Article - A Simple Guide To Anchored Backlinks

If you don't have anchored backlinks pointing back to your site, even the very best content in the world will not get the search engines to take notice of you. To the search engines, a backlink is similar to a vote on the quality of your website and the more votes you have, the higher the quality of the content on your site.

I would categorize the multiple techniques you can get anchored backlinks into 3 main areas:

Anchored Backlinks From Your Own Sites

To accomplish this, you can have one main site about your product, say clocks. You can have a blog that talks about anything and everything related to clocks, a hub at HubPages that describes all the different types of clocks, a Squidoo lens that goes into detail about clock manufacturing, and .... you get the picture. You can then have anchored backlinks from all those sites linking to your main website about clocks.

Submit To Various Directories

You can look for places which allow you to post your own backlink. Usual places would include forums, blogs, article directories and web directories. Do be respectful of a particular site's rules on how and in what manner a link can be posted, and don't contribute to the spam that is so prevalent these days.

Getting Other Webmasters To Post Your Backlink

This is the most time consuming way to get backlinks. But the general consensus is that these types of backlinks are worth their weight in gold. So, in any campaign to build backlinks to your website, make sure third party backlinks are a priority.

I have made a list of the more standard ways of getting anchored backlinks from webmasters and third party websites below. These are by no means the only ways and you are encouraged to come up with better and more innovative ways and ways that are more suitable for your talents and resources.

• Exchange Links. Webmasters have been exchanging links since the early days of the Internet. Links are exchanged between the link directories or the home pages of the sites doing the exchange.
• Link Bait. For this technique, you come up with content, or link bait, that is so humorous, or so good, or so controversial that the webmaster just have to link to it. If you do it right, you might just be able to get hundreds of free links from just one piece of content.
• Give Away Free Stuff. First, make sure you get the rights to the product so that you can legally include some links in the product to your website or blog. And then, you give away the product to anybody and everybody that wants it. If you can't get the rights to the product, you can always request for a backlink in return for a free download of the product.
  

Conclusion

The Internet is changing, and if anything, the pace of change has actually increased. Along with this change, there has been an influx of websites and blog by webmasters hoping to make a living from the net. Anchored backlinks is key to standing out from among all this competition. With the present day social networking site like Twitter and Facebook, getting in touch with other webmasters is actually much easier. It is just a matter of doing the work need, and you will get the backlinks needed to rank well in the search engines.

Internet Marketing - A Primer On Niche Marketing

Niche marketing can be defined as marketing to a subset of a larger market segment. Although the market size will not be very big, the needs of such a market will have the advantage of being much more focused.

In the online world, niche marketing is primarily concerned with niches in which the search engine competition is low. Normally, you will carry out the following steps:

• Research keywords that a surfer will use to find what they want. Look out for those particular keywords which has a good potential for profit and not a lot of competition in the search engine rankings.

• Build a website to target those keywords.

• Optimize your blog posts, or website pages, for your targeted keywords.

• Get other websites and blogs to link to your website using the usual link building techniques like link exchanges, article submissions, directory submissions, etc.

• Keep building those anchored backlinks until you get to the number one spot in Google, or at least to the top of the first page.

You can do it in many different combinations but the basic steps are listed above.


Cost

In my opinion, you must pay for your domain name and web hosting. They will cost you less than $11 per month. The advantages of paying for those far weighs the small cost incurred.

Other than the obligatory domain name and web hosting, there are some services that can increase your productivity:

• Good content for your blogs, articles and websites is key to your success and, unfortunately, also takes the most time to generate. Paying for articles to be written might be a good investment.

• Submitting your article to the various websites, blogs and article directories will take up a lot of your time as there are hundreds, if not thousands, of them out there. Article submission software, especially those that avoids sending out duplicate content, is well worth the investment.

• Getting other webmasters to exchange links with you would also take up a large portion of your time. There are some services that brings together webmasters interested in link exchanges, and some would even monitor the backlinks resulting from link exchanges for you.

