Making money blogging? – not without some incoming links you’re not

Making money blogging, or making money with any other type website for that matter, relies heavily on the amount of other sites linking to it to give that site authority with the search engines. The whole process is at the same time simple and massively complicated and I must admit to being completely ignorant of this need when I first started writing online.

The simple fact is that in any given field, there are a large number of people competing for search engine (or any other type) traffic. They want search engine traffic because that often monetizes well  - because so many people start their search for something to buy on the internet. So - whatever you are writing about or trying to sell, there are other people doing the same thing and competing with you.

I cannot claim to know exactly how google and the other search engines decide how to rank you, but I can share some personal experiences as to what will work for you or against you and I can say that the amount of incoming links to your site from other web sites is very important.  I am not going to get into specific websites, but here are a few simple rules to follow if you wish to make your site a success:

1. Get a lot of high quality incoming links
2. Get some more high quality incoming links

To an extent, if you write good content, people will organically link to your work and you will get search engine traffic. But - you are up against competitors for that traffic and much as I hate to say this - your competitors are cheating.

Yes, they are going out and buying backlinks and doing any number of other sneaky, nasty,  underhanded  things to get themselves ranked more highly in the search engines than you. There are all sorts of ways of doing this and as and when the search engines get their algorithms perfect (never) this will stop working and the best content will be highest ranked. If the google search engine was perfect, you would always get the best, most relevant result for whatever you are looking for. You know how many times that happens.

So - therefore you need to cheat as well. Simple. You are just not going to be able (unless you are extremely lucky) to dominate a search term that is in any way competitive without artificially creating lots and lots and lots of incoming links.

This is a pain in the ass. Nothing more and nothing less. As far as I am concerned this is the least pleasurable part of my job. The single solitary reason I need to spend a large part of my time creating incoming links is because some spammer or con man can make a fortune selling people a shitty piece of software that will not work to help them make money online.

How to create lots of incoming links with as little work as possible

Here are some do's and don'ts for generating links.

1. Do not sign up for a link exchange service that relies on your own site creating outgoing links in exchange. Once Mr. Google identifies that you will get penalized. I know - I tried one to see what happened - Using Neurolinker to increase backlinks - and all the sites I was using it on were penalized. One of them had a -3 PR applied to it.

Now - it may be that page rank is not as important to you as it is to me, but I have a reputation to maintain and seeing some of my sites stripped of their rank was not what I wanted. Also - and I have not tried this because it sounds like too much work and I already have alternatives in place - theoretically, you could use one site to link out with and set up another site on a different web host, using a different name etc to have links in to. Not a route I would choose.

2. Do not sign up for this service called 1waylinks or anything like it - these have all been abused and devalued. One way links

The way this works is - you create a wordpress blog and submit it to their network. They will automatically make posts to that blog which contain out going links to other members. At the same time, you write articles that contain links to your chosen site, using anchor text you are targeting and they will post those articles to the network. This creates incoming links to your site spread across a wide geographic region.

Their software allows you to "spin" the articles you submit so that the articles are not duplicated. This is no longer a viable approach.

3. Do not sign up for these services which have all had their sites devalued or deindexed

• Linkvana
• SEONitro
• SEOLinkVine
• Backlink Monster
• The High PR society
• Build My Rank

Most blog networks are now worthless as a link resource.

4. Do sign up for this service called CC Articles. CC Articles.

At some point, you are going to discover that there are not enough hours in the day to write all the content you need to adequately promote yourself. And you are probably going to come to the conclusion that you need to outsource that work. Let me tell you - that is another major pain in the ass. I have hired (and fired) numerous writers to do this job and I was shocked to discover from the other perspective as it were - just how many lousy, useless, crappy writer there are out there who will steal other people's work and try to pass it off as their own. If I wanted copied garbage, I would have copied it myself. They are cheap and consistent as advertised and I am extremely impressed with the quality. You only pay per article ordered, and can get a 500 word article for as little as $4.33 if you order 30 at a time. Well worth the money and will certainly save you from the aggravation of dealing with writers that mean you end up spending as much time editing and checking their work that you may as well have written them yourself in the first place.

I also offer custom link building solutions - drop me a line for a quote.

Think small and you will be small. Good luck