Blogs and the Humble Trackback
June 30, 2009
Blogs have a few interesting ways to build links that other types of sites do not. As well as being ranking magnets if you take the time to update them regularly, you can ping them, and get on the blogrolls of other blogs. But one of the easiest ways is the trackback.
A trackback is a notification sent to a blog when one of your posts links to it. In the latest Wordpress versions, a single checkbox selection will automatically send a trackback to any blog to which you linked. These are very useful, and don’t cost you anything more than the willingness to show some link love to your fellow bloggers before you receive it.
Trackbacks appear in one of several forms on the linked blogs:
- Some blogs, like mine, have a separate trackback section before their comments. This puts your trackback ahead of the comments, making a link to your site more visible. If that blog happens to garner a lot of traffic, you could be looking at a piece of it. These types of separated trackback sections also attract link love, and I recommend you organize them on your blog this way.
- Other blogs post your trackback as a normal comment. It will appear as an excerpt of what you wrote, usually preceded and followed by an ellipsis (“...”). It appears in first come, first served order with the rest of the comments on that blog.
- It doesn’t appear, but the link garners the owner’s attention. A link will be noticed by anyone who takes any kind of care at all of their blog. That means you might just wind up on the blogroll.
Now, traffic from trackbacks isn’t automatic. Real people have to click through, which means you’ll have to get their attention with something interesting. Since most of what you leave is a title and blog name, be sure to give the post that’s linking to another site a title that will pull people in. Plus, try to send trackbacks to blogs with similar topics of discussion as yours, and the people will be pre-qualified for your content.
If you need links and traffic to your blog, add the trackback to your arsenal of techniques. It’s easy to do, helps build blogging relationships, and can accelerate the process of getting your blog off the ground.
My name is Ryan Ambrose, and I’m one of the co-authors of Can I Make Big Money Online.
Get Keyword Anchored Backlinks to Make Money Online
January 25, 2009
The best way to consistently make money online is to get to the top of the search engine results (mainly Google) for the top keywords related to your website. And the best way to get to the top of the search engine results is by having a lot of keyword anchored backlinks pointing to your website.
This has always been the case but most people have forgotten this simple fact because they are too busy trying to get traffic from social networking sites. The problem is that the traffic you get from social sites is either completely worthless or very close to it. How much money have you actually made from traffic as a result of social site? I bet it’s very little! Now compare that to the people who own the sites in your niche at the top of the search engine results who are making a ton of money every day.
Let me ask you this question…
Would you rather work your butt off every day trying to get a bunch of traffic from social sites and make a little bit of money from it, or work your butt off for a few months to get high search engine rankings then sit back while you make a lot of money every day?
I will assume you picked the latter unless you enjoy working 24 hours a day!
Let’s say your website (or blog) is about making money online. You will want to be ranked on the first page of Google for several keyword phrases related to your niche. For this example some of the main ones would be:
- Make Money Online
– How to Make Money Online
– Ways to Make Money Online
– Making Money Online
– Make Money Online Free
You can use the free Google keyword tool to find as many as you want.
Now, that isn’t exactly the best example because it’s very difficult to get to the top of the search engine results for make money online related keywords. However, it’s not so hard in smaller and less competitive niches. I just chose MMO because it’s an easy one to use as an example.
How do you get those rankings?
You get them by having a lot of keyword anchored backlinks!
A keyword anchored backlink is a link pointing to your website with your main money making keywords as the text of the link. A good one would be from a high quality, high ranking, high page rank website related to your site, but almost any keyword anchored backlink is better than none.
You can get these links a lot of different ways… link exchanges, guest blogging, forum signatures, directories, article marketing, do follow blog comments, some social bookmarking sites, testimonials, contests, and several other ways.
I won’t go in-depth about any of these link building methods because there is plenty of information out there about them already and this post will be way too long if I explain them all.
Honestly making money online is not very complicated. All you have to do is rank at top of Google for as many keywords as you can, add ways to make money to your site, and watch the money roll in. It takes hard work to get there but it’s definitely not complicated.
So, make this the year you really break out and start making the kind of money you always dreamed of. Get started on gaining backlinks right now so you can dominate the search engines!
