Today, we are going to address some of the common reasons site owners/manager might resist linking to your site.

Website Traffic is the lifeblood of any internet site. If you sell the greatest widgets in the world, and yet no one comes into your ’store’, you will starve. 

So….

When you have visitors coming to your site, you covet them and appreciate them because they could have gone to a million other sites.

What you just read is true and is the mindset of most website owners and managers.

So now, here you come asking for an Inbound Link…

Let’s explore six common reasons why a site owner/manager may refuse the link. This list is far from exhaustive.

Site owners/managers are very busy
Site owners/managers are extremely busy people – running a successful site takes a lot of time and effort to properly serve their visitor base.

Building traffic is hard work, why would they send it to you?
Site owners/managers work very, very hard attracting targeted visitors to their site. By virtue of linking to your site, they are sending their traffic away to you. There has to be some strong, compelling reason for them to do this.

You are a direct competitor
If both you and the site you are seeking a link from are in the exact same business – say of selling high quality, raw pet food, what is the incentive for the other site to send his potential customers to you?

Lack of relevancy
If you are selling an online music theory course and the site you are seeking a link from is selling scrap booking supplies, how would connecting those two sites by a link be of benefit?

Unprofessional site
In our current world of tools and wizards a-plenty which allow non-technical people to create professional looking sites (many available for FREE), there is no excuse for a cheap cheesy looking site. A book is judged by its cover. If your site is unprofessional, you are shooting yourself in the foot.

Low quality content
If your site content is shallow, poorly written, full of typos, etc., why would a site manager/owner endanger his reputation by linking to you?

In order to crack this nut, we are going to have stretch ourselves a bit and think about the real benefits of the link relationship to the other site – putting ourselves in ‘his’ shoes. As you can see from the six barriers listed above, the deck is already stacked against you. Take heart though, this nut can be cracked.  Next time we are going to look at ‘Blackhat’ and ‘Whitehat’ linking methods and a foundational level.

Till then…

Your site pages are judged by search engines in two primary ways. 

First, by the number of Inbound Links from other relevant sites and second, by the page’s optimization. 

If your site pages have a ton of inbound links and are optimized properly, you won’t be able to beat away the FREE traffic.  Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc will drive it relentlessly to your door. 

Today, we are going to talk about obtaining Inbound Links.

Obtaining Inbound Links is a challenging part of this business, but they are really crucial for your success.

What is an Inbound Link you ask?

So we can avoid confusion, let’s set up some imagery.  We have two sites in our example – "you.com" and "them.com."

"YOU.COM" is our site/blog
"THEM.COM" is their site/blog

If THEM.COM has a link on their site/blog to YOU.COM, from YOU.COM’s perspective, that is called an Inbound Link.  And from THEM.COM’s perspective, that is called an Outbound Link.

THEM.COM  —–>  YOU.COM

For THEM.COM, it’s and Outbound Link
For YOU.COM, it’s an Inbound Link

Understand?

Another linking example

Let me illustrate further.  Let’s say I have a technical blog/site about Unix Shell Programming and I run across a really wonderful reference site that gives a single page summary of a whole host of really useful commands; I put a link on my blog site to that reference site. 

Technical Blog    ——>    Unix Shell Commands

There is an Outbound Link from my technical blog to the Unix shell commands site.
There is an Inbound Link to the Unix shell commands site from my Technical Blog.

It’s two sides of the same coin.

Next time, we will talk about the Psychology of Linking – it is very important to understand the mindset of other site administrators when asking them to link to your site.  Failure to understand them is recipe for failure and frustration in your quest for inbound links.

Till Then…

Adland Pro – A Free Classifieds Site

I have been using a great classified ad site to advertise my various ventures called Adland Pro (http://adlandpro.com) for about 3 years now.  The great part is I’ve never spent a dime, but I continue to get traffic, month after month.  Now, mind you, it’s not a waterfall of traffic – but more of a slower trickle, but FREE is FREE.

Adland Pro offers free classifieds as a teaser to entice you to spend money with them on advertising upgrades – but I’ve never felt the need to, especially with some of the narrow niches that I’ve been focusing on.

