Building links is an important part of promoting your website(s) and building an online presence. The more you get involved in different places around the web the more you will be noticed and the more traffic you will ultimately get. This is what you might call the “Prolific Principle”. The more prolific you are, the more your “presence” will grow.

This applies to content – publish as much fresh, original content as you can – and it applies to links pointing to your web properties. Be prolific – get out there – a lot.

In an article published a couple years ago on the HubSpot Blog Peter Caputa compares the link building process to passing through the “grades” you go through in high school. The article is called Did You Graduate From Link Building High School Yet?

Peter suggests to really master this process will take 4 years (like it does in high school), and that you have to move through the stages gradually. I think this is probably an exaggeration. If you get good advice you should be able to move through the stages quite a bit more quickly than that, and I believe the stages overlap more than he suggests. Nevertheless, the article makes some good suggestions. Here is my summary with comments of my own…

In Stage 1 (Grade 9) you should build links that don’t require anyone else’s help. These links include directory listings, many of which you can get for free, and references on social media sites where (among other things) you can create a profile – also for free.

I would add to this you should try to get at least one or two links from established sites that will result in your site being indexed as quickly as possible – perhaps from a friend or colleague. If you own a local business look for local business directories. Not only can you get listed there, but you can find other people you might exchange links with.

In Stage 2 (Grade 10) you should launch a business blog and begin adding content on a regular basis. Then start publishing articles on sites like Ezinearticles.com, GoArticles.com and others. You can use a submission service like SubmitYourArticle.com for distribution to a large number of sites.

As I outline in a previous post about article marketing this is a good way to get links (by adding them to your “resource box” on each article) and to build a reputation as an “expert” in your field. Of course this requires writing original, interesting articles. If you are stumped for original content you can just do reviews of other people’s articles or products (like this article) or you might consider using an article writing service like Textbrokers.

In Stage 3 (Grade 11) you should start networking with as many people as possible who share your interests. The object is to make yourself visible. This requires participation and “engagement”.

One way of doing this is to find a number of bloggers in your niche and start making meaningful comments on their posts. This is called blog commenting.

This will gradually introduce you to fellow bloggers and your link in each comment will attract a small amount of traffic from other commenters or readers. Once you gain enough confidence you can approach some of the bloggers you have met this way to do a guest post on their blog. That way you can leverage their readership to enhance your own visibility.

By this stage your blog should have a fair bit of valuable content so you should register it with as many blog networks as possible. MyBlogLog.com is a good place to start. This will help you meet other bloggers with similar interests and will give you some tools for tracking your traffic as it gradually grows.

You can also use other social media to gain visibility for specific blog posts. Digg and Stumbleupon are good places to start. You can also post references (and links) to specific blog posts on your Facebook wall, Twitter, and wherever else is appropriate.

Remember, the objective here is to build connections with key people and use the connections to build visibility. Content is the key. Build content on your blogs, in articles, and with guest posts.

In Stage 4 (Grade 12) you become a power blogger creating all kinds of content: articles, training courses, white papers, webinars and videos. All of these things attract readers, links, and subscribers. If you have done it correctly you should be an important, highly visible part of a vibrant community, and you should be at the top of the search engine results for your most important keywords.

If you’re a blogger or blogger wannabe there’s a informative post by Ann Smarty about guest blogging at SearchEngineJournal.com that you should take a look at.

Guest blogging is a win-win situation. It provides already established bloggers with new, original (presumably well written) content. And it gives the guest blogger a platform to reach a lot of people he or she otherwise would probably not reach.

In another blog post from July 2010 Jeremy Bencken offers some suggestions for developing an effective guest blogging strategy. He suggests you should ask yourself three questions when getting involved in guest blogging:

1. What audience do you want to reach?
2. What’s your goal?
3. Is your content truly great?

The most important point is that guest blogging should be aimed not at building links but at building your profile and establishing your own blog as an authority. That means, first and foremost, writing good content that your target market will be interested in. Then find the blogs that help you target those people most effectively.

guest blogging, writing, link building, branding, blogs, blog strategy

Many webmasters and bloggers think of “link building” as a difficult, boring, mechanical task where the objective is to pile up mysterious things called “links” for the sake of influencing the Search Engines.

