You need traffic if you have to monetize your blogging efforts. A blog that does not attract traffic or one that has little traffic is worth nothing. Paid advertising and social media can get you to a point; however, it is time consuming as well as expensive. To make the blog a success you need to appear on search engines for a wide range of long tail key phrases. You also need high quality links from authority sites. All this clearly means that making your blog popular is an uphill battle, one which must be fought with some tenacity and fortitude.
Here are some ways you can build links:
Link/Resource pages
Most websites and popular blogs have a resource or links page. Generally these pages feature related or partner websites or related blogs. The links on such pages are good for your business, but for some reason people classify them as spammy links. Although these types of links will not get you roaring traffic it still is worth a try. Here is how you go about it. First run a query on Google for your area of interest. Opt to view the first 100 results instead of the normal 10. Make a list of all the URLs in a excel sheet. Then manually sort out the ones to eliminate ones that are not relevant to your business. Further identify ones that have less than 25 outbound links. This is to ensure you have a better chance getting traffic from the site. Next get in touch with webmasters of these sites and request them to list your site on their website in exchange for allowing their site to appear on yours. If you do this exercise diligently chances are you will bag at least 15 to 20 good links.
Competitive links
There are several tools available that enable you to get links from competitive URLs. This is short work and takes only about 15 to 20 minutes to populate a excel sheet with 25 to 30 solid links. Check the tool ‘Competitive Link Finder’ from SEOmoz
Links from targets
If you keep it simple your communication to your target will fetch you good solid links. Most people find this step extremely difficult to overcome. Just ask and you should be able to elicit a positive response from your targets.
Guest blogging
Find out relevant blogs and connect with their owners through email, social media, or direct contact. Don’t just blindly try to connect with any blog pertaining to your business interest. The blog should be in English, it should have some interactions by way of comments, and should have a good amount of social shares. Also make sure that the new content is posted once every month on such blog.
These are just some of the ways by which you can build links. There are other more advanced ways like article writing, column writing, paid tweets, and sponsored tweets that can be employed to build solid links to your blog.
Watch this space as we will bring more link building tips in the near future!