One of the main criteria Google uses to rank a website is by the amount of incoming links to that site. Or more specifically by the amount of ‘quality’ incoming links. This is why it should be the goal of anyone with a website or blog to try and get as many good quality links coming into their website as possible. This can be done naturally over time by offering good quality content that other webmasters will want to link to but if you want to speed things up a bit then you need to work on other methods.

#1 Article Distribution

There are two ways to do this:

1. Submit articles to article directories. This isn’t entirely effective as Google no longer ranks them highly except for a few notable exceptions like Ezine Articles for example. Even then, what we have found is that when our articles have been picked up by other webmasters to use on their own websites, in general they were of low value or Adsense-only sites with little value in the eyes of Google.

Plus there is the problem of duplicate content. Google doesn’t like it and will only disregard multiple pages with the exact same content. It is still worth submitting to a site like Ezinearticles.com however as you can often get some good traffic from them.

2. Submit articles to websites. Instead of article directories, we submit our articles to other websites. This can take some work but the value of the link is in our opinion a hundred times better than submitting to an article directory as you get to pick and choose which websites you want to submit your article to.

So this is what we do.

Firstly, we gather together a list of websites that meet the following criteria:

• Must be on topic – in other words if the page on your website that you want to rank for is about dog beds then you would start looking for sites related to dogs and pets.
• Must have a pagerank of at least 3 or 4 on their homepage and a pagerank of at least 2 or 3 on their article pages. In other words, if your article is going to go to this site, you want to get some pagerank from it and if their articles are already getting a pagerank of at least a 2 or 3 then you know that your article will most likely get a similar pagerank once Google finds it.
• Avoid merchant websites and big companies. They most likely have their own writers and if they don’t then your request to add an article probably has to go through a committee first before anyone is likely to approve it
• Look for a site that already has articles on their site – they obvious already see the value in articles and would most likely love another article written specifically for them.

Once you have a list of potential websites then email each of them to see if they would like an article for their website or blog. Ensure that you let them know that the article will be free and unique to their website. You will also need to let them know that you will be adding a couple of links in the article back to your website.

Don’t submit the same article twice. I have already discussed the problems of duplicate content in Google so once you have submitted an article to a website file the article away and don’t use it again.

#2 Blog Comments

Find blogs or blog posts that are on topic and add a comment. Adding comments to blogs works in three ways. Firstly, it is a way of making friends with those who have blogs in the same niche as you. It creates relationships and you may eventually be able to set up a business arrangment that benefits both sites.

Secondly, it can bring traffic into your site – albeit not very much but each person into your site is yet another potential customer. To get more traffic ensure that you are at the top of the comment list. You can use a free program called Comment Sniper to alert you when a new post has been posted on a particular blog.

Thirdly, you can get valuable inbound links to your site, but there is a trick to it. You need to find blogs that don’t have a nofollow tag. This can be hard work if you do it manually so you can use a dofollow search engine or you can use a piece of software called Fast Blog Finder.

#3 Social Networking/Bookmarking

Submitting to social bookmarking and networking sites is an easy way to get links to your site. There are social networking and bookmarking sites that don’t use the nofollow tag so you may be able to get some link juice from them. These include:

• Blinklist.com
• Mister-wong.com
• Backflip.com
• Bibsonomy.org
• Linkagogo.com
• Jumptags.com
• Furl.net
• Diigo.com
• Rawsugar.com
• Myjeeves.ask.com

#4 Directories

Google really doesn’t value directories much these days so don’t go crazy adding your site to them. Stick with the best of the best. Again it all comes down to quality not quantity. If you can, find directories that are specifically on topic. If you have a craft site for instance then add your site to a craft directory.

#5 Develop Good Quality Content

We’ve already mentioned that content is a good way of bringing in links but it is perhaps the most important. If you develop good quality content then other webmasters will naturally link to you.

What Not to Do

• if you have multiple websites then don’t link between them. Google doesn’t like it and could ban your site completely from their search engine.
• Don’t add your link to just anywhere. Stay focused and look for quality links. You are better off spending a day looking for one very focused pagerank 5 page to add your link to than adding your link to 20 pagerank 1 sites who are all off topic.

