Posts Tagged ‘Link Building’

Add A Blog To Your Site

May 7th, 2009  |  by Court  |  Published in Link Building, SEO  |  6 Comments

A few years ago I created my first website. I didn’t know HTML and I certainly didn’t know about blogging (even though it already existed at the time). Since I had no idea how to put a website together, I fired up Microsoft Frontpage (it was already on my computer) and started fiddling around. A few months later I had a functional, 5-page site.

I put the site online and started trying to figure out how to get links. I understood at least partially that links were the key to success with an online business.

The huge disadvantage that I had was that my little site didn’t get any links for itself. I could have left it online for 100 years and it never would have been found. It wasn’t in Google, wasn’t listed anywhere, and most definitely wasn’t being visited.

I worked on getting links for about six months before anything significant started happening. I didn’t understand most of the methods that could be used to get links so I had to do some really monotonous stuff. I had a job back then and I spent most of my free time searching sites like Linkmarket.net for link partnerships. I didn’t know of any other ways to get links so that was the only choice I had. They were mostly low quality links BUT they still worked and I made a lot of money with that site ($3,500+ per month at its peak).

While I owned that site, it did really well for me. However, getting links for the site was extremely difficult. It was really ugly first of all and it didn’t generate any links on its own.

Blogs have a ton of advantages over static HTML sites and I firmly believe that any site that’s serious about getting traffic with search engine optimization should be a blog or add a blog to their site. If you already have a static HTML site and you don’t want to change it to a blog, add a blog in a subdirectory, i.e. yoursite.com/blog. Here are some of the advantages you can get with a blog:

  • Blogs literally create their own links. When you hit publish on a blog you can expect to get links from blog search engines and other sites. WordPress, Blogger, and most other blog platforms notifiy search engines and other sites that you have published something new and they will link to it. Other sites also find you on blog search engines and will link to you if they like what they see. I sometimes talk to bloggers who complain because their sites get a small amount of search traffic. What they don’t know is that there are people who complain in the static HTML community because they haven’t had a search visitor EVER and that can go on for years with static sites because they don’t create their own links. The owner is on their own to get every single link.
  • Blogs are a lot easier to update than static sites so you can easily focus on producing more content. When I had my static sites I would spend all day trying to figure out how to create a link structure and that was ridiculously frustrating. Looking back I can’t believe I did all that work when I could have been focusing on the content for the site.
  • Bloggers are by far the most generous group of online entrepreneurs. When people complain to me about how hard it is to get links to their blogs I just have to laugh. I would love for everyone to have to work on a static site for a year or two so that they can appreciate all of the advantages that come from blogging. Bloggers are very generous and will help you out if you know how to ask the right questions with respect.

People ask me all the time how much they need to post on their blogs. You need to post as much as you can. Everytime you post you get new links that will help you to get more search traffic. You will also be adding content that will help you to get more search traffic.

What some of you are really asking is for me to set the bare minimum of work that can be done and I would urge you to shift the way you’re approaching it. I would start to think of ways to get as much done as possible and try to figure out how to get satisfaction out of the work itself.

A few years ago I had a partner that I was working on a site with. He would ask almost every day how much more we had to do until the site made a lot of money. All day long it was, “How many articles do we have to write for the site?” or “How many people do we have to email?”. He was thinking about things the wrong way and wasn’t willing to change. I had to walk away from that partnership because I could see that my partner wasn’t willing to pay the price. You can’t expect to make money if you aren’t willing to put in the time.

I have always tried to figure out how to do more and have tried to focus every day on making things better.

Whether you have a site that’s a blog or a site that you have a blog on, your focus should be the same. Post as much as you can or hire someone to do it for you. In the long run, the link juice you gain will pay off nicely.

We’ll be covering more and more ways to get links over the next few weeks as we continue the 30 Days To Better SEO.

30 Articles In 30 Days – New Article Marketing Experiment

February 5th, 2009  |  by Court  |  Published in Link Building  |  52 Comments

As promised, I have prepared a new article marketing experiment. If you missed my last one you can read about it by following these links:

This time around, I’m going to be using a site that isn’t very established in fact as of right now the site has never made me a dime. It gets trace amounts of traffic, nothing to be super proud of:

The all-time highest day of traffic on this site was 17 unique visitors – most of which came through direct traffic. The record for search traffic on this site was a whopping 4 visitors on January 15th.

