Archive for August, 2007
Tuesday, August 21st, 2007
With this article I’ll try and cover both popular and less used ways of building up your incoming links. Obviously, you can drop your link everywhere and you can gather a huge amount of links in a relatively short time. But, you can also do it the clever way and achieve the same goal with a smaller number of links, from sites that are actually relevant to your topic. That’s what it’s all about in the end, links from sites that are in the same niche as you.
As an example for this article I’ll show you how to do link building for an auto blog. Feel free to do the same with your own niche.
1. Niche Social Bookmarking Sites and Categories
Here, you can look for both Digg like sites about cars and you can look for social media sites that have Auto categories.
I’ll stop here because this is just to show you that there usually is a place for your social media link building. Just look around, use Google, and find them. Then submit your best stories to them. Another place to start for niche social media sites is this article: Top 25 Niche Social Media Sites.
2. Niche Forums
I don’t think that it’s really a surprise to anyone that there are forums for almost anything, like coffee forums, clock forums or even anything forums. Whatever your niche is, there is a very good chance you’ll be able to discuss it on some forum. Obviously, a link in your signature is an added bonus. New potential subscribers are another bonus, especially if you know what you’re talking about.
3. Niche Directories
I know that generally people consider that directories don’t provide as much value these days, but in my opinion niche directories still have something to say. You might not find a directory for every possible niche, but there are quite a few that have them.
Just a Google search of auto directory or car directory will give you plenty of examples. Same goes with many other niches.
4. Niche DoFollow Blogs
DoFollow Blogs - usually blogs have url’s in comments with nofollow attached. There are some bloggers, those part of the DoFollow movement that remove the nofollow tag and give some link love to those that comment on their blogs.
You see the tagline of this blog in the upper right corner? The “some ethics attached” part. This is what I’m talking about. Don’t screw over other bloggers. Don’t spam bloggers that are part of the DoFollow movement. When I do post comments on DoFollow blogs I do it because I’m a subscriber and I have something to say. I don’t comment just for the sake of commenting. If the post doesn’t interest me I don’t say anything. If it does, I’ll say what I got to say but I’ll also try to make it a good comment. No “Nice article!” or other 2-3 words comments. The list of over 200 Dofollow blogs can be found at Courtney Tuttle. There are a number of niches that are represented there.
5. Make a Tool/Quizz for your niche
You’ve probably seen them around by now. An example is the “My blog is worth $xxxx” code, which people put in their sidebars. That one has a link back to the blog that released it. The same goes for the others as well. You do need to know some programming or know someone who does, but if you have a good idea and you promote the tool well, it can do wonders.
A quick idea of a tool for an auto blog: a tool that will let people insert the make, model and year of their car, then offer them a code that they can insert in their signature in forums, and it will show a gif image with some of the statistics of the car and maybe the value of the car, updated from the Kelley Blue Book. Can be used both by bloggers and any car enthusiast that wants to show off his car in forums. Obviously, that gif is a link to your own auto site/blog.
6. Create a WordPress Theme or a Forum Theme for your niche
A WordPress theme created for your niche will most probably be used by a small number of bloggers, but when it does they will be relevant links from the credit link you leave in the footer. One other thing you can do to promote it, you can contact bloggers writing about cars and tell them that you’ve made a free WordPress theme that will go better with the subject of his blog then the current one. Of course, contact bloggers that are not using car themes. Same goes for any other niche where you’re not writing alone.
A few examples of car themes for WordPress at WP Themes Free
How to create a WordPress theme: one written by Max, and another by WP Designer
If you know how to code, don’t limit yourself to just WordPress though. You could find a bigger forum in your niche for example and offer them a free custom VBulletin theme in exchange of leaving the footer links intact and pointing to your website/blog. Places with user generated content can be a good choice for this, because while bloggers write maybe a few hundred articles per year, forums tend to gather tenths of thousands of pages written by users.
7. Guest Post on Blogs In Your Niche
Look for blogs in your niche or related. You might want to skip trying to write for big network blogs (Jalopnik, Engadget, etc) and look for blogs maintained by enthusiasts. Guest blogging has already been discussed to death by others so I’m not going to waste your time by saying the same things. Just do good posts and put that link to your blog.
