Backlinks Make Money Online
I just knew that in writing a post late at night I was going to leave something out. I totally forgot some of the really important things about my experiment that I should really make clear so that we are all up to speed on what angle I am trying to work with this little experiment.
For starters, I want to see if a noob like me can get ranked for keywords of differing levels of difficulty. As I mentioned in my initial Make Money Online Experiment For Beginners post I am targeting three major keywords with three different sites. The first keyword is “debt” related and has massive competition. The second is a less competitive but still at the outside of my reach as a noob SEO, it will be a stretch for me to get to this one. And the last is a joke competition wise (an obscure brand of a particular type of home and garden product).
In terms of monetization, the first site could rake in hundreds of dollars a month because it is in a high traffic, high CPC niche. Adsense would be my money maker on this puppy. I would be happy with just getting a reasonable ranking for some of the longer tail terms and scrap out $5-10 a day. But the potential is there to make lots and lots of money if my experiment has stunning results (*fingers crossed, eyes closed*).
The second site is relatively weak in terms of monetization. The CPC is very low in terms of Adsense and I don’t think there will be much of an affiliate presence on this site - but you never know, people may want to buy things from me. It could happen. This site is really more about building something that interests me and fits in with the requirements of my experiment.
The third site has a small amount of traffic but the potential for huge affiliate sales and non-existent competition make the niche pretty appealing. It may pan out to earn me $0 ever, but it is probably a good idea to build it for the farm anyway.
Now that we rehashed the sites that I am going to be building (which I outlined in the first post), lets talk about the topic of this one: how to get backlinks.
Any good SEO knows that the way to making money online in a sustainable fashion is to create high quality content that users like … that just happens to get very targeted backlinks. Backlinks make money because they are the way search engines like Google know that you have content worth reading. They count each link to a site as a vote for the quality of the site and they use the anchor text to understand the topic of what the vote is for.
You gain rankings in the SERPS as more and more people/sites vote for your site by giving it the anchors that you want to rank for.
But you probably know that already.
My Make Money Online Experiment For Beginners Backlink Plan
Because backlinks are so important I am not going to be leaving much of it to chance. I am going to write quality, original content on each of the three blogs and I am going to work at getting this high quality, original content out to the internet using public. I will achieve this goal by using the following tools of the trade:
- Submissions to Blog Carnivals - These are mystical online events where site owners link liberally to other sites who want their article to be linked to. Not ever niche has a corresponding carnival (for example, my first two site have carnivals that they can fit into while the third does not), but I long for a day when every niche will. Carnivals are really useful in getting anchored backlinks from authority sites in your niche for free and have already gotten my really competitive site in the top 10 on Google for my sites name and I just started the site a few days ago.
- Submissions to Article Directories - This is yet another way to get backlinks to your site of your choosing. You get to write the content. You get to decide which category it goes in. You get to decide which page you link to and what the anchor is. These aren’t always the highest quality links, but a link is a link is a link and these types of links are good for targeting long tails and mixing up the link profile.
- Submissions to Web Directories - What can be said about Article Directories can also be said about web directories. These can possibily be more valuable than articles, but I certainly haven’t found a really good one that has let any of my sites in for free. A lot of good web directories cost money to join so I won’t be using any of those since this experiment is designed to see if you can make money online for free.
- Using Griz’s Niche Support Page - A great, free resource for those looking for like minded webmasters in niches that you are working too. I can personally atest to finding a couple dozen of backlinks on this page and I have not used it nearly as much as I should be.
- Active Commenting - Oh, the time consuming act of finding dofollow blogs to comment on! How I rue you! But this is a tactic that does provide some results, and every little bit is going to help when you are a noob and need to get links that look natural and legit. Too legit to quit, yea yea.
- Hub/Lens Writing - Again, a free resources to build backlinks with. They aren’t the greatest resource in the world but they seem like they work decently enough.
- Guest Posting - This is the ultimate in link building because you can get on an authority blog and get the anchor text and the link destination that you are looking for. I doubt I will get too many of these, but I am certainly looking for them.
For now, I am just going to be using Carnivals, Article Directories, and Commenting to get some mix in my two sites link profiles (there are three sites in the experiment, but the third site is going to see how high I can rank for the term I am targeting without any link building). I’m hoping this make money online experiment turns out well.