Here are a few more details about this site:

The whole point here is to see how well we can increase traffic on a site that isn’t established. This experiment is going to be a little trickier because the site doesn’t have many links right now. When I did the first experiment the site I was working with had a LOT more links. This site barely has any.

What I’m going to do to compensate is trickle the articles out very slowly. When you submit through Unique Article Wizard you can tell it how many submissions you want it to do each day. For this experiment, I’m going to add an article every day for 30 days straight, but I’m only going to let the service do 10 submissions per day, per article. By the end of the experiment UAW will be doing 300 submissions per day because each day one more article will be added. UAW has about 1200 sites to submit to in the categories I’ll be working with so it’s going to take about 4 months for all of the articles to go out.

In the spirit of honesty I should tell you that I’m not really sure what’s going to happen with this experiment. Frankly this is a lot of links to add to a site that doesn’t have much link structure. I’ve never been afraid to try new things and I’m certainly not afraid to lose as long as I learn something. The risk in submitting this many articles is that the site gets sandboxed. I don’t think that’s going to happen, but it could. Even if that happens it will be back a few months later so I’m not super worried. Sometimes you have to wait to get the results you’re working for and this isn’t going to hurt the long term potential of the site, even if it does get boxed now.

If You’re Not Willing To Risk, You Don’t Deserve To Win

If past experience tells me anything, there will be some comments that tell me that this isn’t a good idea. They will say that the quality of the article links is low and/or that this is for sure too many links, too fast. The truth is that I could never have gotten to where I’m at without trying this kind of thing. I honestly don’t believe anything I read until I’ve tried it out.

I know that many of you are sitting on sites just like this one. Your site has been around for a few months, gets small or no traffic, and you’re not sure what to do with it. Sometimes I have a hard time understanding why people are so afraid to act. Think about it; if this blows up what have I lost? Not a dang thing – this site doesn’t make money anyway. I guess it will cost me some time but I would much rather spend time doing something like this than reading MMO blogs all day.

If this experiment implodes, I’ll learn something that doesn’t work and will have about a 90% chance that the site comes back in a few months. If it works, I’ll have a nice traffic increase now and will be able to make some money.

Why You Should Link to the Links That Are Linking to You

December 4th, 2008  |  by Mark  |  Published in Link Building, SEO  |  30 Comments

Happy Friday -

There was a principle I studied in my economics classes in college…can’t remember what it was called now…but it went something like this:

If A = B, and B = C, then A = C.

In internet marketing terms:

Links = Search Engine Traffic, and Search Engine Traffic = Money, therefore Links = Money.

Whoever gets the most links makes the most money. That’s probably not news to most of you, but consider this:

When someone gives you links, they’re giving you money. Once you realize that, you start thinking much more gratefully about people who link to your content – especially when they do it with no expectation of getting something in return.

Thanks for the Links

Every morning when I log into the Wordpress admin section here on the site, I look at the incoming links section and I feel a little surge of gratitude for the people who are appreciating our content by linking to it.

This morning I decided to take a few minutes and try to give something back to the people I’ve noticed linking to us regularly – even giving us a blogroll link on their site (some even going so far as to include “make money” in the anchor text, which is especially beneficial to us).

I just wrote an article and submitted it for distribution through Unique Article Wizard – and I pointed all the links allowed in the resource boxes at a few of your sites. I did my best to use anchor text that I thought would get you closer to ranking for the keywords you’re targeting with your sites.

A few of you will see some new inbound links to your site from my article in the coming weeks. Consider those links a small token of our appreciation for linking to us.

Altruistic or Self-Serving? How About Both.

Now, the savvy cynics among you will already be having this thought: “Mark, why are you pretending to be so giving? All you did was strengthen the links that are pointing at your site. The whole activity was completely self-serving.”

The truth is, you’re partially right. This is an example of “giving to get.” By promoting the site that’s promoting me, at the end of the day I’m really just promoting myself.

I guess you could call this SEO Karma…you can simultaneously strengthen other sites as well as your own.

The old adage says that it’s better to give than to receive. When it comes to making money online, I say it’s better to give AND to receive.

Enjoy a relaxing weekend of link-building and money-making…

- Mark