Michael Arrington and John Chow are two high traffic bloggers at opposite ends of the blogosphere. One plays the clown to con people into signing up for affiliate schemes and the other plays the business man but is often woefully inaccurate. I’ll let you decide which is which. However, despite their flaws, and perhaps because of them, Arrington and Chow have enough traffic between them to make or break a blog.

So, how do you get a high traffic blogger to link back to your blog. It’s easy. Really painfully easy.

You could try commenting on their blogs, but then you have to come up with something interesting to say, which is pretty tricky, especially if you are on the clowns blog.

The sure fire way to force them to link to you, often without even knowing they are being forced, is to link to one of their blog posts in your blog posts. A Trackback is one of those things that is utterly simple but at the same time difficult to explain. In a nutshell, if you link to a blog post a link, back to you, will appear in the blog post you have linked to. If the blog you have linked to has more traffic than you do then you stand to benefit much more traffic from the link back than they do from your initial link.

Opinions differ, and have become muddied over time, about whether this technique is called a Pingback or a Trackback. The exact description is irrelevant. All that matters is that your blog post links to another and gets a link back in return.

Sometimes there will be a delay in your link getting posted. Usually this is because of moderation and is nothing to worry about. Of course, occasionally you may find that the link never shows up or is deleted.

Here’s a quick example, using a few of Michael Arrington’s recent posts.

Michael Arrington explains how to use a hand puppet to destroy your own brand.

Yahoo hints at retaliation over Microsoft’s dirty trick.

Clearspace 2.0 gets released.

If you click those links you should eventually see that links back to this post are now sitting happily on Michael Arrington’s blog, bringing me a nice extra kick of traffic to start the week. Ironically, since I am deliberately baiting the system for use as an example in this post, it is absolutely possible that the links won’t appear and my links be mistakenly identified as Trackback spam. Only time will tell.

This is a simple technique that underpins traffic generation around the blogosphere. Use it wisely and don’t abuse it otherwise you will get blacklisted by the blogs you are trying to get traffic from. Some might argue that blogs like John Chow are fair game. Just bear in mind that all that linking does you no good if the Trackbacks or Pingbacks get viewed as spam by the recipient and get deleted. Get it right, and in the case of linking to John Chow, you will probably get a extra fifty unique visitors per day, per Trackback. And it doesn’t take long for that traffic to add up.