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Finding link partners and link exchanges

November 7, 2008 By 6 Comments

Link exchanges are one of the most popular ways to gain links today, but the thing I do not understand is why people waste their time creating useless exchanges.  If you are going to do a link exchange, then do yourself a favor and don’t make it obvious to Google by creating a “links” page and sticking your partners on there.  The value to your partner from this will be abysmal at best, and will also draw the gaze of Google.  People doing these types of exchanges are also more likely to back out of a link exchange without mentioning it, so make sure to check up on them to see that your links are still present.

So that’s the way most people do it, but what are better ways to create link exchanges?  Well first start off by finding reputable sources in the same niche as you that work as complements rather than competitors.  If you find them by searching for the keyword you are aiming for, then it would be stupid to expect an anchor text that will help you rank for that term.   Do a search of semi-relevant terms, such as when I want links for my “online money making” website, I would look for people in the “paid surveys” niche as the content keywords will match very closely and I get great conversions on my survey products.

One alternative to a direct link exchange is a 3-way link exchange, which are somewhat better received by Google.  These involve you linking to one site, they will link to another site, and that site will link back to you.  For my time, these aren’t worth it simply due to the additional effort in coordinating two other people not to mention finding three websites in the same niche, with similar traffic and backlinks, that will work with you.

Googles headquarters (Wikipedia)

Google's headquarters (Wikipedia)

For bloggers, the link exchange world opens up even more.  Links are the currency of the web, and as a result if you find a blog you like, then you can put them on your blogroll then post a few comments on their blog and see if they notice themselves.  This is the informal form of a link exchange, because many times they will give you a link back, as a result you each have sitewide links bouncing between each other as well as related traffic.  While I do occasionally get requests via email for link exchanges, I would prefer these informal gestures, and they are also what I do on my other blogs.  By actually becoming friends with other bloggers in your niche you will find that blogging becomes more enjoyable, and based on game theory it will also be more profitable for each of you to work together.

Moral of the story: play fair with others and it will help your reputation, and if you do nice things online, then people will often be kind in return.

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How to Use Article Marketing for Traffic and Links

September 28, 2008 By 8 Comments

One thing that many people pass over because they don’t wish to spend the time is article marketing.  In my opinion skipping this tactic is quite ridiculous, especially for bloggers.  As a blogger, I typically write in article format as it is, making it quite easy to convert them into an article format for distribution.  I am not alone, almost all blog posts can be used as an article to be submitted to article directories so bloggers are missing out on an additional set of eyes and links when they do not submit their content.

If you plan to simply copy and paste articles from your blog into article directories, I would take into consideration the “duplicate content” filter that Google uses to penalize sites for copying content (supposedly), by making sure that a site:http://www.yourdomain.com actually shows the blog posts before you submit them to major directories, because once they go to something like EzineArticles they will quickly get scooped up by Google’s crawler.  I would also highly suggest that if you write a lot of link bait like I do, that you spend a few minutes dressing it up so that it looks nice in the article.  When I write, I typically write posts such as “23 link building tactics”, which would not look right without the <li> tags.

Why should you integrate article marketing into your overall marketing techniques?

  • Highly targeted traffic, equivalent quality to that of a PPC campaign
  • Increase name recognition; always a good thing to be recognized as an expert in your field
  • Great way to increase the number of incoming links, a properly distributed article should be on 700-800 websites each with a link back to your site.
  • It can actually be fun, don’t make it into a chore and it won’t be.  If you don’t enjoy what you are doing now though you are in the wrong business anyway.
  • Great source of opt-in subscribers to your mailing list so that you can later monetize that traffic.
  • Good way to push affiliate sales if you do it right, since affiliate links are typically not allowed.

So now you want to know how you actually get these waves of traffic, backlinks, fame, and fortune all for free!.  That is understandable, so I will give it to you straight.  I typically follow a multiple step process to get my article to the masses.

Step one should be pretty obvious, pick a topic, research it, and then write the article.

