I had a lot of questions about how his blog progressed toward popularity. When the blog first started he was cranking out a lot of quick posts that weren’t nearly as well written as the stuff he writes today. After a while he started posting consistently and over time his posts became better and better.

The post that stood out in my mind in the very beginning was called something like “The Rules Of Blogging”. I thought it would be pretty cool to write a post like that here in 2012 and share some of my philosophy about the dos and don’ts of blogging. So here goes.

Never Lie… Seriously.

This may sound like kind of a no-brainer but a lot guys fall into the temptation to be deceptive – particularly in the beginning – by doing things like buying Twitter followers and Facebook ‘Likes’. Then there’s the guys who write fake reviews about products that they know nothing about and even leave fake comments to help bolster the power of their fake review.

That may sound like a good idea now, but all it really does is: ruin your reputation. Every person that notices you being deceptive is a person that doesn’t trust you anymore and it really does add up. I’ve lost count of how many successful business people told me “It’s easier to keep customers than gain new ones.”. Don’t focus on just selling people stuff. Focus on being able to sell them something again.

Respect Your Audience

Lying is definitely not the only way to disrespect your audience but, let’s be honest, it deserved a subheading of it’s own. So here’s a list of other things that are disrespectful that you should go ahead and considers No-No’s.

1. Using pagination for brief pieces of content. We’ve all been on those sites and I pretty much never make it through their posts because I get so tired of waiting for pages to load. Pagination is cool if your post is 5000 words long but, it’s not cool if you’re just posting a photo gallery and inflating page views for your advertisers.

2. Using “wait” pages when people try to leave. That might seem like the thing to do when people are trying to leave a sales letter but, it’s not the thing to do when people leave your blog – and it DOES make you seem desperate and rude.

3. Using excessive pop-ups. If you insist on using pop-ups, please only use a light box and don’t set it to come up more than once per visit. I shouldn’t see your light box again when I go to check out another post on your site.

4. Sending excessive advertisements to your list. Nobody likes getting a bunch of ads in their inbox. Emailing people great content is the way to dramatically increase your open rates. Your subscribers will quickly lose interest in what you have to say if all they ever get from you is ads. If people don’t want to hear what you have to say they’re either going to unsubscribe or ignore your emails – and many people will actually report you for spamming. I know of a very well known blog(who I’m not going to mention by name)- and everyone of their emails go straight to my spam folder and I’ve never even reported them for spamming – and these guys have never emailed me content. Never. Just ads, ads, ads, and some more ads.

5. Ads that expand when the mouse moves over them. Maybe I should have mentioned this in number 3 but I’m thinking of it now and it is one of the most disrespectful things you can do to your audience. How am I supposed to enjoy your content when I’m spending all my time making sure my mouse doesn’t wander over to a place on the page that’s going to bring about that – which is the equivalent of a pop-up? I don’t even know why advertisers want ads like that because I would expect people spend more focus on closing it than viewing it(like I do). Spam is spam.

Don’t steal content and always cite sources.

A ‘Rules Of Blogging’ post just wouldn’t be complete without mentioning that you shouldn’t steal or scrape content. The part about citing sources still hasn’t sunk in for a lot of webmasters. I was reading some medical stuff last night and came across a ridiculous amount of sites who basically just rewrote what others were saying and didn’t provide one single source link or cite one single study. So yeah, be sure to always cite your sources and link to them if you want your site to be trusted.

I do have an exception to that rule. Sites that cite sources but don’t link to anyone but themselves. Every time I think about linking to a site like that I want to put a nofollow attribute on the link unless their content is so 100% original(like if they’re publishing their own research) that they truly have no legitimate reason to link out.  I’m just not a big fan of Pagerank hoarders. Your blog isn’t a printed magazine and you should link to your sources.

Google rewards you for linking to useful sites and they have no real way of knowing who is useful if people don’t link. Google engineer Matt Cutts, has already stated this on his blog. It’s important to note that this post was written in mid 2009 but, it doesn’t sound like something they would make dramatic changes to. Here’s the quote -

Q: Okay, but doesn’t this encourage me to link out less? Should I turn off comments on my blog?
A: I wouldn’t recommend closing comments in an attempt to “hoard” your PageRank. In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites.

Blog comments are supposed to be nofollowed and dropped from Google’s link graph anyway but, I think Matt was just itching to mention: linking to good sites is good for your site. I seem to remember Matt stating this with more detail in a QnA video but, I’m having a really hard time finding it. At least I was able to find that blog post.

Post as often as you can.

