How I Increased Backlinks from 61 to 337, in Less than 2 Weeks!
I know… I’ve been kinda quiet lately! I am going to post a couple of “How I do it” posts this week… from increasing backlinks, to increasing subscribers. Aside from spending quite alot of time out of town over the past 3 weeks, I have been very focused on increasing the popularity of a few of my “Keeper” sites, to help make up for any revenue loss I may experience on the sites I eliminate. Part of those efforts involved working in one of my weakest areas, increasing backlinks.
Face it – Building Backlinks is a pain in the ass! Its time consuming and the most tedious task I think we do in Internet marketing, therefore, most of us skip past it and it never gets done! MANY months ago, I picked up a new piece of software called Fast Blog Finder (Free trial) and figured I would use it to locate link-worthy related blogs, and start a commenting campaign to help with it. I think I used it once and thought it too, was a time consuming pain in the ass, and never used it again! THAT was a mistake! The ONLY way this program does any good, is if you actually develop a habit, and use it regularly!
The layout below is exactly what I did over the past 14 days, to turn that around and build some inbound links! It took me roughly 15-20 minutes each day, over the course of about 14 days! Traffic on the site has followed right along with the links, and search volume has more than doubled, compared to the same time last month!
April 1 unique visitors – 286
May 1 unique visitors- 642
First – Why Do You Need Backlinks?
For all readers here, this should be perfectly clear already! You should look at a backlink to your site as a “Vote” from outside websites. The more votes you have from different people (websites) that are found by search engine spiders, the more authoritative your site is assumed to be!Taking it one step further, if the site voting for yours is a high authority of its own, search engines think even MORE of your site!
So… there are two main reasons to get backlinks:
- Search engine spiders follow them to your site!
- Humans who visit the same page, follow them to your site! Some of which may even bookmark it!
Almost Every Related Backlink Helps!
Many times, people focus ONLY on sites with good authority (pagerank) in Google, where the links are followed by spiders and pass juice to your page. Forget all that, and focus on one thing, the page you get a link from is somewhat related to your site. Yes, followed links are better, but not every search engine cares if they are followed or not! If you spend your time worrying about getting only high PR, followed backlinks, the time you spend on this will be much longer!
Also – DO NOT focus on ONLY your main page! On different days, use a different page of your site in your backlinks.
How I Steadily Increased My Backlinks in Less than 2 Weeks!
Like I mentioned above, when I first got my hands on Fast Blog Finder at least 6 months ago, I tried it and walked away from it… thinking it too, was too time consuming for my fast-paced brain!Today, I think completely differently, using this same approach for 15-30 minutes every day!
The easiest way I have found to use this… is to start my blog search a few hours before I actually plan to do the work! This lets the tool do its job and find a large list of keyword relevant blogs, so when I sit to start visiting them, I don’t have to wait for them to be found and can jump right in. DO NOT SPAM the blogs you find and actually peruse the posts and comment in an intelligent manner!
- Download the free trial – or pay the $49 and get the full version, which is loaded with extra features to make the job easier!
- Choose a 1-2 word target phrase for your site, and put it into the “Keyword Phrase” box, press enter.
- Minimize the Fast Blog Finder tool and go about doing your other business for an hour or so…When you return to the tool, make sure you press the “Stop” button, and stop the search. At this point, you have a LONG list of relevant blogs to join in on the conversation! As I write this post, it has been running only 5 minutes, and already found 490 posts related to “home appliance”. After the list is on the screen, you can see all kinds of info, like domain PR, page PR, # of outbound links on the page, whether they are followed or nofollowed, etc.
- I sort them by DATE first, so I can visit recently posted sites first! Regardless of whether they are followed, authority, etc… I go to the top 15-20 posts, browse the post and leave a related comment. If you leave the comment from within the Fast Blog Finder system, it will automatically insert your last comment date into a separate field, so you can track your efforts!
- Second, I re-sort the results and show ONLY do-follow blog posts, and do the same thing… browse the posts and leave a related comment.
- When you return the following day or night, just pick up where you left off, visiting the next group of posts in your same list, or start a new search on another related term!
- Rinse and repeat for 15-20 minutes every day!
My Own Best Practices
Checking Backlinks: The tool I use to check the backlinks, gives you a total as well as all details about your links. (PR, nofollowed, anchor text, etc) I always visit the site BEFORE I start a link building project, to get a baseline and see how my efforts are paying off.
Anchor Text: As we all know, anchor text is important! The downside is that if you spam up your anchor text, you are less likely to have your comments approved! I like to mix up my anchor textas much as possible, and even use my name as part of it quite a bit of the time: “Mark – Home Appliances”
Subscribe to Sites: If the site you leave a comment is related, why not subscribe to the rss feed right in your feed reader (I use Google feed reader) so you can see what else the blog owner has to say, and continue commenting on the same site! This would be called networking! :-)
Develop Into an Effective Habit: If you can force yourself to do this same thing for 3-5 days in a row, you will quickly see it is not as time consuming as you think (Just like I thought!!) and before you know it, you will be churning out 30+ related comments within 15 minutes a day!Heck, you may even find a place to learn more about your niche and find interesting topics to write about!
Bottom Line – No Inbound Links = No Search Engine Love!
Fast Blog Finder is a $49 tool (Download Free Trial Version) for finding related blog posts to network with!
Previously Published Articles You May Like to Read:
- Get Backlinks From Ebay Listings
- 10,000 Backlinks to your Build a Niche Store in Less than 1 Hour!
- 3 Full Weeks into my New WordPress Website!
- How I Increased ePN Earnings by 160% Overnight!
