I submitted an article to a few places and thought that was enough, but looking over my stats I was finding very few hits from such sources. I dropped the issue for months and tossed the notion into the “well, it sounded good on paper” pile. Then I had an epithany!
People are not reading my articles because they don’t know it’s there, so I set about changing that.
Bite your own
linkbait:
I went back and Dugg the article, which in turn got a few
more Diggs. Then I stumbled the article, which in turn got another couple
stumbles. I then joined a few forums and started threads in regards to the
article. I quoted the “fair use” ten percent and then linked to the article for
more information.
My article is now a PR2 and I get at least a hit or two from it daily, so I feel the extra 30 minutes or so it took to socially promote it was well worth the time.
The buddy System:
My blog was not doing all that hot, so I did the above
techniques and it helped some, but I wanted more. I sent a few emails to the
owners of related blogs and worked out a system of mutual promotion. I wrote a
long article for my own blog, as did one of the other blog owners. These
entries were on different topics. We then both wrote smaller entries on each
others longer entries and linked to the larger one as a source of information.
We both enjoyed a short jump in cross traffic.
Promoting friends:
I did a few link exchanges when I first started one of my
pages and I swear I was sending more people to the other sites then they were
sending to me (though that’s speculation). I wanted to turn those tables so I
took the ideas from my article promotion and stumbled the pages that had my
links. Of course this works best if you are not on a ‘link list’ type of page,
as if anyone stumbles into one of those will just stumble again. I did find
that it worked at least in part for homepage links. This method has another
perk, it creates links to pages where your links are on, which in turn can help
their PR, which can indirectly effect yours.
Driving one way
roads:
The same method as promoting your reciprocal links can also
help for the one way links to your page. One way links happen naturally, so
occasionally check Yahoo (site explorer) for incoming links and give those
pages a stumble. If they are on a blog or a nicely written forum post, then you
could also get away with Digg or another social bookmarking tool.
Take a trip to
Geocities:
Now and then when I’m looking for something Geocities will
pop up and while I rarely click into such pages now and then I will find myself
there saying to myself “Wow, this is nice”. I’m now the proud owner of several ‘free
home page’ accounts at various locations. Geocities, GooglePages, AngelFire,
etc. While these do little for me in the way of PR, they have given a little
bit of traffic and a handful of free backlinks.
Be a part of your Community:
Every Niche out there has a community. Most of the community
hangs out in related forums. Join these forums and be an active member.
However, don’t join to just get your links out, as you’ll be labeled a spammer
and banned. Rather put your site in your sig, post in relevant threads, be
helpful, and in a few weeks add your site to any resource threads that happen
to be around. You can read more tips on this method here: 20 Steps to Forum Link Building
With these six simple tips you should find yourself with a nice collection of links that point to your site. If the tips are done correctly then you could also find yourself with better SERP, higher Page Rank, and a fair amount of Organic Traffic…all of which will likely end up causing a circular motion that keeps your site rising in all avenues of site promotion.
Happy linking!