Popular blogs(like ProBlogger and Copyblogger) that don’t seem to need to depend on search engines – tend to post at least 5 time a week. Then you’ve got huge blogs like Mashable, WebProNews, and Venturebeat who post so many times a day that I don’t dare try and count, and these guys get massive traffic and social shares every day. The take-away for this section is- if people can expect fresh content, they’re more likely to subscribe and/or return to your site.

Be careful how you recycle content.

Sometimes, you can update flagship content, republish it, and earn some more links for it. Be sure and disclose it when you do. What you can’t do is reuse it like this guy did. Don’t copy and paste from other posts – reusing sentences, paragraphs, or even multiple paragraphs and try to call it a unique article. Stuff like that can be very damaging to your career, especially if you find yourself needing to write for someone else.

Always make your share buttons easy to find.

I haven’t held a poll or anything, but I really hate it when I have hard time finding the share buttons on a piece of content I want to share. When I don’t find the share buttons there’s a very good chance I won’t share that piece of content.

I believe people are used to sharing being made easy for them and not making sharing easy just seems rude.

Final Thoughts

These are the rules I’ve thought up so far and I plan to update this post if I think of anymore. Do you have any blogging rules that think should have been on this list. If you do, leave a comment. I’d love to hear from you.

Image credit – Neil Milne – CCL Licence

So this isn’t me trying to jump on a bandwagon or anything. I just want to make some more complete information available.

I thought about leaving comments on their sites but I was concerned they would feel like I was trying to show them up on their own site. Because I might want to work with them in the future I decided to keep my mouth shut (fingers still).

Basically, they didn’t cover any of the precautions or long term effects that need to be taken into consideration. So what I want to do is – go over the benefits of second tier link building, and then list the potential problems with some tips so as to help you make a more informed decision about your SEO.

The Benefits

1.) It raises the quality of your links.

The more important Google thinks the page is that links to you is, the more valuable the link is.

In other words, the sites that link to the site (especially the page) that links to you are taken into consideration when determining rankings.

Without links pointing to the pages that link to you, it’s hard to say how long that page that’s linking to you will even stay indexed.

2.) It helps to build a relationship with the site owner.

Let’s say you guest post somewhere and your guest post earns some pretty good links and traffic, more than posts on that site usually earn. It’s pretty common sense that the owner of that site will probably be willing to let you post again – or even start following your other content and linking to it when it’s relevant to what he’s doing.

3.) It can help boost your reputation.

If you have a link from a very high authority domain, and that page is SEOed for keywords that a reasonable number of people are searching for, it’s in your best interest to make sure that page ranks high.

This way, when people see that your site was mentioned there they’ll think “hey, that site was mentioned by veryimportantsite.com. That means that site must be important too”.

Another cool trick, is to get that page to rank well for your brand. This way, when people search for your brand, first they see your site and right underneath it they see veryimportantsite.com talking nice about you. Talk about making a good impression.

The potential problems

As you may already know, I started out in the black hat scene. There isn’t a black hat SEO worth his salt who isn’t familiar with second tier link building.

One of the things that you pick up pretty quick in the black hat scene is that Google looks for patterns that look unnatural.

Google is well known throughout the black hat scene for identifying link wheels and link pyramids and discrediting them or worse.

When I left the black hat scene people were discouraging link wheels and link pyramids and encouraging very random and natural looking link networks.

Risky Practices

If Google begins noticing that every page that links to you also links to another page that links to you, you’re site and/or the credibility of those links is at risk.

Likewise, if Google notices that every page that links to a page that links to you – also links to other pages that link to you, your site and/or those links are in jeopardy.

In other words, thinking that you can just write a long guest post or article sub that links to 5 pages that link to you, so that you can keep those pages indexed and juiced up – this might end up working against you in the long term and maybe even in the short term.

Repeating link patterns

There’s a software called SEnuke which allows you to quickly submit spun articles to Web2.0 sites and article directories and then juice up the links with forum profiles and stuff like that. It does more than that but, I don’t really want to go into all of it here.

This software allows you to create templates that will tell the software what page each site should link to.

What often happens is when people reuse their templates Google starts noticing and then they lower their rankings either with penalties or link devaluation. I’m actually not sure how many times you can get away with using the same template.

The point is – if your white hat seo efforts start resembling “templates” that you use repeatedly, you might get in trouble with Google.

A Quick Tip

If you’re now a little leery of second tier link building, remember that you can still promote the pages that link to you by sharing them on social networks and the like as well as getting your buddies/partners to share them.

The more a page is seen, the more likely it is to earn links.

