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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So it has taken me about 6 years and a lot of mistakes to figure out how to slowly but surely build links into your site (and across your site) and thus build your Page Rank as well. I will describe the techniques and ideas that I have used with THE Canadian Personal Finance Site .

Old “Dead” Content

This is the big problem, if you don’t have internal links to your old content, it is as good as dead (not making you any money, or giving your readers a feel for your ideas).  If you do not link to it, once the post is off your front page, and it does not have any links to it, the only way that a reader will find it is via SEO trickery (which is snake oil in my opinion) to manipulate searching, or via a blind luck search hit. This is why you need to create a tight lattice of internal links to your own content, to make sure your old content is still useful (and by useful I mean money making).

I have heard many times that External Links are the most important thing for a new site, and existing sites to pick up, to increase Page Rank and other ratings, but I like to think that an internal linking structure is also a key to making sure that all of your content has the capability to make money for you, which is really why you are running this business.

Best practices for internal linking? Read on, here are some of mine:

Favorites or Best of Page

This is the first and easiest thing to do. There are posts that you like, and that other folk have liked over time, that you should make available to them in the easiest way possible (eye catchers in the marketing world). How do you do that? There are a few ways that I have seen:

• Have a title and short description rolling widget on your front page, that simply runs through these posts and may catch a new reader’s eye, and thus cause them to read more of your content (and increase their stay on your site). This is a great idea, if that is the way your web site is laid out (don’t just shove this widget on your page, if it doesn’t fit with your theme).
• Create a Best Of/Favorites Menu item at the top of the page. This is really useful too, you then create a static, Best of Page, where you put links to your Keystone posts, that hopefully grab you more readership.

These two methods are easy to implement, and is a must for any new web site, after it has been up long enough to have some older content you still want to monetize.

Weekly Round Up Links

In my weekly round ups on Friday (which I may move to another day since everyone seems to be doing one now), the first set of links on this page is a set of links to all my previous posts for that week. Is this sneaky? Not really, it’s pretty darn obvious.  Have a look at Random Thoughts Slash Into Lent, and see that the first section of links are actually all to my own posts.

Why do this? My guess is that most folks who end up at a page with lots of links, get overwhelmed with the sheer number and will stop clicking after the 3rd or 4th link (I checked with a few other bloggers on this theory and they tend to agree as well), so make sure it is my content that they get to first (yup, self-serving stuff like this is how you get more eyes on your stuff).

Normal Linking

Another trick I have been doing lately is posting a lot of my older content onto Twitter (with the tage OBG, (Oldie but Goodie)) to see if I can get more eyes on my older content. I didn’t touch on that in Twitter Etiquette (see what I did there, I linked to some older content on this site, tricky eh?), but it is another way to get older content a little more life (but I will talk about that in my post about External Linking). With these OBG posts, I sometimes try to link them into my new content as well, thus creating a more complex linking map on my site.

Linking old content from new content just freshens your money making capabilities that much more.

These are just a few of the tricks I have tried to keep my older content fresh, but you must make sure that the old content is “Green and Fresh“, so linking to a post you did about something that happened 5 years ago, and has specifics about it isn’t going to help much (unless you couch the link with a title like Historical Background: then you can sneak those in as well.
Next post will be about external linking, hopefully soon. Sorry my writing here is not as prolific as my regular site, but I need some spare time to think about these things (and discuss them with my blogging peers as well).

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So after spending most of my spare time this past weekend, repairing any links on my web site that pointed at it’s old Blogspot address, I am now attempting to tackle all of the rest of the broken links on Canadian Personal Finance blog, and it is turning out to be another behemoth of a task.

Using the WordPress Broken Link Plug In, I found that along with the hundreds of links to my old web site I had over 160 broken links on my site pointing to various non-existant sites or posts on the Web, Oh Joy!

The interface for the Plug In is very straight forward, so that is good, but I am also cleaning up the postings as well (deleting some posts, that I must have written while asleep, or when I was in a particularly lazy mood, that is for sure). You can simply discard the bad link and that speeds things up a lot, but I have many images that I have linked to that are no longer there, which I want to clean up (the post looks stupid without them).

This site only has 1 broken link, so that is kind of cool too.

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I have tried building a strong link base for Canadian Personal Finance Opinions over the past while and I think I have succeeded, however, I have not been able to build the readership other than being in the hundreds and the RSS readership to about 400 readers.

