Advertisement

First of all this isn’t a paid blog post. I am posting this because it’s one hell of a deal. Provident-direct.com is an FDIC-insured bank that offers an online banking savings account with 3.25% APY. Most normal banks have a very low interest rate, Wells Fargo (my bank) offers is at 0.05%. So you can see the benefit of using an online bank.

To get the 3.25% interest rate you must have at least $100 in your account. You can also make 5 transaction a month for free, after that they add on a $5 monthly fee, which isn’t bad at all. They are also FDIC-insured which means that your money is backed by the government if the bank goes out of business, which is something you should really consider with our current economy.

Signing up with them isn’t hard at all. You just have to fill out a few pages of personal info and then give them your current banking info so they can deposit a few small deposits into your account. Once you see them in your account you then confirm the deposits and then your ready to go. It total it took me 3 days to sign up.

High Yield Online Savings Accounts (Again, I am not making any money if you sign up with one of these banks)
Providentdirect = 3.25%
ING Direct = 2.50%
E-Trade = 3.01% (I know a few happy people using e-trade)

Provident-direct.com is a smaller bank, they only have $6.2 billion in assets (Wells Fargo has $622 billion in assets) but being a smaller bank isn’t a bad thing, and I am more then willing to try them out for the 3.25% interest rate.

If you don’t think Provident-direct.com is right for you then I would suggest checking out ING Direct. I have been with them for many years now and they have been pretty good, only problem with them is there interest rate is only at 2.50%.

If you know anymore good deals then please let us know. I am always looking for good deals

Advertisement

Happpy New Years everyone! This will be my last blog post of 2008!

I just made this tiny script to help me track my adwords conversions accurately. Up until this point I have been using a few html pages with the Adwords Conversion html code on it. But since I have over 15 different products per site my Cost per Conversion was off. So this script accurately tracks my cost per conversion.

The code is pretty simple. All you will be doing is sending the amount the product sold for through the paypal return feature. And then having a piece of code that will grab the amount and add it into the Adwords Conversion html code.

I’m using paypal for all of my e-commerce websites, its simple, reliable, and safe. Below would be a normal “Buy Now” button html code. But instead of using a basic /sold.php page I am using /sold.php?id=9.99. The 9.99 would be the cost of the product you are selling ($9.99 dollars).

(I took out the non-important fields on the paypal html below)

<form action=”https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr” method=”post”>
<input type=”hidden” name=”business” value=”email@domain.com”>
<input type=”hidden” name=”item_name” value=”Product Name”>
<input type=”hidden” name=”return” value=”http://www.domain.com/sold.php?id=9.99″>
<input type=”hidden” name=”cancel_return” value=”http://www.domain.com/cancel.php”>
<input type=”hidden” name=”currency_code” value=”USD”>
<input type=”hidden” name=”amount” value=”9.99″>
</form>

So now when the customer purchases the product from your website, they will then pay using paypal, and then once they get done paying then paypal will redirect them to your return page. Which would be http://www.domain.com/sold.php?id=9.99.

On the sold.php you will want to let your customer that you are happy that they ordered from you. You will also want to tell them important info about the product and/or shipping. And finally you will want to try and sell them some other stuff. So list some other product and give them a special discount for being a return customer. Maybe they just might order more from you.

Also on the sold.php you will want to put the code that will grab the 9.99 out of the url and add it into the Adwords Conversion html code. The code is very simple, basically all you need to do is find out if there is a variable in the url and if so grab it and do something with it.

So we will use isset to see if there is a variable. If so we will grab it using strip_tags(), then we will echo it onto the page. Very simple, take a look at the code below.

(But this in your body tags, make sure to edit and add your own Adwords Conversions tracking html code)

<?php

if (!isset($_GET['id'])) {
// you dont need anything here
} else {
$id = mysql_escape_string(strip_tags($_GET['id']));

?>
<script language=”JavaScript” type=”text/javascript”
<!–
var google_conversion_id = 1010101;
var google_conversion_language = “en_US”;
var google_conversion_format = “1″;
var google_conversion_color = “ffffff”;
var google_conversion_label = “1010101″;
if (<?php echo “$id”; ?>) {
var google_conversion_value = <?php echo “$id”; ?>;
}
//–>
</script>
<script language=”JavaScript” src=”http://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/conversion.js”>
</script>
<noscript>
<img height=”1″ width=”1″ border=”0″ src=”http://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/conversion/1010101/?value=<?php echo “$id”; ?>&label=7LUOCO_xdRDblMj9Aw&script=0″/>
</noscript>
<?php } ?>

