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
I really liked this article, a change from the usual “how to build links, etc.” you see on other blogs.
Wow, I’ve been a total link hog and now I feel guilty cause I knew better. I love the article marketer idea.
By the way that’s one of the equivalence properties of equality from my theorem days.
- reflexive property: a=a
- symetric property: a=b then b=a
- transitive property: if a=b and b=c then a=c
Happy Friday,
Bill
Hah!
The good ol’ transitive property it is. Bill, good to know I’m not the only math nerd in the internet marketing world.
Always good to hear from you.
Google is such a weird and evil monopolistic company. They change their minds and rate sites on odd thinks. But thanks for the traffic Google.
Thank you for the article Mark. I think we can help each other. I am wondering though about cross linking. I have heard that the links between two websites are not as juiced as a one way link. This is why I would tend to not reciprocate links. Is there a way around this or do you think more cross links between websites would outway the advantage of the few one way links we would be able to beg, borrow, or steal?
Have a great weekend.
You’re right Andy. Google devalues reciprocal links, which is why I didn’t just link back to the sites that have linked to us. Not only would it cannibalize the links they’d given me, but the links I’m giving them wouldn’t be worth all that much either.
That’s why I used the article distribution service. It creates links from other sites to their sites. Keeps the strength of their links to me intact, and also helps them out.
Yes, Bill is right. That is a math principle. In economics, it would be more like if a = b and b = c that does not necessarily mean that a = c. However, that doesn’t disprove your point related to internet marketing. Great tip Mark.
Oh, great! Of course there has to be an economist in the audience to point out my errors…
The funny thing is I could be entertained for hours discussing how a does not necessarily equal c. There must be some really cool calculus proofs in there somewhere…
Hi Mark, thanks for this post. I never thought about using the article resource box to point to help promote others. This just adds to the philosophy of “giving to get”.
I just wanted to say that this is one of the best sites on the internet for people who want honest, worthwhile, and accurate information on how to blog and structure their posts.
I’m sure that there are other sites that get more traffic, are more popular with the masses, and have better name recognition. But in all honesty I have learned more useful things from this site and from Courts other sites than from all the other “how to” sites I read combined.
If and when my blog becomes a success I will certainly have Court and Mark to partially thank for gently nudging me in the right direction.
Just thought a thank you was long over due…
Wow Chef, that is an unbelievably nice thing to say, and it makes my day. We’ll continue to try to put valuable stuff here for you.
Sappy love songs are always bleating, “The more love you give, the more love you get”. Turns out link love works the same way.
Mea culpa on not providing more link love to this site. It deserves it!
Link Karma is definitely a very real thing…
Thanks for the compliments!
Nothing is better than manual linking and communicating with people in your niche. Helping the others is in the same market has a lot of benefits in long term.
You mentioned Unique Article Wizard… and I know Court loves Article Marketer…. which is the better between the two, and do you think that the results are really that effective to make it worthwhile?
Also, with UAW, how much extra work per article written do you need to do?
I have two questions, and the timing of this post is impeccable. First, is there a WP plugin that will report inbound links your site is receiving?
Second, I am trying to figure out how G calculates PR on WP when all of the content is dynamic and stored in a database (with the exception of the templates). Anybody have any idea how this works? If PR is partially a function of the number of pages you have on your site, how does G weigh your site with all of the dynamic content? Does the spider work its way through the content in the DB?
Thanks y’all.
WP is dynamic, but the pages it displays are in all reality, static pages. I have a site i created in may, and all of the pages are still the same pages they were in May…. same URL, same text, etc…. Google crawls links, so whatever links you display, Google will hopefully crawl them, and index more of your site.
So yah, Wordpress dynamically adds more tags, more categories, more posts, etc, new archive pages each month…… but those become static elements of your site, and if Google is crawling your site (if you’ve built links to your site, then Google should be crawling) then they will crawl all of those new pages and index them too.
So, in short, no they don’t have access to your database.
Bingo! That’s exactly right.
Thanks for the info. I appreciate learning the value of linking. Sometimes I think it gets a bad rap.
Mark & Court,
How do you guys verify your linktrades?
You’ve got software to keep tabs on links that other people are supposed to have set up to you?
Sincerely,
Jay
Actually Jay, we don’t do a whole lot of link trading with a site like The Keyword Academy. That’s basically what I was saying in the post – if a site links to me I’ll find ways link to their site without having to link back directly. I’ll link to them through article submission programs, from other sites I own, etc…
Hope that helps!
Mark,
I wasn’t necessarily talking about this site.
When I was typing my previous comment, I had Adsense sites in mind.
You need to do trades with those, if I’m not mistaken.
How does one generally check whether the agreed-upon links to it are still up?
Jay
Giving link love back to those who took the time to give you love is very important in my experience. I’ve seen nice traffic gains by simply dropping each person a quickk email thanking them – often leads to another incoming link as they remember you
So you remember everybody you linked with?
Are you running just one site, or do you have an archive of linktrades?
I have been busy link trading with anyone who wants to, not reciprocal though. I write posts for people with anchor text keywords from within relevant posts to their subject. The other half of the equation is that they then link to a different site of mine, with a relevant post and anchor text. The more blogs or sites you have the more links you can spread around. This seems like a good way to get relevant anchor text links to a site you want to push, so this is how i build my links. It is a slow process, and you need like minded people, but one or two links a day does help, and i am sure that almost everyone reading this blog needs relevant backlinks. The other genius in the make money online domain, and i am sure you know who i mean, the one who does not swear!! has provided a list of such like minded people who will help you, and with whom you can do this with.
I guess what i am tring to say is, making money online is not easy, there is a lot of hard work to this, but probably the most important part is networking and finding people who can help you, and then giving that help back.
How about turning off the nofollow for your blog to reward your commenters and installing commentluv?
You know what, the first thing I saw when I click on your site is your template. Looks neat.
Sorry, but as a designer, I appreciate such beauty. And you have a nice post as well. Thanks for sharing.
Very nice information. Thanks for this. By the way, did you create this layout yourself?