A lot of people understand the part about creating a website with content people are searching for however, to get people to find your content you need backlinks which are ways people link back to your content and not only can you get traffic from good backlinks but in the realm of SEO you want it to help make Google rank your site higher. What does google do with a backlink? Well, if I link to my website using this anchor text passive income using SEO than that gives an indication to google that my website should be ranked higher for passive income using SEO.
Also, the anchor text of links from your own website to other pages is also very important. When writing an article that is relevant to other pieces of content on your website make sure to link to them!
Brief warning for those who think backlinks are everything and content does not matter:
Having good content on your website is also very important to get on the first pages of google and to stay there. You want your content to be unique which means not copied from other websites (rewriting is ok but when I rewrite I try to pull information off 2-3 websites at least to have it well done and informative). Also, if you do not have good content and you reach the first page of Google, people (like me) can report you for having shitty content and you will have your site taken off the search engine results for that keyword or simply banned, trust me, I’ve seen it happen to some of my competitors using automated tools to scrape content and “spin it” (a term I will explain later in this post) and their pages were hard to read, they did not last long.
Back to my backlink strategy:
Importance of anchor text variations:
To start off with, if your website is new you do not want to create too many backlinks to your website in the first 2-3 months. Some people will use automated tools to send hundreds of links directly to their website but this is rarely a good idea. Also, you want to vary the anchor text you use to link to a page. In my experience, when I tried ranking pages (especially those with medium + competition) using only 1 anchor text it took me a much longer time to start ranking and see my page appear on the first 3 pages of Google. Ideally, when creating a page you want to be targeting 2-4+ keywords. I would also mention each of these keywords I have a page on one of my bigger website that targets around 6+ keywords that separately are not supposed to give me more than 10k searches a month but combined I get about 30k searches a month (I’m ranking #1 for a few, some of the others I am #2-5 currently).
The first 2 months of life of your new website:
You want to be doing part #1 to #3 of my backlink picture that I posted above. I will explain these in detail here.
#1 Article directories
You want to ideally submit and article to every article directory in this list starting with ezine articles and buzzle. Both of these require unique articles however in the case of ezine articles you can submit an article from your website to them. But, DO NOT DO THIS!!! Especially on a new website that recently got indexed because ezine has years of authority ahead of you and their content will then outrank the content on your own website! It can add more difficulty than it is worth. Simply make 1 new article for ezine and 1 for buzzle. Than, once these 2 are accepted you want to send the same 2 articles to the other article services below. Ideally, you want to change at least the title and possibly also the resource box. Something what I also often do is when I re-use my ezine article I will have 1 anchor text back to the unique ezine article or buzzle article that I first submitted that article to, and another link ot my website. This is basically to strengthen even more the initial article.
- EzineArticles (2 backlinks in ressource box allowed)
- GoArticles (3 backlinks in total allowed)
- ArticleBlast (2 backlinks anywhere)
- Snipsly (any number of backlinks allowed, I would not do more than 2-3)
- Articles Factory (3 backlinks in total allowed)
You can find more article directories but these are the only ones I would submit to manually. In my experience they get indexed without any effort hence why I choose them for initial link building.
#2 Web 2.0 sites
Infobarrel specifically requests unique articles but hubpages and squidoo do not. However, I usually still use a unique article for these 2 services because I find it gives me more “quality” points on those platforms. However, you might just prefer to just re-use your infobarrel articles. In my experience, I really dislike Squidoo mostly because it seems like my lens take more trouble to get published than other websites and also they seem to be harder to index. I sometimes make one but sometimes I skip it, especially if I already made one for a website since additional backlinks from the same source are worth less, and a Squidoo link is already not worth much for the time investment…
Some people use the following free blogs to also create pages linking to their website.
On the subject of web 2.0’s, I will mention a tool that makes it much easier to create multiple somewhat unique articles off an initial one. This tool is called The Best Spinner (TBS) and it makes your life a lot easier to spin articles. If you are new to spinning articles, it basically mean that in a sentence such as “Financial {advice|guidance} to {create|make} money” TBS can make multiple variations such as
Financial advice to create money
Financial guidance to make money
Financial advice to create money
Of course, adding this spin syntax is very time consuming which is why you want to use TBS as illustrated on the pictures to the right and do a replaces with everyone’s favorite. I put a maximum of 3 synonyms because it makes it easier to re-read your articles after and make sure it is still readable (very important when submitting the spun articles that will results off these to other article directories or blogs). If it does not add enough synonyms you can add some more yourself manually. When you want “spun” articles to submit to a directory, just click “spun article” and it will give you an example. The best spinner has a 7 day trial for $7 so that should give you a good idea if you feel it can help you or not.
