If you want your site to make any money at all then you’re going to have to back it up by a solid link building strategy.

Included herein is the culmination of years of research and experimentation in the link building field. What I am going to present to you is what I consider to be one of the best link building strategies that any webmaster with some elbow grease and a willingness to learn can undertake. Using it you’ll achieve not only high rankings, but high rankings that actually stick.

This is a very long and detailed post and hopefully you’ll get a thing or two from it.

How Panda Has Affected My Link Building Strategy

Since Panda hit I have completely changed my strategy to focus on having high quality links sent to my money sites only. No more blog comment blasts, forum profiles, or anything else in the realm of low-quality linking. You’ll see a little bit later that these strategies still have their place, but in order to keep my website’s link profile as clean as possible I have to exclude this style of linking from it.

I can’t tell you that I have drug any sites out of the Panda filter yet, at this point in time very few have. I can tell you, however, that the site I have been experimenting with is making a slow ascent to the top.

If your site hasn’t been affect by any Google filter and you apply the link building strategy I’m about to share with you, you’re going to be absolutely golden for nearly any term you want to target sin highly competitive terms like “auto insurance” or something of that nature. I can and still do hold front page rankings for a few single and double word brand-name keywords using this strategy.

Open Up This Mind Map

Before we start on this please open up the following mind-map in a new tab or new window. It’s going to be important that you have access to this image during the article because I’m going to constantly be referencing it throughout my write-up.

Now that you’ve done that let’s start with the very first bubble in the middle.

Green: Your Money Site

The castle, the money machine. The middle bubble is your money site or your landing page. Whatever you want to start ranking with, this is it right there.

It’s important that your money site is optimized for the keywords you want to target – keys in the url, title, and description is bare-minimum stuff. Make sure your onpage SEO is tight because you don’t want something silly like not having your keywords in the title to be hampering all the effort you put in into link building.

Blue: 1st Tier Links

The bubbles in blue are 1st tier links. These are the links that point directly to your money site and are reserved for the highest quality links you can get.
Let’s go through each one and how you can get them.

Guest Blog Posts: High Quality, Challenging to Scale

This is arguably one of the most powerful links you can get for you site. For one thing, the links are contextual and (hopefully) surrounded by unique content.

If you score a guest blog post on a site that’s relevant to yours then all the better. Some will say relevancy doesn’t matter in linking, it may or may not be true but it doesn’t hurt you to take a shot.

There’s a few different places you can get good guest posts from:

SponsoredReviews: Here you can post a new job and have guest bloggers from all around the world make a bid on it. Depending on their blog you can choose to accept or decline. You set the price and can pick up PR5 blog posts for about $5 provided that you set them up with the article.

MyBlogGuest: This is a cool little website set up by Ann Smarty where you can engage with other bloggers and set up guest-posting arrangements. While it’s not as hands-off as SponsoredReviews is, it is free to make blogger relationships on their forum. There is a paid option where you can post you can post guest posts to their article gallery and have webmasters offer to post them on their blogs. This is $20/month and I am currently subbed there.

Google Queries: If you’re interested in finding bloggers relevant to your niche here’s a few queries you can use to find them.

• “keyword” AND “guest post”
• “keyword” AND “guest posting”
• “keyword” AND “write for us”
• “keyword” AND “guest post”
• “keyword” AND “guest writer”
• “keyword” AND “contribute”

This requires a lot more work than the last 2 sources BUT you will get a much higher quality links and again this is free provided you don’t pay anything for the opportunity to post.

My List: Here’s a cool little list I have compiled that will give you some places to send guest posts to. Please use it responsibly.

The Future of Social Media Links and How to Game Them

Facebook Shares, Tweets, and Google +1′s. Even though Google +1 is still relatively new I am going to throw it in here just because it seems logical that Google would use their own data to improve upon the search algo.

I have a strong feeling about social signals and I think they will start to get more and more heavy in the future.

Matt Cutts says that they are using it lightly on his video:

And you can also find an excellent article by Danny Sullivan on the matter: What Social Signals Do Google and Bing Really Count?

I know of two ways you can get social media links without actually “earning” them.

1. You can incentivize them. I say incentivize instead of buy because you might have seen some people offering free stuff like e-books in exchange for something like a tweet. I think that’s a really clever alternative to buying them outright. You can look at crowdsourcing sites like Microworkers to buy anything social under the sun. You can technically start jobs on Mturk for social stuff but they will get disabled usually before they finish. And don’t forget about Fiverr for a cheap place as well.
2. You can manufacture them yourself. Programs like Tweet Attacks make it easy to manage a ton of your own Twitter accounts. You can schedule following, tweets, and a host of other interesting features. Don’t buy Tweet Attacks Account Creator though, it sucks. If you click on the link there it will give you a better review of this program, I’m not terribly impressed with it but it gets the job done.

When it comes to Facebook I’ve had a lot of positive experience with the software from oCommunity.  The bad part about this software is that its overpriced. If you want to schedule tasks (which you do if you’re running more than 1 account) you’ll have to buy the most expensive version of the software. There is also no account creation module, I had to get one of my VA’s to put together a bunch of accounts.

