Work at Home Based Business

Back in my last post here that I entitled Link to Your Success, I talked about some extra ways of obtaining good, strong keyword anchored backlinks for your sites. Well in this instalment, I’m going to follow that on with another useful way of obtaining links directly for your blogs as well as helping their SERPs ranking at the same time.

Most bloggers have heard of Digg, or the many clones that are available to submit your posts to in order to boost traffic. Such sites that emulate Digg are driven by software that comes from pligg.com and are known as “pligg” sites. I’ll tell you a little more about pligg in a moment. But how many bloggers know that by submitting posts to some of the lesser well known social bookmarking sites can actually benefit your blog more?

Some, like Blogging Zoom are getting big and more popular, but are still very useful for building links and boosting SERPs authority for individual blog posts. They do that by publishing your submitted posts on their main page after your post gets a certain number of votes from othe rmembers of the site. With Blogging Zoom that number is currently 15. So if you join a site like that, it pays to make friends!

But that idea can be followed on to the next level by the smart Internet Marketer. How?

Build your own social pligg site!

Yes, if you have your own web host, then you can build your own pligg site, publicise it and attract new members to build the site from the ground up. Pligg.com provide the software free of charge, so its just a case of downloading it, creating a new MySQL database in your cPanel, following their instructions and uploading the files to your server. You can also download a free template if you don’t like the original and with some cosmetic tweaking, you can have your very own, Google friendly social site up and running within a few hours.

The benefits of running your own pligg site are obvious - you can submit all your own posts to it and build up lots of links to your blogs as well as boost their SERPs rankings. In the early stages, you can set the number of votes to 5 to get your posts onto the front page fast, so their links carry with them any Page Rank your new site has.

A timely tip is to buy an expired domain that already comes with some Page Rank and established links to ensure it keeps it. You, of course can promote your new pligg site and get it more backlinks to further establish its authority quickly.

As you may have guessed by now, I have done exactly what I have been telling you about, so that the information is coming straight from the horse’s mouth! Yep, I built my own pligg site called TheFB and you can easily register for free and then submit blog posts to it directly from the site.

TheFB can be found by clicking on this link: TheFB

TheFB is a PR2 site at present, which I am building links for to improve its ranking over time. So feel free to sign up and make use of this valuable link building resource and get in on the ground floor. It takes only 5 votes to get your post to the front page at TheFB, so what have you got to lose?

And much to gain!

Terry Didcott
Owner of The Honest Way Forum

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Just lately I’ve been busy with a part of my online business that is not just probably the most important part, but also the most tedious and boring.  You see, I have many websites, blogs , Squidoo lenses, Hub Pages and lord-knows-what-else pages out there in cyberspace all with their own reason for existing and all with a need that must be fulfilled if any of them want to see any decent traffic.

I am, of course talking about getting links.

Specifically, high octane, lazer targeted, keyword anchored, one-way backlinks from sources that have lots of authority. And it’s not an easy task, nor a straightforward one.

The major problem with getting links to your site has always been one of time. Having the time to seek out the best places to obtain those links from and going aout getting them any way you can. Now we probably all know the usual suspects when it comes to getting links, so I won’t bore you with those details. You’ll find them in a truckload of articles submitted to every article directory on the planet by people trying to get links from those very articles. Ok that’s one way I said I wasn’t going to mention!

The holy grail of backlinks is finding a good, Google-friendly source that has lots of keyword authority for the niche in which your site occupies, that is to be the recipient of the links. High PR sites in your niche are tough to crack as they don’t want you as competition! Sites with the same PR as yours will also be reluctant to give you links in case you overtake them and steal off with their traffic. The good part about that is that your immediate competition can’t get the backlinks that are eluding you either. So stalemate?

No. There is a way.

Here is one way right here. Writing articles in someone else’s blog that has authority in your niche. That’s fine if you want to bang your head against the MMO brickwall along with all the other marketers, but even this can be manipulated just enough to make it stretch into a related niche where there is not so much competition. The only problem with a blog post is that the link is only good for the tine your post stays on the front page. After that it sinks into the PR-less abyss with all the other archived posts. You can bolster your own post and give it’s page more authority by sending links to it from some of your own sites. That keep’s the link juice strong and authority rich.

Other ways of getting links that most people don’t write about so much is of course from your own sites. You just have to own lots of them and they have to be related in some way niche-wise and you have to make sure you don’t cross-link, as you are after one-way links with the most juice.

