Module 16 - Link Building

Module 16 – Link Building

Important Learning Advisory:

To experience better learning, it is recommended that you print and follow this transcript
while listening to the MP3 audio. There is ample space at the bottom of every page for
you to write your own notes and jolt down ideas. Happy learning!

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 Module 16 - Link Building

Hello and welcome to Link Building. In this course, you will learn how to get more
exposure for your website and get higher page rank that will result in higher search
engine optimization, traffic and overall website authority.

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Now let‟s begin with „What is Link Building?‟

In a nutshell, link building is a process of creating quality incoming links to your website.
It is a strategy that will help you increase your web page rankings, website authority and
get more traffic from your organic search engines and also related websites.

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Why link building is important is because it helps your website get indexed very quickly
and helps with your overall website authority. Link building also helps create exposure,
visibility and credibility for yourself as an expert in your niche and also, for your website.
With high quality inbound links, your site will be seen as a valuable resource that will be
favorable to Google, resulting in a higher page rank for your website.

With link building, you will also get quality traffic from organic search results and also
relevant sites, which will eventually increase your sales and income.

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In this course, you will be learning 5 powerful link building tactics. The 5 tactics that will
be covered in this course are:

1. RSS Feeds
2. Reciprocal links exchange
3. Social bookmarks
4. Website directories
5. Blog and forum commenting

In RSS Feeds, we will be covering what exactly RSS is and how to submit your RSS
feeds to top aggregator sites to get powerful back links and receive ongoing traffic.

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Reciprocal links exchange is an exchange system where site owners, webmasters,

companies and individuals exchange web links between them. This can be a powerful
and effective win-win strategic alliance where you leverage on each other‟s traffic and
efforts.

Social bookmarking is another powerful way to build back links for your website. Social
media is a super hot trend in today‟s Internet arena and millions of people have joined
and are active in at least one or two social websites.

For website directories, it‟s all about submitting your website to all major website
directories. This is a fairly straightforward link building method and will help you to get
lots of back links and more exposure for your website. We will be covering a list of top
websites directories and tools that you can use to submit your website too.

Blogs and forums are a great place to build links through your signature links. However
keep in mind that the key is to provide value. Blogs and forums commenting is a great
way to build backlinks but always focus on providing value beforehand and only spend
your efforts in blogs and forums that are related to your industry, that way you‟ll be sure
to be driving thousands of visitors to your website with forums.

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Let‟s begin with RSS Feed. What exactly is RSS all about? You would have probably
heard of this term many a time but this feature is still not used to its full potential by most
marketers.

RSS stands for „Really Simple Syndication‟. It is basically a notification system that alerts
subscribers of changes made to their favorite website, blog, video, E-zine or author. So
this means that if a user subscribes to the RSS of your website, each time you
implement a new post or change to your website, this subscriber of yours will be notified
via the RSS Feed system.

RSS is displayed through a text-based link headline with a short summary of the content.
This feed is then delivered to the user rather than the user having to go out to look for

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the information or log on to the website everyday to see if a new change is has been
made.

This means that the feed will deliver the updated content to the user directly. The
concept is very similar to an E-mail notification but this is much more powerful because
E-mails today are often rather spammy and they are delivered in an unorganized
manner.

Whereas for RSS Feeds, it is like permission marketing whereby the users subscribe to
your feed and gives you the permission to notify them each time a change or a new post
is made.

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The main reason to use RSS feed is to bring visitors back to your site. This way, it will
help you create a loyal fan base that will constantly revisit your website to read or listen
to your new content. Subsequently you will have constant ongoing traffic in your site.

RSS Feeds are also arranged in a highly organized manner which is very user-friendly
and convenient for your loyal subscribers to revisit to your website to pick out topics and
new posts to read each time.

RSS Feeds are also a great one-way back-link because RSS aggregator sites are
extremely favorable by Google. This as such will result in higher page rank and help you
get more traffic to your website.

Furthermore, aggregator feeds sites such as FeedAge.com also gets picked up by very
quickly by search engines so it‟s a great strategy to get your brand new website indexed
very quickly.

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Now let‟s talk about how RSS Feed works.

There are only two steps to this process. The first step is to grab the RSS or XML feed of
the web page you would like to syndicate. This is normally located on the top right hand
corner of your URL address. The second step is to copy it and then submit it to RSS
aggregators.

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RSS aggregator sites are basically large feed site directories that are constantly
spidered by Google. When you submit your RSS to these sites, brand new sites can get
indexed very quickly in as little as a couple of days. The other beauty about aggregator
sites is that you only need to submit your RSS once and it will be automatically updated.