Also, second tier link building isn’t something you need to be afraid of. It’s just something you need to be careful with (like all manual link placement).

Final Thoughts

The Google engineers might not even have a problem with you juicing up your links with Guest posts or whatever but, it’s very possible that you could get caught up in algorithms that were/are/will be designed to catch black hats if you’re not careful.

Google has made it very clear that high quality guest posting and infographics are OK for link building and there are good SEOs who are doing just fine linking to their guest posts from other guest posts that also link to their site in the byline. But…

This is SEO. What you can get away with today might not work tomorrow and I hate to see a lot of hard work lose it’s value, even if it’s not mine.

Remember, any kind of manual link placement should always appear to be random, natural, and in context.

Columns image by Gary Knight – License

Link Wheel image by David Pagotto – License

I’m gonna go over (real quick) what he covered and then embed the video when I’m done.

I actually just noticed that everything he mentioned about when guest posting can be bad – is the same stuff that was/is going on in the article directories and I think we all know how that worked out.

Article Spinning

I’m particularly glad he mentioned article spinning isn’t allowed – because I saw an SEO claiming that spinning is white just the other day and actually mentioned it in my last post.

It just makes me think that SEOs that actually know what they’re talking about maybe aren’t being vocal enough about what is spam. I think my next post I might make a list of every black hat trick in the book just to bring people up to speed.

Low Quality Syndication

Again, the same thing that was going on when article directories always ranked well. People would write a 500 word article that says NOTHING and submit it to every article and web 2.0 site there was(and some people still do).

I remember one time my sister’s kids broke her recliner chair and I found an article called ‘How To Fix A Broken Recliner’ and the author somehow managed to figure out how to write a 500 word article – telling me to check the warranty and call the manufacturer.

Letting Anybody Guest Post

Like he said in the last video about guest posting, you should only be accepting guest posts from bloggers who write high quality content like Danny Sullivan.

Linking To Spammy Sites

Matt’s been warning us for years that linking to spammy low quality sites can negatively impact your search rankings and obviously guest posting wouldn’t be any different. When someone sends you a guest post, you need to check all the links in the article to make sure they aren’t going to spammy sites.

Will Users be happy if they land on that page?

Before you publish a guest post on your site, please ask yourself if users will pleased with this content. And just like with the article directories, most of the content was generic and untrustworthy. Don’t write that kind of content and don’t let others publish it on your site.

Anyway, here’s the video if you want to watch it.

I can tell you, I was confused and upset when I saw my site bouncing up and down in the rankings. I did end up ranking above the fold for that keyword for as long as I wanted to but I’m not doing anything in that space anymore.

Details Matter

It’s actually kinda crazy the way people hate Google when they don’t get what they want. I’ve even seen people hate Barry Schwartz because they didn’t rank the way they wanted to.

The thing about that is, Barry’s site (seroundtable.com) , covers every little thing that happens in the search space and it’s basically a good place for more advanced SEOs to keep up with what’s going on.

When you’re new and just started learning SEO, you have to be very thorough and you have to make sure the information is up to date, because Google changes their algorithm almost every day. It’s not enough to read a few blog posts.

So many bad teachers make it hard to even learn SEO.

We’ve got people saying things like “article spinning is white hat” and “fake ‘Likes’ will boost your rankings”. If you’re having trouble ranking, it’s definitely not Barry Schwartz’s fault but there are some bad teachers out there.

Understand what Google does and why they do it.

This is one of the things that really holds back some would-be SEOs. They don’t understand what Google wants.

I’m gonna try to explain it real quick.

Google wants to give their users the best results possible for their queries. In order to this, they follow links. They don’t just want to follow any links. They want to follow links that the site owner approves of. Not links that anybody and everybody can place without any moderation. A good example is when Matt Cutts indicated that guest posting for links is okay and they DO want to count those links – as long as the content is high quality.

What they don’t want is: people buying links, paying to have their link stuffed articles placed, or links placed in ‘free for all’ website directories and article banks.

Let me put it another way, they want to follow links that site owners place because they think that the page will be useful to visitors.

It’s hard

Once you figure out and thoroughly know what Google is looking for and why, it may seem all seem pretty simple. But the hows and whys of the algorithm and predicting future signals certainly aren’t simple.

Some people say you shouldn’t chase the algorithm and this is true to a certain extent but, if Google dropped the link graph tomorrow, at the very least you’d need to figure out how to promote your content in a way that would satisfy the algorithm.

For example – if they dropped the link graph and switched completely over to the social graph (which is a terrible idea), everybody would become hardcore social media marketers overnight.