Dedicated to your success, Trent Brownrigg
Owner of a highly successful online home business website and a popular home business blog.
10 Things I Hate About Link Trading
November 20, 2008
You’ve heard great things about link trading, right? Well, I have too, and I’m sick of it.
When I first started building sites, I thought it was what I needed to do. A lot of hours and much frustration later, I accomplished next to nothing. Not only that, but I learned there were better ways to get back links, and realized just how much time I had wasted. For those of you that aren’t yet as convinced about this as I am, I present to you the 10 things I hate about link trading.
1.) I spent lots of time for little gain. Yes, they put my link on their related link pages, and I put their link on mine. Of course, that was when they bothered to respond, or actually knew how to alter the HTML of their own sites to do that. Some just didn’t care if they ever posted my link, and after a lot of wasted correspondence to them, I wound up taking theirs down. This is not my idea of time well spent.
2.) Link trading services aren’t much better. Yes, you can put your link in a marketplace and have people look you up, but the end results are still the same. Plus, the service sends you email asking you to upgrade to the paid service, which will cost you money to do more of the nearly nothing link trading accomplishes.
3.) I didn’t get jack for traffic. Oh, there were a few exceptions, but for the most part, no traffic. Seriously, when was the last time you went to a web site and thought “Oh, the first thing I’m going to hit is the related links page?” Neither does anyone else.
4.) Related links pages don’t have the same page ranks as the home page. I don’t know any exceptions to this rule. Don’t even take the time to believe that your link is going on the home page. Unless you can make a blogroll, that’s probably not going to happen.
5.) You don’t know if you’re going to be cheated or not. Yes, your link page could be nice, well organized, and short enough so that it’s not mistaken for a link farm by a search engine. Do you know your trading partner will have the same? Do you know they’ll even have a clue?
6.) Two-way link trades are discounted in the search engines. Nowadays, search engines aren’t giving as much weight to them as they once did. They even have services that do three-way link trades now to get around that. Still, how long do you think it’ll take some engineer at Google to crack three-way link trading and get their happy little spiders to discount them too? It’s going to happen sooner or later.
7.) One way links are better, and you know the sad thing about them? They’re easier to get. You just trade some content for them with a little tried-and-true tactic called article marketing. You do less work for more gain, because once you’ve taken the time to create a good article and post it to some free article sites, it’ll spread on its own over time.
8.) There’s way too much effort being put into this now-worthless tactic. There are two-way link trading automation scripts. There are two-way link trading services. There are scripts to insure that if someone trades a link with you, they don’t cheat you. And they’re all a waste, because two-way link trading is miserable.
9.) There are ways to make your links go viral that take less time and effort. You can put them into YouTube videos. You can write viral reports around them. You can create cool content, put it on your web page, and have it bookmarked into a site like Digg. If you do a good job, any of it could go viral. If that happens, tons of people will see your link, and you won’t have to spend any time wondering why no web masters ever answer your emails. Ever do that with a two-way link trade? Not a chance.
10.) You might get so frustrated by the futility and low payoff of two-way link trading that you’ll write a rant about the 10 things you hate about it. You’ll really know you’re in trouble then.
As far as I’m concerned, two-way link trading is a waste of your time. There are better ways you can do more and get you better links for less time and trouble. Those tactics are all I ever use anymore, and I get more traffic now than I ever did tormenting myself with link trades.
I’m Ryan Ambrose, and I’m one of the authors for Can I Make Big Money Online.
Link Bait Example - Super Obama World
November 18, 2008
I am starting a new ongoing feature on this blog called “Link bait Examples”. This is the first post in this ongoing series. Whenever I find something on the web that is an excellent example of link bait, I will write a post about it.
The other day I found a great example of link bait when I came across the site Super Obama World. Super Obama World is an online video game take off on Super Mario World that pits President elect Barak Obama against lobbyist, pork, etc. You get 50 lives and when you get to your last life it never ends. So essentially you can’t lose 
It’s a pretty cute game (my kids like it a lot) and it is a great example of link bait. Here’s why:
- It Focuses On A Popular Topic (Barak Obama)
The game was launched during the election and let all of Barak Obama’s rabid fans have something they could send to each other for fun.
