Link Carpet Bombing

After last week’s discussion of external linking, the search for links from the big boys, I didn’t really go into depth about the current methodology I have in place.

I have been over doing the whole social media thing and plan on curtailing this activity for a while and see if it changes much, but I have added a new way to build up links to posts, and that is Carnival Carpet Bombing.

The important thing, is to get all your posts links of some kind, so they don’t become little orphans (this means internal or external links, but especially external links). As most of my readers of  THE Canadian Personal Finance Blog knows I create new content every week (usually about 5 posts), and I have been making a conscious effort to make sure that each post has a link to something internally on my site (usually a much older post), to ensure I have fewer orphaned posts (especially older ones).

The second thing I do is typically on Thursday, I will go to Blog Carnival Central and submit each of the posts for the week to one of the many Personal Finance carnivals, to ensure that then each post has an external link to it (hence the concept of Carnival Carpet Bombing).

Will this bring a lot more readership to my site? I am skeptical, it sometimes brings spikes in readership, but there is a low retention rate on these new readers. This does add external links, and if you are starting out, more likely than not from a higher Page Rank site, which then gives you a higher Page Rank. As long as the external site linking to you is not an identified SPAM or SCRAPING site, then this can only help your site in Google’s Eyes.

What might be useful would be a tool to wander around the net and draw the link map for each of your post, showing where it might have links to, and show the traversal path of robots through your Internal Link Lattice as well. Anybody know of such a tool? I prefer graphical output, since text files with thousands of words give me headaches.

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I have already given some ideas about creating internal links with Link Building a Tutorial (Internal), (see I just created an internal link right there), but now we need to do the important task of creating External Links (i.e. links from other sites, that hopefully have a higher Page Rank than you). External links (hopefully) bring new readers to your site, and can increase your prestige and page rank, so you need to take this topic very seriously.

I have learned a lot of methods for building up external links from my web site THE Canadian Personal Finance Site (see I just created an external link for that site), some have worked well, others not so much, so let’s wander through some of the methods that seem to help out.

Just Ask

One way of getting links from external sites to your site, is by asking the external site owner to link to your site. This seems obvious, but it doesn’t happen often any more either. I rarely add links to my web sites from e-mails sent to me from sites I do not know about (sorry, if I linked to everyone who asked, I’d have a site of links and not much else). If the site owner doesn’t know of you, and does not know you, don’t expect them to link to your site, unless they are incredibly generous. You can try this method, but don’t expect a lot of success with it, unless you know other bloggers well.

Life is a Carnival

This is the obvious way to get external links and to build up your links to external sites as well, simply go to the Blog Carnival hub, find some carnivals that are in your category or topic space, and start submitting posts. Don’t worry that the carnival seems to have 125 posts on it, you are worried about the link, not about if anyone clicks on it (they most likely won’t). This is how I started building up links to my site, and it has worked really well early on.

Hosting a Carnival is really good for this kind of stuff too, because you link to many external sites, but typically those who are in the carnival are supposed to link back to your post as well, which will give you scads more external links into your sites. Hosting a carnival isn’t easy, and if you are a Newbie, the blog carnival owner may not be too enthused to have you host, but keep trying, it pays off.

Best of Posts

Create your own carnival is another option, where you find the big sites in your category, and create a Weekly Best of Links post ( an example of this would be my Random Thoughts: Slash into Lent post). You end up creating outward facing external links, and if those sites see you linking to their content, they may do the same for you, not often, but it does happen.

Remember with these kind of posts, don’t include too many links, because folks just don’t click that many links on any site.

Big Social Media Sites

There are a few big Social Media sites that actually give you a link back from them, and if you are a newbie, their Page Rank is bound to be higher than yours, so having them link to you is good for you. A few of these sites include: Zoomit , OldDogg, Fwisp and others. These links are very useful to have, and more exposure in Social Media, means more eyes on your content, and possibly more folks linking to you as well (and more money to be made as well). A great list of good sites is 10 Social Networks That Will Get You More Traffic, very useful link.

Mainstream media mentioning you will also cause an explosion of links too, but that is very much hit and miss as well, but more exposure in Social Media, increases the chances of this kind of lucrative exposure.

Networking

Get to know other bloggers in your field or in your city. Meet them face to face, or via Instant Messaging, because the larger your circle and network is, the more links you will end up with as well.  It’s not easy to do this (don’t leave comments about how you’d like to get together with the author on web sites, that is just creepy), but you must try. Use Twitter or something like that and say you are in some city and looking for fellow bloggers to meet, you might be surprised who might answer (but also be careful, there are a lot of Trolls and Odd Folk out there too).

As with job hunting, networking is a key to building  your site and links to your site.

So with these two tutorials, you should be able to start building your stature on the web with links both internal and external.

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After the fiasco that was my attempt at hosting the Carnival of Personal Finance (although that post is one of the most popular I have ever had), I ran into yet another interesting whine from one of the many posters who I included in the overly long post (this was found in Stumbleupon):

Host left out a large number of articles from a large number of excellent personal finance bloggers for no apparent reason. Not good carnival etiquette.

