Linking and Traffic Techniques That Work Now (Middle of 2011)
Guys…I will keep this post short and simple. This will be a preview of the “Back to Basics” case study of 2011. I don’t really have time to create and upload a video. It is Friday and I’m finding hard to concentrate on work as 4th of July weekend is ahead. Happy Canada Day, by the way, to all my friends to the North 
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173 Responses to “Linking and Traffic Techniques That Work Now (Middle of 2011)”
I hired out a couple different graphic designers to create a bunch of new affiliate banners.
Here is a preview of one I just had designed. I had this made in a bunch of different sizes...
I'm buying high-end stock images with really attractive men and women. They will all be stylish.
Click here to get all of the codes for the new Women's Banners
And Yavor of "Relative Strength Advantage" created a new men's banner that looks cool and has the same feel as the woman's banner above. Here it is.
Click here to get all of the codes for the Men's Banners -Rusty
Here is a preview of one I just had designed. I had this made in a bunch of different sizes...
I'm buying high-end stock images with really attractive men and women. They will all be stylish.
Click here to get all of the codes for the new Women's Banners
And Yavor of "Relative Strength Advantage" created a new men's banner that looks cool and has the same feel as the woman's banner above. Here it is.
Click here to get all of the codes for the Men's Banners -Rusty
Awesome Rusty,
Can’t wait to see what you do. Also, I just launched my blog a few days ago and was wondering how long it takes for a new site to get indexed by google, does it depend on how much traffic you’re getting?
Thanks
-Keith
Great Post Rusty! Thanks for the Canadian Props btw. Shout out to New Grist Beer. Best gluten free beer ever and its 5.7% woohoo
Since I have a mac I could never use TBS. So I got rapid rewriter by Matt Carter and his back link building program. I haven’t used all of his strategies. But those I have used are extremely effective. SEO quake is an awesome free tool he talks about. You can use it to see if your links are actually getting indexed by google. If there not you can submit them to social bookmarking sites which helps a lot.
Thanks for the heads up Rusty.
One question. You had mentioned that you don’t think web 2.0 sites are effective to rank anymore due to the new panda update. But are they still effective for building links to your main money site just as the article directory sites are, so you mentioned also?
Great post Rusty,
I’m going to go celebrate Canada Day right now. Cheers
.
Awesome, sounds good rusty… i havent checked out 1 way links yet, but i should do that soon…
Look forward to the next post.
Andrew
Nice Post Rusty:
I have to say that is my exact linking strategy. I wait for my blog posts to be indexed then I back link each post. I just did a post this week on Monday, and I was on page 5 for the keyword with no back linking. I then back linked my post and now I am high on page 2. One more round of back linking and I will be on page one. I have been doing this from the start of my blog with each post and I think that is why I went from 14 visits per day to over 1,000 in less than 5 months. Have a good 4th everyone in the U.S.
“My goal is to simplify the heck out of getting traffic to your blog and building up to high traffic levels ”
Sounds perfect – you got my attention Rusty.
Sweet, look forward to the case study.
Hi Rusty always like reading your post I am 2 years learn all this IM but link building is just black spot for me and for most of us I am sure just if you will make like say step by step blue print and best of all in video format of how you doing it I will be bought it from you and many guys too . Thank you man and all the best.Ted .
Great Info Rusty!!! Can you show us exactly by video how to go back and optimize the blog posts that are under performing? This is a good read but I am a visual learner and it would help me to see a video.
I took your advice and tried onewaylinks and am getting great results – thanks. Do you think blogs with commentluv provide higher quality back links?
Thanks for all the updated info Rusty…I have been an article writing and link wheel machine so far this summer, nice to know I can take a break from that!
It was my intention anyway to start going to my archives and optimize my old blog posts. I also would really LOVE a video on this to know exactly what to do. It would be SO helpful! I am a little confused as to what you mean by, “spend time link building to each and every blog post.” Thanks for all the help.
Happy 4th!!
Robin
Looking forward to this.
I have the 2 tools you have mentioned above and love the way the spinning works in the new release.
When you say post less what frequency are you talking?
Thanks
I think Rusty means that you post for the amount of back linking that you can do. In the fitness industry that is dominated by daily emails to your list, most people are posting unique content every day so it’s hard to keep up with the backlinking. I guess just determine what is do able for you.