This is an old-fashioned, outdated and increasingly ineffective way to tackle the job of putting yourself on the map. In the rapidly evolving world of social media it’s all about getting noticed by real people. And the best way to do that is by being strategic and creative in what you publish.

Link Baiting Revisited

One common practice, much discussed four or five years ago, is “link baiting”. The idea behind link baiting is to publish something so unique, compelling, funny, interesting, entertaining or valuable that others will simply link to it to tell their own readers about it.

Now in case you think this technique is outdated, consider how Youtube videos go “viral” (another concept that is starting to sound old-fashioned). Somebody publishes an outrageous, funny, disgusting, cute or whatever video and the chain reaction begins. Person A tells person B who tells person C and on it goes until a million or so people have watched it.

The same thing happens with blog posts (although usually in a less dramatic way). The trick is to say something interesting, original, or controversial and then tell people about it to get the buzz going. The buzz is helped along by people linking to you.

This article from way back in 2006 describes 5 different types of “hooks” used in writing articles and posts intended to get a buzz. The hooks are News, Contrary, Attack, Resource and Humor. See the article for more detail on each of these.

Strategy: Target influential sites or hot topics

The fastest and most effective way to make a significant splash is to focus on influential websites or blogs within your niche. Find a post or video about some hot topic that is getting a lot of exposure and feedback. Then use that atention – that buzz – to bring attention to your views.

Remember, your objective should not just be to “get a link” from these sites. It is more important to get their attention – make yourself visible – Expose Yourself!, by contributing to the conversation in a significant way. That way you may turn other bloggers into allies in your quest for online success.

Blog Commenting – also revisited

The most obvious and easiest thing you can do is add comments to widely read blog posts. Unless you want to become known as the local attack dog you should try to come across as positive and supportive. But don’t just agree with everything they say. Try to add something new and interesting to the conversation.

Unfortunately most well-read blog posts have many comments and yours will just be one among all the others. So you want to do what you can to stand out from the crowd. One effective way is just to write a longer comment than everyone else. This makes it look like you have something substantial to say about the topic, and it also looks like you have put some real thought into what you have said. Of course it helps to actually have something interesting to say.

Taking blog commentary to the next level

If you find an article or post that really warrants it, go ahead and write a review or commentary and publish it in your own blog. This works especially well for current “hot” topics – or blog posts that are getting a lot of attention.

Make sure you let the original author know about your review. Either send them an email directly, or mention your review in a comment on the original. That way you are exposing your own stuff to readers of the original.

The objective is to “piggy-back” on the success or popularity of the original. At the same time you can bring yourself to the attention of the original author, and gain an ally who can help you become more widely known in your chosen niche.

Other Resources:

Link Baiting & Effective Link Building

Writing articles is one of the best ways to gain some online exposure for yourself and for your web properties. As I have pointed out in a previous post, Why Article Marketing is Worth Doing you can write articles on just about any subject and submit them to many different article directories – some of which are considered authority sites by Google.

That means that not only can writing articles enhance your own status as something of an authority on the topics you write about, but when you embed links in your articles they become a great source for backlinks to your website(s). That is one the most important factors for boosting your search engine ranking.

But there are two fairly frustrating parts about writing articles that often torpedo the best intentions of many marketers and small business people. First, they take a significant amount of time to write. And, second, they can take a lot of time to submit to article directory sites.

Outsourcing your writing

The most popular solution to the “I-don’t-have-time-to-write” syndrome is to outsource the writing to people who are eager to do it for you. Often these people are experience writers who have already been exposed to the type of articles you require. And usually you can find someone to do it for a very reasonable cost.

The source we currently use is TextBroker.com and I recommend them highly. Like most freelance sites they act as a middleman between writers looking for work, and marketers or publishers looking for specific types of content.

Once you open an account you will have to deposit a small amount of money into it in order to actually place orders. Placing an order involves submitting an idea of what you want the article to be about, the keywords you want to focus on, a couple of resources they can use to find information on the topic, the length of the required article, how quickly you need it done, and the quality level (between 1 and 5) you are looking for.

