As you may or may not know, link building is the single most important part of earning online with your own internet business. You can take the best site, with the best content and great value for your readers. Without links pointing to your website from external sources, you will get nowhere.
Conversely, you can have little or no content on a terrible looking site that will do really well in the SERPs if you get enough links to it. At least it will do well all the way until a manual review is done, at which time your site will likely get tanked, but that’s a different story (read my “Earning Online with Thin MFA Sites” for more info). The point is that backlinks are the lifeblood of your business, and your business cannot grow without them.
So far, if you have been following along, you have a website set up with articles for your main keywords and cousin keywords. You should also have a bunch of links pointing to those articles and your site’s home page from unique articles that you have submitted to article directories. You should have also built a few backlinks to some of the directories to increase the PR of your articles. Now we will look at some of the other methods for building links.
The first thing I want to mention here is that most of these techniques are not a good idea for new sites (less than 90 days old). I would even be cautious using some of these strategies with sites under 6 months old. The reason is that some of these will get you a lot of links very quickly, which can look a bit fishy to google. The name of the game here is: “slow and steady wins the race”. You want to build links naturally – 5 a day, 10 a day, then maybe 20, etc. The last thing you want is to have a 90-day-old site that has a few backlinks that it has gathered over the course of those 3 months, and all of a sudden, you pick up 450 fresh links.
Okay, keeping these things in mind, here are some of the methods that I use to get more links to my sites (in no particular order).
Link Exchanges
This is one of the most popular ways to get links. It basically involves offering to link to somebody’s website if they will link to yours. The easiest way to find the best links for exchanges is to do a google search for your main keywords and contacting the site owners. You want to look for blogs mostly in the beginning because they are the easiest to get links from. You can either do a search for your keyword under google blog search, or do the search with an “inurl” string. For instance, for this website, maybe I would look for “internet business inurl:blog”. I could also do a search for “internet business ‘leave a comment’”.
- Don’t worry too much about the page rank of the blog. The fact that they showed up in good position in google tells you that they have some authority for your keyword. Also you want to keep some things in mind when looking to exchange links with people.
- One-way links are much better than reciprocal links, so try to use three sites to form a triad, if you can (yoursite1 links to theirsite2, which links to yoursite3).
- Blogroll links give you a link from every page of the site, but they are still not nearly as valuable as links from within the site’s content.
- Be very careful of blogroll links from big sites when your site is young. That is an easy way to get too many links, too fast.
- Links from “links” or “resources” pages are barely a step up from garbage and are sometimes not even in google’s index.
- A site’s position in the SERPs is a better indication of their authority than their pagerank.
While looking for link trades, keep in mind that most people you ask will not even answer the email you send them. That’s okay. It’s normal. Out of everyone I ask for link trades, I probably actually get links from about 1 in every 15.
Guest Posting
In my opinion, guest posting is one of the best ways to get good links to your site. It is easy too. You just need to find blogs that are related to your niche that accept guest posts and contact them. How do you find them? Just do a search for your keyword with “guest post” (keep the quotes). Before contacting the blog owner, make sure that you are allowed at least one (preferably 2) dofollow backlinks, either in the body of the article or in an author bio. You should also look at the other guest posts on the blog and make sure that the articles are not riddled with links to other sites. The more links to other sites on a page, the less your links will be worth. Internal links are fine. Once you have contacted the site owner, and he/she agrees, write them a good quality, unique article and offer it up for submission. You can also offer to build a few backlinks to the post. This helps their site and yours.
If you are a member of The Keyword Academy, you already have a resource that gives you over 700 blogs that are begging for guest posts. You just need to write your post and decide where you want to send it. These are some of the strongest links you can get. If you are not yet a member, i will tell you that just this feature alone is worth the price of admission – especially if you consider the first month is only $1. Get your $1 trial month HERE. <- useful link
Forum Links
Find forums that relate to your niche that allow a dofollow link in your signature. Join the forum and make some posts over the span of a week or two. Make them good posts. Either answer other people’s questions on their threads, or start your own threads with good questions, opinions, etc. After a week or so of adding useful content to the forum, go ahead and add your signature link to your profile. The link will show up on every thread you previously posted to.
