EzSEO Newsletter # 36
Andy Williams ez SEO
ezseonews.com
Hi againToday we will be continuing with our mini-series on link exchanges. Have you started your yet? Just a quick heads up though. I recommended 0spam.com a couple of weeks ago as a great f.r.e.e. way to get rid of spam from your inbox. They have had problems this last week, but things seem to be restored to normal.
This week:
1. What Possesses these people?
2. Recommended newsletter
3. Link Exchange Mini-series Part III
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1. What Possesses these people?
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What would you do if you became very successful in your online business and was making $250,000 per year or more? Would you:
A) Keep your methods to yourself and just carry on living your dream, or
B) Tell the world how you are making your millions and even tell them the URLs of your successful web sites.
If I was asked that question I would be firmly camped in group "A". Why on earth would I want to tell the whole world how I made my money online and even give my URLs out so everyone can see (and possibly copy) my successful sites?
If I could make millions selling my secrets then perhaps it would be worth it, because by the time these new competitors built up their copycat empire I would be retired anyway, right?
What would you do if you were asked to give away these secrets for free. I think you would have to be a raving looney (I hope that phrase does not offend anyone) to offer so much for nothing, even to the point of ruining your own business. Over the last couple of years I have seen online professionals "give" their secrets away only to see their techniques penalised in the search engines. So what possesses these people to do it? To tell you the truth I have no idea but my looney hypothesis does figure in the forefront of my speculations.
OK, you may be unaware of why I am asking this question. Let me fill you in. In the last week I received an e-mail from a subscriber to this newsletter complaining about having a particular eBook shoved down his throat by just about every newsletter they received except mine. Don't you just hate that? I went and read a review of this eBook at a site I trust and found that the webmaster gave it 5 out of 5. I bought the book there and then and read it.
That book was Success Alert. I was astounded that successful people were giving away their secrets and even showing you their web sites.
You can read my review of Success Alert at:
Success Alert
I would be interested to hear the views of anyone who has bought this book already. What do you think - raving loonies or incredibly smart marketers?
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2. Recommended newsletter
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I thought that it might be of some benefit, especially for those new to online marketing, to tell you which newsletters I subscribe to and read. There are very few that I actually read from top to bottom since so many contain one promotion after another and little in the way of useful information. This week I want to highlight one of the best f.r.e.e. newsletters:
"The Jungle Marketer" is Guido Stiehle, from Germany. Guido is a friend of mine so you may think I am being biased here. However, try his newsletter yourself and look at his site. I am sure you will agree that Guido offers great information.
His newsletter is moving to monthly schedule for a while so he can spend more time with his family. Guido and his wife have just had their second child - a boy. Congratulations Guido and keep up the good work.
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3. Link Exchange Mini-series Part II
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Last week we looked at the ways of finding potential link partners. I mentioned my own preferred tool - Arelis:
..as well as PR Prowler
and Link Proctor
If you missed last weeks newsletter, you can find it in the archives on my site. Just follow the link from the subscriber bonus page found at the end of this newsletter.
OK, you have a list of 100 potential link partners, what next?
The next step is quite a tedious one, but nonetheless essential for any successful link exchange program. You need to visit each and every one of your potential link partner sites and ask yourself.
1. Is this site related to mine?
2. Does this site have a links page? (Look for a link on the homepage (or sitemap) that points to "partners", "links", "resources" or similar, and visit that page to see whether or not there are any instructions on linking to them).
3. Does the links page meet the criteria we discussed last week, i.e. few links, reasonable PR etc etc.
If you are doing your link exchange manually, this stage will take a long time. If you are using Arelis, this stage is easy because you just click on the website URL in the list and a preview panel shows the website. From there you can browse the site either with the Arelis internal browser or click a button and have the website open in your default browser (i.e. open in Internet Explorer to view PR).
If the site in question satisfies the 3 points above, this site is a good link partner. Go through all your potential partners and evaluate each site in turn. Make a list of those sites that match your criteria. I would suggest you use a spreadsheet for this stage. Include the following columns:
Website Name
Website URL
Contact e-mail
Website Description (take it from the meta description of the homepage if it is available).