8. Blog Carnivals
Another topic discussed to death, but still valuable when it comes to gaining links from others in your niche. Head on to Blog Carnival and look for something that suites your subject.
Conclusions
These are not the only ways to do it. There are plenty of ways and chances are you already know them, but don’t use them (why??). Linkbait and long useful lists are just two that I didn’t mention here because others have exhausted the subject already.
Syndicated articles is an example that I don’t like because I don’t really want links from blogs or sites that don’t write their own posts. They will be marked as supplemental probably and they’re not that useful.
So, got a niche blog/site? Start promoting it. As you saw, it’s as easy as submitting articles to niche social media sites or writing on niche forums.
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Monday, August 20th, 2007
I’ve installed the SeoQuake plugin 5 days ago, and now I’m hooked. I’m saying that it’s a must have plugin because it offers you new opportunities and it’s a huge time saver when you’re doing research on the competition for any keywords.
It has two major components. First, adding to your search engine results different data for each of the websites ranking for the term you’re searching for. Here’s an example of what you can see when looking for “paris destinations”, first two pages that rank for that keyword.
Open the screenshot in a new window and look at it carefully. This is the information you can see for the first result:
- PR 6,
- 258,000 pages indexed by Google
- 6 backlinks for that particular page that is ranking, as shown by Yahoo
- 672,000 backlinks for the entire domain, as shown by Yahoo
- 55,612 pages indexed by Live.com
- Alexa rank: 3359
- Archive.org has data about this website since 1996
- nobody saved this url in Del.icio.us
- 3 reactions about this page in Technorati
- link to whois query and link to the page source
And this is not all. It can show you much more, like backlinks in each of the 3 search engines and even pages indexed by Yahoo (which I forgot to activate).
Just imagine how much time it would take you to type in all the commands to get this data manually. Even if you preferred that, there is no comparison with having the entire picture right in front of you.
The second component is the Seobar, and you see it when you visit a website. The same information you saw in the SERPS, you can now see at the top of the website.
Click again for the full image. You can see the information at the top, plus something extra I added for the Seobar, whether the site has a robots.txt file, keyword density and how many internal and external links are on the page.
What Is It Good For
- saves a lot of time when doing research
- anytime you search something online you can immediately see if it’s a good niche that you can get into
- see the larger picture by having information on all the competitors in one screen, without doing any work for it
- click on the Yahoo Backlinks data for example and it takes you directly to that page where you can see them all. Same goes for the other data shown.
Now, the only problem I have with it, is that sometimes it doesn’t automatically load the data for individual pages when I’m browsing a site and I have to click the ? signs for each piece of information in order for it to be retrieved. It always works in the search engine results though.
If only it would also show the number of searches that different tools give for the keywords you look for in Google, it would be perfect.
You can download the SeoQuake plugin for Firefox or Internet Explorer from the SeoQuake homepage.
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Sunday, August 19th, 2007
The Weekly Shark Bytes will be posted every Sunday, since it’s the day I catch up with what’s going on in the blogosphere and usually end up finding some new blogs to add to my reader. It’s also the time I read articles that I bookmarked during the week and write down ideas for posts, so it’s the best time to share some link love. I’ll try to keep the Shark Bytes posts with money making articles only. Hopefully I will refrain myself from linking to posts about finding your inner blogging child or finding inspiration.
Josh Buckley - Selling sites for a great profit part 1 and part 2. How to figure out the
value of a website, if you should use a BIN or not, a few details that you need to figure out before hand to be prepared and how to write a description for the sale. I never sold a website so far, so I’m really interested. Bookmarked and subscribed.
Matt Blancarte - found him via Josh Buckely, and he has some interesting articles, like the one on Adsense Arbitrage and a short tutorial on Wordpress themes (doesn’t go into much detail though).
Blogtrepeneur - making my point about diversifying your income, he made $506 from blogging in July, but only $6 were from Adsense.
Mark from Digerati Marketing - in a guest post on the Jon Waraas blog, called Getting Started: Making Money Online. He does a very good job at explaining the difficulties, revenue potential and promotional difficulty for different ways of making money online, from portals, blogging, affiliates, arbitrage and more. A very good read and I recommend it.