Then you might try creating a load of Squidoo lenses and Hub Pages to send links to your mainn sites. Did I mention at the start of this article that I have… mmm, lots of Squidoo lenses and hub pages…

That’s all well and good if you have 36 hours a day to work on them all, because they don’t create themselves and they don’t populate themselves with good unique content. Guess who has to do all that? Blogs are even worse because they constantly deman fresh content. So ok, I personally now have a rather large menagerie of sites of all descriptions and they do provide links for each other, but I struggle to keep up with them all.

So how else do you get links without paying for them, spamming them, or spending your every waking hour building ever more sites to keep your main sites sufficiently gassed up?

Taks another look at Squidoo. Not your own lenses, but other people’s.

There are now over 550,000 squidoo lenses covering just about every niche imaginable. If there is a product for sale, there are probably a dozen or more lenses promoting it. Here’s what you can do.

Pick a niche that you want to work. Select your keywords and build your own main money making site. Build free blogs and lenses etc to back that site up with links. Then go to Squidoo and do a search on your keywords. you’ll probably find many lenses on the subject. Well, go visit each of them and loot at their guestbooks if they have them. Look at the comments closely.

What are you looking for? Links!

With Squidoo guestbooks, the lensmaster has the option to either leave comments HTML set to ON (the default) or switch it OFF. Now most lensmasters are not aware of this so they leave the HTML set to ON, which means you can leave a comment containing a keyword anchored link back to either your free blogs or lenses supporting your money site, in order to boost their authority and the authority of the links they’ll give your main site, or direct to your main site if the lens is legit and has authority itself.

And the way to tell if a lensmaster has left HTML ON is by looking to see if someone else has left a link in their comment. If not, simply move on to the next lens and don’t waste time commenting in a lens that may not allow your link.

This is a fast way of getting links and some of those lenses will have PR…

Aren’t you glad some of us still write in other people’s blogs to procure backlinks?

Terry Didcott
Author of The Honest Way

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There are thousands of people who call themselves “internet marketers” sitting at their computers right now with the intentions of making money online. However, most of them will not make any money, or if they do make some money, it’s won’t be nearly as much as they were hoping to earn.

So, why is it that so many internet marketers are not making money?

It’s because most of them are simply wasting their time when they are “working” online! There are countless ways this can happen. Often times when internet marketers think they are working, they really aren’t. One example is checking your email 20 times per day. I could go on and on giving you examples of how you are wasting your time each day but instead I challenge you to sit back and think about that for yourself.

I will, however, tell you that one of the biggest things internet marketers do to waste their time is blogging. I bet that got your attention! You have been conditioned to think that blogging is vital for online business so you are probably wondering why the heck I would say that it’s a waste of time and will not make you any money.

Here’s why…

In order to make money online, you need traffic to your website or blog. There is no way to get around this fact. However, when you spend all day writing blog posts, you forget to do one very important thing… Market your blog! As an “internet marketer” the most important part of your job is to market.

You can have the best blog in the world with more original content than all ten of the top blogs in your niche, but that means nothing if you don’t get any visitors. Your site might contain the secret to life, but if nobody knows about your site they will never read it. Do you see what I mean? Unless you get visitors, you won’t make money!

But you can’t just get any kind of traffic either. You don’t want untargeted traffic. You don’t want Web 2.0 traffic. You don’t want other internet marketers and bloggers as your main source of traffic. Why? Because those are the people that won’t click your ads, buy from your affiliate links, or even notice any of the things you have on your site that will make you money.

You need to get traffic from the search engines! The visitors you get to your website/blog from search engines are targeted, they are actively searching for your topic, and they don’t have a clue what Adsense is or what affiliate links are. Plus, if you have done your research and are in the right niche, they are ready to spend money. These are the visitors you make money from.

So, what’s the lesson here?

Simple… Stop wasting your time posting to your blog just hoping someone will come read it. Or wasting even more of your time on digg, myspace, delicious, or any of the other social bookmarking and social networking sites that will bring you traffic but not the kind that will make you any money.

Instead, spend more time each day getting inbound links and working on other search engine optimization techniques. Use as much time as you can each day getting your website/blog ranked at the top of the search engines so you can bring in more of the type of visitors that will make you money.

Doing this one simple thing will greatly increase your chances of making money online so you can quit your job to become a full-time internet marketer and live the life you’ve always dreamed of. Now, stop wasting your time and start making money!

About the author:

Trent Brownrigg is a successful internet marketer, blogger, and online business mentor. His passion is helping people start their own home business and make money online. He will also teach you all you need to know about working at home.

You have permission to republish this article on your website or blog as long as you keep it fully intact, with the about the author box, and live links.

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