Drawing members from external blogs

[Tania]

How easy is it to draw visitors from tumblr, blogger, or other external blogs onto your own site or forum?

I've seen people suggest that putting content onto these sites will get followers, which is true, but how do you then get these followers back to your own site? If visitors only share the link to the external blog, isn't that going to direct traffic there and risk diluting your traffic? I tend to share the first part of an article, with a link to the rest, because I've found that although it gets lower traffic to the external blogs, the click-through to my actual site is much higher. It also means there's no risk of a googleslap for duplicate content, despite the cannonical link.

So what would you say worked as a way to use external blogs to get members and users to your main site, rather than as direct sales channels?

 

[PenguinManiac]

They have worked quite well for me, considering side blogs are not supposed to host the main content. I just use them for trivias or silly content, for my objective is to attract people who were not originally interested in the content I'm producing. External blogs (and forums as well) should be used to post different stuff and to diversify your content (of course, promoting your website once in a while will not hurt).
Also, yours was a really good idea, and it sort of resembles RSS feeds and e-mail newsletters: they're good to keep your followers updated, but they're not supposed to replace your main website.