I’m building 5 links per day right now on my own and another few with 1 way to a few articles that I want to elevate.
Remember, once google sees authority in one of your posts, it’s usually good (especially for non competitive keywords) enough to keep your site high. Example: I’ve gotten as high as #4 for “six pack abs”, not a buying keyword but it gets me traffic. I’ve had to fight to keep that site on page one just because everyone think a keyword like “six pack abs” is the holy grail, thus they shoot for it.
Rusty,
Great tips on getting back to basics. I’m sure you have a ton of knowledge to pass along, but at some point I’d be interested in the seasonality of the fitness niche for both traffic and sales. Obviously Dec/Jan are big, but March was a surprisingly good month for me while the last couple weeks of June have been pretty slow. It’s hard to evaluate whether that’s because of a lower interest in fitness or just poor selling on my part.
To everyone else, a couple things I might add, for what they’re worth. Maximize use of Google Analytics and Market Samurai. You might find that you rank for a high traffic short tail phrase even though you were targeting a long tail phrase. Start directing some links toward that short tail phrase, especially if you the sites ranking above you don’t have many links. Also, if you rank on the first page, keep fighting for those top 3 “above the fold” rankings…that’s where the real action is. 2 of my posts provide a quarter of my traffic and my top 10 posts probably account for over half so it doesn’t take many good posts to get some decent traffic.
Hope everyone has a great weekend!
Dave
Question, hopefully someone can help me. Just started using 1 way links but I am confused with the set up. It seems that I have to add a blog that will get articles from 1 way links. If Jimmysmithtraining.com is my authority blog I don’t want random articles from other people on it. I’m confused here. Can anyone help?
Hey Jimmy,
I was confused as well with 1 way links at the start!
Its simple once you know. All you do is buy a domain like wwww.articlesforyou.com (or something along those lines) host it on your hosting account, install a simple wordpress theme and submit that blog (can even add some visual impact affiliate banners!) to the 1 way links network. It is not very clear when you sign up what to do to be honest. That is why this website is so great, we can help each other!
Im off to Europe for two weeks tomorrow, I hope my visits do not drop off!
All the best,
Sam.
I’m getting over 1000 visitors per day now with this exact strategy, except I use market samurai too (and google analytics).
I get about 25% of my traffic from just one post btw so yeah, only a few really high performing posts are needed to get decent traffic.
Btw I don’t feel guilty at all about using the link building strategies since my niche (nutrition) is full of CRAP.
Online search in this market has been completely ruined by spammers and I actually feel I’m doing people a big favor by getting good content up there.
Right now my number one priority is turning one-time visitors into subscribers. Just put up a facebook page and have started becoming active on twitter. This is a part I’ve been neglecting while focusing too much on SEO.
@Dave: The last two weeks in June were really slow for me too, I’m guessing it is just a slow time of year. May was awesome. I’ve been having great success with adsense in the meantime.
@Jimmy: You need to put up a seperate blog for 1WayLinks.
Btw I recommend doing QUALITY spins that are readable, that way you’re not “spewing garbage all over the internet”, instead make sure that the people who happen to read your spun articles still learn something from them even though they don’t click your site.
Ahh I see. So I buy and host a site I don’t care about but when I submit articles to 1wL I just put the urls in for the sites I want? Cool. Thanks guys. Aiming to hit 3k uniques per day. Should be there in a month or so.
“Deep link to each post on your blog.
My advice is to post a little less on your blog, then spend time link building to each and every blog post.”
Taking each article on your blog and building links to each post rather than the home page, right? Where would you build these links from? Other posts on the blog? WL articles?
Create a mini-blog with 20 unique articles (like you mention) all re-written from the same article with hyperlinks to each article on your main blog?
RCOOP: “I wait for my blog posts to be indexed then I back link each post. ” How do you backlink?
ringo: Use the best spinner to create a spun version of your article, then use 1waylinks to build links towards it.
Very cool! Looks like people are ready to build some momentum on their sties again. I love seeing all the comments and action on this post, this is going to be a great case study!
@Keith,
You started during a great time…just follow along and implement the stuff I talk about and you will be good.