- It Is Unique
There aren’t many video games made for Presidential candidates. Especially not professional quality video games that are as well made as Super Obama World.
- It is Fun
Super Obama World is a fun game. Anything that is fun (NOT BORING) is much more likely to get natural links to it.
Super Obama World was such good link bait that major news sites (including Yahoo) linked to it.
This game is used by an online video game company to draw people to their game site. It’s a great way to do this and thus serves as a great example of link bait. This game could also have worked as great link bait for a liberal/democrat leaning political blog.
Free Traffic Secrets 2.0 Videos Are Very Cool
July 6, 2008
One of my favorite Internet Marketing gurus, John Reese, has just released two free traffic secrets videos. I already use most of the techniques that John reveals in the videos, so I know they work.
Even if you aren’t interested in learning ways to increase your website traffic I still recommend that you check out the videos, because they raise the bar on what can be done with video.
Click here to see for yourself.
What Links Can You Point at Your Web Site?
June 29, 2008
I mentioned this before, but I’ll remind you of it again. I don’t link trade to get backlinks. Yes, every so often, someone asks to link trade with me, and I put them in my blogroll. But as a matter of course, I don’t actively pursue it. It’s too much work for a type of link search engines don’t respect all that much anymore.
However, I still have to have a linking theory, and it’s not magic or wishful thinking. It’s just that I trade something besides a reciprocal link to get a link pointed at my site. This sort of arrangement holds the potential of giving me more high-quality or targeted backlinks with less work.
So then, what links can you point at your web site that doesn’t require a link trade to get? Here’s a list of the common, and not quite so obvious, things you could do.
- Articles: Put a resource box at the bottom of a good article, then let anyone use it. This is a long-standing ‘trade content for backlinks’ tactic.
- Viral Reports: I’ve written, and put up for distribution, three viral reports as of this posting with links pointing at all sorts of things that are useful to me. Others can take those reports, rebrand them with their affiliate links, then use them as bonuses for their own purposes. In the process, they use their distribution power to put my links in front of people I might not otherwise reach. This is the larger-scale version of the article marketing theory, and another thing that’s been in use for some time.
- Videos: Ever heard of YouTube? Know what happens if you produce a video and it goes viral? Any link you happen to display in that video could be seen by millions. Video marketing is becoming a trend in Internet marketing lately, and if you know how to make videos, it’s time to looked into making one that can work for you.
- WordPress Templates: Ever programmed one of these from scratch? You could make one for anyone’s use, and include your link in the footer.
- Put them in your products: If you sell something to someone, why stop there? If that product is related to some other site you have, why not mention it? Information products are especially useful in this regard, and can include links pointed at affiliate programs or your other sites.
- Offline methods: Put your site names on business cards, letterhead, and other offline products if you have offline businesses. If you’re printing them anyway, put that expense to more use by promoting your sites too.
Do you have your own favorite backlinking method? Feel free to comment.
My name is Ryan Ambrose, and I’m one of the co-authors of Can I Make Big Money Online.
Type Your Way to Worthwhile Backlinks
May 30, 2008
The SEO strategy I intend to use with my new sales letter page is noteworthy in one big way. I have no intention whatsoever to engage in any link trading to build my link popularity. There are no reciprocal linking pages, and I’m not sending out requests every day to other web masters. Frankly, it’s just too much effort for me.
I don’t miss it. I did link trading through an automatic service on my last sites, and it didn’t amount to much of anything. The search engines don’t give reciprocal links all that much weight anymore, and no traffic ever came from more than one or two of them anyway. So the results really weren’t worth the trouble.
This isn’t to say you shouldn’t build links, because I have every intention of doing so, just like you. You still need them just as much today as you ever did. But what you need are one-way links that don’t require you to reciprocate, and are thus worth more in the eyes of a search engine.
If you want these kinds of links, and you do, you’ll have to find something else to trade for them. With affiliate programs, for example, you trade commissions for someone putting a one-way link to your site in front of interested people. But a classical, inexpensive, and worthwhile tactic is to trade content for them.