Ok so let me explain the code a little. I used isset see if there is a variable in the url, if their is it will grab it, if their isn’t it won’t do anything. Now there are a few different ways to use isset, you can check them out here. In this case the variable would be 9.99 because the url is http://www.domain.com/sold.php?id=9.99. I then used strip_tags() to get the variable out of the url. And I also used mysql_escape_string() to be secure. Then all I do is echo the variable in the Google Adwords Conversion Tracking html code.

You can use this piece of code to make it easier for you to track conversions. Instead of making 15 different sold.php pages you just need to make one. Let me know if you have any questions.

Advertisement

I little over a month ago I made a ping script that will rpc ping a few sites. The script pings one deep link on each one of my sites daily. Giving me more traffic from the search engines, mostly helps with Yahoo (in my testing). I decided to offer a simpler version of my tool to all of you. If you look at the right hand side sidebar you will see the ping tool.

If you don’t know how pings work, basically a ping sends a small amount of data to test connectivity between two nodes. Services like weblogs.com, technorati.com, blogsearch.google.com, and lots other offer rpc pings to let the service know if you updated your website. Once you ping one of those sites it will hopefully send its spiders your way to check out your new content.

About a year and a half ago I was pinging technorati.com exclusively to get my very long tailed keywords ranked on my scraper sites. I was pinging technorati.com daily which was getting my sites ranked up in technorati.com’s blog search, which in return would rank me up in Google because I would have some valid backlinks from a trusted website (technorati.com). I am not sure if this would work anymore, but it worked great back in the day.

Anyways, I made a ping tool that will ping icerocket.com, api.my.yahoo.com, wasalive.com, moreover.com, feedburner.com, technorati.com, blogsearch.google.com, rpc.weblogs.com, and pingoat.com (pingoat.com actually works like pingomatic, it will ping another 5 or so sites). I will hopefully be adding another 5 or so ping sites later this week. But what I am really working towards is a free script that will help get your websites ranked. When I get some time I will have the script not only ping 17 sites, but it will also add your website to a few social bookmarks and a revolving sitemap. Which will be pimp.

So you may use this tool whenever you feel like it. I ask that you dont abuse it, I am tracking everything and I will ban your site from the script if you abuse it. Also make sure to only ping your site only once in a 24 hour period. If you over ping some of these sites they will ban your url from there index.

So why am I offering this seo tool for free? To gather email addys of course If you encounter any problems please let me know. Happy pingin.

Advertisement

Becoming a successful salesperson really depends on creating multiple revenue streams. How many times have we heard that old comparison to the doctor – he rakes in lots of cash when he’s working, but when he gets sick, there’s no income flowing in.

If you’re in Internet sales like so many of us are, then having the money flowing in while your “sick” or when your primary line isn’t doing as well is key to stability and long term success. In fact, any intelligent entrepreneur knows the secret to stable wealth generation is multiple streams of income.

Another key is having residual income – money that’s coming in when you aren’t working for it right then – it comes in while you’re asleep, on vacation, or working on other projects.

So Internet entrepreneurs who are looking to be successful in the long term would be well advised to consider looking into the T3leads, an interactive affiliate marketing network.

The T3 program is especially good for those who already have a website. You’re going to have ads on that page; people expect them, and you know you want to generate income from them. The T3 program allows you to get a commission from each of the leads generated by the T3 ads you place on your website.

If you don’t have a website, then there is a team at the T3leads site that can help you create a site, but the program is quicker and easier to implement if you do have a site.

The way the program works is through an affiliate (you or me, someone looking for additional revenue streams on the Internet) signing up with the program. The account is free to create, so you

After you sign up, then you immediately have access to a series of high-quality, professional advertisements that you can place on your site. These ads look great, and are created by marketers for a great look and feel, so you’ll be proud to have them on your site.

The ads T3leads offer are for the hottest services and the highest paying offers available on the Internet right now. The best offers are those that generate the most profit for the end processor, and therefore generate the most generous commission for you as an affiliate. Right now, these are financial services, auto purchasing services, and credit management services.