@Greg,
Any good spinner will work. The Best Spinner just came out with version 3.0…it is sweet! Not sure is it is Mac compatible. Probably best to just use the one you have and save some $$$$.
@Jason,
I’m getting away from Web 2.0 sites. I just don’t like following so many rules. I don’t really blame them for cracking down, but I’m recomending private blog networks like 1WayLinks, SEO Link Vine, UAW, etc.
@rcoop,
Heck yeah! 1,000 visits per day in 5 months? I should have you put up a guest post here. Would you be up for that?
@Ted,
I’ll make it dead simple. You would be surprised how easy this is once you learn this stuff.
@deek67,
Will do for sure! I should do a video post on how to optimize a post for a keyword. I will also show you how to find hidden gems…posts that can give you much more traffic with just a bit of link building.
@Darren,
Sites with Commentluv are great to comment on…it never hurts to have a link back to your blog with the exact title…especially if your title is keyword targeted.
@Robin,
You will enjoy the video I make for finding posts that can massively increase your traffic levels. I still haven’t decided if I want to do this for Fitness Black Book on video or perhaps a different blog.
@Jason,
It depends upon how many posts you have. If you already have 50+ posts, then posting 1-2 times per week is fine. If you have over 100 posts, then one post every 7-10 days is fine. When you already have a decent amount of content…your time is better spent ranking that content.
@Jimmy,
I know exactly what you mean about people fighting over these “Holy Grail” keywords. I go for the easier low hanging fruit and clean up. I typically aim for 4-5 word phrases when possible.
@Dave,
This is what I’ve experienced.
Rough Months: June, July, and First half of August.
Average Months: March, April, 2nd half of August, Sept.
Surprisingly Good: Oct, Nov, and Dec.
Best: Jan, Feb, May
*I’m always surprised with November and May. I believe its because a bunch of people want to look great before Summer…which is May in the Northern Hemisphere and Nov in OZ and NZ.
@Jimmy,
Just get another domain and submit that to get your articles. You will eventually get a bit of traffic to this blog as a side benefit, so put a banner of some sort or Adsense to monetize.
@Kris,
I should have you do a guest post as well. At some point, I will need to have a “1,000 per day” group of some sort. June is really slow for sales overall online…same thing with my sales. It happens every year. July and 1st 1/2 of August are usually pretty slow as well.
-Rusty
Thanks Rusty.. I am looking forward to it. I am all about what works as I am finding the web 2.0 sites are really crapp right now.
Hey Rusty, I can’t wait for the 1000 per day group.
I hit 1000 2 months ago (roughly 6 months of blogging…with a 4 month break in between).
Oddly enough, June was my best month yet…and July is looking very promising already!
To anyone that is reading this, you can’t go wrong following Rusty’s advice.
I’d love to do a guest post, in fact I’ll start working on it today or tomorrow.
Thanks rcoop. I am a worker and have two blogs with my own product and following Rusty’s advice 25 articles on each and 3 articles a month on 1WL three keywords on each set at 35 each per month. I’ve only been at it for 1 1/2 months and seeing about 60 a day traffic.
Simple instructions would be nice. I will do anything as long as I have a blue print.
I’m heart broken ….
I’ve been consistently climbing and staying very steady, reached 1500 visits yesterday in less than 5 months and as of this morning Google basically trashed my site!
I had a few number 1′s and 90% of my postings were top 10. Now all of my articles are off the map!
Freakin sucks!
Does your site still turn up if you search for site:yourdomain.com ?
If it is, then your site is still indexed although it may have been penalized.
This has happened to me twice, but it was just for a day. Basically all my rankings disappeared except for a few keywords, then the next day they were up again. Happened two tuesdays in a row which kind of freaked me out.
What is the url of your site, I’d like to see if there’s anything that violates the google webmaster guidelines?
If your site has been penalized, you should be able to have the penalty lifted if you fix what was wrong with it in the first place.
Also, check out this thread at the warrior forum:
http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-ppc-seo-discussion-forum/358742-faq-google-hates-me-my-traffic-dropped-my-rankings-gone-my-site-deindexed.html
U rock Kris … I have even been careful not to put my domain in here because of what Rusty said happened to his gain muscle site.