Here is a list of the services they offer:

Free Classified Ads (I use this often)

Traffic Exchange – (I have never used) You display ads for other advertiser on your site, and in return, your ad is displayed to visitors on other sites.

Community Advertising – (I have never used) Adlandpro Community is a free networking and lead generation system.

Text/Banner Advertising – (I have never used) Your ad or banner will be displayed at the top of our pages.

Paid Services – (I have never used) Send your ad to Adland Digest subscribers (25,000). Send your ad to over 680,000 search engines and linked pages, Renew your classified ad automatically to keep it at the top. Use Follow-up Autoresponder System, Mailing List Builder, URL Tracker, Pay Per Click Advertising and Advanced Advertising Package. You can either purchase or earn credits for our paid services.

I am in no way affiliated with Adland Pro — I’m just sharing about them because I use their free classified advertising.

Give them a try – what have you got to lose?

There are many, many ways to drive FREE traffic to your Blog.

The technique that I’m going to show you is wonderful because it is very natural and organic, and adds content to the internet, which helps everyone.

Posting to Yahoo/Google Forums

This technique isn’t unique and certainly isn’t new, but it is very effective and FREE to do.  I have used this technique with great success.

What is a Forum?

It’s really nothing more than an online ‘meeting place’, usually organized around a certain theme.  And there are a myriad of themes and forums – everything from cat grooming to lawnmower repair.

Here are urls for the two largest forum hosts:

Google: http://groups.google.com/
Yahoo: http://groups.yahoo.com/

I would use both of these for maximum exposure.

What you want to do is sign up for a free account in both Google and Yahoo Groups.

Next, you want to find groups that relate to your blog’s niche.  So, if your blog is about feline care, you might search on the words feline, cat, kitten, etc. Then, you want to join each group that seems to fit.  Most of the quality forums are going to require that you join before you can post. 

Each forum is controlled by one or more moderators and the moderator sets the rules for joining.  I’ve joined some forums where I had to submit a bio before they would let me in.  As a rule of the thumb, the more stringent the membership, the higher quality the forum – so don’t be put off by this level of scrutiny.

Your Goal

Now, remember, we are not on the forum just to read and post for our edification sake, we are there to advertise our blog.  However, this has to be done very subtly, else you can get banned from the forum altogether.  I’ll talk more about the etiquette in a minute.

Here is what you do

What you are going to do is either:

• Make a helpful comment to another’s post
• Create your own post, offering information of value that’s related to the theme of the forum

Then at the bottom of our post/comment, we are going to leave what’s called a ’sig tag’ – which stands for signature tag.  The sig tag should be understated.  Here is an example:

R/Stan Beck
http://AskStanBeck.com for helpful, practical tips on blogging.

Do you see?  Very short and sweet and not ’salesy’.

Forum Etiquette

Forum etiquette is really common sense – make sure your postings, comments fit within the spirit of the forum.  Don’t come across as anything but a contributor attempting to help the forum members.

Frequency

You want to get into the habit of being a daily contributor if you can – you are trying to build up trust and brand name recognition for your blog via your sig tag – this is going to take a couple of weeks.  Be patient and disciplined – this will work for you.

So What?

So what does all this activity buy you?  Two things actually. First, the people who are reading your posts and comments will appreciate your contribution, see your sig tag and will click through to your blog.  Second, the search engines love forums because of the content and they will pick up on your comments and your sig tag and index them – which means that you will get traffic to your blog from search engines based on your posting/comments – How Great Is That!?!

So, post often to as many forums as you can handle – it will pay you back with FREE streams of highly targetted traffic.

Can Podcasting Hurt You in Search Engine Rankings?

The short answer to this is yes and no.

Search Engine Rankings are a function of Page Optimization and Site Popularity and are centered on your webpage’s content and how the words on your page match up with what a person types into a search engine ’search’.

For example, if you have a webpage about the pros and cons of certain types of cat food, you most likely have text on your page about dry cat food, wet cat food, raw meat, etc.  When a search engine spider scans you page, it will index on the predominant terms on your page – ‘wet cat food’, ‘dry cat food’, etc.  It will then match up its index results to customer’s search phrase.

