Gadooney.com

Yesterday we covered using ezine articles to start building links to your sites once you’re getting some traction getting indexed in search engines, so today we’re going to look at another good way to start building incoming links to your sites, which involves using social bookmarking sites to full effect.

To recap slightly, when I launch new sites I tend to look at the launch as basically a two-stage process. The first part is, for lack of a better term, the throw-content-on-the-wall-and-see-what sticks phase, where I’ll start up a bunch of sites, post lots of content to them, and not worry about much else. I try not to limit myself or overanalyze things. Since it typically takes months for new sites to get listed in search engines, I don’t worry too much about anything other than getting content up. You still need to pick good niches and subjects for sites, which stand a good chance to be profitable for you, and you still need to optimize the structure and layout of your sites, but I don’t usually chase links and traffic in the first stage.

Once I start to get some love from the search engines, then I start to get serious about the second stage, which is building up the links that point to your site. Some people argue that links are important to get your content fully indexed in the first place, which is true, but personally I’ve found it much easier to build incoming links once I have a goodly amount of content up. It also helps me weed out some clunker sites, as far as ideas I try that turn out to be difficult in practice, so by waiting until they either get some search engine traffic on their own, unaided, I avoid wasting time building incoming links to sites that turn out to not be the best idea in practice, as far as getting traffic and making money.

We’ve touched on social bookmarking sites before when discussing traffic sources, but we haven’t really talked about using them to build quality inbound links to your sites. The idea is really simple and doesn’t need much explaining. When a page of yours gets bookmarked at Digg or del.icio.us or any other social bookmarking site, an incoming link to your affiliate site is created. So completely aside from the chance that it might send traffic to your site, each page of yours that is bookmarked on social bookmarking sites create an incoming link to your site.

Not all incoming links are created equal, as some social bookmarking sites are configured to not pass PageRank to your site (this basically means that not all links to your pages on social bookmarking sites help your page get a boost in search engine results), but pretty much any link to your site is a good thing.

So how do we get links to our pages on social bookmarking sites? Well, one obvious way is to write lots of great content that people are inclined to bookmark. For most affiliate sites, though, that’s a bit hard. It’s also kind of a chicken/egg conundrum, as you need lots of traffic for someone to be inclined to bookmark your page somewhere (since a relatively small number of surfers are active social bookmarkers), and most sites don’t have that kind of traffic at the beginning. It’s also difficult as affiliate content can be rather shilly at times, and not exactly the meatiest of content that someone will bookmark. While you can incorporate easy buttons and links on your pages that make it super easy for users to bookmark the page to various sites, no matter how easy you make it you still need traffic.
Instead of just sitting there, hoping and praying that people bookmark your content, you can pursue a more active role, albeit a slightly sneaky one. Register an account at social bookmarking sites and bookmark your pages yourself. Yeah, I know, it kind of undercuts the higher-minded ideals that such sites are based on, but, umm, it works. I’m not saying that everyone should run out and do this or any other slightly sleazy technique I might cover here, I’m just giving you some options.

So you’d basically create accounts at all of the social bookmarking sites, log-in as a user, and bookmark your affiliate pages/sites that you’d like to generate links to. Pretty simple and effective, but it’s also rather time consuming, as you need to create accounts at each site, manage your log-in/passwords at each site, and track which pages you’ve submitted where, etc.

You can extend the above idea one step further, and use automation to generate even more backlinks from social bookmarking sites.  This is verging into black-hat territory, as far as outright manipulation of various systems to artifically boost your pages in search engine results, so be forewarned. One tool to automate the social bookmarking posting process is Bookmarking Demon, which not only automatically creates accounts for you at many different social bookmarking sites, but has the ability to store your login/password information, so that you simply enter the URL and keywords for the page you want to submit, hit go, and the software automatically posts your page to many different sites.

Bookmarking Demon is far from cheap, but I’ve been using it for a awhile and it’s been well worth the expense. For a free alternative to simultaneously post pages to multiple social bookmarking sites (although it has many fewer features and functionality), you can try also OnlyWire.

Again, I fully understand that this technique will not be everyone’s cup o’ tea. Like I said, just throwing things out there, and the choice is up to you as far as how aggressively you want to pursue promoting your sites, generating links and traffics, and any other number of affiliate schemings that go on to try to make money online.