Once you place an ad on your site, you then use Google ads or pay per click advertising or some other method to promote your offers online. Customers are driven to your site by the link to the advertisement. Once they get to your site, they may see your other products and decide to stay a while and see what you have to offer.

Even if they don’t, they’ll probably fill out their information for the original offer that you’ve been promoting. The customer inserts their personal information into the online form and submits that information, which provides a lead.

T3 won’t pay for every lead submitted on the form, which only makes sense. There are plenty of automated form programs out there, and plenty of pranksters filling in bogus addresses. The T3lead program has a filter that checks for those kinds of leads and rejects them.

However, the quality leads are sold to companies offering the services you advertised through your ads, and then T3leads pays you a commission for sending that customer their way.

An advantage of this program is that it’s a simple program, and one that can work on the side of your primary business, or it can become your primary business. That’s good news for any Internet marketer.

They offer services that are in high demand, so it makes sense to put the ads on your site. Too many places offer services or products that no one is after, so you waste theh space on your site and the marketing money you put into promoting the advertisements. So the T3 program is better than a lot of other programs because it gives you instant profit potential.

With some programs, you’re not quite sure what kind of institution you’re sending your customers to deal with. But T3leads works with a huge network of established banks and other kinds of financial institutions, so you are guaranteed your commission, and your customers are guaranteed a legitimate business with which to work. That makes it a win – win for everyone.

The T3leads program also has a nice selection of promotional tools that they update constantly. We all know that you need fresh content to attract customers on the web, and T3leads provides that for its affiliates. I like that the ads can be posted to public sites or my own private sites; either generates a commission from every good lead.

Because of those high-quality promotional materials, the T3leads program has an excellent conversion rate. That’s important when you’re looking for an affiliate program. Why take up room on your website with ads that don’t generate leads and turn a profit for you? So the fresh, professional marketing materials are a real plus. They advertise a conversion rate of between 1:6 and 1:9; substantial by any standard.

Also, there is a forum where affiliates can ask technical questions – or any other kinds of questions – and get helpful posts as a response. They also have a forum with the answers to frequently asked questions, and a support team to give affiliate support any time of the day or night. They offer 24/7 support in three languages for all their affiliates.

One other feature that is great, particularly because it enhances the residual income aspect of the program is the referral program. You can earn up to 10 percent commission from all the revenue generated by any affiliate you send their way. Now that’s leveraging your assets.

Payments come every fifteen days, and if you build your income to the point that you are earning $1,000 a week through commissions, you can request weekly checks. That makes the whole process even more profitable for you, since you can put that money to work immediately.

It’s a good program, since you don’t have to generate a product or service to sell yourself, simply provide customers to the companies who do provide those services. That’s something most of the Internet business community can do well – market a service online.

Since the program does not resell leads, you’re not subjecting your customers to a barrage of unwanted contacts, but you are putting them in touch with services they want and are looking for, while giving yourself additional revenues streams and residual income to supplement your current online marketing efforts, or begin your online business.

Another real advantage of the T3leads system is the lifetime tracking technology they utilize on their site. With this program, any time customers come back and reorder, you will again get a commission from their purchase. Since customers tend to be loyal to companies that give them good service, this can become a really profitable feature of the program.

While the T3leads program may not be for everyone, anyone with an established website or who wants to become involved in Internet marketing would be well-served to give this high-profit program a look.

Advertisement

This is a paid post.

With all the emphasis on technology and innovations, the Internet is inherently still a text-driven media. You’ve got to know how to read to use it, and if you want to really profit from the Internet, you’ve got to know how to write well.

Sales is about grabbing a viewer’s attention, and well-written copy and headlines grab sales.

So a TechTecs, a new, value priced, Internet marketing course starts you off where it all begins – with the writing.

Rahail Salamat is a successful Internet entrepreneur, one of the guys pulling in tens of thousands monthly from well-marketed websites. He’s launching the TechTecs monthly program to help others avoid the long journey he had getting to the point of being successful.

After spending over $9,000 himself on various ebooks, guides, and courses about marketing and building businesses on the Internet, Rahail found that there was a lot of useless information out there.

He also realized that what would have helped him move toward success even more quickly was a mentor who could guide him along and let him know when he was making mistakes.