This is called article marketing, and it’s been around for a while. Blogs, ezines, and web sites are always looking for content, and you could provide it for them. You write an article in your niche, polish it until it’s desirable for someone else to publish, then put it on a free article site or pay an article announcer to mass broadcast it. Your payment is called a resource box, which is a short blurb about you, a one-way link to your site, and a reason why someone might want to visit it.
This will give you those highly desirable one-way links you want. Plus, articles do all sorts of other things on top of that.
- When you write an article relevant to the topic of your site, it helps pre-qualify the traffic going to your site, giving you far more targeted traffic. That helps the bottom line of getting someone to your site, such as conversions, sign-ups, additional RSS syndication, or whatever your desired result happens to be.
- Demonstrating your aptitude by giving away small but useful bits of information in an article helps increase your credibility in your niche.
- Articles and their attached links are viral. The same article could be posted on a growing number sites or blogs over time, increasing your link popularity without any effort on your part across months or even years.
- If your article is used in an ezine publication, you could see a traffic spike.
For some added incentive to get people to use them, you can put an article or two in your affiliate areas and tell your affiliates they can rebrand the resource boxes with their affiliate links. This is the small-scale version of the viral, rebrandable report theory.
I highly recommend article marketing to anyone who wants to create one-way links, link popularity, and the occasional traffic spike to their web sites. Once you get good at it, you can simply type your way to worthwhile backlinks. It’s a far better method than wasting effort on near-useless reciprocal link trades, or spending money buying traffic from paid sources.
My name is Ryan Ambrose, and I’m one of the co-authors of Can I Make Big Money Online.
How Not To Ask For A Link Exchange
April 9, 2008
Last week I got what I considered to be a hilarious request for a blogroll link exchange. In case you want to know how NOT to ask me for a link exchange, here is the email I was sent the other day (name of said person and sites have been removed):
Hi {find name of blogger and put here},I am writing on behalf of the blog team at xxxxxxx, which runs the popular xxxxxxx Marketing blog.
We are hand picking a few really great blogs to add to our blog roll. If you’re interested in having your blog recommended on xxxxxx blog, please consider adding our blog to yours.
The name of our blog is xxxxxxxx.
Thanks!
I often get requests for links that I think are form letters. However, in this case it was an obvious form letter. I was laughing out loud when I read the line:
“We are hand picking a few really great blogs”
Really??? Hand picking???
If you ever handpick a blog to exchange links with, don’t start your email with:
Hi {find name of blogger and put here},
It kind of gives the impression that you weren’t exactly handpicking my blog.
P.S. My name is George.
SEO Training Program From Aaron Wall
February 22, 2008
I have been ill all week with the creeping crud, but one thing I did want to mention before the weekend is that Aaron Wall of the SEO Book has changed his business model and is now selling a monthly membership for access to his SEO knowledge.
I was half way through writing a review of the SEO Book when Aaron sent the notice about this change. Given how good Aaron’s book is, I am sure that membership in The SEO Book Training Program will be well worthwhile. I plan on signing up for it and doing a review of it sometime in the next few months. In the meantime, you can click here to go check out The SEO Book Training Program for yourself.
Am I A Sheep In The Googlesphere?
October 12, 2007
There were some rather interesting posts and developments this week. Most of them were about Google. So instead of my normal “Internet marketing tips from the web” post, this post should be titled “Internet marketing tips from the Googlesphere”.
Hmmm… Did I just create a new term?
I will have to go “Yahoo” it… back in a sec.
Nope, Yahoo shows 999 results for Googlesphere, rats!
Anyway, the biggest news of the week across the blogosphere was that Google is lowering the pagerank of sites that sell text link advertising. I don’t know if this includes buying and selling banner links or not, but it should since banner ads normally don’t use the no-follow tag.
I think that those who made this decision at Google don’t understand how powerful the blogosphere really is, or they expect most bloggers to act like sheep and fully support Google.
Here are some of the many posts I have read this week about paid links causing websites to lose Google page rank:
Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google (I read it here first)
Penalty Confirmed – But I Don’t Sell PageRank
Dancing With The Gevil – Defamed By Google?
How to Profit from Google’s War on Paid Links
Last, but not least, Aaron Wall pretty much takes the words out of my mouth on this topic:
Google is Becoming Wikipedia Without the Talk Page
So, what am I going to do about this issue?