Mass Article Submission
This is one to be especially careful with when your site is young. It involves getting articles out to hundreds, or even thousands, of article directories, blogs, etc. My favorite tool for this is Unique Article Wizard. One reason is that, although they are not truly 100% unique, they are more unique than most. Also, since they read well, they are more likely to be accepted by the directories. I also like the fact that I can schedule the article submission. When your site is new (90-180 days) I would set it up to submit 5 per day. There are other services as well that submit your articles all over the place, but UAW is the best I have found so far. You can check them out here: Unique Article Wizard
Social Bookmarking
A lot of people claim that social bookmarking is the be all end all of internet marketing. I have news for them – it is not. Do not waste a lot of time with this. I use two services to bookmark my sites – onlywire.com and ping.fm. Take the time to set up your accounts (some of the accounts overlap, so be careful not to use the same services for both), and when you publish a new post, use the applets for the two sites to send the site details to your bookmark sites and statuses. It takes about 30 seconds to do. That is all the time you need to spend with web 2.0 stuff. These sites don’t provide any valuable backlinks really, and the traffic you MIGHT get from them doesn’t generally buy or click ads. It is useful to help you get your pages indexed faster though, and can help get the word out.
Technorati
Go to technorati.com and submit your site to them. Make sure you fill in the spaces that mention sites that link to you. This will help you to get your technorati score higher, which will help push you higher on more of the tag pages, and maybe even the top 1000 for your niche. It is easy to do, but takes a while for them to confirm your site.
MyBlogLog
ByBloBlog.com is a yahoo owned site. It is kind of like a myspace for blogs. They update your “neighborhood” when you make changes to your blog. You can choose to follow people or join other neighborhoods, etc. It can be a good way to find link partners, guest post opportunities, etc. It also gives you backlinks to your site.
Blog Comments
Finally, we will discuss blog comments. Honestly, I could do an entire article on this topic. The fact is that a TON of people use this as their primary source for getting backlinks, and 99% of them do it wrong. Here are some of the major mistakes they make:
- They comment on nofollow blogs. Most blog comment links are nofollow. Sure, the link is a link, but being “nofollow”, it tells google that it is not a trusted link, and therefore the recipient site should receive no link juice. Find blogs that have comment links that are dofollow.
- They use their keyword as their name. If you can get away with this fine, but make sure that others have approved comments using keywords as names. Personally, anything other than a name in the name field, and I will delete the comment from the mod panel before it is even published.
- They give generic “nice post I will subscribe” comments. Provide value in your comments. Add to the conversation. Read the post that you are commenting on and say something about the post.
- They leave comments that have nothing to do with the post (or the site, for that matter). See above.
To me, it is just common sense; do what you can to make sure that the comment is accepted (and even appreciated) and that the link back to your site is dofollow. You won’t get as many links as the spammers do, but at least the ones you get will be worth something.
Your Mind Set
Look at this way; what kind of links do you thing that the search engines will value the most? Pretend that you are a googlebot. You are crawling around the web, looking for quality content to add to your results. You are alerted to the fact that a new post has been published at purpleferretsweaters.com. You crawl the content and see that, indeed, the content seems to be relevant to purple ferret sweaters, but is it good quality content? You don’t know, so you look around the internet for references to the site. Over the next few days, you see that the same article is posted on 453 article directories. You have seen this before. It looks to you like someone posted an article to their site, then mass submitted it all over the place to try to trick you into thinking it is popular.
Now take the same scenario, but with a different linking pattern. During the few days after you notice the new article, you see the link popping up in different contexts – in dofollow comments on blogs, in blog posts, in a few directories, etc; all of them pointing back to the article on purpleferretsweaters.com. This should look to you like people found the article, liked it, and mentioned it on their sites and on the sites they follow.
The first scenario looks like spam. The second one looks like the site contains valuable information that people are talking about. Which one would you include in the top of your SERPs?
Honestly, I don’t think there is a lot more to cover here in the basic Earning Online Course. If you follow this course to the letter, you should have pretty much all you need to make money. In fact, if you keep adding content and backlinks to your site, and you have built the site on good, solid keyword research, you cannot really fail to make money. I will still add more to this site, of course, but from here on I think I will mostly be concentrating on tips and techniques, rather than on a full step-by-step course. We will see. Let me know what you think. In the meantime, build your internet business, build links to it, and prosper!
Related posts:
Internet Business Guide
Nuclear Affiliate Review –
Internal Linking and Why it is
The Keyword Academy Review
Earning Online | Link Building
Earning Online | Growing Your Site
Online Earning with Thin MFA Sites
An Internet Business Takes a Fall
Earning Online | Getting Your
Earning Online Blogging | Your
A Quick Way to Earn Extra Cash
As usual Steve, you have outdone yourself in providing insightful, helpful and immensely relevant information for people to help build their web sites.
I am not sure of this point though, the comment about mass submitting articles and then at the bottom under your head set, basically calling the practice spamming?