Recommended Skills

A relatively good command of English would definitely be recommended, especially if you intend to write the content and articles yourself. You don't have to be a writer, but you must at least be able to write grammatically correct sentences and be disciplined enough to spell check your work.

There is a lot of computer and web related work to do. On the computer, you might find yourself touching up some graphics, or installing a software application, or even doing some html. On the web, you would probably need to update your name servers and configure your hosting account. You don't need to be an expert to do all these, but some level of computer literacy would be needed.

I have broken down niche marketing into a series of simple steps. But those steps cannot be looked at in isolation. You must look at those steps as part of a business, a niche marketing business. As a niche marketer, you are the boss of your niche marketing business. And the decisions that you make for your business must be made not as the niche marketer but as the boss of the niche marketing business.

Hub - Anchored Backlinks - A Simple Guide (Part II)

I found out that my hub about anchored backlinks is on the first page of Hubpages's best hubs category and that would probably account for the traffic and the high number of comments. And therefore, a good way to get exposure would be to write good comments at hubs that are on the front page of Hubpages.

Nevertheless I still believe that clear and simple information is very lacking on the web.

Read the hub ..... Anchored Backlinks - A Simple Guide

Hub - Anchored Backlinks - A Simple Guide

I wrote a simple guide to anchored backlinks on Hubpages about 1 week ago. It was in response to a request on the best ways you can get anchored backlinks to your hubs. In the guide, I categorized the different ways you can get anchored backlinks into 3 categories:

• Links from your own sites
• Links you can post on other sites
• Links you can get other people to post on your sites

I go into some detail as to how the links in the various categories can be implemented. The information I presented is rather basic, so I was rather taken aback by the response. To date, there have been 23 responses.

Judging from the responses, I think it might be fair to say that while the information on SEO is there for everybody, what is lacking is a clear and simple way of explaining it so that those not in the field can easily understand it.

Could be a good market there, whether or not the subject is SEO.

Read the hub .... Anchored Backlinks - A Simple Guide

Internet Marketing - Link Bait

Ever heard of link bait? I have heard of it many times but never quite looked up what it meant. I mean, it sounded like some sort of black hat SEO technique and I have no intention of doing anything like that.

I looked it up recently and found that it is actually a legitimate SEO technique. In short, any content that encourages other webmasters to link to you can be considered link bait - hence the term. :)

The following are the more common link baits:

• Great Content. Write great content, or be an authority on a subject, and webmasters will link to you.

• Humorous, Cute Or Weird Content. If your content is real good, you can get a lot of people linking to you from the social bookmarking sites.
  
  
• Controversial Content. Never fails to attract a lot of debate, traffic and hopefully, backlinks.
  
  
• Tool. An online tool is a good way to get a lot of backlinks. Examples would include html checker, calculators to convert from one unit to another, some kind of graphics generator, etc.

If you use your imagination, there are a lot more ways of link baiting than those listed above. In another post, I would list a lot more ideas and that post can serve as link bait. ;)

HubPages

Can't believe it's been nearly 3 weeks since my last post. Time flies. Going to have to be careful about how I spend my time or I'm not going to make the January 09 deadline.

I have been moving around the web a lot more since I started this, and boy, the face of the web has changed! When you talk about Internet marketing in the old days, it's just submitting your site to the search engines, exchanging links, and getting listed in the directories. Now, it's more about the social networks, or Web 2.0. If anything, these networks have actually made Internet marketing simpler.

I just joined HubPages a few weeks back. It's a online publishing site on which you can write about anything you like, except for the obvious no-nos like porn, racist discrimination, etc. It has a rating system which rewards originality.

What I like about HubPages is that you can get traffic from within the network itself. This is essentially a characteristic of most if not all social networks, which is why I said that getting traffic is actually much easier now.