My pages are indexed still so I’m really hoping this is a temporary slap. My domain is fitness black and white .com
Kevin,
You have one of the most up helpful fitness blogs on the net…all original quality content…I’d be shocked if this was permanent. My “Gain Muscle Now Site” was kind of spammy and I took a bunch of shortcuts. Your site is nothing like that. We will help you figure this out. It will probably be a matter of waiting a week or two and see the rankings rise again.
-Rusty
I really can’t see anything, the site looks great to me with clear text and navigation and genuine content.
I’m sure it will regain its rankings soon, from everything I’ve read it should be impossible to be punished for inbound links and such, only on-site factors.
I see you have the dofollow plugin installed, maybe go through all the posts and make sure you’re not linking out to a bad site.
I’d also check google webmaster tools, you should see there if there are some errors with crawling your site.
Anyways it should probably come back up real soon, I know I freaked out when that happened to me and was about to give up on the whole thing and then it was back up with the same rankings the next day.
Right on guys … just the reassurance is nice anyway! Yes, I was/am freaked out!
I checked the webmaster tools and everything seemed to checkout. The ONLY thing new is I updated to the new WordPress last night — definitely not it … I don’t think
Gonna’ forget about today and we’ll see what tomorrow holds!
Hey Kevin,
I had the same thing happen to me a few weeks back. I did some things and recovered most of my rankings (But I’m not sure if I recovered because of what I did).
Right now, I still have a handful of pages that went from the first page to the 500-1000 th position.
Before, I only had the anchor text of my keyword and they were all from an article network (AMA). So if my article was on gain muscle, all of my backlinks had the anchor text “gain muscle”.
I tried building a lot of backlinks with varied anchor texts and also coming from different sources (more article directory submissions, comments, web 2.0) and it seemed to do the trick. When they jumped back, my pages had better rankings than before.
Good luck and keep us updated!
Hey guys,
When I submitted my blog to hostgator for 1 way links I named it myfreefitnessarticles.com not realizing that posts to that site wouldn’t be from just the fitness niche. Does it matter what the site address is or not? I hope I didn’t just waste money on that site. Another quick question: I am ranking number 8 for a term that gets 165,000 global monthly searches, should I even bother rewriting it and sending it over to 1 way links? Or is it just to competitive for a new site to even try to conquer?
Thanks guys,
Tim
If you’re number 8 without 1waylinks and already getting decent traffic from the keyword, then definitely go for it.
The site address doesn’t matter btw.
Thanks kris! I really appreciate the feedback.
Tim
Rusty,
I’ve finally decided to join 1WayLinks. The reason I hadn’t before was that I wanted to make sure I could cover the monthly fee with sales. I’m hoping this will take my blog from the 200-300 visitors per day range to the 1,000 club.
Alykhan
Thanks Jeff, I’ll post an update … if I don’t quite
in the meantime … just kidding!
I’ve seen your site around on the SERPs, looks like you’re doing a good job on getting your pages ranked well … I hope to be back up there soon!
What are some other tools for the links other than 1 way links and do they work just as well? Any body using anything other than what Rusty mentions?
Great post Rusty!
Looks like everyone is hard at work great to see and hear from new faces. Its been awhile FBT has my other profile on the black list and I wasn’t able to post any comments.
I have actually simplified my linking completely down to 1waylinks and just blog commenting. With the new Panda updates a lot of sites have seen a dramatic decline in traffic. Everything from social mentions to design is factoring in to how will you rank.
Like Rusty has always stated now more than ever its about the “COOL FACTOR” sites that get mentioned, FB like, Google +1 are the ones showing up in the SERP’s. Linking is still needed but a new formula.
Thanks for everyone checking out my site most may have notice a big difference in writing style and I appreciate all the comment love from the follow bloggers!
-Thomas
Waist Hips and Thighs
Hey Rusty I’m not sure how I can reach you but I’ve looked everywhere for a contact form or e-mail address.
My guest post is ready, if you send me an e-mail at kristjan@kriskris.com I can send it to you right away.
Looking forward to the post Kris!
Kris & Jeff,
When you guys say that this happened to you how bad was it? IE, did your posts just “dance” around a bit (say page 1 – page 5) or did they actually go from page 1 or 2 to page 20+?