Once a project is submitted, if it is left “Open”, then any writer with at least the desired quality rating can take the project on. For example, if you want a “level 4″ article, then any writer with that rating or above can claim it. Once the project is claimed the writer will submit the finished article to the system where you can accept it or ask that it be revised.

We’ve had literally hundreds of articles written by these folks and sent very few back for revisions. We often make small editorial revisions, but that is to be expected in any project.

For a 450 word level 4 article you will pay around $10. We highly recommend TextBroker.com.

Article Submission with SubmitYourArticle.com

The other painful part of the process is submitting your articles to article directories like EzineArticles.com, GoArticles.com, IdeaMarketers.com and many others. Since there are hundreds of these sites, and since at least 10 of them are fairly highly ranked by Google most article marketers recommend submitting to at least several of the better sites.

Even submitting one article to five or six sites can take a long time. If you intend to go at article marketing in a serious way you could be spending your whole day doing nothing other than submission.

That’s where an article submission site like SubmitYourArticle.com comes in. These guys will submit any number of articles to several of the major sites, as well as (in their words) “hundreds of other websites in our distribution network.”

The important thing about SYO is that they get your articles into the most important, highly ranked sites. Not all distribution systems do this. Also, like many article distribution sites SYO has integrated “spinning” capabilites which they call “Article Leverage”.

The one downside to the SYO service is that if you need to submit articles on behalf of different authors you will need a different account for each author.

Other than that (reasonable) limitation, SubmitYourArticle.com is the best article distribution service I have found.

Most local business owners don’t realize how utterly invisible their business is to the vast army of web surfers out there. You can have the most beautiful, elaborate and informative website in your entire niche, but if your potential readers and customers don’t know it is there it’s not of much value.

So at least half (and probably more) of your online resource allocation (time and money) should be spent promoting your website, blog, and social networking profiles. Let people know you exist and the chances are pretty good your online investment will start to pay dividends.

A lot of online promotional techniques take a good deal of time. For example, participating in conversations on Facebook can help you build a lot of contacts, but it can also take a lot of time.

At the other end of the spectrum, running an online advertising campaign – Google Adwords Pay Per Click for example – can cost a ton of money – often with questionable results unless you really know what you’re doing.

Article marketing is a cheap alternative

Writing and publishing articles can be a cheap and relatively effective alternative to help you build an online presence. Here is how article marketing works:

1. Articles, as opposed to press releases, should not be written as promotional pieces for your business. They are supposed to be “informative” rather than “promotional” in nature.

2. Informative articles can be submitted to article directories like Ezinearticles.com and will be published there when approved.

3. Of course you can also publish your articles on your own website(s) and blog(s). It is good to continually add new, informative content to your web properties, but that does not achieve the specific objective you are trying to achieve with article marketing. The purpose of article marketing is to get exposure beyond your own websites.

4. If you are the owner of a local business your articles should be written about some interesting topic of interest to your local target market. For example if you own a restaurant in Punkydoodle’s Corners your article should be about something your prospective clientele might be interested in.

5. Generally speaking if you are promoting a local business your article can be about either your location (Punkydoodle’s Corners in our example) or your niche (food preparation, dining out, etc.) This general rule applies to just about any local business.

6. Writing about your location is important because it will be of interest to your localized clientele. But probably more important it will be relatively easy to get ”search engine traction”. The search engines like Google will find your article and add it to their index of web resources about Punkydoodle’s Corners. When people search for information about your location, your article has a chance of coming up in the results.

7. To get this kind of traction your article does not really need to be directly about the exact niche you are targeting. For example your article could be about the history of Punkydoodle’s Corners, or the origin of the name, or the way the local farmers come into town every Saturday night. It doesn’t really matter, as long as it is interesting, has a catchy title, and is about some aspect of either your location or your type of business.

8. It is important to keep in mind that everything you publish on the web has two target audiences. People and search engines. Of course people are always your ultimate readers. But your reach will be greatly expanded if you can get the attention of the major search engines.