For example if you have a YouTube channel, all you need to do is submit the RSS of
your YouTube channel once. Subsequently, future uploads that you make to your
YouTube channel will be automatically updated and notified to your subscribers. RSS
aggregator sites are also instant back-links to new content.

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Some of the top aggregator sites to submit your RSS to are:

 FeedAge.com
 Feedest.com
 FeedBurner.com

When you start a new video channel, E-zine author, website or blog, be sure to submit
your RSS to these sites.

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Content should be syndicated with RSS Feeds and are already installed with the RSS
feature are:

 Social bookmarks
 Podcast
 Press releases
 Videos
 Articles
 Squidoo lenses
 And Blogs

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So each time you create any content of these mediums, be sure to submit your RSS to
the 3 top aggregator sites mentioned earlier.

The second link building strategy is Reciprocal Links Exchange. In simple context, this
strategy means „You link my site and I link your site.‟ So it is a form of link exchange
between you and other site owners, webmasters, companies or individuals.

How this strategy works is to find a site that has related content to your niche. The site
that you are looking for should have similar content but yet different enough so that you
are not directly competing with each other. In other words, you would want to find a site

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with content that complements yours.

Once you have identified a website with related content to yours, what you should do is
find out how much traffic your potential partner‟s site is getting. You can simply get hold
of this information by going to QuantCast.com or Alexa.com.

Submit the URL of the site that you want to gather traffic data from. QuantCast and
Alexa will then display the amount of visitors and traffic that this site is receiving, on a
monthly, weekly and daily basis.

Another plus point feature that QuantCast.com offers is that it will also give you the

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demographics of the users that are visiting a particular website URL. You may make use
of this information to see if it best fits your marketing campaign‟s interest.

Ideally when you do a link exchange with another site, you‟d want the other site to have
a similar amount of traffic that your site has. By using the QuantCast and Alexa tool, if
you are able to find a website like that, then contact the Webmaster with the contact
details that is in the website by either submitting the contact form or E-mailing the
Webmaster directly.

For reciprocal link exchanges, always think and negotiate towards a Win-Win. If you can
get hold of phone contact details, it will be even better if you make a direct call or
conference call with them as this form of communicate is more personal. When you
negotiate, be extremely specific and honest. Remember to always create an affinity and
a reason for the partner to agree on this deal with you.

When negotiating an exchange, you may also want to discuss on areas such as the
duration of this link exchange partnership. Discuss all possibilities at every angle.
Remember to be as specific and detailed as possible.

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Now we‟re going to go a little bit more in depth on this reciprocal link exchange strategy
and you will be learning some of the reciprocal links exchange placement gold mine. The
information that you‟ll be learning in here can help make you fortunes and create an
explosion of traffic for your web site. So be sure to take notes.

What most people would do when practicing link exchange is simply exchanging links on
their blog with a banner or text link. While this is a common and fairly effective method,
there are 3 more other goldmines on the Internet, which should be leveraged upon. The
3 are:

 Autoresponder
 Thank You Page

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 And… Download Page

The first goldmine placement is in the autoresponder follow-up E-mail system. The big
reason link exchanges are highly effective in here is because prospects are already
subscribed to a list. This means that these prospects have already taken a huge leap
forward to give permission to the list owner to communicate with them. It is far more
successful to market to people who are already within a list platform than anybody that‟s
all over the Internet.

As a result, marketing to prospects that are already in a list is easier as the chances of
them being in an open mindset towards recommendation or referrals are much higher.

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This placement strategy is even more effective if you are able to make an exchange with
a „buyers‟ list. A buyers list is a list of customers who have already paid for a particular
product or good. Targeted buyers list is extremely powerful because these are the
people that would normally buy a related product over and over again.

The other placement goldmine is the „Thank You‟ page. The „Thank You‟ page is a
confirmation page that will appear after a user subscribes to a list. This is a page where
the system will normally thank users for their subscription and prompts the users to
check their E-mail for a confirmation notification.

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Now, this is not just a „Thank You‟ page. It is a goldmine! It is an asset because this is
the place where users have just entered into the sales funnel and they just gave
permission to the list owner to market to them.

The final placement goldmine is the „Download‟ page. The download page is a page that
customers are sent to upon their purchase of a product. This is the page where they
download their product. This is another amazing asset on the Internet because these are
buyers that are visiting this page. They have already purchased a product and the
chances of them purchasing related products are extremely high.

So for reciprocal link exchanges, there are some places, which are a real goldmine.

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Always think Win-Win when negotiation partnerships. You may even consider split
commissions or execute a cost per action with your partners where you pay them for
each subscriber.

