You have probably read all there is to know about getting people to link to your blog before, and this post doesn’t tell you anything you don’t already know. This is merely a nice trick to get many people to link to you, without having to do much work.

Basically, the more people who links to you, the higher your blog ranks in search engines. There are many details to this, but that’s a totally different story written by much smarter people than me.

The trick

This has worked extremely well for me for a long time and it is very easy to pull off. It works no matter what blog platform you use.

You probably have designed your own theme or modified an existing one for your blog. It probably looks really nice too. That’s exactly what Tom Watts thought about my old theme for dasBlog and therefore asked me if it was ok that he included it into the next release of dasBlog. Of course it was. At that point I had already made the theme available for download for anyone interested and a lot of people actually did (I can’t imagine why).

The trick is that I added a piece of text to the bottom of the theme which linked back to my own blog. It looked something like this:

dasBlog theme by Mads Kristensen

That sweet traffic

Almost from one day to another, people started to use my theme and links started coming in. After a couple of months when the search engines had done their indexing, my blog got much better ranking because of all the links.

Now I receive a lot of search engine traffic as well as general link traffic and I can thank the theme for a big part of it. So, now you might wonder how to get your theme included in your blog platform of choice.

Get your theme out there

Many of the smaller and mid-sized blog platforms such as dasBlog, Subtext and BlogEngine.NET are probably more than willing to include a nice theme because they might not have that many and they all want to offer as much out of the box as possible. Just write to them and ask if they are interested in including your theme.

For the big platforms such as WordPress and MovableType you probably can’t get your theme bundled. Instead you can add your theme to the various theme sites where people can download themes and also have the download available on your own blog.

It is very easy to get your theme out there with a little effort and the results are noticeable.

For BlogEngine.NET users

After the next release scheduled for this Monday, we are going to release a theme pack with all the themes that didn’t make it into the final release. If you have written a nice theme then we can include it into that pack and into future versions as well. Just remember to add a discrete link to your own blog somewhere.

If you design or tests websites, then you have to make sure they work in different screen resolutions. You have to change the size of the browser window or maybe even change the screen resolution. There are tools that let you resize the window to different predefined sizes, like the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar or the Web Accessibility Toolbar.

If you don’t want to install a toolbar or some other program to resize your screen, you can do something very simple but really useful and customizable. Add any page to your favourites (bookmarks in Firefox) and place it in the Links folder in IE or the Bookmark Toolbar in Firefox. Then right-click the new favourite and change the location to javascript:window.resizeTo(1024,768); and rename it to 1024x768.

The link toolbar with resize buttons

The link toolbar with resize buttons in their own folder

You can then add another favourite and call it 800x600 or whatever screen size you want. It’s quick, simple and easy to customize.