Backlinks are one of the few ways that you can improve how Google and the other search engines see your pages. I am sure that you have probably recognized this in the past and so it is a very good idea to make the most of your backlinks.

This strategy that I want to tell you about today is a good one for making more of your current fans, the ones that have linked to you.

One of the ways to pick up backlinks is by submitting lots of articles. Once these articles are picked up by others and then put on their sites you will be able to hopefully leverage them. You can do this by taking the first sentence of your article and putting it in quotes and then searching Google for it. something like this:

Google Quote Search


Do you see the quotes in there? The search should show up this article (If it is indexed when you read this). Anyway when you do this with your own article you will get the results that Google has found for this term and these should all link to your site, don’t worry that many people will not give you the linkback that they should – they won’t even if you complain.

Once you find this you can  automatically ping the page through Pingomatic by using a link in your Firefox Bookmarks. Grab the following Bookmarklet (just drag it to your favorites bar below the address bar).

Page Pinger

Once you use pingomatic to ping the pages that are linking back to you all the search engines should be takinig those links on the other pages just that much more important and this should help your rankings as a better backlink.

There is lots more to learn about building up backlinks but hopefully this will keep you a bit easier

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Well I have had a chance to use Micro Niche Finder 5 a few times over the last few days and let me tell you it is a cool product now for sure. James Jones has got things going in a great direction. There are a few bugs to be worked out but it is working smoothly and really fast.

So I thought I would mention a few features of Micro Niche Finder 5 that I like best. And here they are:

Micro Niche Finder 5

Easy Keyword search – Using Googles Adwords API to access data quickly and easily, Micro Niche Finder 5 allows you to just enter in a keyword and it will bring back up to 200 keyword terms that Google sees as synonyms (related terms) for that keyword and give you the number of searches per month

Projects - If you get more than a few sub topics for a niche, for instance in internet marketing you may think of affiliate, adsense, adwords, backlinks, and keyword research (interesting idea there) then you can get all the results for these terms and come up with a project.

This project will let you see the most popular terms within the whole broad niche

Find the best keywords – One of the problems with really popular keywords is that everyone and their dog is going after them.

• You can do analytics within Micro Niche Finder 5 to find the number of backlinks needed to be top 10 for a keyword, this is called the measure of backlinks or MOB for short.
• You can do an Exact phrase search to find out how much competition you are up against.
• And finally you can also do a SOC serach which is the strength of competition, which takes a bunch of factors together to give you a number that will tell you how competitive overall a term is to go after.
• Lastly we have something called OCI this is a Microsoft rating on a level of Commercial Intent, that is how much of a buying keyword that term is on a rating of 1 to 100.

I have been using Micro Niche finder 4 for a long time but this new release of Micro Niche Finder 5 is fantastic. I am so excited to see a smoother interface and really quick response, in fact much faster than before.

There are piles of new features that I will dig into in depth in the next few days but I hope you see just from these quick notes just how powerful a tool this is tho get more done in less time and to perfectly hit a buying niche with real needs that you can help and make money from.

a little while back I was looking for something that would enhance my analytics and give me more features than Google analytics gives me. Don’t get me wrong Google analytics is fantastic but one thing that it is really missing is comparisons for pages from day to day and real time tracking.

I tried Woopra, which was pretty good and then settled on Clicky, which at 9.99 a month is pretty cheap.

Right now using Google analytics I track pages views over time and watch trends, and thanks to the built in Adsense integration I can track what pages are performing best on my blogs.

The feature as I said before that really excited me about Clicky was the Real Time website tracking. One of my sites gets 6,000 to 8,000 visitors a a day and using real time tracking I can see exactly which pages get traffic at any time and who is on your site from where. This is a really great feature to me.

Other features that I am really enjoying with Clicky are the traffic comparisons today vs yesterday or 7 days ago by the hour as well as the increase or decrease of a pages traffic compared to the day before. I really get a good feel for site performance and hot or cold pages with these features.

I bet you are looking at this and thinking, “Geez, big deal just a couple features Google analytics does not have” Well you can try it out for a month and see. I of course still use Google analytics and for a small traffic site this may not be to exciting but once you get some traffic there are lots of ways to slice and dice where and how the traffic is coming. Try it out for free here and see what you think.

