One of the methods recommended to generate traffic to your website is to locate highly ranked blogs on your subject and make a Comment on a recent blog post. Naturally, you include a signature file after your post linked back to a page within your own site that is relevant to the subject.

This is an opportunity to obtain both one way links deep into your site for the SE spiders and also a doorway into your site for human traffic that is already interested in your subject matter.

While lapping up this sort of information from your teacher/mentor this traffic strategy sounds eminently sensible while at the same time rather difficult to pin down. How do you know this use of blog comments really works?

Well, here's the proof. I recently put up a new blog site. The subject is something of a hobby of mine rather than a project I was aggressively marketing and is in a very small niche market, in fact I don't think it's a market at all.

So my inspection of the weekly scheduled Google Analytics report that was sitting in my email In tray for a blog on which I was expecting little traffic anyway was quite cursory until the large percentage of referred traffic caught my eye.

By the way, if you are not using Google Analytics then you really should - especially when it is so easy to install on Wordpress blogs.

Drilling down into the report I found that most of the referred traffic was coming from a single inbound link and isolating that link in the report told me that it was a single, very cursory comment I had made on a high ranking blog.

The effect was to attract in excess of 100 visitors to my site that day and although the traffic diminished it has stabilized at around 15 unique visitors per day.

The great thing about this, other than the traffic, of course, is that I am using Google Reader to scan and monitor relevant RSS feeds to give me content and ideas for my site. So I had actually taken the news content from the high ranking site and put a little effort into re-writing it then posted it on my blog.

So I had up-to-date, relevant content on my blog. It was only as an afterthought that I put a very cursory comment on the 'donor' blog. Result: a flock of birds killed with one stone. Fresh, new content for continuity and SE ranking, participation in the subject community, lots of inbound traffic and a long lasting inbound link.

Blog comments? Yes, they work gangbusters!

The latest version of Wordpress has been released today to make bloggers lives even easier. It has a number of useful additional features related to being able to being able to go back to previous versions of posts as well as making posting directly from the web even easier.

Later - 18 July: And the inevitable has happened. A security problem with the new release. Those who should know tell me not to upgrade until the problem sorted out.

Anyway, watch the 3 minute video for a preview.

Wordpress is set up with the ability to automatically tell others whenever you have spoken. After all, there is no point in publishing if no-one comes to read what you have written.

Many new users of Wordpress are puzzled about how this notification to others takes place, especially when the first words they come across are things like 'ping' and 'ping servers' when they are possibly still struggling with the basics of logging in to their new blog.

Although Wordpress is set up to deal with it automatically, in practice there are many choices available. Wordpress calls them Update Services and you will find them in your Writing Settings right down at the bottom of the page.

The default setting on installation is, from memory, Pingomatic and Pingoat. These services distribute the fact that you have just published a new post by 'pinging' a number of ping servers. However, there are a multitude of other ping services.

What there is not is any common opinion about how successful or otherwise any combination of ping servers might be. Indeed there is an argument that multiple ping servers will often be notifying the same servers many times and this can get your message blocked as spam.

Myself, I work on the basis that even if some get blocked I would like to at least make the effort to get my message out there by as many channels as I can. So I use a pretty big list.

There's a useful article on the basics of 'pinging' - where I just found out that a ping is a 'groper'(!) and my page on blogging for more information.

I know, I know, I must be a year too late for social marketing. That's because at my age I'm probably a generation too late. When I first saw stuff about Myspace, Facebook et al the thought filled me with dread. The idea of putting all your personal stuff out there for unknown people to rake over really turned me off. And Twitter! Someone explained it to me and I said; 'What's the point? Why do I want to spend my time writing inconsequential nonsense when all the advice is to stay focused.

Anyway, the creaky old oil tanker of my attitude is beginning to turn. I've just seen a neat idea related to Twitter that led me to rethink my attitude so I'm going to give it a go. I suppose I'll have to give all the others a go too, oh woe is me.

What's the bright idea?

Ahah! Subscribe to Twitterfeed. That way, Twitter will automatically send your blog feed to your friends. So every time you make a new blog post Twitter will automatically distribute it for you. Now that's what I call smart. One up to social marketing!