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If you have been reading our blog recently you would have seen that we decided to increase the number of blog posts for one of our niche blogs. This was kind of an experiment to see if it had any impact on traffic and sales.

You can read the original post here – Blog Posting Frequency – Does it Increase Traffic?.

So far we have stuck to the plan and uploaded 10 posts a day – actually to be more accurate it is probably somewhere between 8-10 posts a day.

Has it increased traffic?

Yes it has but only up to a point. It seems to have remained fairly static despite us adding more and more content. It is definitely an increase on the previous months traffic but it is not progressively increasing which is what I thought it would do.

Has it increased sales?

At this point, not really. It’s a difficult one to analyze however as with the stock market crisis and people getting concerned about spending their money it may be resulting in fewer sales. At this stage, sales have neither increased or decreased.

What’s next?

We are going to continue with this experiment as it has only really been a couple of weeks. I’d like to give it a couple of months at least to see the full impact….if any.

One of the things I really like about affiliate marketing is that there are a lot of ways you can go about it. Some of them require you to spend money like pay per click whilst others are totally free …like article marketing.

Article Marketing is the process of writing articles and submitting them to article directories. In each article you add links to a product or service that you want to promote. When a reader of your article clicks on the link they are taken to the merchants website. If they buy something from that website then you get a commission.

It’s a simple process and doesn’t require any outlay of money. It does however require that you have some sort of writing skill but you don’t need to be a professional author by any means. If you have written an essay or report in school then you can write an article suitable for the internet.

How Does it Work?

The first step is to choose a product to promote. You don’t have to actually buy stock yourself. Instead you promote someone elses product. The best place for this is Clickbank. This site acts as the middleman between you and the merchant. The products in Clickbank are mostly digitable downloadable products like eBooks and memberships.

Once you have chosen a product in Clickbank you can then write an article based on that product. For instance, if you have chosen an ebook to promote on improving your golf swing then your article might be titled – “3 Tips for Improving Your Golf Swing”.

Once you have written the article, which by the way only has to be about 300-500 words, then you add a byline at the end of the article and in that byline you add your affiliate link. You get the affiliate link (or hoplink) from Clickbank once you have registered with them. The affiliate link is just a piece of code that links to the merchants website.

Once you have that all in place you submit the article to an article directory like Ezine Articles, Goarticles, Squidoo or Hubpages. Bear in mind that Ezine Articles no longer allows affiliate links so you may need to create a landing page using Blogger or WordPress.

Now the trick with all of this is that you need to choose keywords to use in your article that are not very competitive. In other words, you want to be able to rank on the first page of Google for your article. This is where you need to do a bit of research using one of the free keyword tools like Wordtracker or the Google Keyword Research Tool.

For our golfing example for instance we would head on over to Wordtracker and type in the keywords ‘golf swing’. From the list that is displayed we would then take each keyword and type it into Google using quotes eg. “golf swing tips”. If any of those keywords show less than 5000 competing websites then I would consider this a good keyword and I would base my article around that keyword.

If you really want to get serious about article marketing or similar techniques then we suggest learning from the best at Wealthy Affiliate University.

A couple of days ago Wanda and I decided to increase the number of blog posts for one of our niche product blogs. Now when we say ‘increase’ we’re not talking about increasing to say two or three posts a day…hell no…we’re going all the way baby and increasing it to 10 a day!

Now some may say that’s a waste of time as you really don’t need to post that often. Generally I would agree with that statement and in fact I have even posted about it in the past. However I have also mentioned that to do this you need a blog that lends itself to multiple daily blog posts. And the blog I am talking about certainly does that.

For the blog you are reading right now I don’t believe there is a need to write 10 posts a day. Regular readers would become overwhelmed, subscribers would probably stop subscribing and to be honest I don’t think I could think of 10 different things to write about on a daily basis for this blog. Even if I did, the posts would be well let’s say…pretty crappy. These sorts of posts need a fair bit of research which takes time and I certainly don’t want to just churn out garbage for the sake of having a lot of posts up. On this blog,I want to have quality content that is informative and provide useful advice for the readers.