My very favorite product for finding keywords is a product called Micro Niche Finder. I just got an email from James Jones, who is the creator or director of this software anyway. James says that not only is the upgrade from Micro Niche Finder 4 to Micro Niche Finder 5 but he also has a video to see some of the new features, it is formatted like a movie trailer. Here is a link to the video. Anyway if you are interested the software is supposed to be out by the end of the month.

Just as a recap here are the reasons that I use Micro Niche Finder

To find popular searches in a niche

To find amount and strength of competition

To find new niches

To find popular keywords for today

Plus there are lots more features. I will do a complete review as soon as the new Micro Niche Finder 5 is released. For now enjoy the trailer

This is a page always in progress and will just be a big long list of ways and sources of traffic to your site. As we all know everyone seems to be always selling some new and fantastic traffic sources but really there is nothing magic about traffic.

Getting traffic has always basically built on the idea that good content finds it’s way to the people looking for it. If you have the best weight loss page it will get lots of traffic and if you have a terrible page it will get no traffic no matter what you do.

At the same time the best article that is of no interest to anyone will still not get any traffic. So be sure to write to a market that is big enough.

So here are a bunch of methods and sources of traffic.

Squidoo Pages – Squidoo is a popular site. Just make sure that you are not writing spammy enough pages and add all of your backlinks to your related pages

Hub Pages – A type of article site that will give you lots of traffic as long as your personal rating is at least 75% and your article is over 50% Read the rest of this entry »

Not sure exactly what to call this post but Jeff Johnson is a guy that I have been following for a couple of years. Who is Jeff Johnson? Apparently the Internet Marketing gurus SEO guru (the concept makes me nervous, but that is just me). And guys like Frank Kern, Eban Pagan, and John Reese have all used Jeff for their sites over the years and I have watched (by email and forums) as he has created a couple of products for free and also of course a home study course for SEO for marketers. I am on a couple of different mailing lists and have run across Jeffs stuff a lot.

In between product launches though I tend to sometimes find little nuggets of stuff coming from Jeff Johnson and today I found a new one.

Most people like using WordPress for the leverage that it can give you in the search angines. One of the great things with WordPress is that you can make sitewide changes really easily by just using easy to use plugins and today I use All-in-one SEO to optimize all of my pages on all of my sites.

Anyway, getting back to what Jeff designed here. There is a new plugin that Jeff has had designed that leverages some of the plugins that you already use or can use in WordPress and this new SEO plugin will optimize setting for some of your existing plugins. You can get the plugin here, and once you confirm your account and get the free plugin you install and run the wizrd and it will optimize your plugins and install of wordpress.

I have this plugin running on three of my best performing blogs that get a total of about 2000 visitors a day and will report back as to the difference in traffic that I get.

Firefox is a great browser when compared to Internet Explorer. I know, the geek in me likes Firefox but most people are just rolling their eyes and saying

“Who cares about a browser with not much market share? My buyers don’t use it anyway”

Well there are good reasons to use Firefox, especially as a web business person. I look at Firefox as my portal to the internet as well as a research and content cration tool. basically I use Firefox as a very strong tool to build my business.

Here are some great extensions that you can use with Firefox to extend the ability that a browser can give you for internet marketing. Read the rest of this entry »

I am a fan of Twitter as one of the future ways of using Web 2.0 technologies to communicate across the internet, but I am going to try this year to avoid Twitter completely. You may wonder why someone would want to avoid the future and the reason is not because I am some kind of technophobe, because I am not. You may think that I am being negative about the technology, which I of course am not saying that at all.

The reason that I want to avoid Twitter this year is becasue there are already a lot of technologies that I am trying to leverage and just adding one more does not help, in fact it hinders my businesses growth.

There are a multitude of ways to make money online and most of them can be narrowed down to some kind of payment for having the visitor to your site take an action. Some people will start a blog and add every single affiliate program link they can find and then add adsense as well. There is no money in not focussing and instead taking a shotgun approach to making money. Read the rest of this entry »

The best way to build your traffic cheap and fast is buy posting in forums and making blog comments on blogs. There are two problems with blog comments for most people and these problems are actually an opportunity for you to be a commenting machine while at the same time getting ideas for new blog content yourself.

