It’s a hoot to see what kind of traffic a particular blog post will bring, particularly if one of my lame posts gets linked from somewhere else.
My all time best draw so far has been something I wrote on finding an old Porsche tractor for sale in a tiny avocado-centric village near my home. That particular post drove people to my site by the thousands over a two-week period. And I still get almost a hundred hits a week from people looking for information on Porsche tractors.
This site that drove all the traffic surprised me. It was a tractor collector’s link on John Deere’s site, www.JohnDeere.com. When I wrote the post on that old tractor, I was vaguely aware of the cult of antique tractors. If you don’t believe that there are a lot of people out there with a similar interest go to eBay and search on “antique tractor.”
All of t his is an intro to a post about link baiting at www.scripting.com. In an entry thats’ up today, Dave Winer writes about what will drive him to post a link, and what keeps him from not linking to a site. I admire Dave’s style and his commentary. His site is one of the first ones I read every morning, and he’s driven a lot of traffic to my site (About 400 since 4 a.m. this morning). Dave’s piece is an excellent primer on when to link and when to pass on the opportunity. It’s here.
I”ve benefited a lot from the “Daves” in my blogging, Churbuck and Winer. Both have linked to me and I’ve learned a lot about blogging from both people. What I really admire though is that neither have ever done posted gratuitous links in their blogs. Recently, PR people asking me to link to their clients in my blog have besieged me. I find this practice very annoying.
Well, I just saw the fishmobile coming down the road from the lake near my house. I’m think I’m g goingv to go throw some flies at the dazed trout. Jim Forbes, 4/27/2007.
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