Linking Strategies
I was first introduced to online marketing in 2000 by a relative of mine who was earning about $4000.00 per month as an affiliate marketer and I have been hooked on it ever since.
I first started promoting free satellite systems simply because it happened to be one of the first programs I came across during my search for profitable affiliate programs.
Without much effort at all , I was collecting monthly checks that would rival most peoples full time pay checks.
Suddenly and without warning my website dropped completely off of the Google radar. You see, Google had just completed a major update that included several changes to their search algorithm and as a result my website was no longer considered worthy of high placement in their search results and therefore fell back several hundreds of pages to where it would barely be seen by human eyes... I was shocked and utterly discouraged, I soon gave up on Internet marketing and pursued other business interests in the brick and mortar world.
My brick and mortar business eventually became quite successful and I found myself with several hours of spare time everyday, so I started thinking about Internet marketing once again and off to work (or should I say surf) I went.
Wow, I could not believe how things have totally changed in a period of only five years! No more one page websites with affiliate banners or classified ads that could drive multitudes of traffic, No way! If you want to be taken seriously you have got to be far more savvy than that. The days of earning huge affiliate commissions with just minimal advertising efforts are long gone my friends. It's a dog eat dog world and your just a puppy being paper trained.
Apart from quality content being the most important aspect of any website it seems that Google (and most other search engines) have placed a huge emphasis on the amount of one way links from other websites pointing back to your website, they view these links as being a vote of confidence and figure that if your website is worthy of being linked to by others then it should be worthy of a higher placement on their search results.
It used to be that reciprocal linking was a good option for getting links back to your site but you had to reciprocate a link in return which eventually was considered to be useless links in the eyes of Google and I'm sure the other search engines will eventually follow suit.
So how does one acquire one way links? I am going to briefly touch on six of the most popular ways of obtaining one way links to your website but I will only go into detail on one that I have most recently been using and have experienced huge success with.
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1) Article Submission: In my opinion this is the #1 way of getting FREE quality backlinks along with tons of targeted traffic and is the one strategy that an online marketer cannot do without.
Writing and submitting articles is one of the easiest ways to explode your business, with so many new ezines and articles directories coming online every day, they are more than eager to accept your articles as it means more content for them.
From my own personal experience I saw one of my websites (richjerkreviews.com) go from a Google Pagerank of "0" to "3" and an Alexa traffic ranking of "1,768,953" to "570,540" within one weeks time by simply submitting one article to an Article Submission Service . Another benefit to submitting articles is for those of you that are putting up a brand new website, by placing your links on these articles you will find that Google and most other search engines will have your new website indexed within days versus weeks or even months.
What I especially like about Submitting articles is that many of the directories you will be submitting to will have a high Google Pagerank that can sometimes filter down to your site thus increasing your website's pagerank and boosting your search engine placement they also tend to get a lot of traffic which can have an immediate effect on the amount of traffic going to your website
2) Content: When your website offers quality content, others will naturally link to you because your site will be of value to them and their visitors.
3) Testimonials: A big trend on the internet right now is to submit testimonials to other websites that include a link back to your websites. If the site owner publishes your testimonial on their site you get a one way link back to yours... It's win-win for both parties.
4) Web Directories: There are thousands of Web directories that accept free website submissions. This is an excellent strategy for getting one way links to your website not to mention the added traffic it will bring.
5) Social Bookmarking sites: So what are social bookmarking sites you may you ask? They are websites that let you publicly post website URL's and their descriptions to share with other readers that might find them interesting, exactly the same as you would add an URL to your favorites on your very own computer.
6) Forums: Drop useful comments on as many forums as you can and be sure to include a link to your website in your signature, once again you will get the all important link as well as extra traffic. This strategy is so simple yet so many people ignore it.
7) Blogs: The same thing applies for Blogs as with forums but be sure to leave only relevant comments as blog owners hate comment spam and will refuse to post your comment if they feel it is only being submitted in an effort to gain a link back too your website.
Give these linking strategies a try and watch your business explode!
