Make sure your link building strategy is one with the tortoise.

The single most popular question I get is some variation of, “What is your link building strategy?”  I can completely empathize with this question because I often find myself wondering or asking what other people are doing to expedite the ranking process. The truth is that I’ve probably read, researched, or tried over 100 different strategies.  The crazy thing is that most of these strategies work.

If so many different strategies work, then why do so many people struggle in this area?  Simple, they don’t take action.  Even the rare few that do take action often times try to take shortcuts and rush through the part of internet marketing they hate… link building.

So, before I get into my link building strategy for Niche Rivalry keep one thing in mind: it does no good to spend hours determining what the best strategy is for backlinks if you don’t actually get out there and build those links, and not just any links, but quality links.

A Few Quick Thoughts on Link Building

Link Cycles

One of my biggest priorities when building links is ensuring that they appear natural, or as natural as possible.  I’ve found the best way to do that is by building links in cycles.  Essentially I’ll cycle through all the different link types instead of just focusing on 1 or 2.

All too often I see people getting 90% of their links from one source (i.e. Build My Rank).  Everything starts off fine and they’re usually ranking well for a few months until, poof, their sites drop like a rock in water.  Don’t get hung up on one type of link just because it seems to be working.  Continue to create link diversity.

Link Velocity

Link velocity is the speed at which you build links.  I don’t put a whole lot of stock into link velocity.  I know people that will preach consistently increasing links over time (i.e. 1 per day for the first 30 days, 3 per day for the next 30 days, 6 per day for the next 30 days, and so on), but that just seems completely unnatural to me.

The best thing you can do is keep it random.

Consistently building links is key, but do it randomly.   I build 10 links one week, 5 the next, then 10 in one day, then take a few days off, etc.  Always mix it up.  No matter how great your site is people aren’t going to link to it daily using some algebraic equation, and you shouldn’t either.

Anchor Text

Hopefully you’re starting to see a pattern here, and that pattern is: mix it up.  There’s 4 types of anchor text you should be using for all of your links:

• Brand match (i.e. if your domain is “Shiny Shoe Store”, your anchor text should be “Shiny Shoe Store”)
• Exact match (i.e. if your keyword is “shiny shoes”, your anchor text should be “shiny shoes”)
• Phrase match (i.e. if your keyword is “shiny shoes”, your anchor text should be “clean white shoes”)
• No match (i.e. if your keyword is “shiny shoes”, your anchor text should be “click here”)

I don’t pay much attention to specific percentages of each, I just make sure to mix it up.

Here’s a great video from SEOmoz that goes into a little more detail.

My Quality Link Building Strategy

You may have noticed I continue to use that pesky word “quality.”  I spoke about quality content in my last post and now quality backlinks.  So what exactly is a quality backlink?  When I talk about a quality backlink I’m referring to 3 main things:

• Relevance
• Authority
• Relevance and Authority

The goal is to have every link that links directly to your money site be some combination of the above criteria.  I’m not a big fan of using tools to automate links directly to my money site.

I actually have not started building links for Niche Rivalry yet.  It’s been less than a month since launching the site and I want to take it nice and slow with this site.  My plan is to start next week and I wanted to give ya’ll a little insight to the exact strategy I’ll be using to rank my site.

As you may have noticed from the post title this is just Part I.  In this post I’m going to focus on what my first month of link building typically looks like and in Part II I’ll show you what the rest of the strategy looks like.  Both parts are critical, so don’t just gather the information from this post, implement it and expect amazing results immediately.

(Note: if the link building map is a little confusing be sure to keep reading, as I go over each method in detail)

Whatever you do, don’t get overwhelmed by how many different types of links I utilize.  You can easily rank sites with one quarter (25%), or less, of the links I utilize.  For smaller, less competitive sites, I may only use a few of these methods or perhaps just a few links from each method.  However, for Niche Rivalry I’m going to be going a little bigger because I think it’s going to take a bit more to create some solid authority.

Social Bookmarks

This is where I start.  I don’t do anything fancy, just simply head over to IMTalk.org and purchase 1 set of the Supercharged Bookmarks, dripped over 15 days, pointed at my home page.  I’ve ranked sites on page 1 with nothing but these links.  In fact I have a site sitting at Number 1 with just these links, and it hasn’t budged in months.

This is just the beginning of social bookmarking or social media marketing.  In Part II I’ll get into some more details of how to utilize social bookmarks once you’ve got some epic content created.

Blog Comments and Forum Responses

I coupled these together because they are very similar.  These are not spam comments or responses.  These are high quality responses and engagement on blogs and forums relative to your niche.  Some niches work better than others for these types of links, and unfortunately some niches just don’t have many blogs or forums devoted to them.

Forget what anyone says about no follow, do follow, or high PR.  These links are built for 2 main reasons:

• Free, laser targeted traffic
• Building rapport with bloggers and potential viewers in your niche

Some forums are royal pain to get a link on.  I’ve found forums on page 1 for long tail keywords where I’ve spent hours posting 50 to 100 times just to be able to respond to 1 thread with a link.

So you can see the power of this type of site promotion here’s a screenshot of the stats from one of my sites that is starting to push $1k per month.

Post Runner

If you’re not a member of The Keyword Academy (aff link), you need to be.  They offer an amazing blog network called Post Runner that allows you to get some relevant, high quality, contextual links.  At the very least sign up for the free month and take a look at Post Runner and what they have to offer.

I like to start with Post Runner because the quality is typically pretty high and I can usually find very relevant blogs within my niche.  I’ll typically do something like 5-10 links to my home page and then start sending a few links to some of my inner pages, especially any that might already be getting traffic.

Web 2.0

There are literally hundreds of Web 2.0 properties out there.  These links are amazing and not so amazing at the same time.  They’re amazing because they’re free, rank pretty easily, and have the ability to pass some nice link juice.  They’re not so amazing because they can be taken down at any time since you don’t actually own them.  With that said though, I always use them.

In the past I’ve only created 3-5 properties for each site and it has worked well, but I’ll be taking that to a whole new level and you should be too.  My goal is to get at least 20 created for each site I build.  That would probably be 2-3 to the home page and 17-18 to inner pages.

Here’s the simple strategy I’ve come up with for my 2.0 properties that seems to be working:

• Create a keyword rich 2.0 property
• Write 1-2 articles, around 300-700 words total and post them
• Let them sit for a few weeks
• Blast ‘em (which I’ll cover more in Part II)
• If they start to rank, give them a little love (add a post, picture, or video)

I’m not going to list every property I use (you can find that list in Niche Chaser if you sign up below), but I will say I no longer recommend using WordPress.com or Blogger.  I’ve just had a lot of bad luck with them removing a lot of properties I’ve put up.

Summary

That’s it for Part I.  The conclusion so far is simple.  Build a variety of high quality links in a seemingly natural way.

So what do you guys think of this strategy so far?  Is it similar to yours?  Totally different?  Leave a comment below and let me know what you think.  I may have left some details out that you are interested in, so don’t hesitate to ask any questions.

Make sure you sign up to get a copy of Niche Chaser, which includes an entire page devoted to where to find high quality links in more detail.

Other Posts in the Niche Rivalry Series

• Niche Rivalry: The Rivalry Begins (12/21/11)
• Niche Rivalry 002: Finding Seed Keywords the Easy Way (12/29/11)
• Niche Rivalry 003: Revealing the Niche (1/2/12)
• Niche Rivalry 004: Site Setup (1/9/12)
• Niche Rivalry 005: How to Write Like a Panda (1/19/12)
• Niche Rivalry 006: My Quality Link Building Strategy – Part 1 (1/28/12)