URL of the links page
With extra columns for:
Date e-mailed for exchange
Links back to me?
Of the three software tools mentioned, Arelis is the only one that will retrieve and store this info for you automatically.
OK, maybe you have found 20 potential partners. The next stage is to create a links page on your site and include links to each of these sites. Manually this is a chore. If you are using PR Prowler or Link Proctor to find partners, you need to do this manually as well. If you are using Arelis, you click a couple of buttons and the links page is created for you.
Each link on your links page should have the following:
a) Link text relevant to the site you are linking to. Try to use the main keyword phrase of the site you are linking to.
b) A description of the site.
The next stage is to upload your links page to your site and ensure you have a link to it on your homepage.
It is now time to contact your potential link partners and request they link to you. However, there is something you should think about here. If your links page has a zero PR, many webmasters will not exchange links with you because they don't see the benefits to them of having an incoming link from a PR 0 page. There are ways to convince webmasters that the link will become valuable to them and we will discuss that in a moment, however, my advice to you is this.
When you create a new site, get a links page up immediately (even if it is empty), and link to it from the homepage of your site. This will get your links page some PR by the time you are ready to approach potential partners and they will be more likely to say yes.
On my search engine optimization website, I link to my links page from all of the pages of my site. OK, this may drain PR from my own important pages, but the advantage is I get a links page with a good PR. The PR of my homepage is 5. The PR of my links page is 5.
This PR has two benefits:
1. Webmasters rarely turn down a link exchange request from a high PR page.
2. Webmasters will want you to link to them so you will get dozens of link exchange requests every week, meaning you dont have to go out looking for partners.
So, how do you contact the webmasters and suggest a link exchange?
You have the e-mail address in your spreadsheet (or Arelis has this information for you already), so write to your potential link partners and suggest a link exchange.
Things you should consider saying in your e-mail:
1. Tell the webmaster that you have been to their site and if you can see who the owner of this site is, use their name.
2. Tell them that their site is a great match to your own and think that your visitors will find their site a useful resource.
3. Tell them that you have already linked to them and give them the exact URL of your links page where they can find their site.
4. Ask them to link back to you.
5. Tell them why they should link back to you.
Point number 5 is where you can really try some pre-sell on your potential link partner. Pre-sell them the idea that linking to you is a good idea and will benefit them.
Here are some of the things to consider when writing your pre-sell.
1. That you know the benefits of a link exchange in terms of PR and link reputation.
2. That you know how to create a valuable link exchange page and will be limiting the number of links on your links page to 30.
3. That the only links on the links page are to your partners (except for a link back to your homepage), and you wont have a menu of links to your own pages, thus diluting the PR benefits to your partners.
4. That the links page is linked to from your homepage (and possibly others) so that the links page gets a good PR and also that their link will be visible to your own visitors and not buried 3 levels deep where no-one actually finds it.
In addition, if your links page is currently PR 0, tell your link partners that:
1. This is a new site. Tell them to check the Whois information to see when the domain was registered.
http://www.networksolutions.com/en_US/whois/index.jhtml
This will show them that your site was not penalized and is low PR because of the fact that it is new.
2. Tell your link partners that your link exchange program is a serious part of your own site-building and that the links page will achieve a good PR eventually.
One final tip here. As with any good pre-selling, make sure you use words like "you" and "your" rather than "me" and "mine".
There is a lot of information here that I believe will help you secure link partners. I suggest that you make up some template e-mails containing what you feel is the most important information rom that given above and use those templates as a basis for all link partner request.
It can take some time to put these e-mails together, but by creating several in the beginning, you can test each of your templates on potential partners and see which one is the most successful. You then have your own unique link exchange e-mail that you can use over and over again.
A word of caution here. If you are using software like Arelis (or Zeus), don't try to save time by using the pre-written templates. Your requests will probably be deleted with even being read. These templates are used a lot and anyone who has been online for any length of time recognizes them and largely ignores them. Take the time to create your own unique e-mail and see your link exchange flourish.
That's it for this week. Next week we will continue this series. If you have any questions, my e-mail address is in the resource box at below.
Have a good week.
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