5 Backlinking Strategies that Work

We all know, by now that there’s more to making money with lenses than just making a bunch of lenses. You have to have a linking plan as well. This can really trip people up because there are so many different ways you can create links they don’t know how to put together a plan, what goes where, or when.

I get that.

Let me run through a couple possibilities with you.

1. Article marketing.

You could create your lens, and then write another article and submit it to Ezinearticles.com, and as many other article directories as you could find. You could use software like Unique Article Wizard to automate this process.

This is one backlinking strategy, and it works… if you do it.

2. Creating content on web 2.0 sites.

You could create your lens, and then go to other free sites and create content there as well… including a link back to your lens of course. There are hundreds of sites you can add your own free content to, you just have to find them and use them.

This is a very valid backlinking strategy, and will work if you work it.

3. Bookmarking

While this is not as powerful as it used to be, you can take your lens and submit them to bookmarking sites. You will get a link back to your lens from each site you submit it to. You can find a long list of sites at socialmarker.com. You could automate this process by using a service like Traffic Bug.

Bookmarking is definitely not the BEST backlinking strategy all by itself, but it definitely adds momentum when used in conjunction with article marketing, or web 2.0 content creation.

4. RSS submission.

You can take your lensmaster feed and submit it to all the RSS directories you can find. You will only have to do this once for each squidoo account, because as you create new lenses the feed will update itself automatically at each directory ~ which is super fun. You will get a new link each time you create a new lens, or update an existing lens in each of the RSS directories.

This is yet another valid strategy to create links to your lenses. It is not as powerful as articles, or web 2.0 content, but it is especially powerful when you use it in conjunction with those strategies.

5. Linkwheel

The best possible backlinking strategy is to use all 4 of the above methods strategically with one another. This is called a link wheel. It can be a little confusing, because it has a lot of steps, and you have to be sure you know where your links are pointing and from where, but when you get the hang of it, it is a very powerful system to create links to your lenses and get them ranking on the first page of Google.

You may or may not know I’ve created a program called Backlinking 101. It will walk you through each and every step of creating a linkwheel, and thus help you create hundreds (if not thousands) of quality links to your lenses. I’m going ot be launching the program on March 1st.

There will be a bonus available for the first 25 buyers… it could be a seriously life changing bonus if you take advantage of it… but the full details I’m saving until Tuesday.

I’m going to send out an early bird email to my Backlinking Tutorials list when the product goes live. So if you want a chance at the first 25 spots and you’re not on the list, you might want to get on it. The list consists of backlinking tutorials once a week… I don’t send out post notifications or anything else to that list, just the tutorials ~ well and the advanced notice that Backlinking 101 is live.

Not having a clear backlinking strategy in place is one of the things that keeps most people I see from succeeding. It’s such an important element of the puzzle, but it’s confusing and boring and tedious ~ and people just don’t do it.

Let me walk you through it…3 assignments a week. One step at a time. See you Tuesday.

5 Easy Steps to Get Your Lens Indexed

Once you publish your lens the next step in the process is to get Google to know it’s there. This is called getting your lens “indexed”. Google is basically a huge index of all the sites out there in the world wide web. Every second tons more sites go live and the little Google bots go out there to find them. This can take some time ~ these bots have a lot to look at.

You can help the bots find your new lens, and get Google to see it with a couple pretty simple steps. The key to getting indexed is creating a path for the bots to follow. The bots are always looking for new content. They “spider” sites regularly checking to see if there’s anything new out there. This is to your advantage. This is how you create a path, or trail for the bots to follow right back to your lens.

1. Find a site that is indexed already ~ one that has a lot of new content regularly so the bots are likely to be there often looking for new stuff.

This could be any number of sites.

Free ad blogs
popular blogs
Article directory
Twitter

These are just a few sites you can  use to help the process.

2.  Create some content on that site and link back to your lens.

Once you’ve found a site that gets plenty of bot attention (it’s regularly updated with new content) you want to create some content and include a link back to your site.

Free ad blog ~ create a post and publish it on the site. In your post include a link to your new lens. (make sure you use your targeted keyword as the anchor text of your link)

Popular blog ~ go and leave a comment. Make it a good comment, related to the content of the post. Use your lens url in the “url field”.

