Two years ago I wrote an article for MaxBlogPress about how I got 6000 visitors to my website, but now I am back with a new story. This article is about link building techniques I have used to get 10,000 visits a day to one website. After all, links directly or indirectly mean website traffic.
The best link building techniques all share one thing in common—they help other people. They may help other bloggers, they may help sponsorship companies, or they may help your readers directly. Helping other people is a painless way to get them to link to your site, so here are seven ways to help other people and get high-quality links out of the effort.
Link Building Techniques #1—Guest Posting
One of the most talked-about link building techniques is guest posting. Since everyone else talks about it, I won’t spend much time on it. In short, find another blogger in your niche and offer to write a post for his or her blog in return for a link back to your site.
It isn’t that simple, of course. Guest posting has become so popular that many blog operators receive dozens or hundreds of offers a week to guest post, so here are a few things you can do to make your offer stand out:
- Personalize your offer: mention details about the other person’s blog near the beginning of your offer. This helps prove you’re familiar with them and their audience, and that you’re not just an automated bot.
- Look for sites with roughly the same page rank as your site. Don’t target the major sites unless you run a major site.
- Consider posting insightful comments to the other person’s blog for a few weeks before you make your offer. If they recognize your name, they’re much more likely to accept your offer.
Guest posting is no joke for me, as many of you might know, as I have built entire websites on the back of this method alone!
Link Building Techniques #2—Link Baiting
If your blog is already popular in your niche—at least a little bit popular—you can attract links using the often-derided link bait technique.
Link bait is usually a controversial headline and blog post, and the best link bait is usually tied in to current news. Here’s a generic example headline:
“How ____ made the biggest mistake of his/her life.”
You can fill the blank in with any celebrity name when they come up in the news: Bill Gates, President Obama, Taylor Swift, etc.
Many, many more link bait headlines are possible, but you also have to follow through with a thoughtful article. You don’t have to be right—and your article can actually be more effective if you’re provably wrong—but you do need to be passionate.
When people read your controversial article, many will comment on your blog. Others will refute your argument on their own blogs—and link to you in the process.
Once you have your link bait article ready, a little onpage SEO would not go astray. This will help you get extra website traffic and more possibilities for link baiting.
Link baiting has three downsides:
- You need a fair number of readers to make it work. If nobody reads your link bait, nobody will link to it.
- You need to be good at writing controversial posts, and not everyone is.
- You also need an audience who will tolerate your shenanigans. If you post something your audience doesn’t care about, they may leave. Worse, if you take the side of something too controversial, such as advocating murder or rape or slavery, they almost certainly will leave—and never come back.
Link Building Techniques #3—Link Swapping
Link swapping or link trading has a bad name in the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) community thanks to a few sites who used to accept any and all link swaps. But link swaps are still a powerful link building technique—you just need to be careful about where you link.
If you find a site in the same niche as yours, your readers will probably be interested in it. Better yet (for you) the readers of that other site will probably be interested in your site. This is the perfect opportunity for a link swap.
Send an email to the other site and suggest that you each put a link to the other site on your Resources or Links page. Google will not penalize you for this—it knows you both rank for the same basic keywords, so you’re both related sites which have a high probability for linking to each other.
You can link to as many related sites as you want—and receive links from them—as long as you ensure those other sites provide quality content similar to your own site. I know people will be groaning about this tip but I think we all need to get back to basics and stop doing things just because everyone else is.
See my free link building tutorial for more information.
Link Building Techniques #4—Commenting
A few years ago someone got the idea that you could drive a lot of traffic to your site by commenting on other people’s blogs. But that was a lot of work, so many bloggers contracted out commenting on other people’s blogs.
The result was ridiculous—many of these contracted commenters were commenting on stuff they didn’t understand, so their comments were vague and uninteresting. If you look at any popular blog you’ll see a number of these worthless comments all linking back to some other blog.
There’s a better way. Don’t try to comment frequently or on many different blogs. Instead focus on writing useful comments. Why? Because many blog authors will update their posts when someone offers very useful information—and they attribute that information to you, usually with a link to your site. I do this on my sites so be sure to drop in and make an awesome comment.
Commenting in the comments section by itself can’t help you—most blogs post links in comments sections with a rel=nofollow tag which prevents indexing by search engines. But links in the blogs themselves are usually regular fully-indexed links—just what you need.
Don’t get me wrong though, nofollow links are still good for traffic, so never discount them.
Link Building Techniques #5—Contesting
One of my favorite ways to attract links is to offer free giveaways. Everyone loves free stuff and if you hold a contest, not only will you make your readers happy, but you’ll get other people linking to your site.
How you run your contest is up to you. You can ask companies to donate giveaways, you can purchase your own giveaways, you can give away your own used stuff (noting it as such), or you can give away your own ebooks. In general, people prefer to win physical high-value stuff, so the more of it you give away, the more links you’ll attract.
When you run a contest, you do want to make sure the word gets out. Email your fellow bloggers and put several announcements on your site before the contest ends so there’s plenty of opportunity for other people to link to you.
Link Building Techniques #6—Press Releases
Press releases sound like an old, pre-web system, and they are, but lots of people still use them to good effect. Consider the contesting technique discussed above. You can use a press release to announce your contest so the word gets out much more quickly and much more broadly than if you used simple email and blog posting.
Press releases are relatively expensive —about $100 per release— so you don’t want to use them often. But when you do use them, you can expect a flurry of responses.
Link Building Techniques #7—YouTube
Videos and video tutorials have been the hot thing on the Internet for several years now, and they show no signs of slowing down. You can take advantage of this trend by producing a few videos and including links back to your website with an offer of more information.
Videos don’t work for every niche, so this is something you want to experiment with before investing too much time. But you might also find that videos are, for now, one of the best link building techniques. My best secret about YouTube traffic is that it is targeted and converts well and that is exactly what every site owner needs.
To get 10,000 visits a day I use these seven simple link building tips and I post fresh quality content on a regular basis. It is definitely not rocket science so anyone in a medium to large size niche can achieve this amount of traffic.