Forum Marketing Tips

This post is about forum marketing as a way of building links, generating traffic and establishing yourself as an expert in your niche.

What you will see below is a PDF document that is Day 2 of our Website Promotion Success Email Mini-Course.

I recommend you sign-up for the course and to our newsletter as you will get extra benefits that you will not get from reading the blog alone.

The report you are about to read covers the fundamentals of forum marketing, where to find the best forums for your niche and, more importantly, how to use your signature file to generate traffic and links.

Forum marketing is a great way to connect with a community of die-hard fans of a particular niche and establish yourself as an expert (you’ll probably learn some things along the way too)!

The report is short but is packed with practical information that you can start implementing straight away.

If you find the text is too small then use the buttons on the top right side of the document to switch to full screen mode or toggle page size. Enjoy!

To your success,

Karl Foxley

P.s. If you like the report why not share it with a friend.

photo credit: lumaxart

What you will see below is a PDF document that is Day 1 of our Website Promotion Success Email Mini-Course.

I recommend you sign-up for the course and to our newsletter as you will get extra benefits that you will not get from reading the blog alone.

The report you are about to read covers the fundamentals of article marketing, where to post your articles and, more importantly, how to use your author resource box (also known as an author bio).

The report won’t take you long to read, you can probably do it in one sitting, but if you are new to the concept of article marketing then you should come away with a much better understanding.

If you find the text is too small then use the buttons on the top right side of the document to switch to full screen mode or toggle page size. Enjoy!

To your success,

Karl Foxley

Polite SEO

This post is about polite SEO; don’t ask, all will become clear in a minute or two.

I have to laugh, someone left a comment on this blog for about the fifth time now, and their email address and website were for different domains so I decided to take a look.

The web link left was for a blogging package (installation of WordPress, blog optimisation and blog training video tutorials amongst other things) from a company that is pretty well known across the web.

However, the email address was for a different domain so I decided to pay the website a visit. I found a company website for ‘search engine optimisation and link building specialists‘.

I looked around and found their link building service and this includes blog commenting.

This is how they sell their service:

We find related blogs that match your service and then leave regular comments.

By leaving regular comments we add value to the community and earn you quality blog traffic and optimized links.

Here is my problem with this; they use different email addresses (but with the same domain), different Gravatars and leave various keywords for their names, this in my opinion makes them no different from a spammer.

It states that they add value but all they essentially leave is a quick sentence that is loosely related to the blog post, meaning that they either didn’t read it or they cannot provide anything of value.

The other issue I have is that I clearly state in my comment policy and in the comment snippet below that a ‘real name’ must be used. Leaving a comment with a name like ‘blog coaching’ will only have your message deleted or I will remove the name and put in a first name of my choosing (and the URL will certainly be removed).

They are billing their service as a relationship building service but all they have done is repeatedly annoyed me by ignoring the box below that states clearly that I love to receive comments but you must us a real name. Simple!

If you are using this sort of service to build ‘quality inbound links‘ to your website then I’d seriously consider a better use of your money because you may just be severing relationships with people without realising it.

Link building can be very fruitful when done properly, blog commenting can be a great source of getting optimized links. If you are looking to get a quality search engine optimised link from blog commenting then find blogs with Keyword Luv enabled, then you can drop a link with your keywords without annoying anyone (this is just polite SEO! )

If you are outsourcing your link building, at least give the company a detailed list of do’s and don’t's.

To your success,

Karl Foxley

P.s. If you are reading this and are from the link building company, please stop wasting your time here!

Best of the Web A Leading Directory

BOTW, or Best of the Web, is still one of the best directories on the Internet. If you think directory submissions is dead then think again!

The assumption that Google treats ‘paid for‘ directory submissions as a paid for link is very much mistaken and this was discussed by Matt Cutts in a recent video. I’ve shared the video before but just in case you missed it, here it is again.

Your take-away from this video is that not all directories are created equal, some are just there to make money from as many people as possible! You need to assess the quality of the directory before you ever pay for a link.