Our niche blog on the other hand is a whole different story. It’s product based and the number of products we can write about is literally in the thousands. We have written so many articles for this site in the past and so many product reviews that it can literally take us about 30-45 minutes (sometimes more, sometimes less) to write up a blog post of between 300-500 words. Now if we divide that up between the two of us so that we have 5 posts each that takes us around 3-4 hours each a day. I don’t think I would want to spend anymore time than that.

We don’t write garbage either because to me that is a waste of time and of no use to anybody. These are nice solid posts with just enough information for our readers to want to read more and click on the affiliate link at the end of the article.

Why are we doing this?

The whole point of this exercise is to see if we can increase the traffic and in turn increase the amount of income we are making on that particular site.

I also want to see if a sudden extreme increase in posting frequency will raise the eyebrows of Google and whether they may consider this as a attempt to manipulate their search engine in some way, which is certainly not our intent.

So what I am going to do is chronicle the events as they unfold on this blog to see how this all pans out. I may post an update every few days although it may only be necessary to do a regular update once a week.

What are the drawbacks?

One issue is whether we will be able to maintain this sort of posting frequency on a long term basis. We could get bored, fed up or even burnt out. We could of course get writers to do the writing for us assuming we have an accompanying increase in income from that blog to cover the cost.

We may even lose some of our subscribers but this is not the sort of site that attracts a lot of subscribers in the first place.

So where are we at now?

Currently our niche blog is quite a strong site that ranks really well in Google for thousands of different keywords. It currently gets around 600-700 unique highly targeted visitors a day. Nevertheless it doesn’t make a huge amount of money and it could certainly do a lot better.

How have we done so far?

• Have we had an increase in sales?

At this point it looks like we have had a very minor increase but it’s too soon to tell as yet. I will be able to comment better on this point after monitoring the sales for a couple of weeks.

• Have we had an increase in traffic?

It’s only been three days but already you can see from the stats that there has already been an increase in visits to the site.

Update #1 – Click here to see the first update.

Despite the sometimes negative reaction paid surveys receives it is actually a legitimate way to make money online albeit it takes a bit of work. But if all you have is time then it is a perfect work at home job that doesn’t require any particular skill or aptitude.

Paid surveys are a great way of making money online but like anything else if you want to make good money from them it does take work. Here are three essential tips you will need to successfully make money online with paid surveys:

Tip #1 – Sign up to as many survey companies as you can

The trick to making it with online surveys is to sign up with as many companies as you can. You should join at least 50 but the more the better. The more you join the more surveys you will receive.

Tip #2 – Set up a separate email address

Setting up a separate email account purely for your survey correspondence will make it easier for you to keep track of what comes in as it won’t get mixed up in your personal email inbox. Register with one of the online email services like Google Mail or Yahoo Mail for a free email account.

Tip #3 – Complete the survey as soon as you receive it

Don’t wait around to complete a survey. Keep on top of it and complete them as soon as you receive them. These companies only send out a limited amount of surveys but they know that not everyone will respond so they will send out more than required. If you don’t get in first then it is more likely that their quota will be filled and you will miss out. Also the quicker you complete a survey the more likely you will be asked to complete more.

You might also like to read our review of Legit Jobs Online which is a site that amongst other things provides an extensive database of paid survey companies that you can sign up with.

I haven’t had much chance to surf the net this week but I did come across a couple of really good blog posts from a blog called Super Blogging Tips. Essentially they are about ‘stopping to smell the roses’ and there is some great advice here for anyone trying to make their blog a success.

• Decrease Your Blog Posting Frequency - Discusses the concept that reducing your number of blog posts can be beneficial – something I totally agree with.

• Don’t Take Yourself So Seriously – Basically this one is about getting yourself to not take yourself too seriously and to relax a bit more particularly when it comes to your blogging business.