From the monthly archives:

May 2007

Link Building on a Budget Part 2

In yesterday’s adventures in Link Building on a Budget Part 1 I talked about “review trades” as a powerful and free way of getting the most authoritative kind of link possible from another site.

Then I left you in the lurch and made you wait until today to see one of the review trade methods I have discovered works well. Hey, I gotta keep the suspense, right?

Link Building on a Budget Part 2

So let’s say you need your site to show up on as many other blogs in your niche or topic group with the keyword “blog marketing.”

You simply start a campaign to get reviewed by people who are already open to doing reviews.

Example: http://www.johnchow.com/make-money-onlin-batch-76/

John Chow is the master when it comes to shameless linking methods. Many purist bloggers make fun of him or even chide him for having no shame when it comes to asking for links.

On the page above he rewards people (see the link list) for linking to him VERY SPECIFICALLY with the term he wants to score for: “make money online”

If you follow his directions to a tee, he will link to you. As you can see, many people are taking him up on this. It is a good method on its own. You should start something like this on your blog for sure.

But I want to point something else out that is NOT so apparent but much more powerful than just taking part in John’s link building technique.

He mentions at the bottom of his post how people scan his 76 batches of links to people who linked to him as a means of easily finding willing bloggers who will link to others in this way.

Why approach people cold when you can find blogs on lists like this to get automatic positive replies to your offer to exchange reviews? You already know they are open to it!

Here’s how I approach people on lists like this:

–

I found you on John Chow’s site (put exact URL here). I like your blog and would love to do a review exchange with you. Meaning I will review your site if you review mine.

If you are interested, here is some of the recommended text and the links I’d like you to use. Please send the same kind of thing to me for your site and I will post about you ASAP.

Recommended text to include in your review:

Jack Humphrey is the author of Authority Black Book, Power Linking, and hundreds of articles syndicated all over the web on blog marketing tactics, link building, and authority site building.

–

See how I got a couple extra links in there to Authority Black Book and Power Linking along with my main keyword? Why not? Show the person you are talking to that they can do the same thing and recommend text for you to include in your post and they will DEFINITELY want to do it, especially if they are known for doing reviews for links already!

Always write something different for each site you are trying to get to review you, and use the content to send someone else if the person you write to rejects your offer – don’t waste good unique content!

DO NOT send the same recommended text to different sites! They will most likely use what you send them exactly as you sent it and you don’t want duplication.

Do this for a couple of months and set a goal to get on 20 sites in this manner (sites related somehow to your niche, not just random blogs) and you are going to see some very neat things happening for you.

Getting Rejected

If you are looking for a really big site in your niche to review you and they turn you down, consider whether it might be wise to get reviewed by them for a fee. In the case of JohnChow.com in relation to my market, I consider it a deal to pay him $400 for a review because he has a LOT of traffic and influence with his readers.

You can check out the large database of bloggers willing to review sites for a fee below:

Get Reviewed At ReviewMe!

More From The FTR Link Building Series:

Don't Miss Out On Free Traffic!
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Link Building On A Budget Part 1

This is a series I am writing on link building tactics that are free or cheap but still very effective and relatively wide open still in most niches.

Review Trades: Link Building on Steroids

Included here is a linking “trick” you can use to help you build an authoritative inbound link portfolio for your site. This is something that is easy to incorporate in your [tag-tec]link building[/tag-tec] campaign.

A lot of people are making money with sites like ReviewMe.com. This is where advertisers can go to pay bloggers to post reviews about their sites, products, or whatever they want.

(You can also make money by doing reviews on your site.)

Find a blog you want to be on, buy a review, and they will accept or reject your review proposal based on what they want to review on their blog.

Now, there is nothing about using ReviewMe that is magical other than they have a large database of participating blogs you can quickly search as an advertiser to locate places you really want to show up fast.

It saves a lot of time, and I will show you an additional trick below to find sites ready and willing to do reviews as exchanges and not just for money.

Basically this tactic is to find blogs in your niche that DO reviews and ask them for a “Review Swap.” “You review me and I’ll review you” kind of thing.

What this link building tactic does:

You get the most powerful link you can get on a blog: “in content” or context (in the post body itself).

Search engines like this kind of link more than anything other. Their reasoning is that you really can’t seamlessly cram in irrelevant links if your content is on topic. If you do, they will catch it and cram you in supplemental results faster than you can say supplemental. Therefore it is hard (and stupid) to spam within good content by sending links to sites which are irrelevant to your niche.

It stands to reason this is why they like contextual linking more than sidebar link lists or comments links. (Plus, if you want a keyword linked instead of your name, you have to get a link in the content of the blog. Or worse, you have to buy a link in the sidebar, most likely from Text Link Ads which will be another monthly payment for you that you might not need if you can grab a context link from a fellow blogger for free.)