FYI – social media is a great way to earn links because, more people seeing your content means more people linking to your content.

Another good example is the way we make sure our keywords are in our URLs for people who link using the URL as anchor text. That’s a trick we use now and if Google started using different signals tomorrow we’d certainly learn new tricks to help rank for what we want to rank for.

Now back to what I was saying about SEO being hard.

Producing content and/or services that people will talk positively about isn’t easy. No matter what, somebody is working hard to build the popularity of any site.

Whether you’re a blogger who’s producing great content every day or a software developer with an army of affiliates and are constantly having to release compatibility updates and new features.

Building a great site and earning backlinks isn’t simple or easy. If it were SEOs wouldn’t be crashing and burning every day.

Image by USACE of public affairs – License

I’m surprised they didn’t do this years ago and if you had asked me I would have told you – “If the time spent watching a video isn’t a ranking factor now, it will be in the future”.

You see, YouTube is owned by Google. In order to understand YouTube’s search engine, you need to understand Google’s.

Google uses human behavior determine their rankings which include but certainly aren’t limited to -

• Editorial backlinks

• The number of times searchers quickly click the back button (this was demonstrated by a negative seo a couple of years ago)

• On-page relevance to the query

By knowing things like this, we can pretty easily figure out what kinds of things Google would use to rank videos in YouTube’s search engine.

• The number of editorial backlinks the video page has.

• The number of times the video has been found embedded throughout the web.

• How much Pagerank the sites that imbedded it and/or linked to it have.

• The number of times the share button has been clicked from unique IPs and/or logged in YouTube users.

• On-page relevance to the query (title and description).

• And now, the amount of time users spent watching the video (likely the average time compared to the other videos that are relevant to the query).

 Are these all of YouTube’s ranking factors? Probably not but they are the one’s I wanted to highlight – and If any of them aren’t ranking factors now, they very likely will be in the future.

SEO isn’t just about what’s going on now. It’s about what’s going on now and what will be going on later.

Before I go, I just want to remind you that these changes are also being applied to suggested videos and not just Search.

Hat Tip – SearchEngineWatch

Image Credit – Kevin Collins – Image Licence

Know exactly what kind of site yours is.

I always knew this site was going to be about making money online. Seriously, look at the domain name. The problem I’ve been having is not being able to make up my mind about kind of “make money” site I want it to be. How much do I want to focus on tutorials? How much do I want to focus on news? How much do I want to withhold for my email subscribers? Are people going to judge me because I’m not well known yet? All these questions have been bothering me quite a bit lately and consequently, freezing up my writing. Last night, I believe I solved all those problems.

You can’t please everyone.

As far as people judging me, who cares. If someone doesn’t believe in me, they can go somewhere else. If you want to make a lot of money doing this, you have to realize that you need a lot of attention and you can’t please everyone. If I gave a tried and true cure for all types of cancer to the world, I promise, someone would find a reason to be pissed off about it. You simply can’t please everybody. If nobody hates you, it’s because nobody sees you. Obviously, that doesn’t mean you should be a jerk.

News is very perishable and you usually need to post more of it.

Now for the types of content. From now on, instead of only writing about news and mixing helpful advice in the posts, I’m going to go ahead and write tutorials and try to only cover the most interesting and useful news. News sites often have to publish a lot more content to keep the traffic coming in and it’s a lot of work for less reward. It’s actually a lot easier for me to write tutorials because when I’m talking about news, I find myself doing a lot of linking and fact checking. For some reason, that stuff is a little strenuous for me. It’s probably because it keeps me from gaining any momentum. Also, tutorials can be recycled with minimal updating and hold search traffic.

Draw inspiration from your competitors.

What got shared the most?

Whenever you’re having trouble figuring out what to post about next, just go to your competitors and see which posts look like they got shared the most. Most sites seem to have those numbers proudly displayed so, you shouldn’t have any problem figuring out which posts got the most bees buzzing.

Don’t steal content.

It’s very important to remember that you’re only looking for popular topics. I’m not telling you to go and steal people’s content. It’s no secret that if someone has a case study or something like that, link to them when you mention them. It’s also no secret that just because someone writes a walk-through for a video game, it doesn’t mean that no one else can write walk-through for that game. Just make sure yours is better. You can also just make it part of a larger tutorial. Do try your best to make sure yours is different and stand apart from your competitors.

Just because your competitors waste people’s time, it doesn’t mean that you should.

Don’t write a long and useless post just so that it will look more attractive in the serps. In other words, don’t write a post about the top fifty blue widgets if only five of them are actually worth talking about.