Article directory ~ this way takes longer because you have to get your article approved, but it will work, and it will be a nice link back to your site. Make sure you use your targeted keyword phrase for the anchor text of your link. This doesn’t have to be EZA ~ there are a number of quality article directories that don’t take as long as EZA to get your content out there.

Twitter ~ this is one of the simplest ones and I find it works GREAT for indexing. Just write a quick tweet and include the link to your lens. (you could also do this for facebook)

3. Ping your new content.

This is a little trick that will help the search engines find your new content. You can go to pingomatic.com and put in the url for the content you just published and then choose services to ping and click send ping. This will notify all those places you’ve put up new content and will help the spiders find your content faster.

There is also a bookmarklet for pingomatic. It’s  a little thing you drag into your favorites bar on your browser. Then you can just click it from any page and it will automatically ping that page for you. This makes it super easy to ping new content you publish. I highly recommend you grab it. (it’s free)

4. Carry on with your promotional plans.

Your lens will get indexed. I promise. It may take 6 hours or it may take 6 days ~ but it will get indexed. However long it takes there’s no sense wasting time waiting. Continue your promotional efforts ~ build links ~ it will only help.

5. Try again…

If you find after a week or so your lens is still not indexed ~ and you’ve done the first 3  things mentioned above, I’d go through and do them again. New content. New pings. That should do it.

***** Word of warning *****

Do not obsess about this. Your lens will get indexed. I have never seen a lens NOT get indexed. Even if no links were ever built for it. Squidoo happens to be one of those highly spidered sites. It will be found. Just do the basics you need to do and continue to promote your lens. When  you’ve done the promotion you need to do, move on to the next lens.

There is no point in sitting around obsessing over one lens, when in that time you could publish another one.

Using a Posterous Network for Your Lenses

I hope you were able to see the huge benefit in setting up a posterous network. Today I thought I’d get into a little more of the nitty gritty, how I do it stuff, which will hopefully answer some of the questions you’ve asked.

1. Think of a general way to encompass all your lenses.

I do mostly product lenses, so they could all be thought of as gifts, Amazon offers great deals on products so they could be thought of as great deals. I do reviews of the product in each of my lenses so they could all be thought of as reviews.

Think of something ~ one overall topic that encompasses all your lenses. This is going to be your network theme.

2. Set up your posterous account ~ using your network theme to determine the name of your site and your username.

3. Go in and set up all the sites you want Posterous to post to. Use your network theme for these sites as well ~ for your site name and username.

ex. My posterous account username for my lenses is Best Gifts Ever. This is the general theme of all the other sites that it posts to as well. In fact, I’ve used the same username across the board (for the most part).

4. Fill in your profile.

When you’re setting up all the blogs/sites you can have posterous post to make sure you’re filling in your profile information. You can use a pen name if you want, but make sure you fill something in when you can add a website. You can pick a lens, or a blog or whatever it is you need to help get a boost in the search engine rankings ~ the links from these profiles are already showing up in yahoo site explorer for the sites I’ve  used… so it’s an important step.

Add an image ~ make it look good. You don’t have to use an image of you. For the best gifts theme I used an image of a gift wrapped box ~ it sticks with the theme and gives me some anonymity since I am using a pen name I don’t want this network linked by my regular social media picture.

5. Start posting.

If your network theme is gifts then start making posts about giving gifts.  I recently did a lens on the composter I have ~ so I wrote a quick post (in gmail) about a great gift for gardeners. I included a couple sentences, a link to the lens, the video that I did for the lens (although I mostly use other people’s videos in my posts. I just happened to have done one for this topic), and a link back to my Christmas blog with anchor text related to gifts for christmas that I’m trying to rank for.

It takes a couple minutes ~ really. A couple minutes. Don’t overthink this. A couple sentences, a video or an image and a link or two ~ make sure to use your targeted keyword phrase as the anchor text of your link. This is very easy to do when using gmail ~ just highlight your keywords and use the little chain icon to create the link.

