Posts Tagged ‘backlinks’

Social bookmarking is one of those buzz phrases you may have heard around the internet, but what is social bookmarking?

Put simply, social bookmarking is simply a more public version of the bookmarking you do on your own browser. When you want to remember a page or site on the internet, you usually go to the ‘Bookmarks’ menu in your browser and click ‘Bookmark this page’, right?

Well, with social bookmarking, you simply allow other people on social bookmarking sites like Delicious and Digg to see what you’ve bookmarked and visit that site themselves. Social bookmarking sites provide you with a platform on which you can keep track of your bookmarks while sharing them with other people.

The larger and more established social bookmarking sites are very well regarded by the search engines so when you bookmark something, that bookmark becomes like a vote for that site which Google and the other search engines see and consequently they will often rank sites higher that have lots of social bookmarks.

For a full list of the social bookmarking sites I use plus those that I recommend, check out my List of Social Bookmarking Sites post.

The benefits of bookmarking in this way are fairly obvious, but I’ll break down why I think they’re such a good part of online business and blogging. Read the rest of this entry »

For those of you looking for a list of social bookmarking sites, I’ve put together the following so you can see and use the full potential of social bookmarks.

The list isn’t an exhaustive list but it is split into the ones I use regularly and the others I know of as being reputable. There are 24 social bookmarking sites altogether in the list. I’ve seen other lists go into the hundreds but to be honest, if you get to the front page of even one of the sites below, you’ll see a rise in traffic. Also, many of those larger lists are outdated as many smaller services have closed down or been bought out.

Remember, there’s also social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter to consider too, which although not strictly social bookmarking sites, they can serve the same purpose and drive significant traffic to your sites via social interaction.

OK, here goes:

The Social Bookmarking Sites I Use

If you reach the front page on the following 6 sites (with the possible exception of TweetMeme) you’re likely to see a large spike in traffic to your site.

• Delicious – Probably the best known social bookmarking site on the internet.
• StumbleUpon – A site where you can stumble upon stories by clicking the stumble button which will bring up random sites within your area of interest. Fun and full of authority with the search engines. Also has its own link shortener which shortens links and shares them on SU at the same time giving you more leverage. The shortener is called SU.pr.
• Digg -  A massive authority when it comes to bookmarking.
• Reddit – A bookmarking site with the emphasis on news stories, this one is a monster. News before it happens.
• Diigo
• TweetMeme

I also used Read the rest of this entry »

In this guide on how to get traffic to your blog, I’m going to take you through a few traffic basics (including some important clarifications), followed by several methods that I’ve used to drive thousands of people to my sites over the years. If you’re at an intermediate or advanced level with you business, you may want to skip to the traffic strategies further down this page.

*     *     *     *     *

When it comes to creating and building a business online, one factor dictates your success over all other factors…

Traffic.

Put simply, traffic is just another name for visitors to your website or blog. If you have traffic, you can start to convert some of those people into regular readers and then some of those regulars into customers.

Just before I show you how I get traffic to my blog and other sites, I want to clarify something very important when talking about traffic.

Getting lots of traffic is great, and if you were able to drive tens of thousands of visitors to your site each month, it would be hard to see how you couldn’t profit from those visitors. However, the key is to get targeted visitors.

What do I mean by ‘targeted’? Well, quite simply it means visitors who are already interested in your subject matter and who are likely to want to find out more about it. Ideally, they will be specifically interested in one particular area of your subject matter which your niche blog will inform them about.

The reason this targeting is so crucial is that they are far more likely to want to stay on your blog, become regular readers (subscribers) and sign up to find out more. They can even become customers, either of your products and offers or those you are an affiliate for.

On your travels around the internet you will see lots of services that offer to get your lots of traffic for relatively little money. The problem with them is that they are usually sending low quality (non-targeted) traffic which is largely worthless to you because they’re not qualified visitors i.e. they’ve shown no interest in your subject matter, they’ve just clicked because of some incentive or other.

So, in this guide, I’ll only be looking at how to get targeted visitors to your blog.

Before we start, I’m assuming you have Google Analytics set up on your site already. If you don’t, get it set up so you can effectively track where the traffic is coming from. Here’s where to start: Google Analytics

Part One: Targeted Content is King

You may have heard the now cliche phrase ‘Content is King’. I’ve added the word ‘targeted’ for the reasons stated above, but also because marketing that content is much easier if it’s specific in its nature.

As in my post on How To Get More Fans on Facebook, you may read what is essentially the advice ‘Write Good Content’ and wonder how effective that is. But think about this for a second. What is it about the blogs and sites you like reading that makes you want to read them and return to them in future? It isn’t the design or the photo of the blogger’s shiny head, is it?

Good content is what draws people back to the site again and again. It’s also what gets picked up by the search engines, to bring you more traffic (assuming it’s optimised correctly, of which more in a minute).

People like to share content via social media and this is another strong reason why creating and writing good content is so important.

But what do I actually mean by ‘good’ in this context?