What does this have to do with Podcasting?

Let’s think about this logically.  What is a podcast?  It is nothing more than an audio file that people access on the internet.  In a 30 minute podcast, you can have tens of thousands of words in a spoken audio form – which a search engine CAN’T access.  Do you see the problem now?  The search engine can only index written content.

What to do?

There are a couple ways to tackle this problem.  The first and easiest way is to write a summary about the content of the prodcast, highlighting the key themes and phrases that seem to describe it best.  This is what most podcaster’s do.

There is another option, however.  You can transcribe (or have it transcribed for you) your podcast audio and place the text on a page on your site.  Now, think of this – tens of thousands of words of pure, rich content on your site.  The search engines will go bonkers with delight. 

Most people don’t have the time to transcribe their material and so that’s why podcasting transcription services have sprung up.  If you Google the term "podcast transcription", you will find a myriad of companies out there that do this for a fee. 

Whether you want to start out by doing this yourself to save some money or you want to hire it out, transcribing your podcast is golden way to add great, rich content ‘food’ for the search engines.

I stumbled upon a wonderful piece of software a couple of years ago that I’ve used for a whole host of audio purposes, including podcasting – it’s called Audacity (and it’s FREE).

Audacity is very powerful because it allows you to record multiple tracks which give you the ability to easily add additional audio clips to your main podcast file.  If you want to add some intro or outro music, you can put them on the two different tracks, separate from the main track.

It has an excellent editing interface which allows you to make all sorts of special effects modifications to your podcast file – echo, fade-in, fade-out are some of the ones that I use often.

Another benefit is that Audacity can be run on Windows, Mac OS X or even Linux – so if you use ‘other than Windows’, you are most likely covered.

Note:
In order to allow Audacity to record your audio and then export to MP3 format, you have to use a special plug-in called ‘LAME’.  Once you put the LAME dll on your system and tell Audacity where to find it, Audacity can seamlessly export to MP3.  It’s a one-time setup.

Okay, here is the link for Audacity’s Home:

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Unless you need some bleeding edge enhancement, don’t bother installing the Beta version – just the normal stable version.

This is the LAME download/instructions page:

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/help/faq?s=install&item=lame-mp3

Some additional LAME instructions can be found here:

http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~raa110/audacity/AudacityHelp.html#LAME

That’s it, enjoy Audacity – it’s a great podcast audio file creation tool.

Welcome back.  In our last issue, I demonstrated a longer article-type of blog posting.  In this issue, we are going to look at a shorter-type of blog posting.

Short Posting

Remember, the key to a successful blog is frequent, other’s-centered posting.  The internet audience world has a very short attention span and if you ‘leave’ them, they will eventually ‘leave’ you. 

Also, people are looking for humanity on the web – a touch.  Talk to your visitors respectfully and warmly.  Also, give them a way to respond back to you.  Most blogs have comment boxes on a particular post, however, you may want to erect a contact form or give an email address – this encourages dialog – a relationship if you will.

Successful blogging, at its core, is relationship building, period.

So let’s talk about the short post.  There is a time and place for a short post.  First of all, a quick note from time to time is perfectly acceptable – even preferable.   Quick notes are reflective of real life – we live at a very hurried pace and people will understand.  The key is to make sure that whatever you put out there benefits them.

Some of the ways that I see short blog posts used:

• Quick Note – to touch base
• Update – an update about an event, etc.
• Ranting about a topic – do this with extreme caution.
• Referral – to a link or event of interest

Let’s give some examples:

Quick Note Post:

Hi all, I just wanted to drop you a quick note to say hey.  Hope all is well with you.  I’m traveling this week – going on a cruise with my family to the Bahamas – awesome.  My wife made me promise that I won’t bring any computer stuff with me during the trip, so I’m going to out until <such and such date>.  Thanks for stopping by – I’ll ‘talk’ to you when I get back.

Update Post:

Hi all, I just wanted to give you an update on the status of the ‘babysitting for dummies’ piece that I’m writing.  I’ve gotten the first couple of chapters completed and I would like for a couple of folks to review them, if they wouldn’t mind.  I can’t afford to pay you for the time, however, I will give you a free copy of the ebook when it’s finished.  If you are interested, please contact me at <contact address>.

