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