Everyone knows that the more links you have pointing to your website, the higher up in the search engines you will climb. For experienced internet marketers, finding links is not a problem; they have developed relationships and exchanged links before, so they know exactly what to do, but for the new internet marketer, building links may be a bit of a challenge, but it doesn’t have to be if you go back to the basics of link building.
How Link Building Works
Basically, you find websites that are ranked high in the search engines. These can be popular websites or websites that have been around for awhile. These are typically sites that the search engines have crawled many times over. You simply contact the webmaster and ask them to link to your website. It sounds easy enough, but there’s a little more to it than that. If you are new to internet marketing, you might not be able to sell them on your website stats or substantial earnings from promoting products, but you can show them a well put together website that has the potential to make money. Even if you don’t have much traffic at the moment, linking to more popular websites can get your site crawled quick as the search engines frequent these sites more often.
Finding Websites to Link With
A quick and easy way to find websites to exchange links with is by doing a simple Google search using your specific keywords. Look at the pages that appear at the top of the results. Check out websites that are in your niche, but not direct competitors. For instance, if you are selling reconditioned auto parts, you may want to link with a site that is advertising tires, or rims.
Check your competitor’s link popularity to see who is linking to them. You can also contact the sites that are linked to them for potential link building opportunities.
Many will say no, but don’t be discouraged. If you take a look at how many websites are in your niche, you will see that a few closed doors won’t end your efforts at building links.
There are a few tips that make them think twice before they turn you down:
- Personalize your email and include contact information.
-You might want to try calling or sending them a fax in place of an email.
-Add their link to your website before you approach them. In your email, include the URL for the location of their link.
-Be sure to identify yourself and your intentions immediately so your email does not end up in the Spam folder.
-Include the HTML or your link to make it easier for them to cut and paste it.
-Double check to see if they have a links page.
There are tools and various grey/black hat marketing methods to get links, including paying for them. If you want to get true quality links, do it the old fashioned way.
Make Money Online: The Key to Niche Monetization
Monetizing your pages is all about making your visitors take a single action. This is true whether you're making direct sales to your site or an affiliate site. It's true whether you're building a list, collecting leads for someone else, or referring people to a membership site. The most important step of monetization is getting visitors to take whatever you have decided is the single most important action for them to take.
If the page you're trying to monetize is a web 2.0 social media page, one way to get people to “act now or leave” is to make your page as ugly as possible. This sounds counterintuitive at first, but the whole point of your web 2.0 pages is to rank quickly and highly in Google's search engine, attract visitors, and get them to do what you want them to do.
Making your page pretty or even very useful isn't in your best interest. If the page is targeted towards a buying keyword, then it's really not in your visitor's best interest either, as they are looking to do one thing: buy! They may be absolutely ready to buy, or they may be comparing products. They might want to intellectually justify an emotional purchase decision. But they are definitely looking to buy!
And the ones that aren't–say, if you're targeting consumers further up in the sales funnel, where they might need to become leads before they are customers–still need only the two options. Click onto your link, or look somewhere else. Either way, you need them to get off the page ASAP.
This is why it's okay for your social media pages to be ugly. In fact, it's actually the most desirable! You don't want to give them a reason to do anything other than to click on the link you've provided.
This also means that you want to use as few shared revenue options as possible. Some social media websites will have this included in the page.
If you're targeting a “buying keyword”–the exact make and model–then you most likely want to send readers straight to your affiliate page.
But what if you want to target people looking for “acne cures”? Make a page that targets this phrase, and will send them to a page with links to specific cures. Make a page for each specific cure, so that a) the general seekers can click on the different cures, and b) people who are already looking for the specific cure, can find an already targeted page!
The most important thing you should remember is to find what sells, and then sell it. Don't keep your visitors around admiring your pretty page–get them off there so they can buy their product, and you can make money online!