Ranting Post:

Caution: Be careful with ranting – make sure that what you are ‘throwing’ out there will not come back to bite you later on.  Make your ranting constructive if you choose to do it.  And make sure that it benefits the audience – if not, don’t do it.

Hi all, I am burned about something.  New legislation has just been passed requiring babysitters to be licensed by the state – this is dangerous over-reach, in my opinion and is utterly ridiculous.  Parents should have the right to entrust their children with whomever they wish. <etc, etc, etc>.

Referral Post:

Hi all, I just ran across a great site called xyzbabysitting.com – wow, you won’t believe the helpful tips that I found there. <etc, etc, etc.>

Caution, be careful about sending your traffic away to other sites that compete directly with yours – you could lose a visitor.

In summary:

Posting short messages to your visitors is a reflection of real life – don’t be afraid to do it, but don’t fall to other extreme either – mix it up a bit.  Variety is the spice of life. 

Just get started, today!

I hope you found the "Good Keywords" tool helpful.  Did you get a chance to create a blogger.com account yet?  If not, then go do that now.

Today, I am going to show you how to write a post.  There is nothing magical about writing posts – they can be formal, informal, whatever your style is.  The thing to remember about posting is it’s not about you.  Self-centered blogs rarely last very long.  You are trying to help someone with your vast knowledge and experience – in this case, in "babysitting."

Okay, let’s get started.  The type of post that we are going to write today is like an article – I like articles because they are great way to advertise your blog – more on that another time.  In our next lesson, we will write a shorter post so you can see one of those.

In our last lesson, we used "Good Keywords" to analyze "babysitting" and we were given a list of potential ‘questions’ people were asking about "babysitting" by the search engine keywords that were entered into Ask.com, Yahoo.com and Overture.com.

One of the search keywords typed in was "babysitter jobs".  So, I naturally turn that into a question:

"How do I get babysitter jobs?"

Now, I must confess, I know very little about topic of "babysitting" as a profession, but I’m going to wing it – so I’m asking for a little grace .

I’m going to share with you one of many outlining techniques for writing effectively and persuasively – I used this when I was in sales many years back to write proposals. 

It’s called HIPSA.

H – Heading – This is going to be our blog post title
I - Introduction – this will give an intro to the topic you are going to discuss
P - Problem – this will outline and define the problem
S – Solution – this will outline and define the solution
A – Action – this will be a call to action

So…

Let’s come up with our Heading/Title.  This is perhaps one of the most important parts of your post – the title.  The idea here is to invoke the visitor’s curiosity. 

Often times, a question is a good way to do that.  Here is an example of a question Title:

Here is a sample Question-Type Title:

"Are Great Babysitting Jobs Really That Hard To Find?"

"How to" also invokes curiosity:

"How to Find Quality Babysitting Jobs in Less that 24 Hours!"

Do you get the idea?

Now let’s work on the introduction.  The introduction is simply a way to introduce your topic to your reader.

Here is a sample Introduction:

Babysitting jobs are great ways to make some extra cash.  Think of it, you generally start in the early evening – say 5pm.  You feed the child your watching, play with him/her for about and hour or so and then they are off to bed between 7pm and 8pm.  All of your hard work is done in a couple of hours and you can just monitor the situation after that – what could be easier?

Here is a sample Problem:

Finding the really cherry babysitting gigs can be kind of challenging.  People with kids tend to form bonds with their favorite sitters and that makes it tough to break in.  Another problem you can run into is the ‘low payers’ – they call you on Saturday afternoon asking you to babysit for them Saturday evening and they are paying a whopping $3.50/hour – and you drive your own car to get to their house!!!  Do you see the injustice?  Of course, what else are you doing this Saturday night – hmmm, nothing, so you accept.  So what is the problem – not enough contacts.  Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to pick and choose?  This is what we are going to try to help you solve.

