Be Friendly

Search This Site for Articles About...

Loading

Backlinking Your Website

I am a strong believer that back links should be provided by other people as a result of them liking your page. I don't like to manipulate them. However, if looked at it from objective point of view, if you participate in discussion on forums about the subjects you're genuinely interested in, then not only its not considered spam, but your backlink starts to gain more weight. Why does this happen? Well the basic formula, that I am actually surprised that not many people know is this:

1. Your website contains keywords "french toast" in the title bar on the homepage

2. Let's say someone also started a thread on some forum with the keywords "french toast" in the subject

3. Now you go to that thread and contribute, and at the bottom of your message you add a link to your homepage that contains "french toast" in the anchor text (Like this: <a href = "mysite">french toast</a>

Most of the time, when people spam, they ignore the "integrity" of these three elements. Title of forum's thread, Anchor text of your inbound link and your Homepage, all must contain the same keywords. Google cares a lot that this is exactly how your site is linked to from other pages. It is only a theory, but I am 100% confident someone at Google have though of that.

What I see is that most people simply spam forums, and their anchor text, nor thread title match the keywords. So, of course they are simply posting a lot of "weak" links. What they don't realize is that they should simply participate in forum discussion, and one link that is "relevant" can be worth hundreds.

Work with what you have, not with what you wish to have and don't have yet. If you have 50 daily visitors on a website you created, work with them directly. Try to offer value to them, instead of thinking its such a low number that it's not worth trying. It is possible to create small streams of traffic with high conversion rates.

One of my websites receives 30-40 daily visitors, or 900 monthly visitors. This website generates 1 to 2 web design leads per day. This is a 3% conversion rate, which I regard as a high conversion rate. Many other things convert at 1%. The point here is that small streams of traffic can still produce results, if they are well targeted.

Edit: as of August 25, 2011, this same page now generates a whopping 10-15 leads per day! This occurred after adding more articles to the website and improving its general appearance. I have been looking for ways to sell these leads to other companies.

I set up a script to forward these leads to one of my partners who runs his own web design company. I receive a reward of 20% from any signed web design project that resulted from these leads. While I operate my own web design company, I still work by myself, and it's difficult to process all leads by myself. However, sometimes I don't mind designing a website for someone who was referred to me by one of my past clients. Web design is something I do only occasionally. Most of my revenue comes from internet marketing, but it's nice to have alternative ways to make money.

How do I do all of this? By working with what I have. First identify what people who visit my websites want. And make it my job to provide it. I care about providing other people with value or services and this gives me an opportunity to make a lot of money with little traffic. When I came to conclusion that I should focus on "what I already have", my revenue has experienced a dramatic increase.

* * *

Don't tell readers explicitly how great your newsletter or site is. Statements like that usually hold no value to the reader. Instead, use that space to say something that would make the reader believe, make their own conclusion, that your newsletter is great. Think about your newsletter, website, or article as a portal through which you educate or illuminate the reader.

This can be compared to the way movies communicate to us. Movies use the screen and to display images that communicate to us. Our blogs and other content communicates by text, and sometimes by images, too. Stanley Kubrick, an American director has summarized this important element as follows:

The essence of dramatic form is to let an idea come over people without it being plainly stated. When you say something directly, it's simply not as potent as it is when you allow people to discover it for themselves.

Imagine if you were watching A Clockwork Orange, and every once in a while, Kubrick's voice would pause the movie and say something like "Well, isn't this just a great movie? Look at the way I used all these bright colors. This movie has the best philosophical concepts ever device by any director in a film. It's great. It's the best movie ever! I want you to tell your friends about it."

As you can see, obviously you want to avoid making such an impression on consumers of your content and let the reader understand what you are talking about by using creative writing methods.

Let's use Stan's advice and apply it to the way we write articles. And be much more effective at providing our readers with value!

Merely thinking, merely creating an idea, and merely making your idea work inside of your head has little to do with being successful in any business. Applying action to your ideas is the challenge. Thinking is something we all do naturally, even not consciously. Thinking is almost like our heartbeat. We can't control it. And it can skip beats too.

But unlike the heart, thinking doesn't have to be autonomous. We can train ourselves to think in certain ways by creating a mental structure to our thought process. It is exactly adopting a new way of thinking is the experiment that can potentially increase your productivity. Unlike you may believe, this structure of your thought process can never be achieved completely. It's not something someone either has or doesn't have. You can get closer to it, but the number of the new things you learn can increase every week, or even every day. These new things can reshape some of the elements of your existing thinking method. But you can add to it, shape it like a sculpture, and make it work for you. Even after 5 years I still continue to modify my own method, however, many of the things that have worked for me in the past remain the same and steadily contribute to my own productivity. I can't imagine writing this newsletter without a method.