Contextual Syndication Networks: My Favorite

You have probably already heard of services like Unique Article Wizard, they have been around for some time now. Contextual syndication services like these are what I consider to be the future of article marketing.

You’re definitely going to need a spinner like The Best Spinner (which is what I use) because you won’t want to syndicate duplicate articles across the web. I’ve done my research, each one of the services I mention below all accept some form of article spinning.

At this moment I use 7 different services and pay almost $300 per month to stay subbed to them all. Here is what I use:

1. Unique Article Wizard
2. Submit Your Article
3. Free Traffic System
4. Article Ranks
5. Authority Link Network
6. Article Marketing Robot
7. Article Marketing Automation

If you were to pick only the best I would go with either Article Ranks or Submit Your Article. I did a case study a while ago where I compared the 6 paid and free services across 6 fresh domains all targeting the same keyword. AR and SYA were the 2 that dominated the top SERP spots after about 2 months of studying and submitting. (By the way, SEO Link Vine performed the worst with only 1 link generated and 2nd to last in the SERPs.)

Don’t forget to sign up with the free ones like Free Traffic System and Authority Link Network, too. FTS actually outranks some of paid services like SEO Link Vine (I don’t recommend this one, it sucks).

If this step seems like a hassle I can do it all for you with my Advanced Article Marketing Method service. It is pretty complex and we have a couple customers that order 10+ of these per month.

P.S. When I get enough interested names to make my own private network I’ll be setting something up like Authority Link Network which will allow you to syndicate articles for free as long as you maintain a PR blog in the network. Click here to put your name on the interested list and you’ll only be contacted when I actually get off my butt to put it together.

PR1+ Blog Comments: An Interesting Observation I’ve Made

This is actually something I stopped doing before Panda hit and started up again after and I’ll tell you why.

I compared some of the link profiles of my sites that got hit with the sites that didn’t. I noticed one of my sites in particular was very heavy in manual posted blog comments that were done ages ago, this site wasn’t hit by Panda and actually benefited.

I also started looking at some of the sites that were ranking in Google above mine, especially the shitty sites. One site in particular, a blogger blog that hadn’t been updated in almost 2 years. It’s link profile? A good 200 manually posted blog comments.

My site that benefited from Panda also had a healthy amount of nofollow links compared to some of my sites that suffered didn’t have as many nofollows mixed it.

At this point all this is is a theory, but throwing in high PR manual blog comments isn’t going to hurt you at all. It’s good for link diversity and the PR doesn’t hurt either.

The only problem is getting them approved takes time, if you can get them approved at all. I would probably stay away from the auto-approved comments because usually they are heavily spammed to death anyway and these kinds of links cross the line into low-quality link zone.

Finding High PR Blog Posts to Comment On

There’s a couple different ways to find high PR blog comments but by far the easiest way is to use Scrapebox.

You can scrape blog URLs by platform and then bulk PR check your entire list in one swoop. Doing this you’ll have a stash of a couple hundred PR1+ blog comments depending on how many URLs you harvested in the first step.

Here’s a video tutorial on finding high PR forums and comment sources with SB:

Hosted Tier 1′s: Web 2.0 Sites, Relevant EMD Domains, and PR1+ Domains

I’m going to group all these in here because they are all pretty similar in function but each have their own small differences.

Web 2.0 Sites

These are free sites that you can post articles on after you’ve set up an account. Of these 3 I think Web 2.0 tier 2 sites are the most common because they are free and easy to set-up. You’ve probably also seen Buy, Sell, Trade forums flooded with services on setting these up for you. While they aren’t what they used to be, I think they are still decent if you can get past the idea that your link building efforts might be wiped away if your properties get moderated for spam.

There is also a relatively new phenomenon with sites like hubpages and squidoo removing your article if you blast them too much with xrumer and blog comments. I’m not exactly sure how much actually triggers this but its something to keep in mind.

You’re Going to Like This List

You’ve probably already heard of the good ones like Squidoo and Hubpages, but here is a list of sites I use that don’t delete your articles because they think you’re spam:

1. blog.co.in
2. multiply.com
3. livejournal.com
4. insanejournal.com
5. jimdo.com
6. weebly.com
7. webnode.com
8. over-blog.com
9. quizilla.teennick.com
10. edublogs.org
11. blogspot.com

If you’re wondering how I came upon this list I actually went through about a 100 web 2.0′s I had set up over 1-2 years ago and found patterns among the sites that consistently deleted and those that did not.

Relevant EMD Domains and High PR Domains Are Similar

These are both pretty similar so I’m going to talk about them both here.

One thing I want to mention is that the costs are higher with this method. You’ll need a special kind of hosting along with the price of the domains and then the time putting some effort into developing the domains.

You may or may not want to use Adsense on these sites because they leave a footprint but it is entirely possible to monetize with other ways. Think cloaked affiliate links. A simple WordPress plugin like GoCodes or Pretty Links will turn your affiliate URL into something that Google won’t be able to identify as far as I know.

You’ll Need SEO Hosting

You’re going to need each site on its own C-Class because if they’re all grouped up on one and you link to your money site the links coming from these sites are going to be devalued. Google has a patent for weighing the value of links that everyone can view online, one of the factors is unique IPs. You can find that patent here.