Moving forward to the next strategy, we will be discussing about Social Bookmarks.
Social bookmarks are a rising trend in the Internet marketing industry today. Over 80
million users are in at least one or more social networking sites today. Furthermore,
social bookmarks have high quality back-links from authority sites such as:

 Twitter
 Digg

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 JumpTags
 Technorati
 Squidoo
 …And more

Social bookmarks also have extremely high page rank that will help boost your websites‟
search engine ranking. Furthermore, social bookmark is a community based which will
result in more targeted traffic to your website and also because it is a community based
website, it can also create a viral effect.

If people like what you have submitted, they will most likely spread the word to their
friends, colleagues and family and thereby resulting in an exponential viral effect, and a
stampede of traffic to your website.

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While there are hundreds of social bookmarking sites out there, these are the top 10 that
you can start with:

1. Twitter
2. Digg
3. StumbleUpon
4. Reddit
5. Technorati
6. Delicious
7. Furl
8. Mixx

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9. Propeller
10. Newsvine

These are the top 10 social bookmarking sites that are extremely popular and active on
the Internet today. Each time you create new content, be sure to submit them to all of
the above social bookmark sites.

While submitting your content to each and every social bookmarking sites manually may
be time consuming and tedious, there are some social bookmark automation tools
available out there as well.

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The 2 recommended social bookmarking automation tools are OnlyWire.com and

BookmarkingDemon.com. These social bookmark tools help you submit your web page
to major social bookmarking sites at a click of a button.

So if you‟d like to automate your social bookmark submission process, be sure to go to

these websites to check out their tools.

The next link building tactic is Website Directory Submission. This is also a one-way
back-link method that will help you build your website popularity. This method is fairly
simple where you submit your URL to related website directories. So all you have to do
for this link building strategy is to submit your link each time you have a new content or a

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new website to the website directories to increase exposure for your content and website

While there are also thousands of website directories out there, here are the top 10
website directories that you may start with. The following website directories have a high
page rank of 6 – 9:

1. Dmoz.org
2. Lii.org
3. HotFrog.com
4. SoMuch.com

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5. Skoobe.biz
6. NetInsert.com
7. Jayde.com
8. Info-Listings.com
9. Gimpsy.com
10. GeniusFind.com

Once again if you want to automate the process of submitting your link to website
directories, there is also an automation tool for this. The recommended tool is called

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Directory Submitter created by a well-known marketer, Brad Callen. You can get hold of
Directory Submitter free at: http://directorysubmitter.imwishlist.com

The final link building strategy is the Blog and Forum Commenting tactic. Blogs and
forums are powerful web 2.0 platforms, which brings people together to form discussions
and provide feedback. These platforms create a community based, which allows people
to freely express themselves. Users enjoy „hanging-out‟ at these places because they
like to feel a part of a community and be able to share common interests and
experiences with like-minded people.

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How this blog and forum commenting tactic work is to start by visiting blogs and forums
that are of your chosen niche. Pick a hot topic that is active which has a lot of views,
threads and replies. Subsequently make a post and comment on it. The key is to provide
value.

Make sure that you spend your efforts only on blogs and forums, which are active and
up-to-date so that you get the most out of your marketing efforts. Ideally, you would want
to make a comment on a post that is recent, as recent as a couple of hours, days or at
most a week ago.

Another trick you may implement for this strategy is to create controversy. This will as
such grab attention in forums and blogs. But more importantly, don‟t spam. Don‟t make

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posts that are insignificant and of no value. Some spammy examples are like “Wow! This
is a great post! Check out my site at XYZ.com.” If you do that, you will be highly
disregarded within the community. Your credibility will be frowned upon and will most
definitely backfire on you. So remember to always focus on adding value. This way
people will eventually start noticing you.

Finally the last step to this strategy is to add your signature after each comment or post
that you make. This is the section where you drop your link to lead readers to visit your
website

Under your signature section, create an anchor text link and leave your website URL. Be
sure that your signature section has a strong call-to-action for them to visit your website.
It could be a free bonus you‟re offering or some special blueprint you‟re giving away to a
limited number of people.

You can also make use of the signature section for personal branding. Tell them who
you are and what are some of the results you have achieved. Generate curiosity and
make them want to click through to your website.

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Finally coming to the end of this Link Building course. Link building will help increase
your page rank and help your website get indexed on Google quickly whether it is a
brand new website or a brand new content that you have just created.

Link popularity will also increase the exposure, visibility and credibility of yourself as an
expert in your niche and also your website.

Last but not least, link building will help you get a storm of targeted traffic from organic
search results and also from related websites. Link building may be time consuming in
the beginning but with time and patience, it will most definitely reap the rewards of a
higher quality website, more targeted traffic and more profits!

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