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Welcome to my latest series – Expert Briefs.

No, I won’t be showing the undies from Expert Marketers (although that would certainly be funny) – but I will be grabbing my friends who I respect and admire and will be asking them to give brief replies to your burning questions about internet marketing and online business success. (Get it? Briefs? Yes, I am easily amused.) ;)

I’ve been wanting to do this series for some time, and, thankfully, I have a great Virtual Assistant who is helping me to put this together or it may never have gotten done.

So, let’s jump in. Today’s topic is Link Building, specifically how to get one-way incoming links to your website or blog.

If you recall, I’ve posted a few blog posts about Link Building recently that you can go back and review if you’re wondering what all the fuss is about Link Building and why on earth it’s important.

The question I asked our experts today is:

“What is your favorite method for building incoming links
to your website or blog? Why?”

I only asked people who I know are actively link-building. Of course, I have plenty of other friends who use other methods of generating traffic, but this blog post is about one-way link building so these are the experts I chose to ask along with their replies.

Willie Crawford of SellMoreBigTicket.com says:

My favorite method is writing and distributing articles.  I’ve written over 1500.

The reason is that not only do I get lots of inbound links from some fairly high page-ranked sites, but the articles also actually bring me in visitors who have read my material and arrive at my site pre-sold on me.

Lynn Terry of ClickNewz.com says:

My favorite method of link-building is to get featured on blogs that reach my market. There are a couple of ways you can do that. You can write guests posts for those blogs, or offer to let the blogger interview you. Text interviews are best for creating relevant content to go along with your backlink, but audio interviews with a description and live link work well too.

With blog interviews, I email the blog owner and introduce myself (with credentials, basically selling myself as a good match for their audience). I give them the option to reply with 3-5 questions (or more if they like) on a topic related to their current theme. I then reply with the answers, creating a very nice blog post for them to publish.

If you have an affiliate program, you can offer to let them sign up as an affiliate so that they can earn commissions on the interview as well.

This is one of my favorite methods for 2 reasons:

1) Bloggers need content. It’s the one thing they are constantly searching for, or working on. You can step in and help them out, and help yourself out at the same time.

2) This is one of the BEST types of inbound links you can possibly get. You have control over the topic, so you get a relevant backlink from a related page. And you control the link, meaning you can deep link to an internal page on your site or blog – and use specific Anchor Text with that link.

Plus… it’s easy!

The trick is to make it highly relevant to their current theme of content, or to expand on a topic they recently blogged about. You just want to find a good tie-in that makes sense both for the blogger and for their readers.

Mark Mason of MasonWorld.com says:

Nicole — getting links is all about a tradeoff between effort, quality and quality.  Often, especially when people are just starting out, they will make the mistake of spending lots of time (or money) on low quality links.

For me, time is my most precious resource.  So, when I go after a link my efforts need to be highly leveraged.  That means that for my investment of time, I need to get lots of links or really great (powerful links).  The answer almost always lies in quality content.

For example, I can write one piece of quality content and syndicate it to multiple high quality article directories using automated tools.  This get’s me multiple quality backlinks in addition to whatever click-through traffic the article generates.

Or, I can write a great article for a guest response post on a high traffic blog like NicoleOnTheNet.com in exchange for a backlink from the article.  That get’s me a quality backlink and clickthrough traffic as well.

Either way, the key is great content out on the internet pointing back to my site.

Susanne Myers of EasyLinkLove.com says:

My favorite way to build links is to create what I like to call a link magnet. It’s a piece of REALLY GOOD content that you post freely on your website. This could be a report, an article, a list, even an audio file or a video. You want to give away some of your favorite stuff here.

Start by thinking about what your target audience really wants. You can also do some research by asking your current readers and visitors or using sites like Yahoo answer or forums in your market to get a feel for what your audience wants.

Spend some time creating exceptional content and post it to your site. Do some keyword research and optimize the page for those keywords so you can build some free search engine. Start promoting the content by blogging about it, mentioning it on twitter and other social media outlets. Tell our lists about it and always invite people to share the link to the content.

Monetize your link magnet by adding a link somewhere toward the end of the content for one of your products. It’s important not to be pushy here or people will be less likely to link to it.

Here are a few examples of good link magnets:

$40 Emergency Menu
This is on one of my own sites. The basic idea is a low cost emergency menu that people can turn to when grocery money is extremely low.

Online Success Podcasts by Nicole Dean
Nicole has recorded several hour long interviews with various experts in the Internet Marketing Field. She focuses on delivering high quality content and does an amazing job coaxing all kinds of useful information from her guests.

Article Marketing Directory List by Trish Lindemood
Lists make great link magnets since they provide a lot of good information in very condensed form.

Quick Extra Tip –

I always like to get the most mileage out of everything I do, especially link building. Don’t do this just for the sake of building links, take it a step further and reap even more rewards. An easy way to do this is to keep tabs on who is linking to this new page. Contact the owners of some of the best sites and see if you can collaborate even further.

And, here’s my 2 cents. I wrote this before reading the others just to make sure I wouldn’t let their ideas sway mine. :)

 

Nicole Dean of .. well, here! .. says:

My favorite method of building incoming links is simply sharing content. I know, it’s kind of a cheater answer, but let me finish here and you’ll see what I mean.

All of the most effective methods, in my opinion, revolve around sharing your own expertise. Let me demonstrate…

-> Article Marketing is simply sharing content.

-> Guest Blogging (or even hosting a kick-butt Blog Tour) is sharing content.

-> Video marketing (recording and posting videos to sites like YouTube) – again, is nothing more than sharing content.

-> Podcasts (being a guest on other people’s podcasts) – is simply sharing your expertise, again.

-> Doing quick interviews like this one – you’ll notice all of my experts are receiving links to their sites. Badda bing, badda boom! I’ll bet those are some of the easiest links they’ve gotten.

-> And, blog commenting works, too. Blog commenting means just leaving comments on blog posts like this one. (Hint, hint.) Although I honestly believe that it’s not the most effective method of generating incoming links, at least not compared to the methods outlined above, it’s still worth doing.

Of course, you can tie in social media and link to all of these sites where you’ve got your content to really boost your effectiveness. But, it all starts by doing what you’re already doing as a blogger – sharing your thoughts — just doing it on other websites.

In fact, that’s one of the biggest mistakes that I see online business owners make is keeping all of their content on their own sites and not sharing it on others.

How Can You Learn More about How to Get One-Way Links?

Again – Susanne is the queen link builder. If you want to learn the basics of Link Building, again, here’s here course  -> Beginner Link Building Course

Warmly,
Nicole Dean

PS. Please post your favorite method for building incoming links to your site below. :) Thank you!