Building a successful website requires content that sells and traffic to monetize. Building the traffic is, by far, the most time-consuming and difficult part of the job, and is where most websites fall short. The best sources of traffic are the search engines, which rank websites for search results based on relevancy and links, meaning that to rank high you need quality links pointing to your website. We’ll talk about how you can build those links yourself in this article.
Remember the 80-20 principle. Once you have your website put together, and have your ads placed, you have only two basic activities to drive you towards success: add more content, and build links. Everything else is icing on the cake, including the reading of “internet marketing” blogs, email, adsense checking…it’s all about adding content and building links.
The top 10 link building methods are listed here, including the obvious ones. Make sure to read the description of each as we’ll be also giving tips to maximize the efficiency of each.
Article Marketing
There are hundreds of websites found online that allow you to write a 500-or-so article, and submit it to their site. Why on earth would you want to write for these websites? Simple. You can link to your website in your article. Write 2 articles a day, and submit it to 50 directories while linking to two of your pages, and you can have 30,000 links within a year.
Of course, these links are not as valuable as other types of links, but with volume they have a huge impact. Remember, your articles will also be read, so if you write fantastic articles and each still only has 10-20 views, you could receive 2-5 visitors per article in the directories. Consistent article marketing means literally hundreds of thousands of visitors throughout the year.
Link Trades
Link trades are the most misunderstood way of link building found online. Most webmasters think they should link to a website that also links to them. This does nothing but cancel out the link “power”, going by Google, because the might engine knows that it’s most likely an artificial link, one that was built.
Instead, do what’s called “3-way-link trading”. It looks like this. Say that you want to trade links with me. I manage several other websites, and would love to have you linking to this site. So you link to this site from your website, and I return the favor by linking to you from my other website. Three-way-link trading means we both get 1-way links pointing to our sites, and we don’t loose “Google juice” because of the trade.
Guest Posts
Guest posts are incredibly popular, with many blogs running almost completely on guest posts. The idea is that you do the “article marketing” concept, only for another blog.
Hint: always publish your most popular-yet-hard-to-monetized articles on other blogs. By giving that article to the other website, you get a very powerful link in a few months after others link to that article. I’d rather take one powerful link as opposed to a 100 weak ones.
You might get less traffic in the short run, but you’ll get more targeted traffic as you start to rank higher and higher for high-paying keywords.
DoFollow Comments
Commenting on blogs is an obvious way to generate a minute amount of buzz. The impact is obviously not going to make you a millionaire, but can drum up a bit of traffic. In most comment boxes, you can link to your website. Unfortunately, nearly all blogs have special scripts that make the links worthless. The scripts are called “NoFollow”, which means they aren’t counted as links by Google.
The good news is that many blogs are removing the NoFollow script to encourage people to visit their websites and comment on their posts, calling their blogs “DoFollow” blogs. You can get free links by adding useful comments to DoFollow blogs. Don’t spam. That’s silly and cuts your traffic, because no one who reads your comment will look at your blog, plus you’ll probably get deleted. Add value, gain value.
So some internet marketers put together a free program that you can download so you can find all of the blogs to comment on. Check it out at Comment Kahuna .
Cluster Marketing
This is the most important link building system, in my experience. I use it ferociously, and base most of my marketing strategy on it. The idea is that two are better than one, and three are better than that. Cluster marketing is the internet marketing strategy of forming your own “network” for a niche. If you have 10 websites dealing with real estate, you have enough websites to build link juice for your main site.
You can generate thousands of links by running two websites instead of one. Basically, you build your own link hierarchy, with primary and secondary websites. This also makes 3-way-link trades possible, as you’ll have more to barter with.
Blog Carnivals
A blog carnival is when a blog decides to link to a week/month’s worth of relevant articles published by other blogs. To get a free link, you just have to tell them about your recent article. You have to be running a blog. Check it out at www.BlogCarnival.com.
When it comes to marketing your website, remember the 80-20 principle. Once you have your website up and running, you only have two real things to do: Write content and build links. An hour per day should be way more than enough to do both, especially as you become more and more experienced.
Authority Posts
This is an indirect link building strategy. The Internet is full of millions of half-thought-out posts, long rambles, and pointless pages. Be the exact opposite, and you’ll find that others will link to you. Think of a topic that is large enough to be considered “website worthy”, meaning that it’s broad enough and important enough to build a complete website about.
The post might be long, but it needs to be organized. Use bold headers, titles, and lots of organization. End it with links to relevant websites. The goal is for someone to read that one article and know enough about the topic to be fairly acquainted with it. Ten or so authority posts will give your website an outrageous boost in links once webmasters stumble across the articles.
Content Networks
Content sites like AssociatedContent.com and Squidoo.com are fantastic for building quality, relevant links. Write up a nice article, and post it to one of those sites. Then write up another different article and submit to article directories. In the second article, link to the first article on the content network. You’ll build your own quality pages to link from. This takes “link building” to a very literal level.
Social Networks
Social networks are websites like Digg.com and StumbleUpon.com. I won’t spend much time here, but I’ve had incredible success with StumbleUpon, with tens of thousands of visitors in one day. The goal is to write an article that makes people in the niche want to go “Yeah!” to. If you can do that, you’ll succeed.
“Buy” Links
Don’t use “link brokers” that literally will find someone who will accept money for your link. That’s too obvious. This is a long-term strategy that pays off if you are looking for major search engine traffic later on down the road.
Buy blogs in your niche. Offer $500 for each blog, and link to yourself on each blog. The more competitive your keyword, the more blogs there are that aren’t making money, meaning you can secure a blog fairly easy. Then link to yourself in the most powerful places, both a home-page contextual link and a blogroll site-wide link.
Conclusion
In the end, remember to put link building into perspective. Once you have your website organized, and have your affiliate programs and ads placed, you only have two activities that should take up your time:
1. Build Links
Build links to cover your search engine rankings. If you spend an hour or two every day for a year, you can achieve #1 ranking in nearly any niche. It will certainly take patience, but it will just as certainly pay off. Making money online is hard work, but once you achieve it, nothing can match the feelings or the checks.
2. Add Content
New content makes you the darling of both the search engines and other webmasters. Remember to make your content “authority” content, so that it’s always link-worthy. The best content is whatever is both authority and social worthy. It should take a few minutes to read, should be comprehensive, and when you’re done you should want to go “Yes!” That’s successful content.
Don’t waste time reading online blogs, frittering with email, or anything else. That hour or so every day is literally thousands of dollars later on. Focus on the big stuff, and you’ll get big results. Just remember: while you’re building links, your competition is probably checking email.
Now go build links! Or stumble this page. That’s always good too. If I missed anything here, contact me at shaunconnell@gmail.com.
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