Think about it this way. We’ve all met that girl who looks really good but, her personality makes her unbearable. Well, when you draw in users by making your content look more attractive than it really is, you’re not much different from her, are you? Users don’t like it when you do stuff like that and there’s a good chance they’re going to hit the back button.

It’s always better to be the guy who cares more about user experience than page views. Even if you don’t make them hate you, it’s still floating around in the back of their mind that you tried to fool them and waste their time.

Another thing that your competitors might be doing that you shouldn’t is just rewriting content without knowing if the information they’re providing is even accurate. Make sure you’re an expert before you start giving expert advice. Again, it’s about providing a good user experience and keeping customers is easier than gaining new ones.

Remember, it’s all been said before.

This is another problem I’ve been struggling with. Basic stuff seems so old to me and I easily forget that their are tons of people who don’t know what I know. Unless you’re talking about news, most everything has already been said and if you want to be an authority in your niche, that information needs to be on your site.

If you’re not demonstrating that you know the basics, why should anyone believe that you’re advanced. Advanced users are harder to sell stuff to. It’s like trying to convince a 90 year old to take the Pepsi Challenge when he’s been drinking Coke all of his life. Social media is an excellent example. Most brands weren’t trying to be early adopters of social media marketing and until there was tons of undeniable proof they didn’t want to get on that bandwagon. Now almost every brand is using social media marketing.

Image Credit – CollegeDegrees360 – CC License

When they first announced this thing, I imagined something similar to my email inbox. I thought I could just check the links I thought were risky, then click disavow, and never worry about those links again.

Instead I would have to create and submit a .txt file which includes the links I don’t trust and then, wait several weeks while Google’s spider re-crawls those pages. I was expecting something more automatic. Here’s an example of a disavow.txt file I took off Google’s blog.

# ask for link removal but got no response

They still expect webmasters to contact site owners?

As if all that isn’t bad enough, Google is still encouraging webmasters to contact the site owners where the untrusted links are placed and try to get them to remove those links.

UPDATE 10/29/2012 – Danny Sullivan just interviewed Matt Cutts and asked him -

“What if you don’t try to remove links? Given what a pain it is to get links off the web, why wouldn’t someone just use disavow? I know Google recommends requesting link removals, but from a technical standpoint, if they don’t do that and just disavow, it’s pretty much going to work, right?”

Matt answered -

“No, I wouldn’t count on this. In particular, Google can look at the snapshot of links we saw when we took manual action. If we don’t see any links actually taken down off the web, then we can see that sites have been disavowing without trying to get the links taken down.”

As you can see, that whole thing about “recommending” webmasters  contact bad link hosts, was really more like a RULE than an recommendation. I already believed that’s what they meant but now, with Danny’s interview, the language is clearer and it’s definitely a rule.

They’re treating this tool like it’s an “if all else fails” kind of thing and I think that’s really uncool because I really believe webmasters shouldn’t need to worry about bad links at all. I just feel like this should be a first line of defense instead of a last line of defense.

Again, webmasters shouldn’t have to worry about bad links anyway. A negative SEO can bombard a site with thousands upon thousands of bad links and numerous negative SEO tests have been done over the past year proving that it works.

Google will almost certainly use it to identify link spam networks.

I’d be very surprised if the web spam team won’t try and go through the data they collect and design a system whereby if a domain gets a certain number of disavows, the spam team would then go and investigate that domain as part of a possible spam network.

All they’ll have to do is send out another mass link warning and wait for the disavow reports to come in.

Hopefully they won’t get trigger happy and try to algorithmically use the data to hand out penalties because,  sometimes webmasters and even SEOs don’t really know good links from bad links and there will certainly be a lot of false positives reported with the disavow tool.

It really bothers me that something that should be intended as a defense against negative seo will probably end up being not much more than the equivalent of filing a spam report. Not because anyone filing the report believes in it, but because someone’s job depends on it.

It will be interesting to see if people actually recover from penalties with it.

Before I go, here’s Matt Cutts going over the tool and explaining who should use it.

My thoughts about the video

• Google likes guest posts that are high quality even if they written by authors who aren’t well known yet.

• Cutts mentioned Danny Sullivan, Lisa Barone, and Vanessa Fox as high quality authors. It may be wise for you to familiarize yourself with their work if you haven’t already. Interestingly, 2 out of 3 of those authors write for SearchEngineLand.

• High quality means: knowledgeable, insightful, and original content.

• Google DOES want to give credit to links in guest posts that are high quality.

• Google wants to discount links in guest posts that are low quality. I noticed he didn’t say penalize.

