Getting Exposure: My New Found Love of Link Parties

This week's installment of getting traffic for your blog is going to focus more about linking with others. I've briefly written about how writing comments on other blogs will get your blog noticed, as well as writing articles for other sources. Today I'm going to write about link parties - sometimes known as blog hopping.

I recently participated in a link party for my ragged flower tutorial, having no idea what to expect. Oh my, I LOVE link parties! They're soooo much fun. Not only do you get to see some awesome creative craft projects, diy projects, and recipes, you also get your blog noticed. Many of the participants also share the "linky love" by commenting on other participants' blogs, perhaps even becoming a follower.

How a link party works is you link up one of your specific blog posts on what you've created recently. There's a linking tool on these link parties where it's simply a matter of pasting your blog post url, naming your project/link, and then choosing a picture. (The link program gives you a choice of choosing a picture from your particular post or uploading a picture from your computer). And that's it! You do have to grab the website's button and place it on your blog post so as to share the linky love and give back to the host for doing the work to set up the party.

In less than a week, I've received well over 500 page views - a large part of the hits coming from link parties. With my new blog, All Thumbs Crafts, the sole traffic (aside from ten hits from this blog) has been all from link parties. (I've had around 150 views thus far). That's pretty good considering the blog is less than a week old! Now you can see why I'm so excited about these link parties and how they can get traffic. In order to have a successful website, you need to combine both SEO and linking with others.

All of the link parties I've seen don't have anything to do with prim, so I figured I'd start up a regular link party here. Once I figure out the backstage stuff, which doesn't look too hard, I'll begin! (The hard part will be creating a button for it). It'll probably be within the next few days - perhaps even this weekend. Each week will have a theme of some sort, like prim kitchen wooden utensils, enamelware, crocks, ornies, dolls, etc. Then we can all drool over each other's perfectly prim items!