Regards Bryan Canada
Thanks Bryan. I see the discrepancy. Using a service like unique Article Wizard is a little different than just sending out a single article all over the place. With them, you start with a unique article and a couple of rewrites of that article. they use their software to use those articles to mix and match combinations that each vary from each other. This creates 100s of variations that are each a little different from each other. They send the different variations of these articles out to their network of blogs.
The links from UAW are not going to count as much as 100% unique posts that are sent out to different locations by hand, but they do get you a lot of links. I have seen where a UAW submission was enough to give an existing site just the boost it needed to get to page 1 in the SERPs.
I don’t think so, UAW is just other way to spam the internet. Those so called Unique Articles is NOT UNIQUE and google won’t count on it, I think it is another waste of time, plus your UNIQUE articles mostly will go into those automated article directories and most of them is PR0 or PR1. In term of SEO, those artilces won’t give you anything, other than links to tons of crappy article directories.
Most people promote it, because they pay well for their affiliate program.
I preferred have one UNIQUE article link on http://ezinearticles.com/ instead of have hundreds links from hundreds of crappy PR0 article directories
” your tenth article pointing to the same site is worth almost nothing ”
This is a scary statement. For people who are building actual web sites with real content on them, does this mean that for the length of these sites, all we can submit to a single site is 4 to 6 sites, and then call it a day?
I understand the need to use a wide range of sites to put up articles on, but to say past 10 back links from the same site are worth almost nothing? Is this an opinion or a fact?
Or is there anything about SEO that is fact, and not an educated guess based on conjuncture?
Bryan Canada
Not sure I entirely get your question, but I’ll try to answer it nonetheless. Do a link profile search on Yahoo for your home page. How many links show up from any 1 article directory? Two? Maybe three? Look at it from a common sense viewpoint. Linking is a popularity contest. how many times does one site say “I like this site” before Google just says, “okay, okay, I get that you like the site, consider you vote counted and stop bugging me”?
In order to really get good at this game, you need to look at things from a higher perspective. Look at things from the point of the search engines, from the visitors, etc. Look at the purposes of things – why do backlinks help? Why does unique content help? What is the point of doing what you are doing, beyond what you hope to achieve.
Think of it this way – every action has a consequence. The consequence may be good, it may be bad, but it WILL be one of the two. When you do something to or for your sight, will it bring good or bad consequences? Why?
EZA is an article directory. Google knows this. Do you really think that they don’t know why the article is there? MAYBE if you post articles under different pen names or different accounts you can get more value out of more links, but that’s a guess.
When it comes down to it, the best way to win this game is to work harder than your competition and to work smarter. Posting articles to the same place over and over is doing neither.
I do not recommend using UAW instead of sending out 100% unique articles from other places. Reread the article above and you will see that is but a very small part of a linking portfolio. In fact, if you check the link profile for this site, you will see that I have not even used them here… yet. There are other methods that I have not mentioned here either that also add to your linking profile.
How many articles are you going to submit to ezinearticles for backlinks to your site? Your first one is worth something. Your tenth article pointing to the same site is worth almost nothing. If you are going to rank high for semi competitive keywords, you need to stop thinking of a few links, or even hundreds of links – you need to think in terms of thousands of backlinks. You getting them all from EZA? Of course not.
Steve,
I’m very interested to know how much you can made online per month by doing blogging like this? Can you survive and work as full time and enough to pay your bills? or you have 100 hundreds of more blogs like this in different domain name?
This is what I do full time. I actually started off with small niche sites, and while I do still have quite a few (25 or so, some under my name, some not), I spend most of my time on a few bigger sites that bring in the bulk of my money. This site is still very young and doesn’t really earn much more than a few affiliate sales each month (like 2 or 3), I mostly started this site to help people.
In essence, yes, you can earn a living blogging. It takes work, like everything else worth doing, but it can be done.
Yes, If you have few big sites that is possible to earning enough for your living, otherwise this kind of blog won’t be enough to make up all your food on the plate.
May I ask what kind of sites of those big one? earn from affiliate? or earn from adsense or just shopping site?
I’m thinking start up a new site and want some ideas.
I use a combination of Adsense (and other similar), affiliate membership, affiliate products, and Amazon affiliates for my super-sites. I have a medium sized site that is creeping its way to #1 after about 9 months that has a monthly potential from adsense from the main keyword alone of over $3k a month. It also has about 10 green cousin keywords.
If you are going to start a new site, and have experience with this, I would recommend a wide-niche super-site (which I will be writing about soon).
Wide-Niche site, it sounds a good idea and for adsense I’m thinking start up article directory, because it covers all different topic, so will get all different keywords payout from adsense. What do you think?