That’s why he’s set up his TechTecs program to show others how to build a successful online business, one step upon the next, and that’s also why he also provides a mentoring service for each person who signs up for his TechTecs.

Some potential customers may not like the idea that TechTecs is a monthly fee service rather than a one-time purchase of a single ebook or one online course. That does make it a program that may not work for everyone.

It’s a particularly good way to go, though, for people who are just starting out in the online marketing business, or for those who have a website that has never generated much traffic, and therefore hasn’t been very profitable.

For those people, Rahail’s real-time mentoring system is a great benefit. He actually has assignments for those who work with him, where he asks them to write a sales letter or a catchy headline, or to develop a product and a great product description.

Each participant emails Rahail their work, and they get nearly instant feedback about these specific assignments. They’ll have the benefit of his success to guide them as they attempt to build a great online site.

Subscribers complete assignments before they get the next group of downloads and instructions about building their businesses, so they don’t jump over important steps. They know they’re ready to move on to the next aspect of building a great business when they proceed to the next section of the program.

Included in his low monthly subscription, Rahail provides a group of courses, ebooks and exercises each month, exercises that he mentors and monitors to make sure the participants are learning what they need to learn and are making progress in growing their businesses.

With TechTecs, you do get multiple courses, exercises, ebooks, manuals or some combination of those things included in the subscription fee each month. It’s not just one or two items every month. So I do see this program as offering a very good value.

These are courses similar to those others sell individually, so if a person needs to brush up on only one aspect of an internet business, he or she might be well served by searching and finding a single course on the topic.

Still, with Rahail’s low subscription price, each month’s fee is much lower than even a single course or ebook would be from another provider. So it may be worth signing up for the monthly subscription to TechTecs, even if you only need a few of the courses.

In fact, you’ll likely find that you benefit by reviewing well-established aspects of your site and your marketing plan through following the TechTec program. A person with an established site can complete the exercises Rahail assigns using products and copy already implemented on the site.

Taking advantage of his personal mentoring and suggestions for improvements will very likely lead to upgrades at your site and increased profitability.

Another advantage I see to using the TechTecs service over searching for individual courses or manuals is that you do save time.
Creating and maintaining an online business is time consuming. You want to spend your time as efficiently as possible, and get to the point of making money as quickly as you can. The TechTec system does help you do this, because it gives you immediate access to a step-by-step program for building an Internet business, and has already cut out the useless information. If you waste your money on a course that isn’t any good, then you won’t be saving anything in the long run.

If you’re new to the Internet, it’s likely you don’t even know what steps to take first, or where you should go next. So a monthly program like TechTecs can really help give you focus and direction, and save you a lot of time.

Rahail doesn’t have pages of flowery introductions and long stories leading into his instructions and manuals. He just has the information. I think that’s great for most of us in the online business world. We know what we want, and we’re focused on getting it. We just need the tools for success. So I think it’s helpful that TechTec focuses on giving you the information straight up without making you wade through a bunch of irrelevant fluff first.

As I said, TechTecs starts with the copywriting and headline writing, which is the foundation of any good Internet marketing business. The exercises will help any entrepreneur, even seasoned professionals.

It’s amazing what an extra set of eyes can do for your writing, and with Rahail’s personal mentoring service, the copywriting courses, headling writing tools, mini-programs that help you find just the right words – all of those items will likely increase your revenue enough to more than cover the cost of a year’s subscription to TechTecs.

After the writing hints and tips, you’ll get guides and courses to help you tap into blogging markets, a variety of marketing mediums, reports and course to improve selling online, free software every month that helps you implement the principles you’ll be learning, information about the hottest niches in the current Internet climate, and fun weekly quizzes and exercises that really help you implement what you’re learning.
All the information in the world isn’t going to help if you don’t use it. That’s one of the differences between Rahail’s program and others; the exercises and personal mentoring that result in you taking action and making progress in growing your business.

TechTecs even makes developing your business into a game, as you complete projects and “compete” with others in the program for the “best” new product or “best” sales letter. Not only do you create great copy or marketing plans, but you can win actual cash prizes as well, a double bonus! So you actually could get paid to develop a successful Internet business.

That reminds me of the community aspect of the TechTecs program. I do like that Rahail encourages participation from all members of the community, and encourages forums and chatting so you can get ideas from all the other participants who are struggling, growing and learning just like you.

