Writing for Your Wealth

I managed to get my first truly profitable site penalized and dropped from the Google index. Apparently doing link exchanges with everyone who asked (including those pervasive supplements companies) wasn’t a good idea. I’d like to say I was naive, but I think I was just stupid.

Fortunately, I have learned from my mistakes and know better today. At least, I haven’t had any sites kicked out of Google for linking to “bad neighborhoods” lately.

These days it’s all about the one-way links anyway, and how to get them is what we’re talking about in Link Building Techniques, Part 5 of the How to Build Passive Income with Article Sites Series.

There’s a bit of a Catch-22 in this game in that once your site appears on the first page of the search results, it’s more likely to be noticed and referenced–linked to–than when you’re buried on page 173–or even 2–but since no one looks back that far, it’s hard to be noticed and get the links you need to reach the first page. So even when you’re putting together a quality content site with valuable information, you’ll need to work on acquiring links in order to increase your traffic and eventually inch your way up onto the first page of search engine results.

Anchor Text 101

Before we talk about getting links, I want to talk about anchor text. First a short defintion:

Anchor text = The actual words in a link that are highlighted and made “clickable.”

When we were discussing, keywords in domains and other on-site SEO considerations, we were focusing on search engine optimization techniques you implement on your own site.

There are also off-page elements that play into how well your site ranks for your keywords. In particular, getting links with your keywords in the anchor text plays a big part. It’s not just about what you say your site is about, it’s about what others say your site is about too!

Therefore, your goal is to not only get links to your site but get links to your site with your keywords in the anchor text.

For example, if I’m still working on that tennis ball machine site, I want people to link to my main page with that keyword phrase, “tennis ball machine,” in anchor text. That helps a lot more than someone linking to my site with the anchor text “click here” or “check this out” or some such.

Now, let’s talk about how we can get those links (with the right anchor text!).

There are three ways to get links: trade your time for links, pay for links, and get them for free. The last is ideal, of course, but it can be hard to get noticed and get those free links, especially when your site is new, so we’ll focus on the first two methods today.

Trading Your Time for Links

If you want to grow your article site organically (this is what Google prefers anyway), or you don’t have the cash to invest in buying links, then you’re going to be working–investing your time–to get those links.

Article Marketing

With this method, you write articles on your niche and include a bio with a link or two back to your site in the resource box. Then you submit articles to article directories where non-writing website and blog owners can use them on their own sites (in exchange for including your bio with live links).

A couple of the big directories where you can submit your articles:

• Ezinearticles
• Go Articles
• Articles Base

This is the primary method I use, and it’s been good to me.

Tip: Go broad with your niche articles, so there will be wide appeal, making it more likely people will pick up the articles to publish on their sites. For example, I might put “tennis ball machines” in my bio link, but I’d probably write an article that covered all tennis equipment or maybe even tennis instruction in general.

Guest Blogging

A guest blog post is an original article that you submit to a related blog in exchange for a link to your site somewhere in the post.

You don’t have to be promoting a blog to become a guest blogger. Just look for blogs in your niche that are already publishing articles by guest authors. (Even if you haven’t noticed guest blog posts on a site you like, it doesn’t hurt to ask if it’s something the blogger might consider.)

Tip: It’s a good idea to start a relationship with a blogger (or at least make them aware of you by leaving helpful comments on their blog) before asking to guest post. Also, browse through their archives to get a feel for what they publish. If you reference one of their old posts in your request (maybe one that ties in with your story proposal), they’ll probably appreciate your willingness to get to know them and their site (AKA be more receptive to accepting you as a guest blogger!).

Leaving Blog Comments

Even if you’re not promoting a blog yourself, you can still leave comments on blogs in order to slowly but steadily build up links to your site.

When leaving blog comments, try using a search engine such as DoFollo, which helps you find blogs in your niche that use plug-ins such as Comment Luv and Keyword Luv. These plug-ins turn blog comments into “do follow” links, meaning search engines will follow the links and you’ll receive SEO benefits from posting them.

Other Ways to Get Free Links?

There are other ways to build links to your site, such as working the social media scene or posting to forums and inserting a link in your signature file. Ultimately, though, those methods generally require a lot of continuing effort to be effective.

This may be okay for a blog you’re constantly working on, but if you’re trying to build passive income, you don’t want to have to spend an hour a day link hunting!

