Link Building Basics

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Hello Geek Campers, and welcome to another podcast!

Today, in this video we are going to learn about link building basics.  This is not going to be one of those videos that skims the surface.  We’re going to dive in and step by step build back links for a real website during this video.  When we’re done you should understand the basic concepts of how to build links for your site.

In part two of this video we will talk about “no-follow” and “do-follow” links and also about how TrustRank and PageRank play a roles in your link building strategy.  But for this video, we will not take those into account.  It’s much more important that you learn what link building is and how it works before we move onto advanced topics – and how better to that then for me to actually walk you through building a link for an existing website.  I’ll also show you the results of how well my strategy worked at the end of this video.

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4 Tips Every Blogger Should Know

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Sometimes things just seem like they should be obvious.  You know, you’ve been doing something a certain way for weeks, months or even years, only to find out you’ve been doing it wrong all along.  You might say to yourself “Now that I know the right way, it seems so obvious!  Why didn’t I figure it out on my own?”

Well, today I am going to give you 4 blogging tips that might not seem so obvious until you know them:

1. Don’t try to be everything to everyone

In simpler terms Know Your Audience.   This may sound obvious at first, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen bloggers start a blog with no real direction and no real target audience.  It is very likely that the people who come here to learn about creating and growing an on-line business are not interested in fixing the transmission on their Ford Mustang!  You need to know your audience.  What are they after?

Think about a shopping mall for a minute.  You wouldn’t go to the pet store in order to look for a pair of running shoes would you?  For that matter, you wouldn’t go to Nine West (they sell high heeled shoes) to buy running shoes would you?  Finding and targeting your audience is very important if you want to succeed.

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Earning a Passive Income while Working

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You don’t have to quit your day job to earn a passive income.  In fact, I don’t recommend you do, until your home-based business is making enough money and consuming enough of your time that one of two things happens:

  1. You feel like you’ve made enough money that you don’t need to or want to continue working anymore.
  2. You’re home-based business is taking more of your time than you can handle working two jobs.

Where you need to be careful is with number two.  If you have more work on your side business than you can handle, you need to make sure it is a viable business venture before you quit your job.  If you can make $100K/yr working 40 hours a week at your job, quitting that for a home business that makes $60K/yr working 50 hours a week is a bad idea.

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Backlinking Strategy

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A question I get asked entirely too often is “What is your backlinking strategy?”  Usually someone will do a little Google research and figure out one of my sites has hundreds of quality backlinks.  They immediately think I have some sort of super secret, or some SEO script, or some dark magic voodoo spell.  The truth is, I do a lot of hard work.  A lot.  But that hard work is worth it in the end.

If you’re new to backlinking, let me quickly explain.  A backlink (sometimes referred to as an in-bound link or IBL) is a link from another website to your site.  Backlinks are the key to getting your site higher in the search rankings. The quality of the links is much more important the number of links.  See my video and article on TrustRank for more on why quality matters.  It’s also important to get links not just from quality sites, but also from higher PageRank sites (sites with more links to them).

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7 Common Email Marketing Mistakes

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We are all human, and we occasionally make mistakes.  Well, every except for me. Right?  All kidding aside, you might be surprised that some of this biggest email marketers are making some fairly silly mistakes and paying for them in lost sales, mass exodus of subscribers, and mad customers.

Hopefully, this guide will help you avoid making those mistakes in the first place, and keep your subscribers in sync and happy with your emails.

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Big Banana Little Banana

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Today I am going to teach you the concept of Big Banana Little Banana.

If you’re a project manager, this will likely be very natural for you and you’re probably already doing something very similar.  For developers this might also be familiar if you practice Agile.  This video is to help those of you who need to better manage the time you spend working on your on-line businesses and blogs.

Take this graph.  You only have so much time to spend each month on your business.  This is especially true if you work a full-time job and manage your online business at night.  The vertical bar is for work you need to accomplish while the horizontal bar is for the time you have to complete your mission.

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DoFollow Sites – The Best List!

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I get real tired of blogs and other websites claiming to have a list of DoFollow sites only to find out the list is a recirculated pile of steaming poo that’s inaccurate and ultimately of little value.

What is DoFollow?

Before we get started, I want to take a minute to explain what DoFollow is.  Many of our new Geek Campers might not know, and this is a very important concept.

Let’s start with NoFollow.  NoFollow is concept that search engines introduced to allow blog owners and webmasters to remove credit from a link.  Google and most other search engines learn to value a website based on how many links from other websites point to it.  This caused SPAMmers to start posting links all over the web to their sites to increase their own rankings.  Google quickly responded by asking blogs and any websites who allow automated posting (think comments and Wiki sites) to add rel=”nofollow” to all links the author or administrator did not add.  Google still recognizes a NoFollow link and follows it for the purposes of indexing, but does not count it towards your search rankings!

As of this writing, most blogs and websites follow this standard.  So posting a comment and linking your site on 500 blogs isn’t nearly as valuable for PageRank building as it once used to be.  They are still valuable as they help anchor text associations with your site, but they do not add to your PageRank count.

DoFollow is a slang term created by webmasters to let you know that they do not support the NoFollow standard and hence comment links on their websites do count towards PageRank.  In other words, DoFollow sites and blogs do not add rel=”nofollow” to their links and Google (and other search engines) will count the links!

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Increase Blog Traffic Faster

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Today I am going to talk about blog traffic over time.  I hope in this video I can help you visualize your traffic, and hopefully help you with some strategies to increase your blog traffic faster.

So let’s get started.

Typical blog growth looks something like this:  You start off very slow, and then begin commenting in forums and other blogs.  Slowly…  and then Google eventually starts picking up some of our keywords and we start to see some acceleration and decent increases after 7 or 8 months.

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5 Tips to Avoid SPAM

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I talk to people and companies all the time who are fighting SPAM.  Usually contact@somedomain.com, or similar address.  I’ve even seen some of these companies change their address to newcontact@somedomain.com in an attempt to stop the flood of SPAM.

But the truth is, if your email address is posted on the web, the SPAMmers are going to find it and you are going to get SPAM to it.  The good news is that there a few simple steps you can follow to slow down that flow of SPAM and just about anyone can implement them.

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TrustRank Explained

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Let’s imagine that you’re a search engine.  You have this vast array of website that you need to index.  Probably a good 10 percent of those sites contain highly valuable content and are very trustworthy sites.  Then there’s probably another 15 percent that contains really good content, followed by another 25 percent that contains OK content.

Then you have a huge percentage of sites.  Probably more than 50 percent that are just junk or SPAM.

The search engines had to come up with a way to devalue those SPAM sites.  We don’t want to show them in the index, and we certainly don’t want to value links from them – and that’s where TrustRank comes in.

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