Personally, I find that if you want these to be worthwhile you have to put unique articles (so they do not get deleted, especially if made with an automation tool) or a highly spun article with some quality. You also might have to do backlinks to some of these properties for them to get indexed. I usually do not do this step for most keywords I rank for unless I feel I could use the extra help. If you do use them, make sure you do some backlinks to them using article directories or some of the services that I will mention in step #4. I also post more than one article on these if I do use them.
Here is a series of videos on how I use TBS for those who want to see how I use it video style.
#3 Guest Posts
Article marketing is great but additional backlinks from the same website carry less and less weight. (100 websites linking to you > 100 articles from the same directory linking to you)
Guest posts are basically when you ask a blog if you can write a piece of content for them in exchange for 1-3 (or whatever) links back to your personal website. For big blogs this is useful to gain traffic and share awareness of other big blogs out there. For someone starting out a website, you simply want to use guest posting as a way to get quality links back to your website from a diverse range of websites. You can either search for people in your niche on google and email the webmasters if you can post articles for them or use postrunner which comes with your keyword academy membership that I mentioned in my keyword research post since their membership also includes niche refinery and a lot of good SEO/monetization knowledge. Postrunner is basically a service where you can submit your website ( if you choose to) to a network and many other people doing internet marketing will send you articles. Whether you submit a site to this service is your choice but even if you do not, you currently have access to hundreds of websites to post unique articles to. DO NOT put spun articles on this service, this is against the TOS. The goal of postrunner (as TKA will explain quickly) is to get a diverse range of somewhat medium quality backlinks.
#4 Article/blog Networks that will create many backlinks for you
Now, these services during the first 2 months if you use them should only be used on your free blogs and your article submissions. You should use anchor text that is similar to the ones you are planning to use to link to your website. Some recommend to use the exact same one but i think that gets discounted by google as spammy linkbuilding. My goal is to make these blogs/article gain some authority with these links and to make sure they are indexed by google. If you use them on your new websites during the first 2 months, make sure you heavily limit the distribution of these articles to 5-15 a day.
Ok, here are the services you want to use for automated large scale linkbuikding. Their are many that are shitty that i have tried over the months which will also get reviewed over time to warn you but these are the ones that by themselves can help your rankings a lot ( which is how i test them, by seeing if an individual service can help my keywords rank without any external help). Together, they are lethal. So lethal that, as I said, you do not want to heavily use them (if at all) on your websites in the first 2 months.
#1 Article Ranks (AR)
Why first? Because they will distribute one of your articles for only $2 per article. This is useful as the first service to try out because most services force you to have a monthly fee and while they are worth the cost, you won’t even be using them at “full strength” for the first 2-4 months. AR basically allows you to submit an article with spin syntax that you create using the best spinner to a category specific to your niche and it will distribute spun versions of this article to many other websites in it’s network (you can include yours in it if you want). Also, unlike some other services and the default the best spinner syntax, you want to use [ | ] syntax and not { | } . To quickly change this just copy your article in Microsoft word and do a replace all { with [ and } with ]. Or select the top arrow key in TBS and do export to clipboard spin syntax which is [ | ].
Oh and, when you are ready to distribute more than 20 articles a month or more, just upgrade to their $40/month service and you will have unlimited articles you can submit!
#2 Article Marketing Robot (AMR)
AMR is a software that will submit your article to thousands of article directories. I have been using it for over a year and it’s probably one of my top 3 best investments I made for link building, it still works really well :). For more information check my article marketing robot review. If you have a website under 3 months old I would schedule the submissions to under 30 per 24 hours (half of those or more will fail btw, that’s normal…). Currently I usually run it at 100 per 24 hours. This is because I do not want my link to suddenly get a huge increase in backlinks and then it all drops off, it usually does not help my rankings at all.