The idea with these article sites is to write them, put them up, do some heavy link building in the beginning, and then move on to other sites. While you’ll occasionally want to add a new article and get a new link, promoting these sites isn’t supposed to become your new lifelong hobby.

Overall, I think you’ll get the most out of article marketing and guest blogging. You can also try submitting your sites to directories, such as Yahoo! and DMOZ but the search engines don’t seem to value directory links the way they used to, so don’t waste your time submitting to every directory you can find (and I wouldn’t advise paying for directory links).

Speaking of paying for links…

Trading Your Money for Links

While Google frowns on artificially boosting your PageRank and search engine rankings through paid links, it is a method some people choose to pursue, so I will go over some tactics for buying links here. Honestly, it’s something I’d do more of if I wasn’t afraid of incurring the wrath of the big G (as they say, it’s not wise to bite the hand that feeds you!), as trading time for links gets old, especially when you start earning money and are looking for ways to reinvest it in growing your sites.

But I digress… let’s talk about paid links, for those who may wish to try and fly under the radar and give them a try.

Sponsored Reviews

Thanks to sites such as ReviewMe.com, many bloggers are offering sponsored reviews. For a set amount of money, they will write up a review for your site and include a link or two in the post.

Bloggers working through ReviewMe will disclose that the reviews are sponsored, and in some cases, bloggers will attach “no follow” tags to the links, meaning you won’t get any PageRank or credit in the search engines’ digital eyes for the link. You should avoid buying reviews from folks who use “no follow” links (if in doubt, just ask the blogger before you pay), since with these article sites, we’re looking for link juice (to increase our search rankings through link accumulation), not just short term traffic.

ReviewMe takes a 50% cut, so if you want to save money, you may consider contacting the blogger directly to see if you can get a better rate by bypassing the middle man.

The downside of working outside a system such as ReviewMe, where prices are already set, is you have to decide on your own whether the sponsored-review asking price is fair. Also you don’t have any sort of money back guarantee if the blogger doesn’t fulfill the bargain. If you go this route, consider sticking with established blogs that have traffic (you can check Alexa.com to see the blog’s traffic patterns), get comments regularly, have Google PageRank, etc.

Pay Per Post

PayPerPost.com is somewhat similar to ReviewMe, except that instead of buying reviews of your site, you’re just asking the bloggers to write about your niche and to include a link to your site in the post. The appealing part of this is that they’ll use the anchor text you give them.

You’ll usually run a campaign and buy links on several blogs instead of just purchasing one review at a time.

You will find a lot of lower quality blogs in the network (though, if you’re willing to pay more, you can limit campaigns to blogs that have a certain PageRank or amount of traffic) as a blog need only have existed for a few months in order to qualify for the program, but the sheer number of links you can acquire with a relatively small investment makes the system appealing for some (the minimum you can pay is about $6.50 per link–$5 for the blogger and a cut for PayPerPost). If you pay $10 a post, you could get 20 links from 20 different blogs for a mere $200.

The downside–and it’s a big one–is that PayPerPost only requires its bloggers to keep their paid posts (and your links) up on their sites for 30 days. Some bloggers will delete them down the road (but some won’t), so you have to decide if you’re willing to take the risk.

Again, for our article sites, we’re really only interested in permanent links.

Text Links

If I were buying links, I’d go for the above two methods, because links are included inside the blog posts–in the content itself. It’s believed that the search engines give more weight to links that appear in the content.

When you buy straight text links, it’s usually a site-wide link in the menu of a blog. In fact, a company called Text Link Ads can let you shop for sites you might want to buy links on this way. You’ll pay a monthly fee to have your link placed on a site in your niche. The more you pay, the more popular the site is, and the more likely you’ll get traffic.

However, that traffic (and any SEO benefits) will only last as long as you’re willing to pay for the link.

You can also find links to buy on your own by visiting webmaster forums such as Digital Point, which as a link sales section.

Be wary of sites offering permanent text links in their menus. The owners should be able to make more by selling links monthly, so an offer of a “permanent link” probably means the site will be abandoned or sold eventually or just isn’t that good to start with.

That’s all folks…

Okay, enough on the buying links topic. You’ll probably want to invest your time getting natural, permanent links instead. (If you do have money to spend, you can always hire people to write articles and submit them to article sites for you too.)

If any of you would like to offer recommendations for building links (or share your experiences with the above methods), we’d love to hear about it in the comments!