For a comprehensive, step-by-step program to build a successful Internet business, the TechTecs community offers a value and personal mentoring that is hard to find, and I think would be hard to beat. At the price, it’s certainly worth giving it a try.

Advertisement

Happy late Turkey Day, hope you all stuffed yourself with lots of good food yesterday. I didn’t have the traditional turkey dinner though, I had steak, mashed potatoes, rolls, and of course pumpkin pie. It was great. So if you read my kinda late-in-the-week blog post about Black Friday sales then you know that today I will be having some sales on BuyBlogComments, BuyBookmarks, and Buy Answer Links.

Now before I tell you the discount codes I want to do some bragging about the new tracking system. Its pretty awesome. Now when you make an order you will be automatically sent an email with a username and password, you can use that to login to the tracking page. From there you can track your order (or orders), edit your anchor texts and url, and later this week you will be able to make new orders using the account.

We are also now offering a customer satisfaction guarantee! If you don’t like the quality of your order or we don’t get your order done in a timely manner then you will be refunded.

Now for the fun part, for Black Friday I am offering 30% off. Which is pretty cheap. Simply use the discount code “blackfriday” on any of the pages below to get your discount.

http://www.buybookmarks.net/discount.php
http://www.buyblogcomments.com/discount.php
http://www.buyanswerslinks.com/discount.php

Advertisement

Black Friday is the day to be making that cash money. Black Friday is the day after thanks giving were everyone wakes up at like 4 am and starts their Christmas shopping off with countless sales going on at mostly all the stores in the US. Black Friday is one of my favorite days of the year. I don’t give a shit about the sales going on, I care about making them sales that day.

So do online shoppers act the same way as offline shoppers on black Friday? Absolutely! I’m not sure about the waking up at 4 am part to make there orders on the internet, but the customers spending masses amount of money on Black Friday online is a fact.

Below are my top 3 tips for other e-commerce store webmasters. To help increase sales and leads.

Tip #1 - Discounts
I have always know that people love sales, but when I made my discount script for Developer Hut, Inc. I didn’t realize how much of an impact discounts make to profits. People get stuff on sale because it is cheaper and they only have a certain amount of time to choose if they want to purchase the item or not. In my personal option its the short time frame that make people want to buy something more then the discounted price. Since most sales are for a limited time, people think that they can only get that product for that price during that certain amount of time. Now since you are giving the user only a certain amount of time to make there decision, and add that to the fact that the product is a little bit cheaper, that makes them want to purchase the product more then they would if the sale wasn’t going on.

I’ve tested this. Put one of your products on sale for 2-3 days and advertise it. Then wait 2 or 3 weeks. Then put the same product on sale for 2 to 3 weeks and watch what your customers do. My customers would buy the product a lot the first few days, then with the traffic staying the same the discount sales go down and down. Since the users see that the item has been on sale for a while, they don’t feel the rush to get the item.

Discounts are a great way to get new buyers. If you have a product you sell for $29 and you sell an average of 5 a day, and each transaction you make $15 (you would make $75 a day) . Would it be better to sell that product for $23 and 10 sell that day (you would make $80 that day)? Sure that is only a $5 increase, BUT now you have a higher probability to have your customers buy other products on your website. So you can turn that $80 profit into $125 profit if only 3 of those 10 customers purchase another product that sells for 15$ profit.

Math: $80 initial purchases + ($15 profit x 3 products) = $125 profit
You would have normally made $75 that day. Thats a 60% increase in sales. Good job! Now just imagine this on one of the biggest shopping day of the year, if not the biggest (I’m too lazy to look this little useless fact up, forgive me)

Tip #2 - Step Up Your Marketing

With all of those potential sales don’t you think that pumping up your marketing during that week will help increase your sales? Well you are correct hehe. While most people will be relaxing on thanks giving night, I will be marketing my e-com sites. I am sitting here looking at a list I have to do on Thursday night that will take me about 5-6 hours to get done, the list is my normal marketing to-do list which I usually do throughout the week. However this time I will cramming that whole to-do list into 1 day, plus adding a few more techniques that will increase my sales.

My suggestion is to do everything you normally do to get your sales, this time step it up. Your hard work will pay off on Thursday

Tip #3 - Mailing Lists

If you have an e-commerce website then you should be collecting emails. If you aren’t then I highly suggest you do it. You don’t have to use an costly program like aweber to capture your emails, just make a simple script and keep the emails in a database until you can use them.