Step two is to submit it to major article directories (EzineArticles, iSnare, GoArticles, Article Dashboard) either manually or with some help from automation.  Typically, I will submit them using a program called Instant Article Submitter to about 70 article directories (although it has a capacity near 600), and then I will use iSnare’s distribution service ($2/article) to get the word out to thousands of webmasters.  Using this method, I typically get around 800 backlinks from a single article.

Step 3 is the most important aspect in my opinion that people often miss.  Obviously the most important part is getting it out to enough directories and writing a high quality article that people want to link to, which is why I didn’t mention that part.  The less obvious par,t is that you should also do a little work to increase the traffic to the various article directories that you submit to.  I will go through and do some social bookmarking on each of the articles for a few of the directories that I submit to, typically I make sure to at least do it for iSnare and EzineArticles as these give me the best quality traffic/opt-ins.

Step 4 is the most fun, do a google search encompassing a unique sentence from your article, such as “and then the 20083 tigers in Alaska went extinct due to hypothermia”, by putting it all in quotes Google will only search for that exact term.  As a result, the number of sites that show as indexed represents the overall reach of your article (in terms of Google anyway).  The more sites indexed, the more backlinks to your website and the better off you are.

And that’s really all there is to know, just make sure that you properly distribute your articles and have an overall marketing strategy before embarking on an article writing binge.  I typically either try aim for RSS subscribers, opt-in subscribers, or affiliate commissions as the traffic coming from articles is typically very high quality.  On that note, feel free to add this blog to your RSS feed :)

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Using Squidoo to Build Links and Make Money Online.

September 21, 2008 By 6 Comments

One of my favorite ways to build backlinks, increase traffic to my sites, and make money online is using Squidoo.  I’m sure most of you know what Squidoo is, but for the rest of the world, Squidoo is a social networking/content publishing platform that allows you to create “lenses” on whatever topic you would like to talk about.  It provides an easy to use template where you literally jsut say what you need to and add whatever modules you would like, therefore no computer savvy is really needed except for the simple <a href><a> to make the links.  As a result, many people that don’t want to take the effort to set up a self hosted blog or website have a way to get their thoughts out, which is great because that is really what the internet is for anyway; CERN (yes, the lab in Geneva) created the “world wide web” in ’93 as a free platform to spread information so it works as a great analogy.

Squidoo is 100% free to use, in fact they actually pay you to use it.  The company is the creation of the guru internet marketer Seth Godin.  It is set up as a co-op, meaning that all profits made are split between the company, the users, and charity organizations.  50% of the profits from Google AdSense ads automatically generated on the pages is sent directly to the lensmasters, 5% goes to various charity organizations (the lensmasters can also opt to donate their proceeds), and 45% goes to the company.   The amount of money that a lens earns is determined by a ranking algorithm to divide up the AdSense earnings.  Money can also be earned via modules such as Ebay, Amazon, or others which each pay on the same scale based on the commission Squidoo earns except for these sales there is no ranking algorithm, just directly attributable sales as if it were your own affiliate link.

The main reason why I use Squidoo is not because of the AdSense/module earnings, but for 3rd party affiliate sales.  I have a couple of Squidoo lenses that pump out a couple thousand dollars a year in affiliate commissions.  The beauty of Squidoo is that it is nearly effortless to create a lens, I have one lens that has made me $1500 in the past 6 months and it took me 7 minutes to create it.  The internal linking system makes it so that all of the Squidoo pages typically have a high page rank, and as a result they are weighted highly in Google.  This means with minimal effort, you can have a high PR web page that is sharing profits that can dominate the search results for some keywords.  Using this PR, you can then build relevant high quality backlinks to your own site and drive traffic or just directly drive affiliate sales.  There is also a great community within Squidoo, and this makes it an ideal place for marketers or average joes to go to make a buck, build backlinks, or raise funds for charity.

If you would like to see my Squidoo lenses check out my bio page, Lensmaster Page.  If you would like to sign up and start building links and earning money from Squidoo you can Sign Up Here.

***My RSS feed is now working, sorry about that guys.  I saw a couple people signed up for feeds but then when I checked Feedburner it was empty, apparantly feedburner doesn’t play nice with WP Super Cache so I had to play around with the caching a bit.  Should work great now, I would appreciate it if somebody tests it out for me :)

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