e_Marketing

A couple of weeks ago I was checking over the backlinks of one of our clients. Apart from the promotional work we've done for this client over the last few months the client himself has been very active contributing to forums and adding comments to blogs.

All of this work seemed to be paying off quite well for him. His site was moving up in search rankings very quickly.

I noticed some odd looking links showing up in his backlink lists (as reported by Yahoo) and I checked a few of them out. One in particular caught my eye. He had left a comment a few months ago on a fairly obscure blog and the link was now showing up in several places in the backlink report.

So I left a comment too. And sure enough a week or so later there it was showing up in the backlink report for my own site - and not just once, but several times because that link was in the blog sidebar and was showing up on every page in the blog.

We're always looking for effective ways to build links and get traffic for our clients (and ourselves too!) This story illustrates a couple of important things.

First it shows that you can pick up links in some fairly unlikely places - in this case, by making comments on blogs.

Second, it suggests a strategy for finding productive link sources. If your niche is "carpet cleaning", then do a search for "carpet cleaning". Have a look at some of the high ranking sites and then take a look at their backlinks. You can use a tool like this one to check backlinks. Look for blogs and forums linking back to these high ranking sites where you can post comments. Make a list and systematically start visiting and posting comments. These will turn out to be some of the best performing links you can find.

This is just another little strategy or tool in the arsenal that I am adding to our Level 2 and Level 3 Link Building programs.

Level 2 already includes numerous blog posts and two unique articles every month. But we're going to be adding a limited number of other things to the program too - things like leaving comments on relevant blogs. We can't do much more than that because we've already packed a lot of labour intensive work into our Level 2 package.

But for Level 3 clients we will be pulling out all the stops - blog comments, Squidoo lenses, Craig's list postings, and even Youtube videos if it seems appropriate. But we'll have more on that in the very near future...