- Build a Niche Store Empire in 12 Weeks – Inbound Links Bring Spiders!
- Build a Niche Store Empire Series in 12 Weeks – Week 5 Development
- Build a Niche Store Empire Series in 12 Weeks – Finding the Right Domain
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I have been doing my part to "Build the Internet" since 1994, when I built my first website! Since then, I have built hundreds of niche websites for myself and many others, focused on design, applications, ecommerce, search optimization and internet marketing.
This looks like a useful strategy. Have you seen a change in Search Engine results with the increase of backlinks or is it too early to tell?
also, what tool do you use for checking backlinks?
Cheers
Brian –
Doh… I added the link to where I check my backlinks. http://seopro.com.au/free-seo-tools/link-checker/
Also – Search traffic is considerably higher this month thus far! Most notably to me was the increase from OTG (other than Google) engines! Leading up to this past month… G dominated my search traffic… now, G is increased as well, but the other engines have come up out of nowhere!
M
Yo Marky Mark… do you still use social bookmarking? Which do you consider to be better, social bookmarking or commenting on forums and blogs? Or do you think they offer the same results?
@ Jake –
I DO for sure! They ALL have a place and do good!!
Mark
I wouldn’t want to calculate just how many hours I have spent over the past 10 years getting backlinks to my web sites. It’s about time a tool became available that will lessen that pain in the behind that getting backlinks can be.
Great point about not limiting backlinks to your main page. I find so many people do this. Even my clients who I am always after to link to their internal pages.
One client I have been pushing to get backlinks to his internal pages since 2003 and am only now getting the point across.
I have downloaded the trial version, installed it and registered it. Now I will give it go and see just how excited I get.
I thought I had found a great tool a few weeks ago but it was limited to finding only 10 blogs. They were suppose to be DoFollow blogs but that part of the tool didn’t do it’s job so I scrapped that one.
I usually use Bloglines to track blog feeds so I can follow the blogs I like and comment on the blogs that have new posts each day. But that doesn’t help me with the DoFollow blogs which are the ones I am really looking for.
I also like to be the first on the block to comment on a post. I get a lot more visits than I do if I am #10 to comment. The fact that I like to leave relevant comments does help.
As usual thanks again Mark.
Looks like a nice tool Mark – whats the difference in functionality between the trial and paid version?
@ James –
Same here on the countless hours with clients!! My local design business involves teaching these things to Clients, and when they dont do it themselves, I usually end up with more work! :-)
I am right with you on being the first commenter also!! If you can reply first on a busy site… you can get MANY visits from it!!
@ Doug –
Trial is limited to finding 50 blogs or posts. Of those 50, a maximum of 5 will be do-follow.
The Gold edition wont stop running until it hits almost 1000 blogs or posts, and will ID up to 125 do-follows!
In the Gold edition ($49) you can also save / export / import blog lists into the system for comment management. Meaning, if you have, or buy a list of do-follow blogs, you can import the sites into FBF gold, and manage everything in one screen. :-)
M
Good post Mark. I’ve been using Blog Comment Demon 2 which is my preferred tool. Check it out.
I have a related question/experience for the gurus on this blog.
I started a practice of blog commenting to get backlinks a while back using a similar tool called Comment Kahuna (maybe that’s my problem).
Regardless, I noticed the same thing, as I started adding backlinkgs on blogs to deep pages on my site, those pages would climb the rankings in Google.
However recently I had 2 pages on the site which had ok rank (not great) for which I started building backlinks via comments. After a few days or backlink building, those pages fell completely out of Google. I can only guess it had something to do with the links I built while commenting.
How common is this for a ‘bad link’ on a blog somewhere to kill the rank for a given page on your site? Anyway to prevent or fix the problem?
Thanks!
@ Mike –
I also have BCD and BMD… Unfortunately, I have never used any of them to their fullest extent, until I started using this one again! I may have to rervisit those as well!!
@ Glenn (HokiesFan)
Good to see ya around again! The pages you are talking about… do you have a good balance of unique content on them? I have noticed and talked to a few otherrs about, what seemed like a penalty on a specific page, pushing it farther down in search listings.
What was determined looking at the pages, was that they lacked a balance of content in reference to the number of listing or ad type items on the pages.
In other words… they just needed MORE unique content on them.
Mark
Cheers for the post Mark. A very useful tool indeed, it’s one I have tried in the past and like yourself walked away from it. I hate building links, always have and always will but you suddenly realize the importance when the traffic starts dropping and so do the site earnings :).
I think your spot on when you say dedicate a small amount of time to it each day. Let’s face it, we are trying to build backlinks steadily and slowly and 20 minutes each day isn’t going to kill us now is it :)
Cheers!
Ben
Absolutly great review on the importance of backlinks, and how to get them. Looking forward to trying the tool and gaining more insights from your posts.
Best,
Brandon
Mark-
Been mulling your response and looking into some of my pages and have a follow up question.
To add more content and less products per page, I’m going to need a lot more store pages on my blog. In figuring out how to do this, I checked out one of your sites and notice you have ‘drop down’ menus on your wordpress top navigation. They seem to be exactly what I need. Did you use a plugin for this, or what do you recommend?
thanks,
hokieg
@ Glenn –
The drop menus can probably be coded into your existing theme. I dont know of a plugin for it though…
I have started to do this but didn’t have an automated process – this is exactly what I need! Thanks again, Mark. This will be a real time-saver! I’m working against the clock to avoid going back to a day job….
This seems like a very good tool. I saw it on another site but I did not pay any attention to it. Your write up sounds very interesting as I need to build up links to my sites.
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