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Saturday, August 18th, 2007
Since it’s weekend and all, I’m testing the new version of the Shylock Adsense plugin, so please don’t be alarmed if you see weird positions for ads on the blog. I’ll release it today or tomorrow I hope.
Also, you might have seen that I’ve changed the theme for the blog. Wasn’t really satisfied with the previous one, especially with the width of the posts. I’d love an opinion on the current theme I’m using if you got some time.
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Saturday, August 18th, 2007
In their own words:
In a nutshell… The Thirty Day Challenge is about making your first $10 online. For a full 30 days we are going to be showing you exactly how to start your own Internet business and generate your first income online without spending a dime.
In mine:
The good part: if you’re looking for new gray hat techniques to rank and make some money then their videos do provide good nuggets of information, that I personally didn’t see anywhere else. The market research part especially is pretty good. It will teach you how to research keywords and find a niche for affiliate marketing. If you’re a beginner then these videos will teach you how to do it in an easy way.
The bad part: if you’re not a beginner and you already have some experience with setting up blogs and other similar stuff, it will drive you mad trying to follow all the metaphors and the nonsense that the presenter spits out. It’s really beginner stuff, but the bad part is that you have to follow it because it does have some nuggets of wisdom here and there, that you don’t want to miss. So, yesterday I’ve spent an excruciating period of time watching all the videos released so far and listening to podcasts. The worse part is that I can’t stand the voice together with the way he talks.
The spam part: the whole thing has a nasty “I’m going to sell you an e-book at the end” feel to it. The thing that really put me over the edge was the fact that they claim in the videos that they will be using “white hat” techniques only. Having seen all the videos, that makes me think that either they don’t have a clue or that they’re lying through their noses.
No mater what their explanations might be, there is no way in hell that submitting one page Tumblr blogs with affiliate links on them to 20+ social media sites can be considered white hat. Screenshot on the right shows you how one of those sites looks after the 30DC Brigade marched through. If you look closely, you’ll probably notice a number of Tumblr blogs submitted.
And those are not all of them. There are probably thousands of these nitwits by now, happily spamming social media sites, getting banned from Digg, Reddit or Netscape and still thinking that they’re making money online using white hat techniques.
And to top it off, the snake oil salesman presenting the videos talks about how he feels good that he helps people find what they want (while linking in his spam blogs to 10 page classic sales letters) and that white hat is the way to go to feel good about yourself and make money in the long run (don’t remember the exact words and you couldn’t pay me to watch those videos again to find out).
Conclusion: watch the videos, don’t believe a word he’s saying about all that stuff being ethical. It’s not. The reason I recommend the videos is because if you want to make money online and be good at SEO, you need to know everything, white and black. And it does show you a nice way to rank fast for uncompetitive keywords. Take the lessons, use different methods.
I’m all for gaming Google, that’s what SEO is all about. I’m just not the kind that would spam sites that other people use, to rank for a keyword that brings 100 visitors per day.
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Digg.com doesn’t have an auto category but when you do see car related news make sure you use the blog this feature and get a link from that article.
You see the tagline of this blog in the upper right corner? The “some ethics attached” part. This is what I’m talking about. Don’t screw over other bloggers. Don’t spam bloggers that are part of the DoFollow movement. When I do post comments on DoFollow blogs I do it because I’m a subscriber and I have something to say. I don’t comment just for the sake of commenting. If the post doesn’t interest me I don’t say anything. If it does, I’ll say what I got to say but I’ll also try to make it a good comment. No “Nice article!” or other 2-3 words comments. The list of over 200 Dofollow blogs can be found at Courtney Tuttle. There are a number of niches that are represented there.
You’ve probably seen them around by now. An example is the “My blog is worth $xxxx” code, which people put in their sidebars. That one has a link back to the blog that released it. The same goes for the others as well. You do need to know some programming or know someone who does, but if you have a good idea and you promote the tool well, it can do wonders.
A few examples of car themes for WordPress at WP Themes Free
Another topic discussed to death, but still valuable when it comes to gaining links from others in your niche. Head on to Blog Carnival and look for something that suites your subject.