Mailing lists are great because it keeps your customer up to date about your products, increases your sales, and help with your branding. I highly suggest writing up a nice little newsletter and sending it out on Thursday night. List all of your specials going on and also tell them why and how they can use them. Well, what I meant to say was, convince them that they need your product.

With these 3 tips you should increase your sales on Black Friday. If you discount your products, increase your marketing during the week, and send out them newsletter then you should be able to pull in some decent numbers that day. Good luck

Advertisement

This has really interested me, I have been watching these 3 company’s ever since fuel went sky high last July. When I went out to Cali last summer I was told that Dodge was reducing their BRAND NEW trucks to 50% below the listing price. Now all 3 want a $25 billion dollar bail out to survive.

GM and Dodge are in the most jeopardy. GM said publicly that it wont be able to get through this year without some help. Dodge currently has about 10 billion in assets (not cash) and is going through about $4-5 billion in cash every month. Add that with the fact that sales are down something like 35%, IMO there will not make it to 2009 without filing for bankruptcy or getting bought out (or merge whatever you call it). Maybe they should stop giving out bonuses! That really pisses me off, the fact that they are asking for a loan from me and you but they are still giving out bonuses…

Back to GM, I first thought that they where in the best shape because they have all those hybrid cars. But last month there sales went down 45% and now I guess they wont even make it though the year. GM and Chrysler are in talks of a merge, it looks like they even might merge by the end of the month?

Now with Ford, it appears that they will make it through the year just fine, infact they have reported that they will make it though the recession just fine. Even hiring more employees for the new 2009 F-series trucks (I want one!). I don’t really believe them just yet, but we should see soon how things turn out for Ford.

Now on to the controversy! Do you agree with the $25 billion dollar bail out that will be coming from you pocket, or to let them fight the struggle on there own? I was actually for the bail out at first, I mean why would the government let even one of the company’s fail? That would mean another 300,000 plus lost jobs. But as I’ve been hearing other peoples options I’m now I am leaning towards not bailing any of them out.

David Lithman recently replied to my Facebook status saying “I’m against all government bailouts. They govenment shouldn’t be putting their hands in and spending our tax dollars to protect corrupt and ill-run businesses. Let them go belly-up, and let the free market fix itself. New businesses will come along in time. Having our government spend billions of dollars to bailout publicly traded companies is a more horrible idea. Bailouts will only delay the inevitable. Let them die now, and rebuild for the future.

A quote from Senator Richard Shelby:

“Companies fail everyday and others take their place. I think this is a road we should not go down. They’re not building the right products,” he said. “They’ve got good workers but I don’t believe they’ve got good management. They don’t innovate. They’re a dinosaur in a sense.”

Also, I’m in favor of them just picked up our of Detroit and relocating to the midwest or south and deunionizing.”.

I actually agree with David on that, except for moving to the midwest/southwest. Why should we loan these company’s our hard earned money when they have built up a failing company? If one or all of these company’s were to fail then I think they should. Now they want help while they are giving out millions of dollars in bonuses.

I want to know what you guys think of this? Let me know in the comments on where you stand on this issue. Also please correct me if you noticed that I have bad info anywhere in my blog post.

EDIT: It looks like President Bush vetoed the bail out. About time he did something good

Advertisement

How to get link exchanges? Chris M asked this question on the last blog post comments. It’s is a good question because this is one of the easiest and simplest ways to gain links.

This method of getting backlinks is stupidly simple. All you have to do is email people asking for a link exchange (or at least that is all I do). You can also advertise your link exchange on the top webmaster forums to make getting your link exchanges even easier. Infact, just today I have done 7 link exchanges with other webmasters from sitepoint, they found me from this blog post, which was a free listing I posted a few days ago.

The best way to do a link exchange is to wait until your website has a page rank of some sort, even a page rank 1 will help. For some reason webmasters still look at your websites page rank when doing a link exchange, so its a lot easier for you when you wait a few months and get a valid page rank before you start asking people to link exchange. Lets be honest, would you link exchange (or even email the guy back) if you had a Page Rank 5 website and some guy emailed you asking to link exchange with his page rank 0 website? But what if their website was a page rank 4? Get the point?