So, does Best of the Web provide a quality link? Absolutely!

BOTW has a Google Page Rank of 6, so the Goog see the directory as an authority site.

Are all links approved? No!

Bad quality websites are not approved.

So, if you are still looking for a top quality link, you can now rest easy that getting listed on BOTW is NOT the same as ‘buying links’ as Matt Cutts has made clear.

Go get your top quality link right here.

Get A Quality Link Today at BOTW

The most important thing you can do is make sure you select the most appropriate category for your website (remember, relevancy is key).

If your website crosses a range of categories then I recommend you choose the one that is most important to you.

To recap, a paid link in a poor quality directory that approves all links is probably going to do more harm than good, BOTW on the other hand is a great place to start with you link building strategy.

To your success,

Karl Foxley

P.s. If you are interested in local search, BOTW have now added a special feature for just for you. Just click on the link towards the bottom of the home page that says ‘local search’. Here is the link again.

Amazon is a marketing force to be reckoned with and a webmaster can learn a lot just from studying the website and going through the checkout process a few times.

Just last week I went to Amazon and grabbed a copy of Stephen Pierce’s Secrets to Creating Wealth and ended up leaving with Ewen Chia’s How I Made My First Million on the Internet and How You Can Too as well.

Amazon just has an incredible knack of making the sales process easy and the recommendations they make are usually spot on. Keep the above links in mind as I will be referring back to them in a minute.

Back to the main point of this post, ‘What Amazon can teach webmasters about link building!’.

Before you start thinking that your website is nothing like Amazon in size or content, you can still learn by what they are doing! Let’s just take a look.

Amazon has content that people love to link to. People can create wish-lists and share them with their friends, people have recommended reading pages on their websites, and so on.

Amazon has an army of affiliates that link from their websites into Amazon’s interior pages (deep linking), promoting particular products.

I bet you can guess where I’m going with this! The majority of the links that people create don’t go to Amazon’s homepage, they go to interior pages.

Why is this important?

As a webmaster or SEO consultant, building links to your website is a part of the optimisation process. Having inbound links, especially from authority sites, has the benefit of generating traffic from referring websites and the search engines see incoming links as a thumbs-up pointed towards your site.

Your Take Away For The Day?

Ask many SEO’s what they would do if they were to work on their inbound link building strategy from scratch and they will say that they would generate more links pointing to interior pages of their website. You see, many people go out and start adding their site to directories and advertising sites but they only seem to add their top level domain, example: www.foxleymarketingsolutions.com.

You see, a website with links pointing to a variety of interior pages will look much more natural to the search engines than if you were to go out and generate 1000 links all pointing to your homepage.

So how do you get more inbound links to your interior pages?

Create killer content that people naturally want to link to. People are more likely to link to the actual page rather than your homepage and this is exactly what you want.

A good example of something that is useful is the Customer Focus Calculator – WeWe Monitor by Future Now Inc (lots of sites link to this tool).

Can you come up with something similar. When writing articles for distribution on article directories, create a deep link to a relevant page on your website.

When posting in forums, where you can naturally link out to a particular page on your website then make sure it is an interior page.

I’m sure you can come up with many other ideas!

So, you don’t have to be Amazon and you don’t need a massive affiliate army (although this helps), all you need to do is make your inbound link strategy just that bit smarter.

Take a look at the links above I posted about the two products I bought on Amazon. You can see that I have hyperlinked the text that is describes the product rather than saying:

‘Stephen Pierce’s Secrets to Creating Wealth book‘

or

‘for the The Stephen Pierce’s Secrets to Creating Wealth book click here‘

These examples have much less relevance to the search engines than the links I used at the beginning of this post so try and build links that describe your content accurately (include keywords).

For optimal results, be sure to combine building your own inbound links with creating content that people want to link to.