There are a few reasons to do blog commenting and the main ones are backlinks to your own sites (some nofollow blogs will not help but that is ok), getting blog owners know about you, and finally to have readers of blogs see you and get exposure to your site by clicking your website link on your name in the comments.

Finding posts to comment on

First problem is that most people doing internet marketing go to the classics, Problogger, Shoemoney, John Chow and others but these are crap blogs for getting traffic to your niche site unless you are in the internet marketing niche. If you are in any other niche then you have to hang with the thought leaders and then become a thought leader.

Do some searches, if you are interested in Organic Gardening then start looking for gardening blogs, environmental blogs, blogs about organic farming and of course your own niche or organic gardening. This is going to keep you on the pulse of your niche and also reading these blogs will give you lots of ideas to get new posts of your own out.

Do you have a Google account? You should as this is how you get access to a Google tool called Google Reader. Google Reader is an RSS reader and when you are using an RSS reader all you need to do is to copy the link location for any site and simply add the subscription to Google Reader and then you will get updates every time that this other blog makes a post. Add all of the blogs that you have found for your niche, and although you may be struggling a bit with Google Reader you will get the hang of it in a matter of hours if not minutes and have a nice easy way to access 100s of blogs if you want to all at one website.

Commenting tips

OK, this is the second problem, writing blog comments that will be read in the shortest amount of time. Now you have found lots of posts in your niche to do blog comments on so go ahead. The nice thing about blog comments is that once you have made one the site will remember your info for the next time that you comment. There is such a short supply of comments to smaller blogs that as you make a couple of comments the blog author is going to notice you and link back to your posts.

Anyway the blog comments themselves should be a couple of sentences long and should add to what the post is about. If you are leaving longer blog comments then try to write down the gist of your comment so that you can create a post out of your blog comment for your own site. (I just copy my comment into notepad for later viewing). The worst thing that you can do is leave lots of blog comments saying “I agree” or “You are right”, these comments add nothing to the conversation and will not be supported by the author and are not insightful enough for anyone to click your link to see your site.

How much commenting to do

I think that devoting 15 minutes or a half hour a day to blog commenting is great. I know that Yaro Starak says that as he was starting he would at the end of the day just leave comments as much as he could but I think that it is great to do this before you are tired. Get the blog comments in, get some ideas for future blog content, and move on to the rest of your work for the day.

Robert Scoble wrote a piece yesterday that advertisers are starting to look beyond just pages views and visitors to the value that traffic is really worth. In the end he asked the question

“How can I take my art further?”

I used to get obsessed about my traffic but you are right and the thing that I have started to look at is how the blogs that I have and the blogs that i follow are a bit of an echo chamber.

There is no reason in this day and age of the internet to just make incremental change but instead I have been looking a lot more at how I can really expand what people would expect to see from a blog. Over the last year we have seen blogs become communities a lot more than just commenting, Arrington at Tech Crunch and Problogger have job boards, many people are starting to build on forums and the blog is just a start to building a community with new articles as being the start.

There is good reason why we are doing what we do and for internet marketers we are looking for more traffic always but we should also be looking at what our traffic is worth to an advertiser. I have one page that converts almost nothing on 200 pageviews a day as the people are seeing the content, liking it and moving on.

What is more important than a pageview? There are a few things behind that visitor.

How many pages is that visitor looking at?

How long is the visitor hanging around for?

Is there a good chance that the visitor is going to come back?

How much chance is there that this visitor will trust you enough to buy?

These questions are stepping stones in the value of your traffic. As you get visitors you want to move your visitors through these questions to the point where your visitors are loyal to your positions on subjects within your niche.

Building content on a daily basis is important but more important still is doing what the big hitters and opinion leaders are doing and that is to add tools and features to build community amongst your viewership.

When you are looking at your traffic everyday, hopefully from Google Analytics,  look beyond the pageviews and visitors and instead look at how deep your visitors are going and start quizzing in your blog about what people would like to see to build up their experience and stay on your site.