Rusty,
— Pretty sweet I guess in the long run that 200 visits/day is NOT acceptable! Thanks for all the help!
Just wanted to say it’s kinda’ “funny” that I got a little over 200 visits yesterday and I was PO’d! — today is looking a little worse
Looking forward to getting my site back up and pushing towards my next goal of 2k visits every day.
Most of my posts went to page 5-10+, only one of my keywords remained at #1 like before.
But like I said, they were all back up the following day. One thing I did those days when my site went down was to get some links with more generic anchor text like Jeff mentioned above, not sure if it really changed anything.
I also went through all the comments and deleted all links that looked dubious. Then I added some disclaimers but I see you already have those.
I still have absolutely no idea if what I did actually changed anything. I know that around the second time around this happened my web host went down for at least a few minutes (might be a coincidence), so since then I’ve been monitoring the uptime with a free account at pingdom.com
Sometimes Google is just weird, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone with a genuine site getting a permanent slap though so I’m sure this is only temporary.
If everything else fails, and you do have a penalty and it doesn’t regain it’s ranking within the next few days, then I’d recommend going through the entire Google Webmaster Guidelines, then applying for reconsideration at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration
Thanks Kris, that is suspicious because my host went down yesterday but then again that seems like an awfully quick reaction for Google to kick my butt.
I’m gonna’ start “un-optimizing” my site a bit. I started sending a few “click here” variations as you and Jeff mentioned so maybe that’ll lift the flags a bit.
Once this is all worked out maybe I’ll have a good guest post on how “not to suck!”
Google seems surprisingly fast sometimes, I’ve had new posts indexed literally within seconds, that is I hit the publish button and go straight to market samurai to add it to the rank tracker and there my post is on page 4-5ish.
If your site went down in the rankings at the same time as your web host then I’m guessing that is the cause, but it never hurts to go through a site every now and then to do a clean-up.
Check out this video by Matt Cutts explaining downtime and rankings, he is a google representative:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXrwyTGOf1E&feature=player_embedded
Hey Kevin,
My homepage went from position 6 to like…37. Some of my articles dropped from the first page to the 5th page. Other articles dropped from the first page to positions 500-1000 (a lot of them are still there…haven’t gotten to them yet). 2 of these pages were ranking # 2, each getting 300-400 views per day…now they’re dancing around position 400-600.
The first group of pages recovered last week, I have just started to work on the next group now.
Hope this helps
Enjoyed this post Russ.
I’ve recently had a site hacked that had a PR3 and was unable to retrieve my content. I had to start from scratch and my rankings practically vanished. Mad? …uh…yeah.
Anyway I new that I had only two choices, which were to just scrap it, or start again.
I chose the latter and within a month I am ranking for incredibly competitive terms in the IM niche on Googles first page and am consistently getting between 100-150 visitors per day after one month.
One thing I’d like to say with regards web2.0 sites is that they can still work but they require more links to them than just your typical social bookmarks.
My goal is to get my visitor count to the 1000 visitor mark this month.
Thanks for sharing your strategies on this most helpful blog.
To your continued success,
Nando
http://www.NoGurusNecessary(dot)com
Had a near death experience – figuratively that is. A post ago, someone suggested reading an ebook on best way to use 1waylinks. I read it and it seemed reasonable. Basically instead setting the post rate at 2 or 3; set it at 20. Again, his logic seemed okay; so I did last weekend.
Oh no, I should have known – a shortcut, thru the briar patch.
Next day, my page 1 ranking on 2 keywords disappear. Even searching those keyword with the blog title yielded nothing. Then my blog basically disappear. Then I went into a panic.
I had visions of a year and half work disappearing. My traffic has dropped to under 20 all week. There is a large, forehead shaped crater on the wall next to my computer.
So, what’s the teaching point – stay with the tried and true, stay with the Rusty’s advice on the blog and commentators like Kris and Dave. No taking shortcuts, basic principles and quality content that people want to read.
PS, my forehead really hurts, but I’m much better not…I think.
Likely its bouncing around and will pop up again soon! You should probably keep writing and backlinking as if it had not happened!
And when you get time repair the wall