So your super site bring you 3k/month alone just from adsense? that is very impressed.
Can’t wait to see your new article about the wide-niche site topic.
Thanks
I didn’t say that it brought me that now. I said that was its potential. It is less than a year old. It is currently at PR4 and still working its way up in the rankings. Most sites like that bounce around for a year or so. Mine has been as high as #4 and is currently 9th. Supersites take a while, but they are well worth it.
I see, do you have link here to your wide-niche super sites? so I can take a look your idea?
Steve, I’m also interested to hear about your project for learn2earn2 and http://powertimemanagementsystems.com/
Does the owner start making money now after you help him make the changes?
Well, with learn2earn2 and PTMS, you would have to ask Bryan. With l2e2, I changed the design and SEO of the site, and instructed him on how to add content and link to it in an SEO-friendly way. We changed the focus to higher traffic keywords, and redid the site around them. I had some monetization ideas, but he wants to go with promoting his own products, which is fine.
With PTMS, my job was not to change his layout or look at all. I was to only get his existing site into wordpress so that it could be better SEOed and it would be easier for him to add content. I am not involved in the design of that site, other than what he specifically wants me to do.
I am not actually finished with his sites. I had a bit of a back issue, and needed to take some time off. I am just now getting back to the point where I can spend time in front of the computer, and I am seriously backlogged! lol
Oh, I see, because I used to read his article on learn2earn2.com on daily basis, but he stop publish any new articles month ago after the new looks. Thanks.
I can’t reply directly because I am out of “nests”, but no, I will not be sharing the site info. You will find that most people don’t. I will post about the process soon, though. It is very similar to niche site building. Stay tuned.
Hi,
I don’t why so many people who so called themself as SEO “experts”, don’t want to share their money making website and prove they are give out right info. to their reader.
Like this blog, the whole purpose is teach people how to build online business, why you don’t share the URL of your super-niche site that is success and let people see it and us as a reader here may buy some of your offer from that niche site too, then you can make more money of it. your wide-niche site is OPEN TO PUBLIC anyway right, why not share it here and be proud of it.
That is what I don’t understand, if you are worry about someone copy the idea, then that is even more silly thinking.
Remember competition is ALWAYS THERE.:)
Interesting. I do not remember calling myself an “expert” on anything.
Also, the site I mentioned is not a super site, per se. It actually started as a niche site and grew. It is a medium site now, and about 9 months into a 12 month time-line. I may decide to give out the URL, but if I do, it will be during the lesson. I will definitely give AN example of a properly done supersite, though.
Hey Guys, i’m just posting this to try and get a free link to my new blog, yes, i know this is abit cheeky but at least i’m being honest about it.. unlike some of the absolute rubbish i see people posting on blogs these days, if you could help me out by leaving this comment on your blog that would be much appreciated, feel free to put a comment on my blog in return and i’ll make sure it sticks
God Bless You
I approved this comment for 1 reason – so you can see that it does absolutely nothing for your site. In fact, if you go to the website that was given, you will see:
“Onlineguardian has banned ” greg41pate.sosblog.com ” hosted on sosblog.com due to the violation of terms of services.”
I have written a lot of articles on comment links. To sum it up quickly – at best, they are mostly useless. At worst, they will get your site banned, deindexed, etc. It is rare that a comment link is worth the time it tales to post it. Here is when a comment link is good:
1 – The comment provides value to the readers of the post (so admin will approve it and leave it there)
2 – The link is dofollow
3 – The site has authority (high PR AND ranks well for its main KWs)
4 – There is not 140 other comments with links in them on the page
How many sites do you see that allow dofollow backlinks, have authority, and aren’t inundated with other comments? Yea, that’s kind of what I thought.
Interesting read, I’m going to have to try Unique Article Submitter, I think it’s my logical next step. Seeing as you seem to know about this sort of stuff, I found a technique for getting a PR9 dofollow link on another blog here: – http://mobile-airconditioners.blogspot.com/ do you think this would work? It seems like a strange way of doing it, and I can’t imagine google indexing these kind of links…
Honestly, I do not know whether it would work or not. Is that page in Google’s index? It has not been cached, and after over a month it does not show up in yahoo site explorer. Even if it did get indexed, I doubt it would carry much weight, especially since it is not anchored. Personally, if getting a link from youtube was that important to me, I would create a youtube channel with the name of your keyword (or some variation), post a couple of videos, get the channel indexed by google (maybe even with some PR and put your website in where it says “my website”. I do believe that is a do-follow link.