• Google doesn’t like spun articles.

• Google doesn’t like duplicate guest posts so make sure your post only gets published on one blog.

• Google doesn’t like articles that look like they were written for an article directory.

• Google doesn’t like guest posts that are outsourced to non-experts. I personally don’t even allow anyone to guest post here unless they are a regular contributor to the site they want to promote.

• Just enough isn’t enough. If the blog you want to write for says “the post must be 300-700 words”, make your post as close to 700 words as you can without filling it with a bunch of fluff.

• Matt said – “The sorts of links we’d like to be counting more would be – the higher quality articles where somebody really put some work into it and they have something really original to say.”

Conclusion

As I said at the beginning, this is good news for up and coming bloggers who put user experience first and links second. In fact, if you want to put links first – the best way to do that is to concentrate on producing content that is created for users. It should take several hours to write the post and only couple of minutes to decide on your anchor text and insert the link. This means that significantly less than 1% of your thoughts should be on the link.

If it doesn’t take you several hours to write a guest post, don’t be surprised if the links in it get discounted somewhere down the line. In the SEO game, what you can get away with today won’t necessarily work tomorrow – and you really can’t go wrong with producing quality content that contains links to quality content. So do yourself a favor and do it right the first time. It saves a lot of effort down the road.

1) There is no substitute for hard work.

There’s just too many scam artists out there trying to convince people that they can download a software and watch their wallet grow once the software is configured for their niche. If any those guys have been getting into your head(they’re very good at it), this section is for you. I hate to be the bringer of bad news but all of that stuff is a scam. Making money online is hard work, particularly in the beginning. You have to really want it but, once you get it all down, you can almost write your own ticket. Once one site’s growth stagnates, you can start another. Rinse and repeat.

2) Build your own well-designed site.

When you’re trying to make money online you need to actually start your own business. If you work for other people you always lose money to the owner of the business you’re working for. What this means is: you need your own site, your own domain, and your own hosting. That’s where the real money is – owning your own business with your own site.

You will need your own domain and hosting because no one really takes you seriously when you’re using a free website like blah-blah.blogspot.com. I don’t why but, the authors of free sites usually don’t put the kind of love into them as they do a site that they own. Also, you never know when the owner will delete your site for some irrational reason. You have a lot more control over whether or not something gets deleted with your own hosting and domain.

Also, your site needs to have a nice design that that’s easy to navigate. How often do you type the address of an ugly website into your address bar? Not very often right? On the rare occasions that I do it, it’s because the site is incredibly useful. So make sure your site is nice or you’ll be putting people off and making your job harder. No matter how useful your site is, if it’s ugly you will be making less money than you would if your site is nice looking.

3) Build relationships with your visitors.

When you build an online business, you need to do everything you can to make your visitors want to visit your site again. Every successful business man knows that the best business is repeat business. The way to achieve this is to make sure that everything you do is useful to your user base. Whether you’re a guru or an entertainer – providing information or software – affiliate marketer or product developer, everything you do must be valuable for your visitors. This is how you get people talking about you, and coming back for more. This is how you minimize your need to depend on referral traffic and therefore secure the longevity of your business.

4) Gain as many subscribers as possible.

You need to get as many people to subscribe to your messages as possible. This way, you don’t have to buy advertising because people have already agreed to receive messages from you. The best mediums for subscriptions are email, Facebook, Twitter, sometimes LinkedIn, and sometimes Google+.

Each of those social networks and even email, have their own culture that you’ll have to familiarize yourself with. They all make it very easy for users to spread the word about you. However, it’s very important to understand that people don’t like getting ads from those mediums most of the time. What they do like is, occasional special offers, company updates, and most of all – useful content.

You can send ads sometimes but, it’s better if they get an ad without realizing it’s an ad. A good example is teaching them how to do something and mention a product that can make that task easier. I’m not going to go into too much detail about that because what you can do to advertise stealthily depends largely on the nature of your business. Long story short, bombarding people with ads is surefire way to find your messages being mostly ignored or worse.

5) Find or create something good to sell.

There’s plenty of ways to monetize a site. You can sell ad-space on your site, display affiliate banners, display pay-per-click-ads, write product reviews for affiliate products, and/or sell your own products(software, apps, e-books, etc.), . My personal favorite is affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is when you display a special link and receive a commission when someone clicks that link and buys the product. The relationships I talked about earlier are the key to being good at affiliate marketing. It’s a lot easier to recommend products to people if they’re already familiar with you and trust you – and because repeat business is the best business, don’t recommend something unless you know it’s a good product that will be useful to your visitors.