Ok, so now your website has a page rank and you have a few hours to sending out a ton of emails asking for a link exchange. So what does the link exchange email look like? Lets move on…

Writing a link exchange email:
This is my method of getting link exchanges, there are tons of methods and you can use whichever one you want, but this is mine and has always worked well for me.

The first thing you will want to do is open up notebook and write your email out in that. Then you can keep that text file open and just copy and paste that into your email client to send to the other webmasters. You want to keep the email simple, all you need to do is ask for a link exchange and then tell the other webmaster your websites info and what he or she should do next to move forward with the link exchange. Here is what mine would look like:

———-

Hello,

I run domain.com. I am wanting to link exchange with your website. If you are interested then please add the below anchor text and url to your website and then email me back, once I see my link up I will add your link up ASAP.

Anchor: Chicken Sauce (example)
URL: chickensauce.blogspot.com (example)

———-

EDIT: You will actually get a better success rate if you add the others website up first before you send out the email. They will look at your website and see there link and more likely add your link up. This does take more time, and at the end of your link exchange campaign you will have to go in and delete all the websites that didn’t add your link up. Its up to you.

Simple huh? Now all you have to do is type that up once, save it in notepad, and then just copy and paste that into your email message body when your ready to send it. Now lets move onto finding some sites to link exchange with.

Finding websites to link exchange with:
This is simple. All I do is type in my websites niche in google followed by “link exchange” with the quotes. That will filter all websites that are specifically looking for other websites to link exchange with. Want an example? Well if your website is about making jello, then your niche/sites category would be cooking. So all you need to do is type this into google search - cooking “link exchange” - click here for the example.

As you can see there are a few websites to link exchange with. I’m on the 7th page and I am still seeing sites just asking to be link exchanged with.

Now its time ask all those people for a link exchange. So now all you need to do is email the webmaster with the email you already wrote earlier. You just have to do it on a mass scale. Try to send 20-30 emails out a day because you will probably only get a few emails back from those 20-30 emails. Somedays you only get 1 or 2 links, someday you might get 20 links. But whether you get 1 links or 20 links… you are still getting links aren’t you?

If you have any questions at all ask them in the comments, I will answer them to the best of my abilities

Advertisement

Ok so you have your website. Your site is 100% done (no under construction pages) and you’re ready to start your SEO link campaign. But before you start your seo link campaign you need to go over a few critical points before you start building up your backlinks.

Before you start your link campaign, make sure:

Your website is completely done
Whenever you start your seo marketing you want to make sure your website is 100% done. Google dosen’t like it when you have “coming soon” or “under construction” pages on your site. Here is the google webmaster guidelines explain how they treat coming soon pages.

Get your on-site SEO done
There is no reason why you would start your SEO link building unless you are fully happy with your onsite SEO. Spend the time working on your on-site SEO before you start working on your off-site SEO. This is not a guideline, its just common sense. You want to make sure the google spiders love your site as much as they EVERYTIME they visit your site. So make sure your 100% done with your on-site SEO.

Make a SEO plan, and follow it
Most successful businesses have a business plan. A business plan outlines everything the business will do to return a positive ROI. You should do the same so your seo link building campaign returns you a positive ROI, whether its a return-on-investment of your time or money. Even if your seo link building plan is simple, you still have a better chance to rank for your term then someone who just wakes up one day and decides to buy some random links off digitalpoint.

The best thing you can do is sit down and plan every aspect of gaining links. I usually say I will do 3 or 4 different link building methods in a certain amount of time, once that is done I will sit down and take a look at all the data. I will see what is working and what isn’t working for that site/key word. After that I will adjust my link building campaign to get the highest ROI for my time and money. For an example, this site I’m working on this week my plan is to write 100 blog comments, 200 dofollow bookmarks, and 500 directory submissions. After I do all that and then wait 2-3 weeks I will see where I am at with my rankings. I will look at all my data and see what I need to work on for that seo link campaign.

Starting your SEO Link Campaign
This is part one, the research of your link campaign. Right now you have your website, your keywords, and some money to spend (or lots and lots of time to use submitting to directory’s or writing blog comments ). Now you need to research your main competitors to see what you need to do better to beat them. You may only need to get a few links to beat your competitors, or you may need to get 100,000 backlinks, you will have to see using this method. You also need to know how well your competitors on-site SEO is done. Sometimes your competitor has 5,000 backlinks, but you may only need 500 backlinks to beat him for that term, the reason is because your competitors on-site SEO is crappy and your websites’ content (on-site SEO) is more relevant then your competitors. Duh… but how do we get all of this info?