Well, a more accurate description would be ‘content that helps, educates and/or entertains your reader’. A concept I learned from Yaro Starak about building blog content was the idea of ‘Pillar Content‘. This is simply the idea of creating strong (usually educational) articles that will become reference points for other people and will likely be shared by those people with others, who in turn will use it as reference and share it with their peer group and so on (a viral effect). If done properly, it will also be picked up by the search engines and become the reference for anyone searching for the terms you’re discussing.

There are several kinds of pillar content which include:

• ‘How To’ Articles – You take or find a concept that lots of people want or need to know and you show them how to do it. If you’re in any doubt as to the effectiveness of this idea, look at the title of the blog post you’re reading right now!
• Technical Blueprints – This is especially suited to the more technical blogs where you take people through the exact steps they need to follow to achieve something of a technical nature. It tends to be quite scientific.
• List Articles – You will have seen these all over the place, because this concept works well. For some reason we humans love a list. We like the order and simplicity it brings. Consequently, ‘The 10 Best Ways To ___________’ or ’7 Ways To ___________’ tend to be good ways to share information with your readers as it becomes easier to digest.

Personally, around 20% of my traffic to this site comes from ‘How To’ articles. The main reason is that I’ve researched the title and concept of my ‘how to’ beforehand.

Here’s how I do it: Read the rest of this entry »

When it comes to making money online, ensuring you do the best keyword research possible is essential.

What do I mean by ‘the best keyword research‘?

Well, it’s actually disarmingly simple but so many people get this wrong, so I thought I’d explain what my definition of that phrase is, along with the ways to do it effectively. Plus, I’m going to show you a tool you can buy which will put you miles ahead of the competition.

If you want to go straight to the Market Samurai Review, simply scroll down and watch the two videos below.

OK, so for me, good keyword research is all about finding keywords with the following attributes:

• You can rank highly for them relatively easily (with perhaps only a few hundred backlinks maximum).
• They are what the market is looking to buy, not information keywords.
• They are not confused with other possible uses. For example, some keywords are also names of products in other markets, so you need to be wary of these. For a great example of this, read this post and watch the video on Pat Flynn’s excellent blog.
• There are exact match domain names available upon which I can build targeted sites.

So, with that in mind the next obvious question is: What is the best keyword research tool?

Well, it’s worth saying that there are plenty of good free keyword research tools out there. When I first got started I used:

• Google’s Keyword Research Tool
• The SEO Book Keyword Tool – Go to Keyword Suggestion on the main page and you’ll find the keyword tool. You need to register but it’s free to do so.

However, both of these fall down because they don’t go far enough. You see, I want my keyword tool to tell me not just the amount of potential traffic (accurately), but also the value of that traffic. I would also like it to tell me what the phrase-to-broad-match ratio is, because this will determine how much ‘extra’ traffic I get from other similar searches and whether or not my keyword will get drowned out by those searches.

If it could tell me the competition I’m facing too, that would be awesome.

For me, the best keyword research tool is Market Samurai, because it does all of the above and tons more. I’ve been using it for a while and I have to say, I’m still regularly amazed by how good it is and how much quicker and more accurate it’s made my research.

In the following videos, I show you a full piece of keyword research from start to finish, using Market Samurai. Enjoy the full review as you watch over my shoulder and if you want to get a free trial simply click any of the Market Samurai links or the banners in this post.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been working on trying to get several of my sites onto the front page of the search engines. One of the more traditional ways of making yourself an authority in your niche and making your site relevant (which helps your ranking) is to submit your site to reputable directories.

The problem with that is that it’s totally tedious.

As a result, I went looking for some ways to get it done easily and quickly. I’m happy to pay for the service, as it counts as outsourcing the necessary (but boring) stuff that makes a business run.

And I found this:

http://www.adventuresininternetmarketing.net/directory-maximizer

It’s a good service and allows you to submit to 1211 directories. What’s more,

Read the rest of this entry »

If you read my blog last week, you’ll see that I chatted a bit about the new plugin I discovered thanks to my friend Wayne Lambert. The plugin is called Pretty Links and helps you to cloak links using your own domain name. Very cool.

Well, I have an update for you…

I was writing some articles recently for Ezine and other similar directories and realised that they wouldn’t accept these cloaked links, even though I’d made them pretty. Incidentally, when I say pretty, I don’t mean that I’ve covered them in flowers and patterns. I just mean that they now have look like this:

mydomainname.com/pretty-link

instead of like this:

bit.ly/random-collection-of-letters

So, although the plugin is awesome for blog and e-mail postings, it doesn’t work for article links. However, what does work very well is using domain names to cloak the links. Basically, you buy a domain name, then set it up to forward to your affiliate link. Whenever anyone clicks on it, it takes them straight to the affiliate promotion.

Now you may be thinking: ‘Yeah, but isn’t it more expensive to buy a domain name every time you want to cloak an affiliate link?’

Yes, of course it is, but there’s a very good ‘up side’ to doing it this way.

Read the rest of this entry »