This is what I really have problems with in the whole Carnival world, just because you send in a post, why do you think it should be included? Especially if there are over 100 posts to choose from? Most of the larger carnivals I have seen (and stopped reading) are just so bloody long, I gave up reading them (unless they had an “editors choice” at the starting, where I read those 5 and ignored the rest). Witness this week’s Carnival of Personal Finance #202, at least it has an Editor’s choice box so I can ignore the rest of the over 100 entries.

This is why writers ridicule bloggers so much, the whole “… we should be inclusive…” mentality of, just because I wrote it someone must want to read it (this post included) is lazy, and will never make you a better writer.

I had 1 or two queries which were by normal writers who simply asked why, so that they could hone their skills, but the deluge of whining and complaining drowned out these writers. Why anyone wants to host a Carnival these days is beyond me.

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I had forgotten that I had volunteered to host the Carnival of Personal Finance, this past weekend, so when I got the e-mail from the Carnival owner I was surprised and a little panic’ed as well. 

I had written a posting already for Monday talking about Family Day in Ontario, and after taking a few minutes to think I came up with the concept of writing this week’s CPF in a Family Advice format. Thus was born:

Carnival Of Personal Finance #192: The Family Day Edition

I always valued advice from my family and from what I had heard from other folks there was always an inherent value in advice from different members of your family, so I went with that.

I looked at how many entries had been submitted for the Carnival (it is a weekly Carnival) and there was almost 100 of them, which again made me go Holy Crap (just reading all of this was going to take a while).

The Carnival itself has a set of rules for posting to the Carnival which helped trim out some of the entries up front (I’d say about 10-20%). Some posts you would tell were simply “factory” posts from sites that pump out content with very little personal input.

I started trimming and was looking for specific personal finance/family type posts which started knocking out a lot of entries, and finally I ended up with about 30 entries that I was going to use. I managed to write it in a reasonable (if rushed) format and managed to add a few pictures from the Ontario Government’s Family Day web site as well.

Backlash

Normally when I have submitted to Carnivals and not been included, I have simply gone, “Oh well…”, and moved on, but evidently that is not the “norm” when it comes to other Financial Bloggers.

One sent me a “short” note asking why I didn’t include the post, and I have been receiving “snippy” comments as well from other bloggers about my edit’ing techniques.

I didn’t want to simply publish a “here is a list of interesting posts” Carnival (I do that enough on Fridays, and frankly it is a very lazy blogging trick), I wanted it to make sense and be concise (so that someone might actually go through all the posts, not just the first few).

The Day After

Not sure what hosting this Carnival will do for my site. It didn’t really increase my traffic that much (it was a good day, but not the best day).  Hopefully I have picked up a few more readers and maybe picked up a few more incoming links, we shall see.

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Friday I will be publishing a Carnival of Catastrophic financial advice, where I asked fellow financial bloggers to send me in their worst financial advice story, the stories are interesting, but no one bares their souls as I did a few weeks back in Worst Financial Advice Given Ever .

I guess that might be a way to draw more traffic is to create a real Carnival and then use that to draw more traffic to the web site? Another thing on the TO DO list for the web page.

Friday or Monday I will publish my monthly income statement, such as it is.

Still no fixes for this theme or the UBD advert rotator.

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I am starting to get the hang of this whole video thing, but now I need to actually think about what I am trying to capture with my phone/camera. Currently my personal blog is filled with short clips of my son doing various odd things, which makes me much like the parent who invites friends over to watch ENDLESS home movies of their kids (but at least with the blog, you can ignore it).

My Carnival postings are slowly starting to come in:

Carnival of Debt Management #15 : Big Cajun Man presents Canadian Household Net Worth Up posted at Canadian Financial Stuff. Canadians as a whole their debt as a percentage of their net worth is decreasing, but that seems to be due to their assets increasing in value, not due to a nationwide debt reduction strategy.

Only one so far. My friend at Canadian Capitalist has hooked me up nicely and work can begin this weekend in earnest attempting to get my site moved onto it’s own hosting site! Should be a lot of fun.

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Interesting, I worked hard and submitted a whole bunch of stuff to Carnivals, which I list on Life is a Carnival over at Canadian Financial Rants, yet half of the postings I never even heard about, I had to go to Technorati and see who had linked to my articles. I thought the whole reason for Blog Carnivals was to create buzz and cause folks to come over and look at them, yet not many folks asked me to advertise for them? Maybe they already have a good readership?

I posted to very diverse Carnivals seeing if I can create new readership from different “groups” of folks as well, all very interesting stuff.

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Yes, that is another way to get folks to notice you on the Internet, is by sending articles to one of the many Carnivals that are posted on a regular basis on many different sites.

The first thing is to make sure you have some good content on your blog, that you figure might be carnival worthy. Then you go to this site, or one of the many other sites where lists of carnivals are kept. Using the simple on line forms submit your article and hopefully the editor of the carnival for the week will put you in.

This has worked quite nicely for me on my finance site to build up a readership of folks who seem to enjoy my odd viewpoint on finances in general. The next big step is to actually volunteer to host a Carnival. That will drive up your readership a TON, at least for that week and will also increase your in-link and out-link count, which will in turn help your Google Pagerank as well (as well as your Technorati and Alexa.com rank as well).

Links are really important (incoming more so, but outgoing is pretty important too). We’ll talk more about that soon.

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