Here’s the difference between the three kinds of links you typically see on blogs…

Link Type 1: Context Linking

In content, or context linking, would look something like this:

Jack Humphrey runs the Friday Traffic Report which focuses on blog marketing, Web 2.0 social marketing, and link building strategies.

Engines like the above more than any other form of link because links that show up in the content (posts) get more points for relevancy. You want this kind of link more than any other from any site linking to you. But certainly not just for some better rankings in the engines. There’s something just as good or better about this kind of link.

These kinds of links get seen!

Forget Google for a minute and realize that the highest value real estate on any blog is the part that gets read. Stands to reason, right? The more eyeballs that float over your link, the more clicks that link is going to get, the more targeted traffic your site receives.

Look at you right now – you are ignoring the stuff over on the right, at least right now, because you are intent on figuring out what I am trying to teach right here in this post. The links in this post have the highest click value on my whole site right now because this is the post most people are reading at this time.

So site reviews, or mentions from other bloggers and sites, are the very best kind of link you can possibly get.

Link Type 2: Blog Comment

A comment on someone’s blog looks like this:

Jack Humphrey
Great blog! More please!

And you cannot see blog comments until you go to the permalink home of that page. And comments are at the bottom. Less readers by far. Less clicks.

Now don’t give up being a part of the larger conversation in your niche and stop commenting. Just realize the difference in the value of this kind of link and the link example above.

Exception to the Rule:

This kind of link is more ideal for me specifically because a lot of people search on my name, Jack Humphrey, so I need to be #1 for that. But what if you are more of a normal blogger who doesn’t market yourself as a “name?”

Then the link above (with your name and not your keyword) is totally useless to you for keyword branding and link popularity based on the keyword you really want there. It’s great for getting targeted traffic from the other readers, but you get much less of it than being in the post itself. MUCH less.

Here is how I would love all my comments on all the blogs I have commented on to show, if it was kosher, which it is not…

Blog Marketing
Great Blog! More Please!

If I were able to somehow change the dozens of blogs I have commented on from using “Jack Humphrey” to one of the best keyword terms for my market, “Blog Marketing,” I would be #1 on Google right now for that term easily.

But I can’t. You have to use a real name in comments on blogs if you really want the comment to be approved. I won’t even let people use keywords in comments on the FTR.

Link Type 3: Paid Text Link or Sidebar Link Swap

The third way to get a keyword anchor link on someone else’s blog is to buy it or swap links, usually in a blogroll or link list in the sidebar. The thing is, you don’t have enough money to buy all the links you need unless you are a Rockefeller, and swapping links is a pain in the butt because you are fighting for some seriously rare real estate in everyone’s sidebars.

Google is making sure you can’t jump to #1 for competitive words just by buying links. How? They just don’t give a PR7 link all by itself as much “juice” as they used to. They do this specifically to thwart people manipulating their rankings through link buying unless they do it in big volume.

And that’s expensive – REAL expensive.

More FTR Link Building Resources 

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Blog Marketing Tips

Blog marketing is a rich, wide-open world that offers more opportunity to drive targeted traffic than any other format for online publishing. With a blog you can take advantage of traffic sources unavailable to people who still try to market their sites with no blog presence.

Therefore, you can out compete those in your niche who are far behind the times. Web 2.0 style sites offer myriad opportunities to market your blog from Digg-type sites where you post about your latest content, to blog-only communities such as MyBlogLog, SpicyPage, and Technorati.

I outline several hundred methods for marketing your blog in the Authority Black Book. But I have also found some other places that you should check out in a week or two when you are done reading the Black Book. (There’s more than enough in there to keep you busy for months!)

Blog Marketing Tips From Some Of My Favorite Experts

There is only one thing stopping you from seriously boosting your traffic: application. Since I am giving you the goods for free here, you should assume my motives are mostly pure.

(I do expect that when you start pulling down 100-500 more targeted visitors per day with what I share you are naturally going to want to come back for more blog marketing tips, so there’s your full disclosure!)

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Google Buys Feedburner For $100 Million

Man I wish I had started Feedburner.  Same feeling I had when Skype, MyBlogLog, and many other things sold for big bucks.

Despite the fact that [tag-tec]Feedburner[/tag-tec] had an “under construction” sign on their Feedvertising section for as long as I can remember, they have a lot going for them elsewhere.

Practically every blog of note on the web uses them, including this one.  I love the stats tracking, but find myself checking MyBlogLog stats far more often.

You couldn’t start a much easier service than Feedburner.  The technology isn’t as impressive as you’d think would be required of a $100 million dollar buyout.  But it’s never about that these days.  It’s all about the user base and the marketing that made the site a monstrous success.

The more eyeballs you control, no matter how simple your services or products, the more you can expect to be offered when Big G comes calling.  I would imagine Feeburner has some very serious user numbers, plus they control a lot of real estate.

Wonder if we will start seeing the ability to put Adsense in our feed pages now?