For SEO hosting I use C-Class IP Hosting because their pricing is pretty unbeatable @ $1 per IP. I haven’t had any trouble with them yet. Having trouble with these guys, not recommended.

Exact Match Domains aka EMDs

These are super-niched sites that are created with EMD domains.

The purpose behind these is to rank fast for just 1-3 relevant keywords, push your competiton lower in the SERPs, push traffic to your money site, and maybe make some affiliate $ in the mean time.

The power behind EMDs is all in the domain name. If you are looking to target the keyword “portable power tools” for example, ideally you’d want to register portablepowertools.com, portablepowertools.net, or portablepowertools.org.

The SEO benefit when you register a domain in a targeted keyword like that is immense. Some have speculated that the recent algo update has dropped EMDs down a bit but I still see them ranking for low-hanging fruit keywords all the time and that’s the kind of stuff they really dominate.

The cool thing about EMDs is they are quick traffic generators. Hitting page 1 with these sites is not hard, provided you post some content on the front page and send a couple links its way. The cool thing is that you can link out from these sites directly to your money site, acting like a traffic funnel as well as a valuable source for link juice.

PR1+ Domains

You can pick up non-dropped domains through a service like DropDay (I used to use Freshdrop for free but it went paid, anyone know of any free alternatives?) or the Godaddy TDNAM Scraper Addon in Scrapebox. Here is a good written and video tutorial on finding PR1+ domains with the TDNAM Scraper from Scrapebox.

PR domains only serve one purpose, link juice. You can pick up expiring domains @ auction or Godaddy Firesale that already have PR and links pointing to them.

While I’m not going to go into this too far because it’s beyond the scope of the article, know that this is a good tier 1 strategy and some highly competitive terms are getting ranked using only this method.

You may be able to rank with these if you’ve got some decent content up there along with a handful of quality links but you won’t be able to rank as efficiently or quickly as an EMD domain. However, where it lacks in its ranking ability it makes up for in the links and PR it comes with so this is a great option for some high PR homepage links to your money site.

“Wildcard Links” For Link Diversity

In case you’re wondering I made up that term because I didn’t have anything else to call the one-shot links that I would build only once or twice every couple times a month.

These kinds of links I don’t think help in SERPs too much, something like directory submissions is such an old strategy there’s really no telling how much Google has devalued these links over time.

BUT they still serve a good purpose, link diversity.

Having a link profile that is full of all different kinds of links is good for your blog for two reasons.

• It looks more natural.
• When and if Google devalues any of the stronger strategies that we’re using, we won’t get bonked too hard because we have a diverse link profile and our juice is coming from many different kinds of sources.

Explore different kinds of wildcard links, I’ve only mentioned a couple in the mindmap and you could probably think of more if you really sat down and considered it. Hey, I already though of another, PAD submissions.

P.S. I’m going to go over a really sick way of getting Yahoo! Answers in my Microworkers case study. Stay tuned for that coming next week on our around July 16.

Red: The Laundered Tier 2 Link Blasts

These are the kinds of links that I no longer point at my money site (except for the AMR submissions), but just because I don’t point them at my site doesn’t mean they no longer have any use.

These are the links that will push up your Tier 1 web 2.0 sites, your EMD domains, and the PR domains that you picked up at auction.

Social Bookmarking

If you want to blast social bookmarks hard there isn’t anything else on the market besides Social Bookmarking Demon.

It is a little bit pricey for just social bookmarks and you might prefer to use something free on the market, but I’m not familiar with any free solution because I’ve owned BMD for such a long time. There could be a free alternative out there that is decent, maybe someone can mention it in the comments.

Blog Network Blasts

I think this is one of the better 2nd tier link services you can go with and in fact you can point these links to your money site if you really want to.

There’s a few services I’ve seen in your favorite webmaster B/S/T as well as on Fiverr that will submit your spun article to xx or xxx number of blogs they have.

These are usually just a bunch of low-quality blogs across a ton of c-class IPs (check that) so it’s good for low-quality contextual links.

Article Submissions

I think blasts using something like Article Marketing Robot also has a good place as a solid 2nd Tier link source.

Because spun articles are so easy for you to get and Article Marketing Robot submissions are cheap to come by, this makes for a very effective and cost efficient link building method.

Forum Profiles

A lot of people who were heavy into forum profiles have since reported that they are no longer working as well as they used to post-Panda.

They may be right, but forum profiles are probably one of the easiest kinds of links to get for your Tier 1 properties thanks to services like Drip Feed Blasts. Getting this kinds of links is as simple as slotting in your keywords, URLs, and scheduling them out.

I haven’t used forum profiles in quite some time but this is still an option.

Blog Comments

Same with the forum profile links, blog comments have also reportedly taken a big hit after the update.

I have never really blasted my money site with blog comments either, I only use them to push up my Tier 1 properties.

These again are very easy to get if you’ve got a tool like Scrapebox that can harvest thousands of links and then blast out spun comments to them. You can also get a lot of auto-approve comment links using this method as well.