Here are some of the ways you can get traffic from HubPages:

• When you publish a site (it's called a hub), your site will appear in a section listing the latest hubs published, so you will get some traffic in the first few hours.
• Comment on other publisher's hubs. Your id will be attached to your comment, so you can attract some traffic to your profile and your hubs.
• Become a fan of other publishers (hubbers). You can attract their attention and you get to know when they publish a new hub. If you are fast, you can be the first to leave a comment. ;) They might become your fan as well and will be informed whenever you publish a new hub.
• HubPages has a system which rewards originality. An original article has a higher rating, and has a greater chance of being listed under the Hot Hubs and Best Hubs category.
• HubPages also has a Best Hubbers category. Consistently publish great hubs and you can get into this category. More great traffic for you!

In the old model, Internet marketing is all about search engine optimization and getting your links onto other sites. While this has not changed in the new model, getting your links onto other sites has gotten very much easier. The focus has shifted to user generated content, and building relationships.

You can view my profile on HubPages here.

Twitter

Just signed up for Twitter a few hours ago to explore the possibilities. For those who doesn't know what it is, it is a service in which you type in what you are doing at any given time in 140 characters or less. This message will go to your friends, that is, whoever is "following" you. You can also "follow" other people, in which you get their messages. Actually, in a nutshell, that's it.

But for marketing and networking, there are definitely possibilities. You can view who I'm following, and who the people I'm following are following, and so on. Since each person will typically follow 50-100 people, you can access thousands just from the people I'm following and who they are following.

When you are viewing a person's profile (I don't know the proper term), you are also viewing the person's "tweets", or messages. That way, you know a little about each person, about who they are and what they are involved in. If they appear "relevant", by all means add them to your follow list. And if they are on your list, there is a chance that they will add you to their list as well. I mean, I just signed up and I already have 2 people following me and one of them subscribed to my mailing list. :)

I can think of more possibilities but I'm not going into that now. Take a look at what I'm doing now here:

http://twitter.com/wanderert

Step One

I am really amazed at the amount of misleading and hyped up information there is out there on Internet marketing and home based businesses. We are at the point at which a total newbie, who is just embarking on his journey, does not know where to turn.

On the one hand, you have an Internet marketing guru telling you that link exchanges are great are traffic, and then you have another telling you that you must do SEO or you are not going to get any traffic, and another saying that link exchanges and SEO are passe, social networks are the in thing now.

And every Internet marketing guru has a product to sell! And you know what? Seems that everybody is a marketing guru. If you have the testimonials, the scanned copy of your bank statement, and a product to sell, you are an Internet marketing guru.

Sorry, enough venting.

The point I'm trying to make is that you don't know where to go for good, honest, reliable, down to earth information.

Since I already have a site at http://QuittingYourJob.com about home based businesses and Internet marketing, and its approach is to offer honest and down to earth information, I can start there.

I will revamp and expand the site, concentrating on increasing the number of brandable ebooks available, introducing more relevant articles and updating the marketing section with more up to date information.

For now, revenue source will primarily be Adsense. I will look into other sources in the coming weeks.

Article Marketing

Been browsing the forums and discovered that article marketing, sometimes called bum marketing, is a popular way of doing Internet marketing. General idea is that you write an article, include a resource box at the end which points to your website and submit the article to popular article directories. Once your article is published, you get free traffic.

You are advised to do some SEO research and to include relevant keywords in your title and in the first paragraph of your article.

In addition, since one article can only get you that much traffic, you should write MANY articles. We are talking about, maybe, a few articles per day! I find that surprising because the quality of the articles will definitely suffer.

I browsed the article directories and read some of the articles posted. Indeed, a lot of the articles I read, although not pure garbage, contains little originality and not much useful content. Those articles are basically food for the search engines and for obtaining backlinks for the author's site.

Sad that Internet marketing had degraded to this point. :(

But enough complaining and onwards to Jan 2009.

For a start, I will adopt the following basic strategy:

- improve my sites at http://quittingyourjob.com/ and http://wacky-background.com/.
- write GOOD articles for promotion.
- write more ebooks for QuittingYourJob.com.
- browse the forums for promotion and information.
- develop quality link exchanges and partnerships.
- promote the ebooks I have written.

In the next few weeks, I will have to look into other niches and products I can sell.