marketplex.net

It’s 3 days into my project, I’ve sorted out domain registration and hosting, setup a WordPress blog and installed a few crucial plugins, registered on Twitter and signed up to a new service so I can get a steady stream of followers, added a few affiliate links and cloaked them using a script I put together myself and bashed out about 10 blog posts just to get things started.

I knocked together a quick box advert to an affiliate product (aff. link) I’m promoting, so now I also have a rudimentary sales funnel – just about the most basic type of funnel possible but it’s a start.

I created a vision statement so I can remember why it is I’m doing this at all.

I also signed up to Google and installed the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin on this site. It’s telling me I don’t have a whole lot of traffic yet, which is to be expected. So I need to start building some.

The two traditional ways to get traffic are to either pay for it using tools like AdWords or get it free from the search engines by using web site and page optimisation (SEO). Some of the newer methods focus on social media, Twitter, Facebook, etc, and I’m already doing a little bit of that.

Paying for traffic is way too risky at this stage, I’m not even entertaining the idea. I also have to hold down a day job so I’m not going to go crazy trying to optimise every page for the search engines. But there’s still another option open that won’t require a whole lot of my time that I can do on a daily basis without too much pain. In fact it should be fun if I approach it in the right way. The method is getting other web sites to link back to this one, back links.

Previously the task of getting quality back links, that is links from well established “authority” sites in your niche (or market), meant spending ages on third party blogs and forums providing top quality comments and trying to slip links in wherever you could. Or befriending the site owner and asking him to give you a link in a blogroll or other prominent spot. But there’s a WordPress plugin you can use to make this task a whole lot less painless and guarantee yourself a back link every time.

CommentLuv, by Andy Bailey, will, “show a link to the last post from the commenters blog by parsing the feed at their given URL when they leave a comment.” This, “rewards your readers and encourage more comments.”

Put another way, when you go to a blog that has CommentLuv enabled, you can make a comment and the plugin allows you to also submit one link from your own blog which will then be displayed beneath the comment you have made. Because the CommentLuv community expects and wants this to happen it becomes a lot easier to build your back links provided you are providing quality comments.

And that’s the real key here. Nobody wants spam on their blogs so there’s no point posting comments if they aren’t part of the natural discussion and don’t add value to it. Of course you should be targeting blogs in your niche so the subject matter should be interesting anyway.

One chore is finding blogs with the CommentLuv plugin enabled, but Andy Bailey has thought of that and provided a search engine on his site that will return results from all the CommentLuv enabled sites that have been active in the last 7 days. Clever chap.

So this is a no-brainer. I’ve downloaded and installed the plugin and I’ll be making a list of 10 to 12 CommentLuv blogs to follow on a regular basis and I’ll start commenting on each as part of my daily trawl for what’s happening in my market. I need to do the research anyway but now I’m going to get back links for my effort. Makes sense.

Visit http://comluv.com/ for more details.

Back links are almost always good and no matter what new trend or market revolution comes along we should still pay attention to the bread and butter work of building an online presence. However, the main thrust of my traffic getting efforts will centre on an entirely different and supposedly highly effective method which I’ll talk about in a later post.

One Response to “Getting Back Links for a Blog”