I haven’t decided yet. On the one hand, I have come up with a plan that could REALLY tick off Google, on the other hand I can be a sheep. Decisions, decisions...
In other news…
Tiny start-up rival to Google?
A new company called Proximic has come up with a very cool new technology. From the sounds of things it might become a great way to monetize your site and be a huge competitor to Google’s Adsense. Microsoft, Yahoo, Google… let the bidding wars begin!
Lastly, I got an email from Google’s Adsense program last night about a new service that lets you make money from YouTube videos. I am very excited about the possibilities for some of my other blogs.
That’s it for now…
Make Big Money Online Winning Contests
August 6, 2007
Guest post by Matthew Henrickson
In my last post, Create Buzz for your Website with a Contest, I mentioned that you can really drive traffic, build links, or get RSS feed readers for your website with a contest. Its fun, simple, easy and most importantly it works.
Because it works so well, many bloggerss have been hosting contests, and some prizes are really appealing.
To make contests successful they really have to be easy. Bloggers are giving away large sums of money and prizes, and making it easy to win. There isn’t much of a reason NOT to enter when the reward is so high.
Win Money Entering Contests
By spending very little time entering in contests, I have personally won well over 100$ and smaller prizes including a very nice MP3 player.
In most of these contests it does take a little bit of luck, but if you enter a contest everyday, you are bound to win something. Even if it isn’t something you exactly want, you can turn around and give it away on your own blog.
Big Prizes to be Won
Blogs like INVESP are doing huge cash prize giveaways. There is 400$ up for grabs! To win that contest you must subscribe to their RSS feed. Sometime in the month of August, they will post a ‘secret word’ in their RSS feed. When you see the word you email it to contest@invesp.com. One lucky person who sends the secret word to that email will be randomly selected to win. If you win, make sure you are a member of their mybloglog community, so you can receive the full 400$.
Not Every Contest Can Do That
Not everyone can afford to give away 400$, but say you win the contest. You can turn around and re-invest 100$ of that money on your own contest. If you can market the contest right you can expect quite a few linkbacks and RSS Feed Subscribers.
Everyone likes free stuff, especially free money.
Internet Marketing Tips From Around The Web 6/22/2007
June 22, 2007
I had a very busy week this week. It was my five year old’s birthday this week, I worked on the design of my new money making project, and kept busy with a lot of other things. Anyway, here are some of the articles I read this week that I thought would be of interest to you…
The Things That Get You Successful Won’t Necessarily Keep You That Way
Wendy’s post was very interesting for me, because I have been facing this problem. My problem may be slightly different, because I feel like my online business direction was better BEFORE I started blogging. Wendy asked some good questions and because of Wendy’s post I found out Darren had posted some advice for Wendy:
7 Reflections on Scaling a Blog to a Sustainable Business
Darren makes some good points and I think this post will be very helpful for people in Wendy’s situation.
Because of Darren’s post, I found Desty’s post:
The Perils of Owning a Growing Business
Desty’s answer is REALLY good. It is what Rich Schrefen talked about in his Internet Manifesto series, it is what Alex Mandossian has been talking about for years, and just about every other Internet Marketer/business person will tell you that you need to build systems. It’s something I have known about for a long time, but never implemented. It’s time for me to build some systems….
Better Blog Branding: Is Your Brand Breaking Promises?
Chris’ post came at a great time for me. This blog is taking a slightly new direction, because of all the guest bloggers that have been signing up to write guest posts. Chris’ post reminded me that I don’t want to take it easy because of the guest bloggers. You still expect to hear from me and you will. What the guest blogging will do is allow me to make this an even better resource for you.
Increase Google Rankings, Backlinks And Advertise For Free
My friend Garry Conn has a very creative blog link exchange program going on. Go check it out if you are interested in getting more links to your blog.
Never stop experimenting
This was one of several good posts I read this week by Martin Reed. I came across his blog when I was doing some online searching. He mentioned that you could even try changing your writing style. Changing my writing style is something I think about ALL the time on this blog. I much prefer to write stuff like this, and this. I guess I should go ahead and try to be funny more often on this blog. What’s the worse thing that can happen? Google won’t penalize me for having a bad sense of humor, will they?