6) Get seen by relevant audiences.

Those relationships I talked about earlier are great but, they have to start somewhere. You need your site to be seen in as many places as possible but, only by people who will be interested in whatever you’re providing. If you have a website about ninjas, you don’t need to be seen on a site about Barbie dolls. You would need your site to be seen on sites about martial arts, Japanese history, maybe military history and other sites about ninjas. The more relevant, the better.

Search Engine Traffic

While we’re on the subject of relevant audiences let’s talk a little about SEO. SEO stands for search engine optimization. Search engine visitors are by far the most relevant and engaged new visitors you can get and right now, Google probably has 80% of the search market which is good because I took that “Bing It On” challenge and Google won hands down. Needless to say, when you’re doing search engine optimization – you’re really doing Google optimization.

When it come to seo, you need to think carefully about the intention of the user when targeting a keyword. If your content doesn’t match the intention of the user, they will very likely just click the back button. I’ve seen sites rank near the top for very high volume keywords and barely get any clicks because they didn’t understand the user intent of the query well enough. If someone types “ebay ” into Google, what do you think their intention is going to be? They most likely want to go to ebay.com, right?

Or, let’s say that your site revolves around real estate and all your ads are real estate affiliate links. If you write an article on that site about seeing eye dogs and rank well for those keywords, guess how profitable that traffic is going to be. It’ll be worthless.  Think about this when you’re doing keyword research. Your ads, offers, content, and audience must all be relevant. Proactive SEO is pretty hard work it’s very unpleasant when you chase a key word and find out it’s a dud.

The way that you rank high for your keywords is by having other webmasters link to you. How useful your site is and how many relevant people see it – ultimately determines how many webmasters will link to you. You also need to make sure your keywords are in your title tag and used a few times throughout the content of your page. Of course, there’s a lot of people who cheat Google’s algorithm but Google is quite good at catching them. I’ve never seen anybody catch a penalty from Google who didn’t have it coming.

Social Media Traffic

Another way to get seen by relevant audiences is by making friends with people who are interested in your topic on social networks. As you can probably tell, that’s not my preferred way to promote a site but it does work and I know a lot of people who do it successfully.

I also know of a lot of people who have a massive number of social followers but aren’t reciprocal. If your site is awesome and you maintain your social profiles well, people will follow you without you having to reach out to them. Popularity builds popularity. Maintaining a social profile is kinda like maintaining a site. Most everything needs to be useful but a little bit can be personal. A little bit of personal stuff actually helps build trust. Whether or not personal stuff is good for your site will depend on the nature of your business.

Guest Posting For Traffic

Find blogs that are relevant to your topic and offer to guest post for them. When you do this, make sure the content on your site is awesome and the content that you provide to the blogger is awesome. Also, make sure the content you provide is relevant to that blog. If their site is about personal finance and you send them an article about soccer statistics, the blogger’s not going to be very happy is he?

Be as valuable to his user base as you are to yours. 99% of the time guest posters get a link to their site at the bottom of the post in the about the author section(aka the byline). This will give you some SEO value and people will click the link and visit your site.

Don’t use the same byline more than once and don’t make the links in your byline say the same thing too often. If your links say the same thing too often you could incur a search penalty – because most website’s links will naturally say many different things – depending on the context of the article they’re placed in.

If you have 40 links pointing to a page on your site – they should say 20 or more different things. Of course, nobody knows the exact amount but Google. It should be noted – Google’s not against guest posting but, they are against “over optimization”(as they put it when they announced the change). It should also be noted – I haven’t seen or heard of anyone catching a penalty from guest posting but, I still like to be careful with links just to be safe.

7) Final Thoughts – Always create value.

It may sound like I’m repeating myself on this last section but, there are some points I want to make sure got across to you. There lots of ways to make money online. They all involve creating something that people will want. Whether it’s articles, tutorials, apps, software, videos, or services – it’s just like any other business. You create value and make sure the value that you create gets out in front of the right people. As long as you do that, you will make money.

Author – Wayne Icard is the founder and primary contributor of NetProEarnings.com

Image Credit – Keith Ramsay – License

What do I mean by soul-less articles? They wrote lousy articles that didn’t have any heart or personality. Why should they put their heart into their link spam? It’s not like anybody was ever going to read that stuff. Seriously, that’s what most of those SEOs seemed to think. There was definitely enough of them that said it. As if all that wasn’t enough, many of those articles had more than their fair share of grammar mistakes because they had been run through an article spinner – and I’m the first to admit that spinning articles is exhausting.