More on “Google Buys Feedburner” from TechCrunch.

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Top 21: The Best Article Directory List

Article directories are a dime a dozen. If you are going to do it the hard way, meaning you’d rather submit one at a time and not use the best article syndication service I have ever used, then focus on submitting your articles to the top 21 article directories below.

You won’t benefit from the long tail effect of submitting to the other article directories available, but you will at least hit the big ones with the highest Alexa and Google rankings.

1. EzineArticles

2. GoArticles

3. WebProNews

4. ArticleDashboard

5. SearchWarp

6. PubsACS

7. ArticleBase

8. Isnare

9. Buzzle

10. ArticleCity

11. IdeaMarketers

12. Site Reference

13. Article Alley

14. Web Source

15. Amazines

16. Submit Your Article

17. TheWhir

18. Excellent Guide

19. Directory Gold

20. Articles Factory

21. SelfGrowth

Need more article directory information?

Here’s a big list of article directories.

Also check out my post on getting the most out of article syndication.

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Google Adsense Arbitrage Party Is Over

Another in a series of moves to get rid of the “made for Adsense” site industry, Google is eliminating accounts of people who are using [tag-tec]arbitrage[/tag-tec] (buying clicks from Adwords and other traffic networks to send traffic to higher paying ads on sites with no meaningful content and a lot of ads).

Junk sites are breathing their last breaths as site builders try to hang on to any profits they can for as long as they can, while Google continues to shut doors.

Read more about this issue from Jennifer Slegg.

If you are building any kind of scraper, made for Adsense sites and hoping you have a real business on your hands, think again.  Your “business” is a scam and the people who sold it to you have sold you something you’d probably never do in the real world if there were a real world equivalent.

This is because people feel more anonymous online.  Which is so incredibly naive it is pathetic.  Wait until someone wants to reach out and touch you and you will find out just how exposed and naked you are on the web behind your proxies.

Google sees all.  You aren’t the only one reading your gmail.  You cannot fool one of the largest companies in the world with some of the smartest engineers and programmers on the planet with a piece of $27 software and a pat on the butt from the jerk who sold it to you.  Let’s get real!

When the reality sinks in, people are going to be scrambling again, as they have after every slap, smack down, and other adjustments Google has made to quell the theft of advertising dollars by scraper site builders.  I personally know some serious black hat guys who have all but given up their constant rage against the machine and gone white hat (maybe a little “off” white).

They are some of the highest earning black hat people I have ever heard of and they are giving it up.  This comes from the top down and you should seriously pay attention when the originators this stuff start to bail.

The answer?  People need to grow up or go back to their day jobs.  There are no free rides anymore in the Adsense world.

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Traffic Tactics - Howie Schwartz Exposes Underground Google Tips

Update March 10 2009
Howie is seeking an apprentice to help him. Find out on his free webinar tonight!

—

See the new “Blog Marketing Search Engine?”

Just one of the many killer tips Howie Schwartz shared with the Traffic Tactics Workshop attendees yesterday here in San Diego. Howie talked a lot about “trust” points of contact with Google. Basically meaning, anytime you can connect with Google or another authority site, you are building the trust, or credibility of your site with Google.

The neat thing about Google’s custom search engines (Google Co-op) is that you can control the results. You are #1 in your own search engine for your keywords.

I have some work to do still on the sites I want included in “my” search engine, but people are using it and I am even getting Adsense revenue by allowing Adsense ads on the results pages.

Which is cool because now I can use Adsense off-site and not use my more valuable real estate on FTR for low paying advertising. It gives you the ability to add to your total page count, even though my personal search is on Google’s servers, of course.

Getting users to use the search app to find stuff on your site and other related sites gives you the ability to have another point of contact with visitors before they leave your site. Another chance to have some click action on ads where you had none before.

It also boosts Google’s ability to check out and thoroughly spider your site because, of course, they are watching your search engine carefully.

The other cool feature of this service, as Howie pointed out, is something called Google Marker. This is a toolbar button much like Netscape and others make available to surfers to allow you to “mark” a page or entire site they find important, interesting, or worth another look later.

I can mark pages or sites all over the web and allow them to be in my search engine results, which means over time I will get a search engine tailored to what I think are the most important sites in my niche. Which will help my visitors by allowing them to get an increasingly useful, targeted, and edited search engine on internet marketing topics, resources, tools, and information they can use.

You can also invite people to help you by contributing to your custom search engine. All of this builds more links to your site from another contact point in the Google megaverse.
This was one among dozens of things Howie shared with us for ways to get in front of the people Google attracts and getting on Google’s radar screen using some of their gadgets.

It is always amazing to me what Google is doing that rarely gets talked about. People like Howie who watch the huge range of developments Google releases, with no fanfare whatsoever in most cases, help us keep up and keep ahead of others in our markets with new Google technology and services.

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