6. Add some other stuff too.

If you come across something interesting ~ a great deal, a great gift idea ~ even if you haven’t done a lens on it go ahead and shoot out an email to posterous. It only takes a second and the more you give to this network the better it will be. The better it will work for you.

What if I have different niches?

If you can identify an overall theme for your lenses you only need one posterous network (ie. gifts, reviews, deals). If you have lenses (or a website) that are totally different than the product lenses ~ and are about a whole other topic you might want to set up a second posterous network.

This is only necessary if you really find yourself living in two worlds. I have 2 networks. One is a gift theme and one is a kid theme ~ this is where I connect with other parents around some of my other sites and interests. Some of my lenses will go through the kids network ~ but most of them won’t.

When you set up a second network you can add an additional email address to choose in your gmail account. (Go to your gmail “settings” and then to “accounts and import”. It will allow you to add another “send mail as” address. When you go to send a post to posterous just choose (from a drop down menu in the email writing area) the email you want to send it as ~ which will correspond with the email address you used for the specific posterous network you want to send your post to.

Here’s a quick video that shows how I create posts to send to my posterous network.

I hope I’ve answered your questions about using a posterous network for your lenses. If you questions I didn’t answer or need clarity ~ just ask in the comments section.

Link Building Made Easy with Posterous

We all know links are crucial to the success of our lenses. It’s links that move them up the search listings to the first page so we can get traffic. We also probably know that link building is tiresome, boring and monotonous. However, it’s something that must be done.

There are tons of ways you can build links ~ however ~ I’ve recently come across a way that you can easily create links over a number of high quality platforms ~ all at once, super easy.

I love super easy.

I must say I blew this method off for a long time. I thought it was something those fancy “iphone” people did. I barely have a cell phone so I really didn’t think it was for me. But, guess what! It IS for me. I’m loving it, sending out content, getting links and all in less than 5 minutes a day.

I’m going to post a few videos down below to walk you through the process. There’s a little setup in the beginning, but it’s relatively painless, and within 30 minutes you too will be putting out fantastic links on some of the best sites around.

Don’t worry too much about his talk about the upcoming modules ~ we’re just looking at the platform part. (It is fantastic information ~ so if it gets you excited go ahead and listen ~ it’s all free at the Challenge.

What is Posterous?

Ed talks a lot about using his iphone to mail in his content. You can  use any email service. I use gmail! It has a text editor ~ so you can easily add anchor text links, bold, images, videos etc. All you have to do is hit send!

When adding video to your email post you only have to add the url ~ not the embed code.

I hope you’re getting excited about this! When it finally clicked for me… BAM!

Setting Up Posterous

Let’s start auto posting! Adding sites to Posterous.

I would not worry about setting up a facebook page ~ he’s showing people how to set up a network to promote an entire niche site they are doing ~ a facebook page is not quite as appropriate for promoting a wide variety of lenses.

I hope you see how powerful this Posterous network is, and what a fantastic way it is to build backlinks.  If you have questions about the process please ask them in the comments section. Tuesday I’m thinking about running through some of the ways I use this network to promote some of my sites. If this sounds good ~ please let me know.

Take note of the type of posts he is making to his posterous network. (this was the part that knocked me over with a feather) They are not 300 word articles…. Short, interesting, posts. Think about it.

Quick Tip: New Way to Promote Your Lens

You know building links is super important. I recently found a great website to help build more links to your lenses.

It’s called shetoldme.com. It is a bookmarking site similar to Digg in that people can vote up or down your submissions.

Unlike Digg it welcomes product related submissions as well as being ok with you submitting your own stuff. Our kind of site ~ right?

It is also an ad revenue sharing site ~ which I’m not sure is going to add up to much, but it could be something.

It’s super simple ~ just create a new account. Acceptance is not immediate ~ but it only took overnight for me, and someone else said it was only an hour or so.

Once you’ve been accepted ~ grab the url for the lens you want to submit.

Log in to SheToldMe.com and you’ll see a link to add a link/story.

Click the link and a page will show up where you fill in your info.