Happy link building,

Karl Foxley

KeywordLuv

When you leave a comment on a KeywordLuv enabled blog, instead of the name being hyperlinked as in the typical, Karl Foxley being a link to my blog, I could instead leave Karl Foxley @ SEO Company and the ‘SEO Company‘ becomes the hyperlink.

To make it work you will have to type your name in the following  way exactly as I have in the example below:

Karl Foxley@SEO Company

Although this may not look right when you type it in actually ends up looking like this:

Karl Foxley @ SEO Company

The plugin is great for those people who want to increase the number of comments their website receives. If you would like to use this as a traffic generation tactic and inbound link strategy then all you need to do is type in the following in to the search engines:

“This site uses KeywordLuv”

To increase the quality of the links you leave I would recommend that you find blogs with a decent pagerank. I would also stress that this still falls into the blog commenting realm so make sure you only leave comments that add value to the blog post and blog readers. This will also give you the additional benefit of sharing your expertise and experience within a particular field. My last suggestion is find sites that are related to your particular niche and you can do this by adding a search term before the quotations:

“This site uses KeywordLuv” search engine optimization

So, get searching for the websites with KeywordLuv enabled but please treat the blog author with respect and leave valuable comments only.

UPDATE: You can use the search box below, simply type in a keyword / keyword phrase for your particular niche. Bookmark this page so you can use the search box as part of a blog commenting strategy. Please leave comments that provide value, never spam as this only damages your reputation.

You may have noticed that this site was a KeywordLuv enabled blog but I have taken the difficult decision to deactivate it. Why? Well, as this website becomes more and more popular I am receiving a lot of spam comments that do not comply with my comment policy and it would appear the spammers are only looking to receive link juice from the KeywordLuv plugin.

‘Good comment’ and ‘thanks for posting’ doesn’t really add any value. I simply do not have the time to get through the number of these comments that I am receiving as they do make it past my Akismet filters meaning I have to moderate each one manually. If you really want to thank a blogger because you like their post then a better way to show your appreciation would be to use one of the ‘sharing’ buttons at the bottom to digg, bookmark, tweet, etc, the post. Please read my comment policy for more information about commenting on this blog.

Before you get disheartened at my decision I would like to stress, if you leave 5 decent comments (amended: please read our comment policy below) on this blog you will be rewarded by having your links do follow enabled. Additionally, if you are consistantly providing value to my readers I will reward you by linking out to your website at some point in time or maybe I’ll even add you to my blogroll.

If you do want to use KeywordLuv you can get the plugin from here.

To your success,

Karl Foxley

P.s. For a CommentLuv search engine visit our CommentLuv Enabled Blog Traffic Generation blog post.

photo credit: uberculture

I’ve decided to start blogging regularly about link-building and traffic generation. Instead of writing a 30 tips to more traffic etc, I’m going to share each one individually as I come across them, test them and get a decent result.

I am going to qualify each tip I share as a successful traffic generation tactic if it generates, at least, a few visitors to my website per week.

Although only a few visitors to my website a week isn’t heaps of traffic by any stretch of the imagination, the cumulative affect of having lots of links all sending a handful of visitors each week will turn out (over time) to be a good sized piece of traffic that’s not to be sniffed at.

The tips will cover:

• Link building for traffic generation.
• Link building for search engine optimisation.
• Link building for local search (great for businesses operating in a particular region).
• Traffic generation best suited for squeeze pages (lead capture pages).
• Traffic generation through search engine placement from alternative websites (those that you do not own).
• New places to share your RSS feed.
• What ever I consider to be ethical, whitehat and to the benefit of your website and business.

So, what should you do now!

The first tip is going to go live tomorrow so I recommend you grab our RSS feed and stay-up-to-date with our latest posts as they go live.

If you have any traffic generation methods and link building tips you want me to trial, test and share then use the contact form or leave a comment; no affiliate links please.

Be sure to check back tomorrow for the first post!

To your success,

Karl Foxley

P.s. I’m giving every page that is related to this topic the tag [lbtt] so you’ll be be able to pull them all up together when you do an on-site search.