Using PerformancingAds as my basis for this I found a likely site where an ad might be of use, and I found a fellow Canadian Financial Blogger in the Million Dollar Journey, who’s rates are a little steep for a week, but I decided to experiment and bought a week of advertising on his site. We shall see whether this will build readership or be a waste of $20.00. I have blown more on stupider things, so I think this is a worthwhile experiment.

If this campaign works, my next steps will be to approach Million Dollar Journey for a more permanent solution. Currently, my site is linked to from the N.C.F.B.A. and other sites, however, it will be interesting to see if my new 125×125 ad is enticing as well.

Canadian Personal Finance blog 125x125 Advert

Targeted Blog Advertising With PerformancingAds
Make Money With PerformancingAds

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The more I learn, the more I realize how much I have to learn, is sort of how my week has been going for this blog.

After realizing that there must be BLOGSPOT based internal links in the content on this web page that points to my old Not How To Do It blog, I wondered how could I find all of that.

The easiest way to deal with it was:

1. Go into your WordPress Dashboard
2. Select “Manage Posts”
3. And then in SEARCH input your old blogspot address (in my case nothowtodoit.blogspot.com)
4. Voila, all posts that you have that have internal linksto your posts on your Blogspot site!

For me it was simple only 5 posts to fix, one, two three all updated to point to my new site address, all internal links fixed and happy no problemo.

Then I wondered, how many of the posts on this site have internal links to my old finance site? Go back to the Manage Posts page and input  canajunfinances.blogspot.com, OH CRAP! Pages upon pages of posts with internal links back to my old site. I am slowly cleaning up that mess, one by one, and adding tags so it is a long tedious methodology for now.

Then I realized I need to do this on Canadian Financial Opinions as well. OH CRAP!!!! That is going to be hundreds of posts to fix with internal links! Darn.

BDV-361074-BDV

Is there a better way, to do bulk edits in WordPress?

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So there are a bunch of sites that I keep finding that enjoy scraping content from Canadian Financial Rants, which is flattering in 1 way, but very annoying in other ways. None of these sites seem to monetize too much, so I will let them be for now, but I am also including more and more links to my internal articles in my postings, to see if I can pull folks off those sites and onto my real site!

What does that picture have to do with anything? Nothing much, it’s just a silly picture of what I think of Leaf Fans (from Davezilla). No I am not a Sens fan, I am a Habs fan! Get it right!

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So after doing Canadian Financial Opinions, I inserted a whole bunch of Amazon links in it to different books and such, but completely bollocks’ed up the links so that anyone who clicked on them got an HTTP 404 message asking them if they are smoking the crack.

Checking your links work correctly is like making sure you use the Spell Checker. Yes, you can put up psotings wtih bad seplling but it does make you look sptuid. The same way you need to check your links and make sure they all work correctly too!

Oh and if you think folks are “scraping” your material for their own sites, include internal links to your own blog, that way if they put it on their site, you’ll have a link back to your site!

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So once you have folks reading your site, you don’t really want them wandering away, without looking at your advertisers, or better still looking at other things on your site.

The problem being, if you simply put HTTP links for other sites (which you need to do, to help your rankings), then usually your page disappears from the reader’s browser and the new pager replaces it. Typically a link like this looks like:

< href=”http://canajunfinances.com”>Canadian financial rants has an interesting article on vomiting

Well this is great for the Canadian Financial site because you are sending folks over to his site (that’s me by the way), however, your site now disappears from the browser. You can however with one added command fix this.

< href=”http://canajunfinances.com” target=”_blank”>Canadian financial rants has an interesting article on vomiting

This now causes your reader’s browser to open a new window for this link, and keeps your page in tact so they can wander off and read your linked pager, but then come back to your page by going back to their original browser window. I don’t remember who pointed this one out to me, but it is a good idea, I think.

Apologies for missing yesterday, I was actually dealing with my son’s vomit.

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This is the question your readers and potential readers have every time they come to your site. If the content of your site is boring, or doesn’t catch the readers eye or fancy, then you are going to lose readers, and potential income.

Now if your site is a simple set of links with a bunch of Adsense ads on it, then this article doesn’t pertain to you, because you don’t care, you just want folks to stumble over your site.

You need to figure out how to make your posting interesting. A picture is always interesting, a video is even more interesting for a lot of folks, I really like this clip, of my daughter sinking a 3 pointer, which I then wrote an article around:

Ask yourself the question, “Would I want to read this”, every time you write and you won’t go wrong!

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