Here is a sample Solution:

The key to getting the word out is by advertising. Now, you may feel very intimidated by that the sound of that, but let me assure you, it’s not that hard to do.  Here are some ideas for you:

Advertise by:

• Word of mouth – spread the word to all your friends who have young children
• Signs – put on neighborhood metal mailboxes or on telephone poles
• Business cards – put business cards on every car in a parking lot; pass them out door-to-door.
• Working in the childcare at a church – let the parents know when they are dropping off or picking up their kids that you are available for babysitting gigs.

You see, some very easy steps.  Pick the method(s) that is(are) the most comfortable for your to do.  If you follow these techniques, you will have more babysitting jobs offers than you’ll know what to do with.

Here is a sample Call to Action:

It’s time to take action – go out and do it today.  Take a small baby step, like make some signs to put on mailboxes.  Tomorrow, you and a friend go out and put the signs out on mailboxes together.  You can do it.

Well that’s it.  Here’s to profitable babysitting for you!

In summary:

We’ve written a post for our babysitting blog which is structured like an article.  We used the HIPSA method to help us structure  it.  The post is 100% visitor centered and should be of value to someone looking for ways to find babysitting work. 

In my next issue, I’ll demonstrate a short post.

Take Action!

Try your hand at a longer article post.  It may seem intimidating, but you can do it with practice.  Make sure you use the HIPSA method to help you organize your thoughts.

Last time, we established that we were going to create a blog about ‘babysitting’ and that rather than guessing what we should write about, that we were going find out what questions people are asking and address those.  We discussed how search engines are places ’search’ for information about topics.

There are many tools in the internet marketplace that allow us to see under the hood of the search engines a bit.  Obviously, the ones that cost money are going to be more thorough, however, for what we are looking for, we can get from a free tool.  This tool is called "Good Keywords" (http://goodkeywords.com).  Here is the download link: http://www.softnik.com/download/gkwv2.exe.

Go ahead and install this tool now.

Once you’ve installed it, go ahead and run it.

I’ve created a short 6 minute video which shows you step-by-step how to use the tool.

"Good Keywords" Video Tutorial

Okay, what did you think?  Pretty easy, right?   Great.  If you have any questions, just hit the "Ask Stan" button at the top-right of the page and I’ll get back with you.

In our next lesson, we are going to take a couple of these keyword results from the "Good Keyword" tool and turn them into actual posts on a Blogger.com blogsite.  I’ve already got a post created that shows you step-by-step on how to to create one.  It’s called "How To Create a Blogger.com Account in 10 Easy Steps".  That’s it for now.  Have fun with "Good Keywords".

Till then…

In my last post, I encouraged you to write down 10 passions, interests, skills that you have.  If you haven’t done that yet, do it now, before proceeding.

Let’s set the stage.

I have chosen the topic of ‘babysitting’ as the passion/skill/strength that I want to build a blog about.

What should I write about?

I can think of a number of things off the top of my head…

• Babysitting rates
• How to find a good babysitter
• Babysitting safety skills
• Etc.

Although I can write about dozens of subtopics on ‘babysitting,’ wouldn’t it be better to write posts that address actual questions/problems/challenges that folks are having with ‘Babysitting?’   You bet.  Why guess when we can know for sure.

Did you know that search engines keep track of each of the search phrases that people type into them?  Yahoo does, Google does, MSN does — they all do. 

Okay, So What?

When people search for something in a search engine, what are they actually doing?  They are looking/searching for something – hence the word ’search’ in search engine.

Some people are just doing casual research because they heard a friend talk about ‘xyz’ and they want to get more information.  And, some are searching because they know what they are looking for — they’ve got a need, a problem that they need answers for.

Think about it this way.  A search phrase represents a question asked by a person or group of people.

Let’s take the search phrase ‘babysitting rates’ as an example.

What is the underlying question the phrase ‘babysitting rates’ represents?

How about:

‘What is a good and fair babysitting rate?’

So for any search engine phrase, try substituting a ‘question-type’ prefix before the phrase to make it more clear to you what’s being asked.

Here are some ‘question-type’ prefixes:

What is/are…
How is/are…
How do I find…
How do I make…

Do you see the pattern?

In our next lesson, I am going to take you through the research process with a FREE tool, widely available on the internet.