You use AMR very clsoe to how you would submit your article to article directories besides that you put an article with spin syntax using TBS and AMR will send all the article directories a different version. I also like to give it 2 levels of spinning for the title as I explain below:
Example of a title spin that I would do for AMR
title 1: You need money to make money, so read this article
title 2: Financial advice to make money
title 3: Article on finances and the top 5 ways to make money
Then I use the best synonyms replacement to get:
titles 1: You {need|require|want|will need} money to make money, so read this {article|write-up}
title 2: Financial {advice|guidance} to make money
title 3: {Article|Write-up} on finances {and the|and also the|as well as the|along with the} top 5 {ways to|methods to} make money
Usually I will manually add more spin syntax and combine them in one big spin to get this:
Title to generate many articles from : {You {need|require|want|will need} money to make money, so read this {article|write-up}|Financial {advice|guidance} to make money|{Article|Write-up} on finances {and the|and also the|as well as the|along with the} top 5 {ways to|methods to} make money}
For more information, I did a blog post with videos on how to use TBS
So, combining all these 4 steps and using the best spinner to get the most out of your articles can be a very efficient way to get backlinks. It has worked for me and many others!
If you have any questions ask away!
Alex,
When you are using AMR, how long does it take to see the pingbacks or trackbacks in your blogs comment area? I installed that plugin, pingback power but from all the submissions I did with AMR so far, I have not see any. Is there some type of setting in wp that needs to be done?
Thanks!
You should start seeing some very quickly. Websites that have an approval process will of course take longer.
And as I mentioned in a post early this month, you have to disable wp captcha, it has a bug and it also prevents pingbacks :(. So I use akismet now to prevent spam.
Great post Will surely apply your ideas on my blog and see how it goes 🙂
Awesome site guys. I’ve seen lots of backlink plans and this is solid and easy to implement. Curious if you’ve used UAW instead of AMR?
I use AMR instead of UAW nowadays, mostly because of the one time payment. UAW is quite expensive…. I’ll update the guide a bit with some of the current services I use soon. It won’t change much but ya UAW has been replaced a while ago.
Funny for me to come across your comment, Im at the decision between AMR or UAW to set up my “Cloud Cover” sort of speak. Forget who used that SEO term but its essentially lots of naked links and related words or click here type words as anchor text. I have used both before. Im a bit crazy when it comes to spinning articles because I want them very unique, but UAW wont support the way I spin so im limited to their footprint leaving paragraph spin (or sentence spin but paragraph structure remains consistent as well as link structure).
And the down side of AMR as I just noticed is that nearly all the links created with AMR are no longer live. I had done some submissions about 5 months back. Immediately after my submission were though I loaded the Live Links and build back links to them. There was 700 Live Links then. Today, there are less than 30 Live.
Whats your take on this Alex?
I just dropped UAW because at this point I find other networks better and UAW is one of the most expensive ones. As for AMR links going down, that kinda happens with everything really. Even “higher” quality networks like BMR lose a lot of their links I find and honestly I would rather have something like AMr because it does not take that much effort to create all those backlinks again.
I pay a guy on fiver to use AMR for me. That stuff is outta my IQ range =)
Hi Guys i am thinking of useing myartcilenetworks
as i am look for more have you guys tried them before ?????
Currently i use amr, article ranks, samauri artciles
Not want to try ezarticles as you say you would not use them on your main blogs which is what i want to do
Many thanks
nonno. I WOULD use ezarticle backlinks on my main blogs. I would just not allow them to post other people’s posts on my main blogs. But, I allow this on 20+ domains so far and NONE of them got any negative impact (in fact it seems to help and adds more idnexed content to your blogs over time). Basically it’s a “just in case” one day Google does something to that network allowing articles (has not happened so far, I’ve been using this entwork since 2010).
I did try my article network… It was ok results… I recommend one month at most and to “use up” the network but only after you used up other ones which are much better (the ones you are currently using fall in this category, so does ezarticle)
Hi Alex
I see you use 2 EzineArticles for quick ranking which i understand
what do you think of the approch people use of useing stacks & stacks of article links from EzineArticles for the same site
Do you rate this idea or is it a bit old hat ?
Andrew
I do not do it because it has diminishing returns. I try to maximize my time. I do those 2 articles also because either way sooner or later I will need to use them for distribution networks (once I add spin syntax).
I just want to thank you guys, hehe, Im an RSD member too, but I was super excited when I saw 0.86$ on my google adsense..Even though that’s like nothing compared to you guys, it got me going and …got me thinking I can make money doing this 🙂 How long did it take for you to make enough money that you could live off seo alone?
About 8 months for me… I think a year is a better average. It really depends on how much time you put into this. I was working on this almost full time (despite going to school or summer jobs)