Earning Online | Getting Your First Links

By admin, on April 17th, 2010

Hopefully you have been following along with our Earning Online Course, and you have your site set up to target your main green keyword along with your first two posts. If you are not there yet, you should find the “Earning Online Blogging Course” section in the sidebar and follow the instructions in the course to set up either your free blogger blog or your own self hosted wordpress blog.

GoArticles.com

Great, so we now have a nice long post targeting your main keyword and hopefully with a couple of cousin keywords in there as well. The first thing you need to do is write a 400 word or so summery of your first long post. Then you will go to GoArticles.com, sign up for a free account, and post your 400 word article there. There are a couple things that you want to make sure you do to your article. The first thing is to take the first occurrence of your keyword in that article (it should be in the first paragraph) and make it into a link pointing back to the post on your blog.

The second thing that you will need to do is create an “author bio”. The author bio is simply a couple of sentences with a call to action and a link (or two) to your site. An example would be “Learn how to create extra cash for your business at Steve’s Internet Business Guide”. In that example, I am targeting the name of my site (a variation on my main keyword) with a link to my site’s home page and one of my green cousin keywords to a post that I wrote targeting that keyword.

For this article, you already have your site’s post targeted at the top of the article, so use your main keyword as a target in your author bio and link it to your home page. If you don’t know how to create a link, this is the html:

<a href=”http://yoursite.com”>your keyword</a>

Just copy that and replace “yoursite.com” and “your keyword” with the url and keyword. When the article is published it will come out like this: your keyword

EzineArticles.com

Now that your first submission is done, we want to head over to EzineArticles.com. We are going to take the article that we wrote for GoArticles and rewrite it. I have found that the easiest way to do that is to rewrite it 1 paragraph at a time. Read the first paragraph and then just say the same thing, but worded differently. Then move on to the next paragraph and do the same thing. When you are done, you will have a unique version of the same article that you can post to ezinearticles. This is also good practice for when you move on to the Unique Article Wizard (which will be covered in a separate post much later).

With ezinearticles, your links should be only in your author bio. In this case your bio should link back to your home page, using the site name as the anchor text. You can use the name if there are words besides your main keyword in the name, or use the address. For instance, let’s say your main keywords is “earn cash make money online”, and your site is named “Learn to Earn Cash Make Money Online”. Use that title as your link to your homepage here. If the title is the same as your keyword, just use earncashmakemoneyonline.com, and link it back to your home page. We are varying the anchor text on purpose here. I was taught in the Keyword Academy that we should vary our anchor text to keep from pissing of Google, and it has worked well for me, so that’s what I am recommending here.

For your second link, take a variation of your keyword and point it towards to your goarticles article. We will be doing quite a bit of this cross linking to our article submissions. The reason is that sites like these and the other two we will address today have good page rank. Page rank is a measure of authority. The more page rank a site has, the more valuable (in general) the links will be. Your site, right now will have a PR n/a because it is new. Google updates pagerank every three months or so. By the first PR update, your site will either go to a PR0, 1, 2, or possibly even PR3, depending on how much work you put into it. On the other hand, I have seen articles from ezinearticles or goarticles (or other directories) go to PR2 or PR3 with only a couple of links pointing to them. That gives me a PR2 or PR3 link back to my site!

Squidoo, Hubpages, and…

You will want to do three more rewrites over the next week or so while you are waiting for your ezine article to be approved. Once it is approved, you will want to create a hub at hubpages.com and a lens at squidoo.com with two of those articles. In those articles you will point to your home page, the big post on your site, your ezine article, and your goarticles article. You can create the links in the body of your hub/lens. Don’t worry too much about making them pretty or anything. You can make money from both squidoo and hupages, but you can worry about that later, once you have the site done.

With your third rewrite, you should go to a couple of the other big article directories and post it to them. Point each of those articles to your lens and your hub to get them some back links. I like to use articledashboard.com and 3stepads.com.

I know that this seems like a LOT of writing, but trust me, it is worth it. The trick here is to not get lazy and just submit the same articles to these places. In many cases, the articles may not even get indexed by Google. The best case scenario is that they will get indexed, but have very little worth. If you cannot picture yourself writing that much, there are companies that will write articles for you for as little as $0.01 a word and do rewrites for as little as $0.008 a word. The one I use most is Content Authority. It is owned by a member of the Keyword Academy and they produce good content.

Well, this lesson is over, and I hope you got a lot out of it. In our next lesson we’ll go into other link building strategies to further build your internet business.

Bryan Beckstead

April 17, 2010 at 4:13 pm · Reply

As usual, an excellent article by Steve. The detail is great, always on point, very informative. The points about pointing back to your posts to get more link juice is something that I need to do more of myself. Thanks for the pointers Steve.

Bryan, from Canada