You can get that attention by “optimizing” your content for the search engines. And for local businesses who are pursuing a local target market the best way to optimize your web content is to make sure you focus on your location names. If you make it obvious that your article is about Punkydoodle’s Corners your article will get indexed that way. So when people do searches for various aspects of your location your articles will come up in those searches and you will inevitably get hits.

How does this promote your business?

But how does this give your business any promotional value? If you write about the history of Punkydoodle’s Corners how is that going to bring customers into your restaurant?

The short answer is, you get exposure for your website by adding information about yourself (the writer) and your business in the “About the Author” resource box at the end of the article.

This answer might be a bit weak for local business owners used to running ads in the Yellow Pages or the local newspaper. But the simple fact is this is how you gradually build a strong “presence” for your company.

You build a presence not only in the minds of your prospective customers, but just as important, in the indexes of the search engines. As you add more resources linking back to your websites the strength and “authority” of your sites is increased in the eyes of the search engines.

So not only will you get significant exposure through the articles themselves, but your own website will gain in “authority” and come up higher in the search engine results for your most important keywords.

Almost everybody who knows anything about online marketing knows the importance of search engines – especially Google. In fact Google has become so dominant it is almost impossible to talk about the internet without immediately discussing the role of Google.

The process of systematically trying to get the search engines to drive (“free” not paid) traffic to your website(s) is called Search Engine Marketing. SEM, as it is often rererred to, involves different ways of trying to influence search engines – especially Google – to give you high ranking for searches done on your most important keywords.

For example, if your most important keywords are “Toledo Real Estate”, SEM involves trying to get high ranking in Google searches for the phrase “Toledo Real Estate”. This way people will click on your link in the Google search results and be taken to your blog or website.

Voila. Traffic.

The two most important techniques used in SEM are

• “Optimizing” your content for specific keywords. This is usually called SEO – short for search engine optimization. SEO involves choosing the most promising keywords, and then making sure those keywords show up in your web content in the most important places.

• Link building. Getting links from other sites pointing to your content is a good way to get the attention of the search engines. They consider inbound links as “votes” by other online bloggers and publishers that your content is worth looking at.

Generally speaking, the more your content focuses on your primary keywords, and the more inbound links you have, the better your website or blog will rank in the search engines.

But there are problems with SEM…

• It is indirect. You are relying on Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. to determine who is or is not a good candidate to visit your site or blog. This can be a very frustrating experience – especially when you are in a competitive market.

• It takes a lot of time and effort (usually) to influence the search engines. Typically you will have to wait at least three months to see any lasting results from SEM and SEO.
• It is unpredictable. We have seen clients rise to #1 for their search terms, and we have seen other clients drop off the map. It is hard to know if this is ever the direct result of a concerted SEM/SEO effort. You do your best to give Google and Bing what they want, but you just don’t know for sure it is going to work.

SEM is just one part of the marketing puzzle

SEM is a valuable long term strategy which every serious online marketer should adopt. But don’t count on immediate results. Eventually as your blog gains credibility you will consistently draw traffic from the search engines. But it can often be a very long and tedious process.

Even more important, SEM will only take you so far. It is what we call a “passive” method of marketing. It is like Social Networking in this regard. Social networking – being active in Facebook, for example – will introduce you to many new “friends” and prospects. But it will generally not do much direct selling for you.

For example, if you own a restaurant and you want to run a one week lunch special, SEM will be almost useless. To generate traffic to your offer page you will need other promotional techniques. These will be discussed in future posts.

Building Links with BlogEasy

Here’s how the BlogEasy SuperLink program works – This is a program to help build inbound links to your blog(s).

1. Every time you publish 10 BlogEasy articles we will give you one SuperLink credit.

2. For every SuperLink credit we will create a special SuperLink article that will be posted only on your blog. Or we can use a recently published post of your own as a SuperLink post.

3. Then we will create a synopsis of that SuperLink post with a link pointing to your site and make that synopsis available to our members in the BlogEasy article list.

Can you see the potential here? Publishing BlogEasy posts not only gives you high quality relevant content, but it is an awesome way to build inbound links from just the kind of sites the search engines consider the most important – other active real estate sites.

Go ahead. Sign up for the free 5 day BlogEasy trial right now**