Looking at your competitors link building methods
Getting your competitors link building methods is easy. But it does take time to see exactly what your competitors are doing, which you will easily build after researching your competitors backlinks. Now there are TONS of different ways to gain backlinks such as directory’s, paid links, blog comments, social bookmarks, blog comment spam, forum spamming, link exchanges, generating your own websites to use as relevant backlinks, etc, etc, etc. You need to look at your competitors list of backlinks and tell what exactly they are doing. Which is something you will easily learn how to do after do it a few times.

To view my competitors backlinks I use Yahoo search. Simply put “site:” before the url and it will show your that sites pages and inbound links. And for the most part Yahoo is pretty accurate. When you view a competitors inbound links you should be able to tell how the site is gaining its backlinks. If they are using directorys then you will see a lot of directorys on that page, if they are using paid links then you will see keep seeing the same site over and over again (if they are doing sitewide text links). Its the same with blog comments, social bookmarks, spamming, etc. You will be able to see how they are getting there links.

Examples:
Ok, so using the keyword “idaho payday loan” we will look at the top 2 results for that term and see how they got there links.

Site 1
www.mypaydayloan.com/idaho-payday-loans.htm
Backlinks: 3,188
Domain Created: 1999

At very first glance I can see they they did directory’s and link exchanges, I can see that because most of the first half of the links are link exchanges or directorys. But after about the first half of the page the links get shadier and shadier. I can see some websites where it appears that they have either purchased the links or made the website specifically to get backlinks to there website, this method is used all the time. Simply buy a few .infos and set up wordpress on them, then load them with some shitty content and give your main website a few links. Then find some inexpensive way to get those .infos backlinks, such as spamming. Those sites will gain backlinks, which in return gain your main site backlinks. Well it appears that this guy either did that or buy some links, one example is here.

It also appears that this guy spent a lot of time doing link exchanges. You can see one example here. To get these backlinks all you need to do is type in payday loans “link exchanges” (example) in google search and you find hundreds of sites that would love to link exchange with you. Only problem with that is the success rate is very low. I did this last week, I sent out 20 emails asking for a link exchange, its been about 1 week and only 3 people out of those 20 emails contacted me to link exchange. But the quality is pretty decent, most of the time its worth the time to put into link exchanging your website like this.

Ok so, the first page on Yahoo mostly has link exchanges and directory’s. Now lets skip a few pages in. I am still seeing a bunch of directory’s, link exchanges, and shady websites that look to be set up to link exchange with each other, the same way as an SEO empire. They also have a sitewide link on the web tracking site. I would consider that a purchased link, the way that link is camouflaged within the testimonial looks a lot like a purchased text link to me. They might be trying to trick google there.

Site 2
http://www.idahopaydayloans.com/
Backlinks: 93
Domain Created: 2004

At very first glance I can see it would be pretty easy to beat this site in the SERPS. Not only does the site only has 93 backlinks, but all those backlinks are pretty much from a handful of sites. Having 93 baclinks from different websites is way better then having 93 backlinks from 15 websites. Its physics really.

But thats not all, this site ranked up by using spamming! It looks like this guy is using comment spam to rank up. Its very beatable, just report them. You can see some examples of there spamming work here and here. This site was very easy to see there link building methods, all they are doing is spamming. The quality of those links are horrible, this site would be very easy to beat for that term “idaho payday loans”.

Conclusion
Above we looked at 2 very different link building methods. One site the guy was very seo white hat and did link exchanges, directory submissions, making his own SEO empire, and purchasing links to gain his well earned sport for that term. Although this guy does have quality backlinks, its very beatable.

The other guy used blog comment spam to rank up for his term. His site would be very very beatable for that term. I would say that all you need is about 50 quality links to beat that guy. But since his site is from 2004 it would take a little time to get the trust from google to get in the top 3.

Ok so now you know how to look at your competitors backlinks. My next blog post I will be going over what link building methods you should use for a certain term, because each term is different. If you have any questions please ask them in the blog comments below, I will answers them to the best of my abilities.