Just fill in the url. Add your title (make sure you use your targeted keywords you found in your kw research). Then create a description. I just write a little bit about the product or why someone would want to check the page out. The description has to be 200 characters, which is only a couple sentences.

Just below that you’ll be asked to choose a category ~ unfortunately there aren’t a ton of categories, so just pick the one that is most closely related.

Then choose your keywords ~ I’ve been picking wider keywords and not adding my exact kw here. Ex. ironman gravity 4000 inversion table is the kw I used in my title (that’s my targeted keyword) I would use inversion table in the tags section.

The tags section is connected to their site ~ it links to other related “scoops” on their site. I dont’ want to compete with them for my main keyword. Make sense?

When you’re done click “send it now” and you will create a scoop. The title and the read–> link both turn into keyword anchor text links that point to your lens.

There is also a place in the profile section to add a website. A link to that website is created on every scoop you create ~ so great links to that site as well.

This site offers do follow links and appears to be doing quite well for people ~ just one more quick and easy way to create another link to your Christmas Cash lenses.

What do you think? Have questions? I’m all ears.

Really Getting the Linking Done

I know day after day I harp preach encourage you to properly link your lenses so you can get ranked in the search engines and get traffic and make sales.

I’ll be straight up with you here… I suck at linking. I hate it. I find it super tedious and BOORING.  I have recently picked up an additional accountability partner to really kick my butt on linking and staying focused on one element of my business.

With the knowledge I would have to face him at the end of the week and tell him if I did or didn’t do… I decided to make a spreadsheet. You know how much I love to check stuff off.

Here’s what I found… (and it surprised the heck out of me)

I haven’t been doing half the linking I think I thought I was doing.  YIKES.

I had general terms on my spread sheet, free ad blogs, wp blogs (my own network I use for linking) etc. I found I quickly became confused by what I had and hadn’t done for each keyword I was working on, and quickly realized I generally quit this linking process long before it is actually complete. HMMMM…

I changed my spreadsheet, and added each specific site I link at so I can make sure I have linked for each keyword/lens. This has helped the confusion and it really made me realize how much I haven’t been actually getting done.

So my guess is, and this is just a guess, if I ain’t doing it, neither are you. Which just might explain why some of my lenses don’t rank ~ and yours as well.

I have this crazy brain that says “If I don’t do it, it’s cheating”  which thus far has really eliminated me using any kind of automation.

Since I’m doing more and trying to spend less time I’ve realized I have to let go of that. If a tool can do a bunch of the things I’m doing ~ exactly how I’m doing it ~ except by itself without me ~ well DAMN ~ let it do it!

Here’s what I’m talking about.

Traffic Bug.

This software does the RSS submission, directory submission, bookmarking submission, pings, and more. These are all things I would do if I could get my stuff together and actually do it, I do currently submit to RSS directories, but look at all the additional links I am now getting by letting it do it for me!

Anyway, I thought this software would be super expensive, but it’s not. It’s very affordable and actually gets the job done. I still do my own linking through other sources, but this is where I start now. The machine doesn’t get bored. It doesn’t give up half way through because it doesn’t feel like doing it anymore. It gets it done, over time, nice and slow and steady ~ just like I like it.

If you are having trouble getting your linking done I highly suggest you try traffic bug for at least 2 months. It will take time for all the links to get created, and even a little longer for Google to find them all, but it will happen. With the level of competition we use for Squidoo lenses it shouldn’t take much more than traffic bug to get your lenses ranking.

Just so you can see exactly what I’m doing (and I’m still doing a lot of doing)  here’s my linking spreadsheet. (it is an excel spreadsheet. You’ll need excel to open it) It’s exactly what’s printed out and on my desk right now ~ today’s my Squidoo day so I’ll be linking my brains out. If you want to have the boxes printed out so you can make your checks inside boxes here’s the instructions.

I spent an entire day a month or so ago going through and researching every link building process I could find. Traffic bug fit all my requirements and was about 90% cheaper than the next closest option. This is a new site, but it is working quite well thus far. I know for a fact the price will be increased, so if linking software is something you’ve been thinking about I suggest you get it now while it’s still very affordable ~ it probably won’t be for long.