So now, we’ve got a bunch of guys flooding the inboxes of bloggers with their so-called guest posts that are really nothing more than the same junk they were giving to the blog networks and, as is to be expected with this sort of thing, some bloggers have taken their contact information down entirely, because they’re so tired of all the blatant spam that for some reason, these “SEOs” think will get published with flowers, sunshine, and smiley faces. Of course many more bloggers(like this one) are expressing their outrage.

The craziest part(for me anyway), is when these guys submit articles that aren’t even related to the site they want to get published on. WTF? We’ve got full grown men acting stupider than the robot they’re trying to trick because somehow they got it stuck in their mind that they would get more done if they indiscriminately just blast articles(full of spammy links to spammy sites) all over the internet.

The Solution

Guest post with nothing on your mind but providing a good user experience.

Seriously, almost every guest post I’ve ever read had a link in the byline. It’s like going out on a date. You both know why you’re out together and if you don’t provide a good experience and give her the signals that she’s looking for, you’re not going to get the results that you’re looking for. Guest posting works the same way. If you don’t give the blog’s owner the signals he’s looking for, he’s not going to publish your post and you’re not going to get the link that you shouldn’t really be worried about anyway because, if your post doesn’t get published, you’re not going to get that link.

Instead of worrying about the link,

1. Worry about the type of content that the blogger’s readership is looking for.Can you solve a problem that they have?
2. Worry about how well you may need to get to know the blogger before he’ll even open an email from you. Does the blogger even have a “Write For Us Page” or something similar?
3. Worry about the quality of the content that’s already on the site. Are you skilled enough to create content of that caliber?
4. Worry about the linking behavior of the blogger you want to write for. If he doesn’t link out a certain way, what makes you think he’ll let you do it?
5. Worry about whether or not the post you’re writing will earn some links and shares from that blog’s readership. It makes your byline link more powerful if people link to it and share it.
6. Worry about whether or not your post will build some positive familiarity. Familiarity is a powerful thing. Why do think large companies pay just to have their name on the sides of buses, and pay to have football stadiums named after them?
7. Worry about whether the pages you want to link to look spammy and ask yourself: “Is there’s any natural reason for the article I’m writing to link to that page?”.

Quick Summary – Provide value and don’t do anything spammy. Worry about making people happy.

Focus more on making your site worth visiting again and again.

I could write a really long post about this but, I’m just going summarize it for now. Are you capturing leads with your site? Are you capturing email addresses and social subscribers? Are you providing content and/or services that people are going to want to continue receiving? Would people want to recommend your service to their friends? Would people want to share you content with your friends? If you’re not, your problems are a lot bigger than SEO.

I don’t recommend black hat, but I’ll give you a black hat tip anyway.

Let’s get something straight. Blog networks still work. Blog networks like BuildMyRank was don’t work all that well because anybody could join them for a low fee and they were very effective. This mean Google will find them and destroy them. If you find a blog network, ask yourself this, “is everybody going to know about this in six months?”. If the answer is no, it’s a far safer bet than BuildMyRank was and believe me, there’s plenty of blog networks out there that sill work. Seriously, if I can find the blog networks that still work and don’t attract too much attention, why can’t you?

Always remember, never point dirty links at a page that you can’t afford to lose, like your homepage or any page that’s earning links well enough without wearing a black hat. Sometimes, the only way and easiest way to recover from a penalty is to delete the page the dirty links pointed to. It’s hard to believe people are just now figuring that out.

Final Thoughts

What do you honestly think is going to get you quicker results? Sending out a bunch of guest posts that get rejected because you didn’t even try to provide any value to that site’s audience? OR, learning about that site and their audience and doing your very best to make them happy when you guest post?

I wrote and spun enough articles for blog networks to know that providing value for people gets better results and is a lot more stimulating, and I’m saying that as someone who’s sites still haven’t caught a penalty. The rankings for my keywords are gradually falling now after several months because they are competitive keywords and I haven’t promoted for them for months. Honestly, I’m amazed they stayed on the front page this long with the amount of people that actively chase those keywords.

It’s not like black hat doesn’t work but, I think that when you do black hat seo it’s easy to get distracted from the most important thing: providing value. I really think that by providing value to other people’s sites as well as yours, it makes you a better webmaster because you’re always gaining more experience and feedback from the webmasters that you’re guest posting for. This is extremely important to me because I want to focus on making sites that people want to type into their address bar, share with their friends, and link to naturally. In other words, I want to focus on building sites that don’t depend on Google.

Image by Bill Burris with License