers receive an E-Mail whenever a new article is being posted. To not overcrowd your readers inbox, you can choose to send one E-Mail a day at a chosen timeframe. Just scroll down a little bit to find the 2 ways to subscribe to my blog.

I am offering the E-Mail option for my readers, but it does not seem to be accepted that much. This may be different for oher blogs, especially depending on their topics and their readers. For me, it´s only about 3% of all my subscribers using the option to follow my blog via E-Mail.

Do you offer E-Mail subscription on your blog? How does it work for you?

This article is part of my series:
The 25 best ways to increase traffic to your blog. Please read the other 24 articles and you will definitely increase your blog traffic.

The year heads to its end quickly and another month has passed by. November was a quite successful month for me. Again, I´d like to thank those who sent visitors to my blog and made more popular. I grabbed some stats from my Google Analytics and here´s the list of blogs, which sent me more than 10 visitors during November:

Many thanks to:

1. A. Manickavel from assessmyblog.blogspot.com (60 Visitors)
2. John Cow from johncow.com (59)
3. Daniel Scocco from dailyblogtips.com (49)
4. Diana Bajenaru from 134u.com (44)
5. Caroline Middlebrook from caroline-middlebrook.com (25)
6. Kevin Muldoon from bloggingtips.com (23)
7. Tay Fuller from superbloggingtips.com (23)
8. George Manty from canimakebigmoneyonline.com (22)
9. Satya Narayan from bloggingtruths.com (18)
10. Carlo Selorio from carloselorio.com (17)
11. John Chow from johnchow.com (16)
12. Mohsin Naqi from bloggingbits.com (14)
13. Neil Galloway from thoughtsfrommylife.com (13)
14. Wayne Liew from wayneliew.com (12)
15. Courtney Tuttle from courtneytuttle.com (11)
16. Ben Cook from bloggingexperiment.com (11)

The numbers
This adds up to 417 (383) unique visitors from these blogs alone which represents 9.79% (8.63%) of my total unique visitors in November. Thanks again, keep it going. (Numbers in brackets refer to October count)

Visits were up 12.42% and PageViews climbed 18.03% against last month. Direct traffic to my blog raised by 26.09% and - best of all - traffic from search engines went up 30.38% with google bringing in almost 90% of total traffic from search engines.

The number of RSS readers climbed from 88 to 142, which represents an increase of 61%, thanks to all readers for that.

Popular posts in November
These are the most popular posts from November 2007, I hope you didn´t miss them:

• Top Blogs About Blogging
• Things to do before hitting publish
• 30 Social Bookmarking Sites You Need to Know
• How Google Analytics Gets You More Visitors
• How to speed up WordPress easily
• 12 Blogging Tips I Have Learned

What I am Planning for December
I set several goals for myself this month. First of all, I want to keep up my posting frequency of around 5 posts a week.
Number of RSS readers is targeted to break 200 by the end of the year and I aim for reaching an average of 200 unique visitors on my blog in December.

The blogging mistakes series will start in the second week of December, don´t miss it.

What are your goals this month? Anything you want to achieve in your blogging?

If you use google analytics on your blog, here is a small clue on how to get your own visits to your blog filtered for it.
As a blogger, you will probably visit your own site very often, to answer comments or check design tweaks or what ever.

All these hits are being tracked by analytics by default. But with this little trick, you can trigger the analytics code only when another user visits your blog, but not when you visit it.

Put this to your footer.php just before the </body>-Tag.

<?php
get_currentuserinfo() ;
global $user_level;
if ($user_level != 10) {
echo'
<script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
_uacct = "UA-XXXXXX-X“;
urchinTracker();
</script>
‘;
}
?>

And replace the XXXXXX-X with your actual analytics-ID. From now on, every time when you visit your blog, while you are logged in as an admin, the analytics code won´t be triggered.

The if ($user_level != 10) checks, whether the visitor is an admin (WordPress-UserLevel = 10).

This guest post submitted by Alex Sysoef, Publisher of WordPress Web 2.0 Guide Blog and author of Web 2.0 Wealth System.

WordPress is without a doubt one of the most flexible scripts when it comes to pure functionality available straight out of the box and became blogging platform of choice for thousands of bloggers. People love it because it simply works!

But just because functionality is there and readily available doesn’t mean it can’t be improved. And that is where WordPress truly shines by supplying a wealth of plugins that allow us to take it beyond its intended use. Comments system is crucial to blog interaction and in this post I want to discuss how a few plugins can greatly enhance what is already available.

To make the process simple and meaningful we will take a staged approach and discuss which plugins apply at each stage and why.

Stage 1. Improve Administrative Tasks

Replying and controlling comments on your blog is a big part of daily blogging routine. And to make it simpler we will use a few plugins to streamline the process and prevent unneeded work.

Better Comments Manager is a superb plugin to streamline your tasks of replying to comments, controlling them and allows many functions not available in core. Some of the more notable would be threaded reply and listing all comments for specific post to manage them.

Spam Karma 2 is the best of the bread spam protection for your blog. Unfortunately comment spam is one of the biggest problems that we, as bloggers have to deal with and this plugin removes 99% of them. But what do you do with remaining? Use Bad Behavior plugin to remove an additional 0.9% and then you only have one or two comments every once in a while to delete. Not too shabby, huh?

Lucia’s Linky Love is another plugin you might want to consider if you believe that good comments should be rewarded by providing a full SEO enabled link to their blog. Allows you to reward your regular commentators on autopilot once you configure the options to your liking. I personally Do Follow links from good comments on my blog and this plugin is a great time saver to me.

Stage 2. Enhance Commenting Systems Front End

Brian’s Threaded Comments is a great replacement for standard comments template and gives people the ability to post replies not only to the post itself but also to other comments and in my personal blog it increased the amount of participation by allowing direct conversation.

Comment Love is a fairly new plugin that detects the commenters blog feed and adds the latest post from the author’s blog with a full link to at the end of the comment. This plugin takes the idea of link love to the next level and is responsible for nearly doubling the number of comments on my own blog.

Live Comment Preview generates auto preview of comments below the form and is one of my favorites, as it allows you to instantly see what your comment will look like. Anytime you can provide visual enhancement – you can increase the number of comments and this plugin does just that and does it well.

Subscribe to Comments is a plugin, I personally think should be integrated into the core. As a blogger I visit and comment on many blogs and I love the option to subscribe to comments on threads that caught my attention and allows me to receive notifications when new replies are posted. This plugin is a must have as it not only makes it simplier for your visitors to participate in discussion – it generates repeat traffic for you!

Once you complete installation and configuration of plugins listed above – your commenting system is taken far beyond its original design and your blog is a lot more interactive. But what perhaps is even more important you have just simplified many tasks for yourself and added new means of traffic generation.

While there are many more plugins that can be used to improve the commenting even further and I discuss many of them on my blog, plugins above I consider essential to every WordPress blog and hope you find them useful as well.